Now this is weird. For the first time that I can remember, a film under 65 minutes is receiving a standard commercial release. And Strange Way of Life is significantly shorter, clocking in at 32 minutes, at least three of which are end credits. I guess you can never underestimate the power of a millionaire director with offshore shell companies, or the mini-major distributor (Sony C...
2023-10-09 03:44:50 +0000 UTC View Post
I really did not like Emma Seligman's debut feature Shiva Baby. In addition to simply finding it unfunny (while being aggressive about its own confidence that it was funny), it was just too mean-spirited for me. Danielle (Rachel Sennott) was a fairly ordinary fail-daughter, trying to be less of a psychological mess and find her way into real adulthood. And the film took great deligh...
2023-10-09 03:29:12 +0000 UTC View Post
Also, what the hell. Although it has not been officially announced yet, here's what I'm showing in November for my program in the Houston Cinema Arts Festival. The program is called "Eiffel Towers and Hoover Dams," which was the most enigmatic thing I could come up with on short notice.
Tomonar...
2023-10-05 01:06:28 +0000 UTC View Post
Yeah, sorry. It's been a minute since I gave you some of that good content.
But in addition to being buried under grading (which I just finished today), random assignments, the tail-end of Viennale work (also finished), presenting films in Austin (thanks for coming, Lucas and Dave!), and locking my November program, it's been a bit nuts.
Plus...
2023-10-05 00:45:54 +0000 UTC
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BY REQUEST: Jake Levens
At the risk of being reductive, Scott Barley is the Philippe Grandrieux who doesn't fuck. Or, putting it less facetiously, Barley shares Grandrieux's interest in expanding the language of experimental cinema to encompass thematic and emotive concerns. But where Grandrieux fixates on the human body and its extremities of affect, Barley appears to be staki...
2023-09-23 19:42:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Although I have consistently found the work of Tulapop Saenjaroen interesting, I have yet to figure out quite what to do with it. The first film of his I saw, Room With a Coconut View, was the one I appreciated most since, despite its unusual aesthetics -- digital simulation, a robotic narrator, an overall prefabricated sheen -- its aims were fairly straightforward. The film was about a beac...
2023-09-21 04:36:45 +0000 UTC View Post
No one else's films look like Isiah Medina's. He is one of the only contemporary filmmakers who seems not only to have taken stylistic cues from late Godard but to move those methods in a newer direction. It isn't just the fact that films like Inventing the Future and He Thought He Died are steeped in dense philosophical ideas, although like Godard, Medina seems a bit more intereste...
2023-09-21 03:51:43 +0000 UTC View Post
Going into Orlando, I knew only a little about Paul B. Preciado, a queer theorist who completed his dissertation under the tutelage of Jacques Derrida. Much of his work has been about transgender experience as a liminal state that severs the presumed connection between gender and assigned sex, and in his book Testo Junkie, he likens the transformation of his body through testosteron...
2023-09-18 02:21:35 +0000 UTC View Post
BY REQUEST: Brandon
Oh, Inverted World
I'll confess, Bert Haanstra is one of those names that has always been bouncing around in the back of my head, as someone I should really look into. And to be honest, I could say the same thing about Dutch cinema in general. Granted, I have seen a couple of Joris Ivens films, and a couple of Johan van der Keukens, but compared with other European national cinemas, I'm woefully uninformed about film from the Netherlan...
2023-09-18 01:21:48 +0000 UTC View Post
Nothing but home-baked goodness.
Mademoiselle Kenopsia (Denis Côté, 2023) [TIFF]
While watching Mademoiselle Kenopsia, it occurred to me that Côté’s tendency to mov...
2023-09-16 04:39:16 +0000 UTC View Post
My piece on Wavelengths is forthcoming at MUBI. I couldn't address every film, but here are some of the ones I did.
Slow Shift (Shambhavi Kaul, 2023) [TIFF / NYFF]
These stately boulders resemble Magritte paintings in the real world, and the entire array is occupied by dozens of ...
2023-09-13 02:52:15 +0000 UTC View Post
How would you know if there was a festival film lurking in your neighbo(u)rhood? Do you recognize the signs?
I'm a bit buried at the moment. There will be new writing up here soon.
But for now, enjoy one frame each from every shot in Godard's "trailer" for Phony Wars.
2023-09-11 19:54:57 +0000 UTC
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First, I want to thank all who have participated up to this point. This has worked out even better than I imagined, since I've gotten to see films I might not have gotten to for years.
Second, here are the next three selectors. But know that I am in the midst of my biggest work crunch of the year, so it may take me a minute to fulfill your requests.
Third, how about the names on that whee...
2023-09-02 20:28:28 +0000 UTC View PostA few more brief remarks on films I'm screening for TIFF, etc.
Spirit of Ecstasy (Héléna Klotz, 2023) [TIFF]
A fairly conventional film in punk attire, Spirit of Ecstasy suggests what might have happened if Lisbeth Salander had decided to go into finance. Claire Pommet, the singer-songwriter professionally known as Pomme, plays Jeanne, a 24-year-old military br...
2023-09-02 18:26:52 +0000 UTC View Post
BY REQUEST: Alex
It's always a pleasure to catch up with an as-yet-unseen classic from the Japanese New Wave. These directors tend to exhibit a formal approach that I find rigorous and seductive, mainly because the radical anti-illusionist cinema that was in vogue at the time is much more organic in these films than in so many others. That's of course because classical Japanese...
2023-09-02 17:54:47 +0000 UTC View Post
BY REQUEST: John Edmond
Few things are more gratifying than discovering a film that's not only major in and of itself, but seems to serve as a missing link in cinematic history. This is the first film I've seen by the Cantrills, the husband-and-wife Australian duo who until now I mostly knew from their Cantrill Film Notes, a self-published journal about avant-garde film. I real...
2023-08-28 02:43:26 +0000 UTC View Post
Yes, 'tis the season. I am currently previewing TIFF films for Cinema Scope, and Venice Days films for InRO. Below are brief excerpts of the reviews that will appear later in those venues.
My hope is that (a) it will give you a sense of what I've been up to, and why I'm behind on this site; (b) the blurbs will be enough to let you, the subscriber, know whether or not (IMHO) the films are worth ...
2023-08-27 03:09:48 +0000 UTC View Post
On first glance, Lady Killer (Gueule d'amour) is not as immediately stylish or fluid as the other Grémillons I've seen. Certain early scenes felt rushed, and the director seemed to be relying on awkward pillow shots (e.g. the clocktower) with no obvious function. Its narrative engine -- an egotistical former soldier being taken for a ride by an attractive grifter -- is articulated ...
2023-08-21 00:14:49 +0000 UTC View Post
Back in the days of the Movie Nerd Discussion Group, someone introduced the initialism YMMV. This of course means "your mileage may vary," taking the car commercial disclaimer and applying it to movies whose pleasures are highly subjective.. I thought about this when I read negative reviews of Theater Camp after I saw it, and mostly laughed my way through it. Best as I can figure, here's the...
2023-08-19 20:04:46 +0000 UTC View Post
BY REQUEST: Mike D'Angelo
This is one of those canonical masterworks I just somehow never got around to, and although my thinking about cinema would have been more advanced in many ways if I had seen it before, I'm glad that I encountered it late. Almost from the jump, Teshigahara makes it clear that he is telling an elemental story, quite literally. Human beings are i...
2023-08-19 05:00:52 +0000 UTC View Post
"As is often the case with Loach’s collaborations with screenwriter Paul Laverty, The Old Oak simplifies matters in the name of educational agit-prop. The regulars at the pub resent the presence of the Syrians, reflexively blaming immigran...
2023-08-17 20:07:49 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey folks, I have fallen behind on subscriber requests as well as new releases, so sorry about that. This is That Time of Year, when the flood of writing assignments comes in: TIFF capsules for Cinema Scope, catalogue entries for the Viennale, and a smattering of TIFF / NYFF / Venice reviews for In Review Online. Plus, classed begin Monday at UH, so I have been prepping like a madman. Five classes, t...
2023-08-16 19:52:37 +0000 UTC View Post
I have one more film to watch and write up from the last tombola. Some dude called Michael Del Angelo has asked me to watch something called Woman in the Dunes. Never seen it! Should be a hoot.
I meant to watch it today, but I've had an irritating headache all day long and couldn't concentrate. So hopefully tomorrow's the charm. But I did go ahead and select the next three selectors.&n...
2023-08-10 04:55:25 +0000 UTC View Post
BY REQUEST: Michael Dodson
Okay, so a little context. When I first started making top ten lists going back through the years, I felt like I needed to be honest about my experience of the Films of the 1980s. I wasn't a cinephile as a kid, and I guess I thought that it wasn't entirely fair to revise my feelings (can't call them "opinions," exactly) regarding the films I grew up w...
2023-08-09 02:47:49 +0000 UTC View Post
BY REQUEST: David Katz
For what strikes me as a minor film, its writer-director clearly wrote and directed the hell out of it. What's immediately striking about Trouble in Mind, apart from its "We Love the 80s" aesthetic, is the fact that Alan Rudolph's location shooting in Seattle (um, excuse me, "Rain City") generates images as mannered and light-sculpted as anything...
2023-08-08 02:12:12 +0000 UTC View Post
While watching Barbie, I was thoroughly enjoying myself. I not only found it clever and self-aware, but also appreciated the large-scale physical constructions Gerwig got Mattel to spring for. In the design of Barbieland, as well as the "Mattel headquarters," you could really see that Gerwig wasn't joking about her cinephilic aspirations with this film. Jerry Lewis's The Ladies Man'...
2023-08-07 21:43:39 +0000 UTC View Post
I've been writing a fair amount for In Review Online, and this means I end up reviewing films that don't necessarily get addressed on this site. So as I've done before, I'll post excerpts from those upcoming reviews, and add links to the full-length pieces once they go online.
Vera (Tizza Covi ...
2023-08-07 03:45:05 +0000 UTC View Post
BY REQUEST: Matthew McGee
I'm not sure how I managed to miss Sound of the Mountain back when I was doing my deep dive into Naruse. Of course, the man has dozens of extant films, and it'll take years to work through them all. But this one feels major. For one thing, it's the film of Naruse's I've seen that seems to be most clearly in dialogue with his peers. Although
As many have remarked already, this is Petzold's most Rohmerian film. A seaside getaway becomes an interpersonal proving ground for a self-important intellectual (Thomas Schubert) buckling under the pressure to produce a second novel as successful and acclaimed as his first. Afire stages this crisis as one of solipsism, as the novelist, Leon, repeatedly forgoes social interaction in order to...
2023-08-02 01:56:17 +0000 UTC View Post