Hi folks, just wanted to drop in and say hello. I haven't been seeing too many films lately, since I've been dealing with a lot of other work: grading freshman papers (done, for now); reviewing another horrible Cannes selection from Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (coming soon at In Review Online); and trying to make heads or tails of Deborah Stratman's latest featurette which (despite all the catalogue descr...
2023-03-06 03:06:42 +0000 UTC View Post
I should mention right away that I have not read the Miriam Toews novel on which Women Talking is based. (There are only so many hours in the day, and for better or worse I do not share Scott Renshaw's adaptation completism, admirable though it may be.) So I cannot speak to how well this material works in a literary form. But I will say this. The version of Women Talking that has en...
2023-02-24 20:48:42 +0000 UTC View Post
Jennifer Reeder's new film Perpetrator is getting very strong reviews since premiering at the Berlinale, and to be honest it took me a while to figure out exactly why. Granted, I am not the world's biggest horror aficionado, but Reeder's film initially struck me as clumsy and scattershot, a collection of half-formed ideas held together with a low-budget 1990s direct-to-video ambiance. Other ...
2023-02-22 04:22:52 +0000 UTC View Post
It's incredibly rare for first-time filmmakers to make great work their first time out. So as a general rule, it's preferable to see a debut film with great ideas but shaky execution. Anyone (except maybe Kevin Smith) will get better at their craft over time, but it's much less likely that someone will become appreciably smarter or more sensitive as an artist. More mature, sure, but that's another th...
2023-02-20 03:45:39 +0000 UTC View Post
Before trying to say anything halfway cogent about A New Old Play, I wanted to read Shelly Kraicer's interview with Qiu in Cinema Scope 91. There are a couple of reasons for this (aside from the fact that anything Shelly writes is well worth reading). Fi...
2023-02-17 03:17:34 +0000 UTC View Postor, Notes on Two Prominent Art-Horror Flicks from 2022
Resurrection (Andrew Semans, 2022)
First of all, I was surprised to learn that Andrew Semans' first film was Nancy, Please, a film I have not seen but remember hearing about. It stuck with me because of the bizarre narrowcasting of its central conceit. A grad student's dissertation is held hostage by an angry...
2023-02-15 05:11:30 +0000 UTC View Post
As the deadline for the 2023 Skandies rapidly approaches, I have time to watch a couple more eligible films. So this is a FLASH POLL. Which one(s) should I prioritize?
Thanks.
2023-02-10 20:33:15 +0000 UTC View Post
A quick glance at Letterboxd confirms it: "a Dardennes version of Run Lola Run" is the popular characterization of Full Time, the second feature film by Éric Gravel. Trouble is, this admittedly simplistic description goes a long way toward explaining why Full Time is so effective. If we recall, Run Lola Run was an experiment in propulsion, with Franka Potente raci...
2023-02-10 19:23:41 +0000 UTC View Post
Walk Up is a slight change-up for Hong, whose structural conceits have generally been somewhat abstract affairs (doubling, mirroring, repetition). Here, Hong uses an architectural motif to organize a set of interconnected stories, and although Walk Up is a perfectly fine title, I wonder whether he'd have called it Three Stories if Nanni Moretti hadn't gotten there first. Li...
2023-02-07 05:29:53 +0000 UTC View Post
Marx Can Wait is perhaps a bit of a detour in Bellocchio's career, since he hasn't made very many documentaries, and his late style is characterized by an expansive, operatic mode that's in stark contrast to this rather straightforward family chronicle. But then, as Bellocchio demonstrates throughout the film, the suicide of his twin brother Camillo has been haunting his films throughout his...
2023-02-05 04:39:18 +0000 UTC View Post
The state-of-the-media doc Fantastic Machine left me in deep despair, but probably not for the reasons it's makers intended. Starting off with the usual chestnuts -- Daguerre, Muybridge, the Lumières, Méliès -- the film seems intent on rehearsing the same history of visual culture that you could find on a Wikipedia page. John Berger's Ways of Seeing covers a lot of the same basic...
2023-02-04 03:38:19 +0000 UTC View Post
More so than in the past (I think -- I'd have to crunch the numbers), notable experimental filmmakers are shooting their shot with feature films that, while certainly not conventional by any means, are a bit more accessible than their short-form output. For every The Grand Bizarre -- a film in which Jodie Mack retained the essential formalism of her earlier work, extending it quite logically...
2023-01-29 07:06:17 +0000 UTC View Post
I watched Grémillon's The Love of a Woman without realizing it was his final film. So quite by chance, I participated in the pastime of hardcore auteurists, seeing exactly how an old master concludes their career, offering what is presumably a crystallization of all their artistic signatures. Until I watch a few more Grémillons, I won't be able to speak to that. But I can say that The ...
2023-01-27 02:43:34 +0000 UTC View Post
So I decided to start (admittedly a bit late) on my Grémillon odyssey with an early silent, one with a someone odd reputation. Maldone is a film that was produced by its star, Charles Dullin, someone who appears to be second-billed or lower in nearly every film he was in. Dullin had a supporting role in Clouzot's Quai des Orfèvres, and that's the most popular film in which he had ...
2023-01-24 20:18:02 +0000 UTC View Post
So a few weeks ago, I wrote about Through the Olive Trees, and as far as I was concerned it was my first viewing of it. Guess what?
I was going through my 2014 viewing log, mostly to record some titles to Letterboxd. And a lot of them I barely remember. Like something called Anna which I guess was retitled Mindscape, starring Taissa Farmiga? Or a bunch of Korean films...
2023-01-24 04:01:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Expanding on the layered, accelerated style she has developed in her shorter films, Fox Maxy arrives at Sundance firing on all cylinders. Though Gush is Maxy’s first feature-length project, the artist doesn’t capitulate to convention. Gush marks a clear progression in Maxy’s method, often appearing to adopt an organizational logic more akin to music than any conventional narra...
2023-01-21 21:16:49 +0000 UTC View Post
There's a strange thing about "realism" that I've never quite understood. In many respects, the world we live in is cruel, ugly, and inhumane. And in the course of trying to protest against those conditions, a great many artists seek to replicate those conditions, or at least a close surface resemblance to them. I suppose the thinking is, by lifting situations out of the overall flow of things, and a...
2023-01-21 21:03:30 +0000 UTC View Post
An underwhelming Golden Bear winner from a less-than-stellar competition, Alcarràs feels very much like a compromise vote. There is nothing terribly wrong with Carla Simón's sophomore feature, but it is rather undistinguished, a broadly based piece of family portraiture that takes place at a moment of crisis and transition. We observe three generations of the Solé clan, rural farmers who ...
2023-01-18 03:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
I receive email notifications when someone new joins this Patreon. And I was confused today by a sudden uptick (to put it mildly) in subscribers. As it happens, it was all due to the great Peter Labuza, who cited my last post approvingly on the Twitter Dot Com. Thanks, Peter!
But I also want to welcome and thank these brand new readers (or in a few cases, some repeat offenders) who kindly help ...
2023-01-14 03:01:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert, 2022)
I will say this much: it's not boring. Part of the secret of EEAAO is that it moves at such a clip that the Daniels are able to whizz past any number of moments that, if you really chewed over them, would seem very familiar. Certain segments, like the rock sequence or many of the more banal al...
2023-01-13 07:04:28 +0000 UTC View Post
Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood (Richard Linklater, 2022)
I turned this film off after 30 minutes earlier this year, but watched in full due to the acclaim it's gotten. And I mentioned a few things on Twitter related to it, which I will elaborate on, just a bit. First, I recognize that I have very particular problems with a lot of Richard Linklater's films, and they are co...
2023-01-10 03:39:21 +0000 UTC View Post
Well, well, well. In addition to getting a touch of flu, my dad has gone into the hospital. He has pneumonia, and is improving, but there are a lot of things Jen and I have to manage, along with our usual duties.
So with any luck, tomorrow will be a writing day. I want to talk about Descendant, All That Breathes, and Geographies of Solitude as offering very different ...
2023-01-09 02:40:28 +0000 UTC View Post
Okay, so I needed a little break from all the 2022 films I've been mainlining, and this film turned up on a torrent site, and it occurred to me that I'd never actually seen a film from the DPRK. And well, it's just about what you'd expect. Just barely competent as a piece of cinematic storytelling, but streamlined as a work of unabashed propaganda, Song of Retrospection...
2023-01-06 04:44:15 +0000 UTC View Post
A brief note on a Croatian film that has flown a bit under the radar during the 2022 festival season. Safe Place is a rare animal indeed: a debut feature, autobiographical in nature, with the director serving as lead actor, essentially occupying the role he did in real life. There are so many ways Safe Place could run aground, notably the fact that Lerotić is so incredibly close to...
2023-01-04 01:37:52 +0000 UTC View Post
Considered by many to be Yang's masterpiece, A Brighter Summer Day certainly earns its four-hour runtime. For one thing, the film's episodic organization keeps things moving at a brisk, varied pace, often turning away from its putative center, Si'r (Chang Chen) and observing some of the action swirling around him, particularly the plight of his parents. But also, this is a fairly panoramic f...
2023-01-03 23:48:22 +0000 UTC View Post
There There (Andrew Bujalski, 2022)
As I said on my now-deleted Letterboxd remarks, this is a film that I admire in theory, because it shares some DNA with the structural-experiment films of people like Hal Hartley (Flirt) and Todd Solondz (Palindromes, Storytelling). (I didn't like the Solondz films at the time, but I should revisit them since I've w...
2023-01-03 06:16:24 +0000 UTC View Post
Baumbach's adaptation of the "unadaptable" Don DeLillo novel has at least two direct quotations from Godard. The traffic jam in Weekend is here recreated to demonstrate the gridlock of panics suburbanites flee the "airborne toxic event," and several of the scenes in a glistening, utopian A&P store (including the LCD Soundsystem dance number over the credits) are pretty clearly cribbed fr...
2023-01-03 05:35:21 +0000 UTC View Post
"Lana."
"Lana!"
"LANA!!"
"WHAT??!"
2022-12-30 23:20:21 +0000 UTC
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The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, 2022)
An essentially literary premise is given rather regal cinematic treatment by virtue of McDonagh shooting on two ridiculously picturesque Irish islands, but it's more than just visual splendor he achieves. The film takes great care to communicate the insularity of Inisherin, a place where one can literally witness the Irish Civil...
2022-12-30 03:12:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Just so's you know, I got the Eclipse 34 set for Christmas, so January's director of the month will be Jean Grémillon.
Deal with it.
2022-12-28 08:43:43 +0000 UTC View Post