So most likely tomorrow I will watch the remaining request from the last subscriber tombola. That would be from Matthew McGee, who made me smile by assigning me another Mikio Naruse. So next up is 1954's Sound of the Mountain (now on Criterion Channel). As Nictate would say, "come at me, Naruse."
Before mentioning the next three lucky "winners," I just wanted to throw this out. Ever no...
2023-07-28 06:21:29 +0000 UTC View Post
Maybe I like minor Loach, when he and Paul Laverty are not trying to hard to make a statement and are content to explore Britain's rich history of class struggle. I ended up watching Jimmy's Hall since it seemed like it would be a useful point of comparison for Loach's newest (and last?) film, The Old Oak. Both films focus on physical locations that serve as social and political hub...
2023-07-28 02:59:26 +0000 UTC View Post
BY REQUEST: John Powers
Aside from a few shots that follow clerks "upstairs" to another department, Wiseman's Welfare takes place in one large room. This is the main headquarters and waiting area of the New York City welfare department. There are satellite offices (one on Waverly, one on Broadway) that are mentioned but never seen. The allusions to these other offices ...
2023-07-26 17:52:33 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the most disarming aspects of See You Friday, Robinson is the portrait it provides of one of its subjects, Jean-Luc Godard. An elderly man, frail but still quite active, Godard is seen editing videos, but also folding his laundry and making some food in the kitchen. There is no sign of his partner, Anne-Marie Miéville, and at one point the director, Mitra Farahani, mentions that alth...
2023-07-26 04:27:44 +0000 UTC View Post
After seeing three of his earlier films, Pietro Marcello finally made sense to me with Martin Eden. Not only was in anchored by a brash lead performance by Luca Marinelli; its literary roots provided the strong narrative and thematic bones that I felt were missing in his previous feature film Lost and Beautiful. So perhaps Scarlet is a step back, or maybe Martin Eden 2023-07-24 19:02:48 +0000 UTC View Post
I changed my mind just a bit on this one, going back and watching a few key scenes after I'd come away with a mostly favorable impression. And although I do have very mixed feelings about Asteroid City, I have no trouble comprehending the fact that some longtime Wes-watchers feel that this is his best film in years, if not ever. If, as the memes and SNL sketches contend, "Wesworld" is a quan...
2023-07-24 03:22:30 +0000 UTC View Post
I was moved to finally watch this acknowledged experimental masterwork because its maker, the Basque artist José Antonio Sistiaga, passed away last month at the age of 91. Given the nature of ...ere erera..., I had been putting off watching it in the hopes that an actual screening might eventually come my way. This is a 70-minute, silent, hand-painted film, and on top of the fact that light...
2023-07-21 03:02:06 +0000 UTC View Post
A brief note about A Kitten For Hitler, which I watched out of perverse curiosity. Word is that Melvyn Bragg, producer of The South Bank Show, challenged Ken Russell to make a film that he himself would want to be censored. Of course, given Russell's penchant for pushing boundaries, this was quite the obstruction, a...
2023-07-19 03:26:03 +0000 UTC View Post
It feels like I've been seeing an inordinate amount of this guy's films lately, but hey, blame Thierry Fremaux. Tchaikovsky's Wife is Serebrennikov's latest, and is the final film I still had to catch up with from the 2022 Cannes competition lineup. When it debuted there, the reaction was mostly lukewarm, with a few critics observing that Serebrennikov, who made Leto and Petrov'...
2023-07-19 03:03:59 +0000 UTC View Post
A bit of context for the uninitiated. Siegfried Fruhauf might best be characterized as a B-player in the contemporary Austrian avant-garde. I wouldn't call him an "also-ran," exactly, and most of the films of his I've seen have been passable enough programmers, short works that would fit comfortably within most experimental film showcases. They are diverting enough while they're in front of you, and ...
2023-07-16 05:45:54 +0000 UTC View Post
BY REQUEST: Scout Tafoya
Dear Scout,
Please excuse the possibly cloying approach of discussing your film in epistolary form rather than a conventional review. This is mostly my way of mitigating the awkwardness of writing about a film when I know its maker, and when (as was the case with Frederic Da and Maximilien Luc Procter) the maker is a subscriber and will be reading...
2023-07-15 03:42:14 +0000 UTC View Post
If you ever check my viewing logs on The Academic Hack, you'll know that I have been mainlining recent experimental films, mostly because I have my November program to begin thinking about, and also because I have been communicating with different programmers via back-channels about what an uneven year it's turning out to be. There's plenty still to see, and I don't really feel right "reviewing" film...
2023-07-13 02:34:18 +0000 UTC View Post
BY REQUEST: AR
-Basements were recently my thing. Do you know what I found? I swear I'll propose only good things. I see wooden boxes. Do you know what was inside?
-Corpses?
-Electric saws!
A true oddity, In the Shadow of the Blue Rascal...
2023-07-07 04:26:30 +0000 UTC View Post
What would you write about if an editor offered you the chance to write about anything you wanted to? I mean, within reason -- film or media related, at least tangentially -- but I am having a bit of trouble deciding what to do. So I thought I'd put the question to you.
What haven't I written about? Or who(m)? Looking over the field of avant-garde production, I feel as though I've covered most ...
2023-07-07 03:25:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Side note: isn't it weird that the Unilever ice creams have, like, twenty different brand names? Theoretically, a brand benefits from international recognition, and yes, all the various brands (Magnum and/or Good Humor in the U.S., by the way) feature that heart shape. Still, it's an odd strategy.
I still have one subscriber request to get to. AR (not the entire state of Arkansas, presumably) h...
2023-07-03 04:33:37 +0000 UTC View Post
BY REQUEST: Emilio
It's fitting that as Kristoffer Borgli's newest film Sick of Myself is wending its way through theaters, I should be asked to have a look at the director's previous feature, which is available for viewing on a number of platforms (Amazon, Vudu, Tubi) but was hobbled by legal difficulties from which it could never quite bounce back. Its final form, as...
2023-07-02 05:01:24 +0000 UTC View Post
I have been a fairly consistent champion of the documentaries of Nikolaus Geyrhalter. He is an Austrian formalist whose visual essays ask us to look closely at aspects of the world typically hidden from view. At their best -- Our Daily Bread (2005), 7915 KM (2008), Over the Years (2015) -- Geyrhalter's films meet the hidden elements of our existence with an impassive, metho...
2023-06-30 02:46:18 +0000 UTC View Post
BY REQUEST: Kevin Wall
We all have our aesthetic biases. It's unavoidable. The only thing a conscientious critic can do is keep trying to engage with works that fall in our blind spots. As I've written elsewhere, some of my very favorite films and filmmakers are ones I used to have a lot of trouble with. You never know if and when something is going to click.
In many respects a radical shift for Albert Serra, Pacifiction is about history and delusion, the carving out of an imaginary place out of time and being brought up short when you discover, much too late, that time has been carrying you along without your awareness. Depicted in wide establishing shots that resemble the exoticism of Gauguin, the Tahiti of Pacifiction is both a real p...
2023-06-26 20:52:14 +0000 UTC View Post
A title card at the beginning of the film informs us that it was inspired by a set of late-19th century silver collodion plates. Alas, Godland is very clearly a film organized by the logic of still photography, since Pálmason's stock-still cinematography and fixation on landscape give the whole affair the stodgy feel of a well appointed coffee-table-book. After producing two smart, well-wro...
2023-06-25 22:43:33 +0000 UTC View Post
Eugène Green's latest film begins with a quote from St. Augustine, relating to the nature of time. There is no past, present, or future, according to Augustine, but rather three distinct forms of the present: the present of the past, the present of the present, and the present of the future. In other words, the past is only comprehensible inasmuch as we think about it, and use it, in our own time. L...
2023-06-24 19:39:39 +0000 UTC View Post
These three subscribers have gotten the short straws. Or the long ones. Depends on how you look at it.
#87: KEVIN WALL
#49: EMILIO
#10: AR
So you know what to do. Either message me with your requests, or just drop them in the comments below. And as always, thanks to all who participate, who read, who comment, and just all of y...
2023-06-23 06:21:44 +0000 UTC View Post
BY REQUEST: Daniel Wood
Բարեւ, ես եմ
Ես երկար ժամանակ մտածել եմ մեր մասին*
A rediscovered classic of Soviet-era Armenian filmmaking, Hello, It's Me! is both an elegy to those lost in World War Two and a subtle critique of the bureaucratic and political limitations placed on scientists and intellectuals during the postwar ...
2023-06-23 06:04:18 +0000 UTC View Post
If you follow my writing (which presumably you do, to some extent), you know I have a few hobby-horses I come back to again and again. And one of them relates to debut films, and the tendency of "tyro helmers" to stuff way too much plot, and way too many ideas, into their films. It's a logical response to how difficult it is to get something financed and made, and it clearly seems connected to the fe...
2023-06-22 00:11:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Another of the handful of sequels that actually improves upon its predecessor, Across the Spider-Verse isn't bogged down by 45 minutes of the "normal" world, since Into the Spider-Verse already got that business out of the way. Instead, we are almost immediately plunged into a series of abstract, painterly environments, clarified with a hint of irony by literal comic-book intrusions...
2023-06-21 03:02:38 +0000 UTC View Post
If proof were needed that I can never leave well enough alone, I decided -- felt obliged, really -- to go back and finish Serebrennikov's 2021 Cannes entry. Part of this is plain old obsessive completism. However, even though I certainly did not like the 30 minutes of Petrov's Flu that I saw back in October, I felt a grudging respect for it. So many films fail because they are risk-averse an...
2023-06-21 01:15:49 +0000 UTC View Post
BY REQUEST: Luke Fowler
See, this is why I think this subscriber-request lottery is turning out to be a good idea. Mr. Fowler's request, Too Late, is a film I'd never heard of, and if by chance I ever stumbled across a mention of it, I would probably have made firm plans to never watch it. It's precisely the kind of sub-Tarantino, neo-movie-brat exercise I ten...
2023-06-18 06:20:35 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm sure this will come as a surprise, but I am not a devotee of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. When a specific film gets good notices, like Black Panther or Shang-Chi, I will give it a look. Since I don't really fuck with Marvel, I can't say anything meaningful regarding the sameness of the films, or the corporate directorial style. I'll leave these complaints to the dut...
2023-06-16 18:26:52 +0000 UTC View Post
Sorry for the inactivity, but man alive, it has been too hot to move, think, or write. The AC can only do so much to keep up when it's over 100 degrees (37.7 celsius if you're nasty) for much of the day. Still, I didn't want to fall too far behind, so I'm going to try to knock some of these recent films out in semi-short order.
2023-06-16 03:42:02 +0000 UTC
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While watching The Eight Mountains, more than once I thought about Brokeback Mountain, and not just because both films are about the love between two guys, or the fact that Luca Marinelli vaguely resembles Jake Gyllenhaal. No, the main thing was a nagging feeling I had that this film was extremely well made while at the same time painfully obvious, in the way that certain literary a...
2023-06-13 04:37:10 +0000 UTC View Post