One of the year’s most acclaimed films, Return to Seoul is also notably absent within the so-called “discourse.” It seems that a lot of people like it, but don’t have a lot to say, perhaps because they believe that its quality is self-evident. I did not care from director Davy Chou’s previous film Diamond Island, and I will freely admit that Return to Seoul is an ...
2022-12-28 06:01:28 +0000 UTC View Post
Just a quick word about a film that kind of snuck up on me. In its first twenty or so minutes, Dos Estaciones seems pretty familiar. From its rigid compositions to its setting in a small-batch tequila factory, it seemed as though González was making another film, half-doc / half-fiction, about traditions being eradicated by capitalism. And while this is of course an evergreen topic, there a...
2022-12-27 23:56:21 +0000 UTC View Post
It seems to me that the revelatory thing about Touki-Bouki (and yes, I'm going with the onscreen hyphen) is that while Mambéty clearly has something to say about colonialism, modernity, and superstition, he allows himself to communicate those ideas in a sidelong, almost incidental manner. When you compare Touki-Bouki to the films from this period by Sembène, ...
2022-12-27 04:15:57 +0000 UTC View Post
Poitras's brutal documentary about the life and work of Nan Goldin, while not exactly critic-proof, does present certain challenges for someone who means to write about it. That's because All the Beauty and the Bloodshed does a fairly good job at analyzing itself. It is a rather classical documentary in that it presents a set of problems, provides context and evidence, and ultimately puts fo...
2022-12-26 07:02:21 +0000 UTC View Post
For those of you unfamiliar with Rose Lowder's work, I have written about an earlier set of Bouquets about ten years ago. For decades, she was used a meticulous frame-by-frame exposure method. This often results in a jittery form of animation, ...
2022-12-23 21:14:59 +0000 UTC View PostIn a time of all-encompassing irony, it's hard to know whether sincerity as an antidote or just another pose. Two of America's leading auteurs decided to go back in time with their latest films, offering their own Freudian origin stories on the assumption that their personal memories might resonate more broadly, giving us some historical explanation for How We Got Here. The results are suitably mixed.
2022-12-23 20:20:58 +0000 UTC
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Look, no one is more surprised than me. As far as I was concerned, Ruben Östlund was a smug, self-righteous alt-right troll, using irony and pseudo-intellect to "own the libs." In short, the cinematic equivalent of an 8chan troll, someone who took saw himself as the latest arthouse moralist and teller of uncomfortable truths, extending the tradition of folks like Haneke and von Trier but lacking the...
2022-12-22 20:31:07 +0000 UTC View PostAs with all such lists, a grain or two of salt is advisable. There are always more experimental films produced and released within a calendar year than can ever be watched by any given human being, regardless of how hard they may try. And in my case, I was unable to travel to any film festivals this year, so I have no doubt that I missed a few key titles along the way. But it’s the end of the year, lists are fun ( 2022-12-20 06:28:25 +0000 UTC View Post
I had jotted some notes on this film back when I watched it, but they went missing from my desk. I mention this just to explain that I have owed Decision to Leave a full-length review for quite awhile, and I will undoubtedly rewatch it once the year-end crunch is over.
I will say that I had an interesting email exchange with Patreon subscriber / Asian cinema expert Shelly Kraicer, who ...
2022-12-19 06:31:26 +0000 UTC View Post
The Whale (Darren Aronofsky, 2022)
Piss poor.
Confession: I HandBraked a copy of this from the screener disc I got, because I need to send the disc out to a friend. (It's going out tomorrow! Promise!) But I looked at the file and assumed it was copyguarded, because the file was so dark I couldn't watch it. Turns out, the file was fine! It's the film that'...
2022-12-19 01:01:52 +0000 UTC View Post
The Maiden is the first feature film from Graham Foy, a Calgary-based director who released a number of short films under the moniker Fantavious Fritz. It's a solid debut, and this past September at TIFF, it was heralded as part of a mini-New Wave in Canadian filmmaking, along with two other new films, Concrete Valley and Queens of the Qing Dynasty. Moreover, The Maiden...
2022-12-14 19:52:23 +0000 UTC View Post
[CW: groveling apologies]
Well, my final papers are in. 120 beautiful seven-page essays plus MLA bibliography, all waiting for my attention. There's simply no avoiding it. Meanwhile, the end of the year approaches, and I am trying to get through as many of the major 2022 releases as possible. Granted, the industry has a somewhat different definition of "major" than I do. (E.g., T...
2022-12-13 16:28:53 +0000 UTC View Post
The Potemkinists (Radu Jude, 2022)
Jude's short film is not so much a tribute to Sergei Eisenstein as it is a reconsideration of the actual mutineers of the Russian ship the Potemkin, using a little-known historical footnote to address the broader problem of cultural history in the former Soviet bloc. While Eisenstein concludes Potemkin with the tsarist ships joining t...
2022-12-10 23:25:31 +0000 UTC View Post
Few recent films have initially seemed as original, or as inscrutable, as Skinamarink, the debut feature from Kyle Edward Ball. Seemingly on its way to becoming a cult object since its premiere this past summer at Montreal's Fantasia Fest, Skinamarink is fascinati...
2022-12-09 00:20:39 +0000 UTC View Post
Sorry for invoking a bit of Muskese there, but indeed, the people have spoken. This month, my subscribers have made me an offer I can't refuse. Why? Because you clearly want me to take the motorcycle by the horns.&n...
2022-12-08 05:34:36 +0000 UTC View Post
Artistic experiments don't always pan out, and the important thing is to learn something along the way. Trite as that may sound, this conviction marks the difference between a noble failure and a time, unenlightening success. Azevedo Gomes' latest film is a cinematic adaptation of a work that is was an experiment in its own right. While writing The Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle, ...
2022-12-07 05:29:10 +0000 UTC View Post
The Inspection is an autobiographical debut feature that shows Bratton's onscreen avatar, Eliis French (Jeremy Pope) hitting rock-bottom as a result of having been turned out of his home by his Christian bigot mother (Gabrielle Union) at the age of 16 because he's gay. With no options left, French decides to join the Marine Corps where, if the film's odd fantasy sequence is to be ...
2022-12-06 06:26:43 +0000 UTC View Post
Only Wiseman's second excursion into fiction filmmaking*, A Couple displays a fairly radical idea of what fiction actually is. His first non-documentary, 2002's The Last Letter, was also a compact, intensive examination of a single female performer, Catherine Samie. But that production was essentially stagebound, a kind of documentary (or at least a document) of a theatrica...
2022-12-05 05:33:57 +0000 UTC View Post
It's taken me awhile to get to the final film in Kiarostami's Koker trilogy, and this is one of those instances when I really wish I hadn't waited. It's hard to say how I would have reacted to Through the Olive Trees in 1994, or 2004, or even 2014, although I'm fairly sure I'd have still considered it the weakest, most pro forma film of the three. Where is the Friend's Home? 2022-12-04 06:18:29 +0000 UTC View Post
It's still hectic over here, with the end of the semester grading compounded by end-of-year cramming. And I know there are some films from the last poll (esp. Through the Olive Trees) that I still need to watch.
But what the fuck. With the S&S poll dominating "the discourse," I thought I'd query you to see which films from the 100 on the list I should watch in December. These are a...
2022-12-03 06:48:18 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the year's best films, Rewind and Play might best be characterized as a forensic documentary. French-Senegalese director Alain Gomis acquired the unseen rushes from an episode of the French TV program "Jazz Portrait," created and hosted by one Henri Renaud, an interviewer whose smug officiousness is matched only by his discomfort in his own skin. I haven't seen any other episodes of "...
2022-12-03 06:07:16 +0000 UTC View Post
It wasn't my intention to write about Glass Onion on the day that Sight & Sound released the results of their 2022 critics' poll. This event, which happens once every ten years, is always exciting and controversial and results in a predictable flurry of comment on Film Twitte...
2022-12-02 02:54:55 +0000 UTC View PostThis is the first of several catch-up posts, so I won't be going into as much detail as I probably should. But some of these films I honestly couldn't write about because I programmed them, and it felt vaguely like a conflict-of-interest. So here goes.
Although Joshua is very clear that this film is a direct homage to Luther Price, that can be a bit misleading. This is no cinematic cov...
2022-11-28 06:23:19 +0000 UTC View Post
Plenty has already been written about EO, Jerzy Skolimowski's very strange, often exhilarating new film. And while the director himself has confirmed what most viewers detected immediately -- that EO is a loose adaptation of Bresson's Au hasard, Balthasar -- I actually noticed similarities to another Bresson film. In L'Argent, Bresson follows the movement of a coun...
2022-11-27 20:07:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Soldat is a German filmmaker who doesn't have much of a festival profile in North America, which is a shame. While I would make no grand claims for his films, he does shine a light on queer marginality with a gaze that is simultaneously dispassionate and empathetic. His 2020 film Resident Ground Floor was about a gay agoraphobe on disability who spent nearly every waking hour jerk...
2022-11-25 02:03:19 +0000 UTC View Post
Having now seen three films by Ruth Beckermann, I'm more confused than anything. Does she have a discernible unified project? Her work seems to have the rigorous conceptual bent one so often finds in Austrian cinema. But Mutzenbacher strikes me as a concept in search of its proper cinematic expression. There's just nothing terribly interesting here. A group of Austrian men responded to a cas...
2022-11-24 06:45:22 +0000 UTC View Post
Befitting such a close result, I am going to attempt a compromise. I will focus on the major titles with longer reviews, and drop a couple of drive-bys along the way.
Meanwhile, enjoy Edward Münch, Mike!
2022-11-24 06:35:19 +0000 UTC View Post
As the year-end crunch keeps crunching, I am inevitably falling behind in my reviews. I have thought about how to handle this, and I came up with two possible solutions. And, since we haven't done a poll in awhile, I thought I'd leave it up to you guys.
YOU CAN GET WITH THIS: I will do a couple of omnibus posts with single-graf drive-by reviews of the films I haven't addressed yet
or
<... 2022-11-20 05:36:12 +0000 UTC View Post
Hong Kong filmmaker Simon Liu has gained greater exposure over the past few years, and rightly so. In an avant-garde film environment that for some time has favored long takes and minimal camera movement, Liu works very differently, combining agitated handheld cinematography with a breakneck editing speed, often incorporating superimp...
2022-11-20 05:26:09 +0000 UTC View Post
At their best, the films of the Dardenne brothers embody a critical realism. Part of what has made their work so powerful over the years, so original and affecting, is the way that they construct characters, particularly ones who live on society's margins or otherwise find their backs against the wall. The Dardennes, who might reasonably be considered Christian Marxists, have always taken great care ...
2022-11-19 06:42:46 +0000 UTC View Post