Diverting enough, Palm Springs is little more than a concept, and a borrowed one at that. To be fair, it's a bit different from Groundhog Day, in the sense that here there's a b.s. Hawkingesque explanation for the time loop, and it isn't some sort of punishment for being an unpleasant person. This makes Palm Springs more "contemporary," I suppose, and not just because popul...
2020-11-10 19:38:27 +0000 UTC View Post
His House (Remi Weekes, 2020)
Thematically, haunted houses are all about history. As such, they can serve as a handy metaphor for personal as well as political scenarios, and it takes a deft hand to avoid calling on simple cliches and mistaking them for insight. His House is unusual in that it uses the idea of a haunting or a curse as a highly specific means for explor...
2020-11-10 02:55:43 +0000 UTC View Post
A curiosity. If you consider Promising Young Woman in the context of the broadly commercial revenge-thriller, comparing it to something like Hard Candy, it may seem audacious. It certainly has its unexpected twists and turns, but more significantly, it seems to treat the issue of trauma with more gravity than it necessarily has to. On the other hand, looked at as a "serious" film, <...
2020-11-08 12:33:53 +0000 UTC View Post
I was frankly so put off by the melancholy whimsy of Miranda July's first two features that I was kind of dreading Kajillionaire. Her first film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, worked a bit too hard to turn a collection of doodles about standard-issue loneliness into a cri de coeur on the deleterious effects of the Internet and a grand statement about How We Live Now.
THIS REVIEW IS EMBARGOED. SO KEEP IT IN THE FAMILY, PLEASE.
Much like this year's major sports championships, the 2020 Oscars will go down in the logbooks with an asterisk by the results, a historical notation of a big, unknowable What If. Despite that fact, the studios and the industry are going to try their best to normalize the awards, since there is a lot of money riding on...
2020-11-02 19:53:28 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm nervous. We're all nervous.
But here are some things to consider.
Today's tweet thread from Politico carefully details the eight crucial states in the election, and how all of them (aside from Michigan) could really go either way. Really? This is Politico, the "center-right" insider publica...
2020-11-02 15:36:31 +0000 UTC View Post
An undeniably bizarre film, Kung-fu Master! seems almost designed to, well, punch and kick at the boundaries of French cinematic lyricism. From its prosaic upper-middle class Parisian trappings to the main character's return to a childhood home in the countryside (Britain in this case, rather than Provence) and right up to an eventual retreat to an isolated island paradise, Varda's film oper...
2020-11-01 19:37:19 +0000 UTC View Post
Neither as baldly declarative as Mangrove, nor as poetically open-form as Lovers Rock, Red, White and Blue splits the difference, resulting in the strongest mainstream film released thus far from Steve McQueen's five-part "Small Axe" project. While Oscar prognosticators are much more likely to zero in on the conventional courtroom drama of Mangrove, as well as that...
2020-11-01 04:05:16 +0000 UTC View Post
SOME SPOILERS AHEAD.
It has to be addressed right off the bat. Nasir is a didactic film. It is made with a very particular purpose in mind, and by the time it is over, there is absolutely no ambiguity about what that purpose is. There is a particular strain of thinking that considers didacticism, in itself, to be the opposite of art, or at least art's nemesis. This is ...
2020-11-01 00:00:24 +0000 UTC View Post
Sorry for the limited watching and writing in recent days. I have in the midst of a really hellacious headache cluster which has been slowing me down over the past week and a half. I have an appointment with a neurologist next week to see about getting some new meds, but for now it's kind of an icepick-in-the-eye-socket sort of situation, day in and day out.
But! Soon, in addition to finishing ...
2020-10-28 05:32:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Or: Paranoid Racist QAnon Wackos Say Darnedest Things: an Exposé For Make Benefit of Understone Dwellers During Trumptastic Years of 2016-2020.
Cheap shots at easy targets. Pretty much a waste of time. Also, how can the whole film be premised on Kazakh girls being caged, and not once does Cohen go for a chant of "lock her up"? That's ground level stuff.
2020-10-26 02:58:07 +0000 UTC View Post
This is an utterly trivial film, but it's also kind of weird. It's really a fairly standard midlife crisis film from a woman's point of view. We've seen a lot of these in recent years, where a wife feels left behind by her work-driven husband, losing her identity in motherhood. If we might be so bold as to postulate that many of Coppola's films are autobiographical in some oblique way, On The Roc...
2020-10-26 02:49:42 +0000 UTC View Post
Although I hadn't remembered it until I checked my logs, I did see Ostrochovsky's debut feature, a film from 2015 called Koza. It was the story of a washed-up boxer trying to make a comeback because of financial distress, and it was shot to look like a documentary. (Most of the principals were playing thinly fictionalized versions of themselves.) I mention this only because Servants...
2020-10-25 05:16:29 +0000 UTC View Post
This review will contain spoilers.
At first I found myself in a rather bothersome predicament. I was left cold by Charlie Kaufman's latest effort, and I suppose I could replace the word "cold" with the phrase "emotionally unmoved," so as to avoid the necessity of appending the phrase "no pun intended" to the sentence, which admittedly weakens the force of the judgment. But ...
2020-10-24 04:07:52 +0000 UTC View Post
It's true, Malmkrog isn't for everyone. But I must admit to a certain surprise at the criticisms directed at it by the reviewers for Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. It's not that I expect Puiu's difficult film to be embraced by "the trades," per se. But that both reviews seemed to take the same tack, arguing that Malmkrog, by dint of its relative physical stasis and extreme disc...
2020-10-23 19:15:56 +0000 UTC View PostOkay, first things first. Are we sure we're not being punked?
Anyway, for the sake of argument, let's assume that the cinematic career of Michel Franco is a real thing, something we're supposed to take seriously. I can't speak with a lot of authority about it, since I have only seen Chronic and this one. Yes, I avoided the brother / sister incest film, and the extreme cyber-vi...
2020-10-17 18:49:45 +0000 UTC View Post
The word on the street is true. Hlynur Pálmason's second film is a major leap forward from his already-impressive debut Winter Brothers. That film, which was largely characterized by its tonal strangeness (I called it a social-realist Farrelly brothers production), did not really suggest that Pálmason was going to evolve so quickly into a stark formalist. But almost from the outset, A ...
2020-10-16 19:46:34 +0000 UTC View Post
Okay, guys, it's Cinephile Confession Time. This is the first film I've seen by the acclaimed duo of Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross. In fact, awhile back I tried watching two of their films (45365 and Tchoupitoulas) and lost interest. But of course, the near-unanimous praise that has greeted their latest film has made it impossible to ignore. And what can I say? Sometimes critical con...
2020-10-15 22:42:31 +0000 UTC View Post
Say, have you heard about essay films? They are all the rage right now. In fact, the Currents section of the New York Film Festival featured five of them, with their combinations of fact and fiction, their meta-textual analysis of a given topic (often a matter of representation), and their insistent exploration of the impact that the past has on the present. In fact, these films are so ubiquitous rig...
2020-10-13 18:14:30 +0000 UTC View Post
Hong operates in a minor key here, with the compositional interest primarily hinging on all the things he doesn't do. The Woman Who Ran doesn't scramble chronology, nor does it involve awkward, blubbering confessions around a soju-saturated restaurant table. But most importantly, this film doesn't center on male-female relationships. Men do pop up now and then, and the absent husband of main...
2020-10-12 19:06:34 +0000 UTC View Post
I was asked to write a statement for the National Society of Film Critics relating to the Netflix indictment, which I've pasted below. So I tried watching the film, and made it 30 minutes through. And although there is no reason to label this child pornography -- I mean jesus -- this is another one of those 2 Live Crew moments where we find ourselves going to bat over the 1st Amendment for what is, i...
2020-10-10 05:56:05 +0000 UTC View Post
At one point, during the final third of Dick Johnson Is Dead, the film's subject says something jarringly poignant to his daughter, the filmmaker. "I used to be your dad," he laments. "Now I'm your little brother." Dick is worried because Kirsten has to leave the country for work, and he's worried that he will get into trouble in her absence. This is one of several moments of painful lucidit...
2020-10-10 04:55:24 +0000 UTC View Post
Dunn Rovinelli's So Pretty was a dense, complicated feature film that encompassed literary concerns, gender identity, the difficulties of collective resistance, and the entire question of whether all of those things could serve as a broad ethic for life itself, or were interruptions of a "life" that lay elsewhere. It's heady stuff, and by contrast, Dunn Rovinelli's latest is a model of simpl...
2020-10-08 23:02:53 +0000 UTC View Post
Did you know that Woody Allen had a new film this year? Apparently some nonsense called Rifkin's Festival, about a guy hanging out at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. It quietly world premiered at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. Who cares, right?
Well, based on the harmless but unengaging French Exit, Azazel Jacobs is just one more filmmaker ...
2020-10-08 20:13:34 +0000 UTC View Post
As it happens, I already related most of my thoughts about this incredibly moving film in my third NYFF report for MUBI, which was mostly supposed to focus on the films in the Currents section. But I found unexpected affinities between Time and Edström / Winter's The Works and Days, despite their obvious differences.
Time is clearly meant to be an accessible, e...
2020-10-08 04:23:37 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the most critically lauded documentary filmmakers of the moment, Gianfranco Rosi seems to define his films by geographical location rather than population or community. Granted, if you choose to limit your purview to a specific locale, you are likely to end up with a cross-section of a particular community as well. But Rosi's method is curiously dialectical. It adopts a formalist organizationa...
2020-10-06 22:52:38 +0000 UTC View Post
I must admit, I'm a bit confused by the fact that this rather pedestrian film is being hailed as a breakout for Olaizola. And to be honest, the more I think about it, the more I suspect that the acclaim is rooted in the fact that Tragic Jungle closely resembles so many other, better movies. A little Herzog here, a little Apichatpong there, and a healthy dash of Claire Denis and Lucrecia Mart...
2020-10-06 19:29:13 +0000 UTC View Post
