msicism

Tommaso (Abel Ferrara, 2019)

Tommaso is a film that virtually compels us to read it as autobiography. It's about an American film director (Willem Dafoe) now living in Rome, who is married to a somewhat younger woman, Nikki, played by Ferrara's own wife (Cristina Chiriac). The couple have a three-year-old daughter, played by Ferrara and Chiriac's own daughter (Anna Ferrara). Tommaso, the director, is in recovery for alc...

The Midnight Sky (George Clooney, 2020)

NOTE: This "social reaction" is EMBARGOED. So let's keep it entre nous, fam.

I haven't checked in with George Clooney, Film Director since 2005, and judging from The Midnight Sky I don't need to go back and catch up. Granted, this film was already on the wrong foot with me when I discovered it was an example of possibly my lea...

City Hall (Frederick Wiseman, 2020)

The great Frederick Wiseman will turn 91 on New Year's Day. Like a handful of old masters (Godard and Michael Snow come to mind), Wiseman is still going strong and shows no signs of slowing down. At the same time, City Hall is a rather unusual film for Wiseman. Very few directors have exhibited the same single-minded consistency he has, and because his style is so dialed down as to seem effo...

Dear Comrades! (Andrei Konchalovsky, 2020)

With the exception of his brother Nikita Mikhalkov, Andrei Konchalovsky may be the most well-connected filmmaker in Russia. This may be irrelevant in evaluating his new film Dear Comrades! But one of the things that is rather irksome about this film is its absolute confidence. In dramatizing the 1962 Novocherkassk massacre -- during which Russian auto employees went on strike to protest econ...

The Maltese Cross Movement (Keewatin Dewdney, 1967)

Quite unexpectedly, I finally had the chance to see Keewatin Dewdney's The Maltese Cross Movement, a film I've read about for as long as I've been studying experimental film. Dewdney is a mathematician who made exactly one film, following a cinema workshop he happened to take while completing his PhD at the University of Michigan. This one film became a minor classic, t...

David Byrne's American Utopia (Spike Lee, 2020)

"Utopia -- the more impossible it seems, the more necessary it becomes." (Yvonne Rainer)

Of course it isn't Stop Making Sense. Nothing else is. However, one of the most striking things about American Utopia -- the film, the concert, and the new songs -- is how it subtly charts Byrne's evolution as an artist (and thinker) since 1984. 

With the Talking Heads,...

Minari (Lee Isaac Chung, 2020)

Let's see: Dreamer dad (Steven Yeun), steadfast but skeptical wife (Han Ye-ri), mostly nondescript older daughter (Noel Kate Cho), adorable little boy with a congenital health problem (Alan Kim), and a vulgar grandma (Youn Yu-jung) who must learn to sand down her rough edges in order to connect with her little grandson. Robert McKee would wet himself over Minari, right down to its...

Collective (Alexander Nanau, 2019)

Over on Letterboxd, I discovered a Romanian writer, a graduate student in Leeds, who'd had enough of viewers watching Collective and saying "it's just like Trump!" She (sorry -- I think she's a "she") has some fundamental biases against Americans to begin with, mostly having to do ...

White Lie (Calvin Thomas and Yonah Lewis, 2019)

White Lie is almost intolerable. It creates a scenario of fundamental tension -- a liar and grifter continually on the verge of being discovered -- and slowly, methodically turns the screws, showing the walls closing in. We've seen this before. But there are a few things that set White Lie apart, giving it more emotional resonance than we know what to do with. Katie (Kacey Rohl) is ...

A Modest Proposal:

Someone should loop this soundbite into a kick-ass EDM cut called "Hit Those Speakers."

Uncle Frank (Alan Ball, 2020)

Ball gonna Ball. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's mystifying, in a way, that Uncle Frank arrives on global streaming the same week as Happiest Season. Both films are bizarre throwbacks to an era of toxic homophobia, and not just because they depict the struggles of the closet. The Clea DuVall Christmas film is like a cultural timewarp, wherein Kristen Stewart's gay urban academic discovers ...

The Mole Agent (Maite Alberdi, 2020)

An unconventional documentary in a number of respects, The Mole Agent is effortlessly entertaining and often quite touching. But it seems that some critics find the film uniquely untrustworthy. Part of this is the usual suspicion of heartwarming material, a tendency of critics to police the boundary where sentiment may ooze over into schmaltz. The Mole Agent is a film about senior c...

Routine Pleasures

Black Bear (Lawrence Michael Levine, 2020)

Back in 2014, I saw Levine's film Wild Canaries, but I didn't remember much about it except that I did not like it. When I looked back at my review, it all came back to me. It's a seriocomic caper film slathered in Hitchcock and Rivette references, and that seems to be a big part of what won it admirers when it debuted. But 2020-11-25 23:35:53 +0000 UTC View Post

After Lucia (Michel Franco, 2012)

Michel Franco is not Michael Haneke. This strikes me as an obvious enough point that I really shouldn't need to articulate it, but everywhere I look, it seems that critics and programmers insist on explaining Franco as Mexico's answer to Haneke, as "Hanekesque." This is absurd. And I say this as an admirer of Michael Haneke, but certainly not his biggest fan. (He has made more films I strong...

The Nest (Sean Durkin, 2020)

With its insistence on atmosphere over plot, The Nest is kind of a perfect sophomore film, the sort of work that a young stylist gets to produce after establishing themselves as a rising talent. It's the mark of an artist unwilling to adapt to the standard codices of industry filmmaking, someone intent on going their own way. Despite Sean Durkin's involvement as the showrunner for the very i...

Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds (Werner Herzog and Armando Christian Pérez, 2020)

Cinetracts '20 (various filmmakers, 2020)

Omnibus films. We all have traumatic memories of them. Do you remember where you where when you saw 11'09"01, the cosmically atrocious international gang-bang intended to pay homage to the memory of 9/11? While some people experienced that disaster collectively, in a film festival setting, I saw it after the fact on a screener, but the impact was still fairly gutting. I'll never forget Aleja...

Two Films by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese

It's a cliche, but it's unavoidably true. A critic experiences few pleasures greater than that of discovering a major new talent, partly because it's so rare. As the saying goes, 90% of everything is crap. Never is this more often true than with younger filmmakers, who are usually too besotted with their influences, or nervously trying to curry favor with audiences and producers, to generate anything...

MLK/FBI (Sam Pollard, 2020)

The documentary as preamble, or perhaps as prolepsis. It is understandable that every generation requires its reintroduction to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., given the active myth-making that surrounds him. King's calls for racial justice are customarily severed from his equally emphatic demands for economic equality, which makes him a suitable hero for Americans across the political spectrum. After a...

Make Way For Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937)

Back when I taught Film 101, I always showed Tokyo Story. In general, students responded well to it -- as well as they responded to anything foreign and in black-and-white, which was a tepid reaction compared with Hitchcock, which struck them as the beginning of "real" movies. But without fail, some students would mistakenly interpret Ozu's formal restraint, and his work with actors in parti...