msicism

June Director of the Month

I'll have at least one more Ray write-up (for The Big City), possibly another, before May is over. But now, let's set the agender for Pride Month.

Betrayal (Lewis Milestone, 1929)

That feeling when you discover your wife with your best friend.....

Road to Nowhere (Monte Hellman, 2010)

Neither a disaster nor an auteurist triumph, Road to Nowhere tells us a few things about the changes in B-movie logic since Hellman made his genre masterworks. In the age of cable TV and streaming video, there's only artsploitation, an attempt ...

Devi (Satyajit Ray, 1960)

Faith and reason, at it again. As is often the case in Ray's films, Devi provokes crucial questions regarding the treatment of women in Bengali society. But he does this by taking their dehumanization to the limits of tolerability. In this rega...

Final Destination Canada (and more!)

Due to my short attention span recently, I have been watching a ton of public service announcements on YouTube. Just from a filmmaking perspective, a lot of these are really fascinating and demonstrate a remarkable audiovisual economy. There is usually ...

The Big Experimental Rundown (Part Two)

ABOVE: a pharmacist working at a Steenbeck

Reach Capacity (Ericka Beckman, 2020)

Much like A Tribe Called Quest, Ericka Beckman ha...

Madalena (Madiano Marchetti, 2021)

I had previously watched half an hour of Madalena during Rotterdam, and although it was certainly impressive enough formally, it left a bad taste in my mouth. First-time director Madiano Marchetti has the beginnings of a sharp visual sense, and...

Slower Traffic Keep Right

Since I have not been producing writing as quickly or as often as I have been in the recent past, I figured I owed you all some explanation. You are, after all, paying customers, without whom I'd probably be unable to produce as much "content" as I do. ...

The Big Experimental Run-Down (Part One)

Despite the fact that avant-garde film and video are sort of my bailiwick, I've been spending much of my time on this Patreon focusing on feature-length narratives. This is mostly due to laziness; really digging into experimental films is more difficult...

Gull (Kim Mi-jo, 2020)

Gull is a rather simple film, although its depiction of the aftermath of sexual assault is undeniably disturbing. In her first feature film, Kim clearly wants to get one very important point across. Women in Korea who've been the victim of sex ...

Aparajito (Satyajit Ray, 1956)

Considering Aparajito in relation to Pather Panchali, I began having significant doubts about Ray's approach to narrative construction, especially with respect to character. There's an odd slackness here that I think is supposed to ech...

The Killing of Two Lovers (Robert Machoian, 2020)

The Killing of Two Lovers is a film that focuses most of its attention on things that don't happen. From the opening scene, Machoian introduces David (Clayne Crawford) as a sort of rural Hamlet, struggling with the urge to make a cruel...

Moon, 66 Questions (Jacqueline Lentzou, 2021)

As has been the case with several of this year's New Directors / New Films selections, Moon, 66 Questions is a bit frustrating, since it seems to promise much more than it delivers. To be a bit more specific, first-time feature director Jacquel...

An Enemy of the People (Satyajit Ray, 1989)

There are a few particularly interesting things about Ray's take on Ibsen. First, until about a year ago, Ganashatru (An Enemy of the People) was largely considered to be one of Ray's very worst films. Reviews I've read strongly imply ...

Faya Dayi (Jessica Beshir, 2021)

This is a uniquely frustrating documentary, because it has so much potential. First-time director Beshir uses an intellectually impressive approach to the problem of depicting contemporary life in eastern Ethiopia, choosing to focus not on the plig...

Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955)

As I've addressed here and on other forums, I had no direct exposure to the Official Film Canon as such. Coming to cinephilia from a focus on painting and sculpture, I gravitated toward experimental cinema, and being a grad student during the 90s, I was...

Downstream to Kinshasa (Dieudo Hamadi, 2020)

In recent years, the documentaries of the DRC's Dieudo Hamadi have started receiving more recognition in the West. (True/False awarding him the 2018 True Vision award certainly helped raise his profile.) His latest been selected for Cannes, but of cours...

Comedy Corner (workshop material)

Konstantin Chernenko and Pope John Paul I walk into a bar. "One vodka and one cabernet," Chernenko announces, but the bartender points to two gentlemen on stools. "They're already having your drinks," he says.

"The Lord giveth...." remarks JP1, but the Soviet president is visibly irritated. "You mean we didn't even make it to the end of th...

Film About a Father Who (Lynne Sachs, 2020)

This is a difficult film to evaluate. It's the latest in a recent spate of auto-portraits of filmmakers and their families, and obviously one of the difficulties with these projects is that the filmmaker is ensnared within their own narrative. This is t...

Wood and Water (Jonas Bak, 2021)

Clocking in at a lean 80 minutes, Wood and Water is one of those films that gets so much right for so long that it's actually a bit nerve-wracking. Is the filmmaker going to make a misstep? First-time feature director Jonas Bak doesn't err, exa...

Sleepwalk (Sara Driver, 1986)

I did not care for this movie. But it has undeniable significance as an artifact.

I'm probably in the minority here, but I just don't think this 1980s NYC downtown filmmaking has aged very well. After sampling Alexandre Rockwell's In the Soup<...