Let's get this out of the way first. Ben Affleck is a good director. While The Town and Gone Baby Gone weren't perfect, they built on Affleck's firm understanding of Boston life and class politics, making those simmering tensions accessible without dumbing them down. And for what it is, Air is a well-directed film. It focuses its attention of Nike as a workplace and as a se...
2024-01-18 21:56:57 +0000 UTC View Post
BY REQUEST: Morris Yang
Pascal Plante's last film, Nadia, Butterfly, had an odd fate. Not only was it "selected" for the nonexistent 2020 Cannes Film Festival. Its entire premise was scuttled by Covid, since it was about a French-Canadian swimmer competing in the equally nonexistent Summer Olympics in Japan. It's hard to say what impact all this had on Plante, but it's...
2024-01-18 01:55:09 +0000 UTC View Post
Covering some of the same ground of Sophie Fiennes' 2010 documentary Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, Wenders' film wisely adopts a less instructional, more experiential approach to Anselm Kiefer's artwork. Over Your Cities mostly focused on Kiefer's studio in Barjac, France, which the artist gradually converted into a multi-tiered, tunnel-laden installation work, and that film mad...
2024-01-15 20:25:32 +0000 UTC View Post
Judging from the widespread disapproval A Brighter Tomorrow elicited at Cannes, it is getting harder for viewers to distinguish between Nanni Moretti, the writer-director, and Giovanni, the grumpy character he so often plays. Here, he plays an Italian director whose long career somewhat resembles Moretti's own. But if A Brighter Tomorrow is in any way a self-portrait, it's a jaundic...
2024-01-14 23:37:12 +0000 UTC View Post
BY REQUEST: Imperial Hean
First things first: I am woefully under-informed about de Toth as a filmmaker. This is only the second film of his I've seen, the other one being his 3D House of Wax. So I have a lot of catching up to do, and I can't really say how this early entry fits into his career. But taken on its own terms, Two Girls on the Street is formally a...
2024-01-13 03:51:30 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm not a huge fan of writer Dan Kois, but sometimes you've got to give the devil his due. In the first ten minutes of Ferrari, we hear the protagonist's mother (Daniela Piperno) utter a line that's become one of the catchphrases from Walk Hard, the comedy that tak...
2024-01-12 20:35:21 +0000 UTC View Post
Of course it's a bit awkward, like showing up to the gala wearing the same dress. Robichaud's third feature follows just a year after Todd Field's TÁR, essentially making it "the other lesbian symphony conductor movie." And while there's quite a bit of interest in Days of Happiness all on its own, the comparison actually helps reveal some of what the writer-director is up to. Where...
2024-01-12 05:58:30 +0000 UTC View Post
It may not be quite fair to say Kore-eda is in his flop era. After all, many quite appreciated his Palme d'Or winning Shoplifters much more than I did, and I've certainly missed a few of his films along the way (most notably his thriller The Third Murder and his French-language debut The Truth). But I myself haven't really responded to a Kore-eda film since Still Walkin...
2024-01-08 22:23:57 +0000 UTC View Post
Yesterday the National Society of Film Critics (of which I'm a member) voted Past Lives the best film of 2023. Embarrassingly, I had not seen it, although I intended to catch up with it. Now, having seen the film, I'm just confused. Song is a playwright, and Past Lives is her filmmaking debut. Would some aspects of Past Lives be more evocative on the stage? I sort of doubt ...
2024-01-07 23:32:57 +0000 UTC View Post
All art criticism is unavoidably subjective. And in some ways, I wish that weren't the case. Like anyone who strives to be a critic, I have certain criteria for what I think an effective film should do. And if I stick to those, I can form a fairly compelling argument either in favor or against a particular film. It's when those niggling feelings get in the way -- intangibles like personal taste or no...
2024-01-07 22:52:31 +0000 UTC View Post
Okay, so since only one of the last three "winners" provided a film request, we'll just move along. (Thanks to Robert Davis for serving up Putney Swope.)
So here come the next contestants!
#64 - IMPERIAL HEAN*
#32 - DANIEL GORMAN
#114 - MORRIS YANG
*Note: Mr. or Ms. Hean only subscribed to the Patreon a couple o...
2024-01-07 05:46:25 +0000 UTC View Post
At last year's Berlinale, several competition titles were quite well received, including but not limited to Past Lives, Afire, Music, Suzume, The Shadowless Tower, and BlackBerry. But the Golden Bear seemingly took everyone but the jury by surprise. Nicolas Philibert has had an extensive career as one of the world's most reliable documentary filmm...
2024-01-06 05:02:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Given my ambivalence about the place of the essay-film / video-essay in the current avant-garde landscape, it seemed like I should learn more about the history of the form and some of its more well-regarded applications. Various academics in my ambit (including my lovely wife Jen Wingard) have been showing Ursula Biemann's films in their classes for quite some time. This in itself gave me pause, sinc...
2024-01-06 03:53:34 +0000 UTC View Post
Close Your Eyes (Víctor Erice, 2023)
About twenty years ago, academic studies of both Theo Angelopoulos and Alexander Kluge were published with the same subtitle: "the last modernist." But based on the hopeful, elegaic Close Your Eyes, it's pretty clear that Erice is the last man standing from the previous century. Everything about this film, from its leisurely pace t...
2024-01-02 21:31:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Happy New Year, friends! Let's make it a good one without any tears, etc. I fell a bit behind on write-ups, so these may be a bit shorter than usual. No, really. I mean it.
The Crime is Mine (François Ozon, 2023)
It's quite the sweetheart deal that Ozon has with Music Box Films,...
2024-01-02 03:08:48 +0000 UTC View PostAs we say goodbye to a very difficult 2023, I wanted to look back at some of the experimental films and videos from this year that inspired, entertained, and challenged me in the course of my viewing. Some of these films I've written about, some multiple times. Others fell through the cracks as I dealt with other assignments. But all of them suggest ways forward for a "genre" (for lack of a better word) that is undergoing accelerated change in the digital era. If you haven't seen these works,...
2024-01-01 01:50:34 +0000 UTC View PostDavid and Abner, you still have the chance to contact me with your Lottery requests. If I don’t hear from you by the end of the first week in January, I will draw other subscribers’ names. But no pressure. 🤷🏽♀️
2023-12-29 06:56:11 +0000 UTC View Post
The Taste of Things (Tran Anh Hung, 2023)
Perfectly inoffensive middlebrow material, somewhat elevated by directorial flair. In its broadest outline, The Taste of Things combines some key themes from both The Remains of the Day and Ratatouille. (No, hear me out...) Wealthy gourmand Dodin (Benoît Magimel, in a strong, understated performance) has empl...
2023-12-27 06:45:37 +0000 UTC View Post
Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella, 2022)
I've learned over the years that it's quite possible for a film to do everything "right" and still leave me cold. As was the case with La Flor by Citarella's colleague Mariano Llinás, Trenque Lauquen has drawn high praise from various quarters, and it's easy to see why. Like a somewhat more focused version of La Flo...
2023-12-24 00:55:28 +0000 UTC View Post
The films of Damon Packard are an acquired taste, to put it mildly. Although he is far too sophisticated to be relegated to the "outsider art" category, Packard does display a maniacal, self-contained DIY approach and an aesthetic defined by a view of cinematic history as essentially "browless." Spielberg, Lucas, and Carpenter populate his projects, along with a fascination with high-gloss 80s genre ...
2023-12-22 03:49:47 +0000 UTC View Post
Memory (Michel Franco, 2023)
The last thing I want to do is oversell Memory, since it is a relatively modest film and one that probably suffers under close scrutiny. One of its two main protagonists, Saul (Peter Saarsgard) suffers from dementia, and he ostensibly cannot make new memories. But when Sylvia (Jessica Chastain) and her daughter Anna (Brooke Timber) enter hi...
2023-12-21 21:38:52 +0000 UTC View Post
La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher, 2023)
Usually my opinion of a film is fairly consistent throughout, but with La Chimera, I found my response to it kind of yo-yoing between grudging admiration and genuine thrill. This response was more extreme than it was with Rohrwacher's previous feature Happy as Lazzaro, which I appreciated on its own terms while never really ...
2023-12-16 22:12:33 +0000 UTC View Post
Yes, yes, it's that time again. Final grades are finally submitted, the lights are up along the eaves and in the yard (see above), and it's a mad dash to the end of the year, trying to jam three festivals' worth of Serious Viewing into a couple of weeks. As long-time subscribers know, this means my write-ups are mercifully brief, unless I see something that strikes me as particularly interesting. Luc...
2023-12-14 04:02:58 +0000 UTC View Post
As is often the case with Todd Haynes' films, May December is organized according to a very specific conceptual matrix. Haynes is not a filmmaker who discovers the meaning of his films along the way, but creates them as sort of Platonic models of his particular philosophical understanding about the subject at hand. And one of the constants of Haynes' filmmaking is the idea that representatio...
2023-12-08 04:44:33 +0000 UTC View Post
The unavoidable familiarity of Fallen Leaves, together with its mere 80-minute runtime, initially made me think that this film represented Kaurismäki on autopilot, applying his long-ago perfected style to something utterly slight. After all, the usual elements are all there: rockabilly, leather jackets, a very photogenic dog, and above all a stony, downcast approach to performances, saturat...
2023-12-04 20:17:20 +0000 UTC View Post
I went into watching The Teachers' Lounge rather naively, since I did not realize it won several majot Lola awards including Best Picture, or that it was Germany's official entry for the International Feature Oscar. I suppose I should have known something was up, since Sony Pictures Classics doesn't pick anything up for distribution anymore unless they think it has some built-in audience or ...
2023-11-30 23:17:54 +0000 UTC View Post
Before going any further, I invite you to read Phil Coldiron's Cinema Scope piece on Music, which carefully explicates both the narrative organization of the film and its somewhat ambivalent relationship to the Oedipus myth. Having watched Music knowing on...
2023-11-28 21:35:53 +0000 UTC View Post
BY REQUEST: Robert Davis
"Where have you been?"
"Laying back in the cut."
Ah yes, what to do about Putney Swope? It has a fairly sturdy premise but then Downey fills it in with a "Laugh-In" sketch comedy approach that pretty much jettisons any editorial impulse. He throws anything and everything at the wall, and while some of it sticks, a ...
2023-11-27 16:40:28 +0000 UTC View Post
Frybread Face and Me (Billy Luther, 2023)
While Luther's debut film is nothing if not watchable (it clocks in at a scant 82 minutes, after all), it's the sort of film that might've benefited greatly from some additional workshopping. It must be acknowledged that we live in a rapacious "content" market, and a number of Native artists and storytellers whose work has been too long...
2023-11-26 05:05:14 +0000 UTC View Post
It's fortuitous that this random selection is happening on (American) Thanksgiving. That's because over 300 years ago, I stole this web domain from members of the Karankawa tribe.
No seriously: because I am grateful for your support of me and my work, especially in recent weeks. So thank you!
The selectors this round are:
#35 - DAVID (davicusfin)
#137 ...
2023-11-23 21:53:52 +0000 UTC View Post