BY REQUEST: Michelle Berman
After watching Little Murders, I read a bit about it and learned that Elliott Gould, who starred and produced, actually had Godard attached to direct for awhile. When pre-production his some sn...
2023-11-23 21:42:04 +0000 UTC View Post
My lovely wife Jen is a much bigger fan of David Fincher than I am. She's liked most of his films but is especially taken with Zodiac, because for her it is the clearest and most detailed expression of what she feels is Fincher's consistent the...
2023-11-22 02:57:33 +0000 UTC View Post
Time has been kind to the pure abstraction sometimes called "visual music." In the world of experimental cinema, this is work that seemed to receive grudging respect for its importance, but was quietly regarded as a conceptual cul-de-sac that had run it...
2023-11-20 19:52:05 +0000 UTC View Post
BY REQUEST: Jorge (because I could not find his first choice)
Despite recognizing that Ira Sachs is indeed a major filmmaker -- one who has made one film I actually really like -- I feel as though Passages is, as they say...
2023-11-19 03:24:39 +0000 UTC View PostI've been getting back into movies a bit over the past few days. Tomorrow, Jen heads to London for a long weekend, and I expect I'll take the opportunity to hit the Killer Moon-Priscilla-Holdovers trifecta, and maybe I'll even take a peep at Oppenheimer. But I'm setting my expectations low all around. Anyway, ...
2023-11-17 21:38:30 +0000 UTC View Post
It's patently obvious that Eduardo Williams' The Human Surge 3 is unlike pretty much any film that's ever been made. That's because Williams is employing new technologies that were made for 3D virtual reality, but adapting them for 2D feature c...
2023-11-13 06:57:31 +0000 UTC View PostThis is the last dead cat related post. I just think the video gives a really good sense of who he was.
2023-11-09 20:56:15 +0000 UTC View Post
I am going to take a few days off from posting any writing. Yesterday my dear cat Boonmee died very suddenly. I'm still in shock. And although I know that I will start to find pleasure in all the things I cherish about this season -- cold weather, Matt's birth...
Although I've always found Armond White's "Better Than" list to be needlessly petulant, I do occasionally understand the impulse. While I certainly admire Eduardo Williams' The Human Surge 3 (review coming forthwith), I have the sense that its ...
2023-11-07 04:45:48 +0000 UTC View Post
The Light Matter film festival, programmed by my comrade James Hansen, is happening right now in Alfred, New York. Check it out if you can.
They are showing dozens of...
2023-11-05 02:30:23 +0000 UTC View Post
This is always a difficult time of year, even without the added stress of having my reviews sharing server space with bizarre fetish porn. How is this semester still going. How.
A younger, more energetic me would have gone to the Museum of Fine Ar...
2023-11-03 03:25:27 +0000 UTC View Post
The offending website, Kemono, has an email address marked "Legal," and I sent them a firm request to delete my work from the site. Does the address go straight to the trash? Probably.
I did send a notification to Patreon Support, letting them kno...
2023-11-01 23:24:27 +0000 UTC View Post
So today I got an email from a festival publicist, telling me that a filmmaker had complained to them that my review of their film used "unauthorized" screenshots, instead of their official promotional images. This confused me, because I understood this...
2023-10-31 18:55:49 +0000 UTC View Post
Two travelers from Canada, Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) run out of money in Australia and go to a work-travel agency, where they secure temporary employment working at a bar in a mining town, a hundred miles from nowhere. Soon, they fi...
2023-10-31 04:22:23 +0000 UTC View Post
BY REQUEST: Michael Ewins
I watched Marathon a full eighteen years ago. That's a pretty brutal factoid to face, and in a way this is the ideal film to revisit from that period. I was just starting to take cinema seriously...
2023-10-30 04:16:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Now, as November approaches, we find ourselves careening into the period where prestige pictures assert themselves, demanding our attention. As is often the case, we encounter a number of productions with solid pedigree and appropriate festival attentio...
2023-10-29 03:30:04 +0000 UTC View Post
I knew next to nothing about Here when I watched it, aside from the fact that it's Belgian, and that it's one of the year's most acclaimed films. Reading about it afterwards, and seeing the way people have interpreted the film, I'm utterly at a...
2023-10-25 03:25:51 +0000 UTC View Post
Alas, my very first Visconti film. Like a handful of other major directors, he is someone I just never got around to, and for some reason the rep screenings of his films always seemed to correspond to me being somehow indisposed. Seeing The Leopard<...
2023-10-24 02:09:57 +0000 UTC View Post
Lila Avilés' second film is as claustrophobic and enveloping as her debut, The Chambermaid, was standoffishly austere. Someone coming into the theater late would think they've seen something like Tótem before: the members of a large ...
2023-10-20 03:11:00 +0000 UTC View Post
The Shadowless Tower (Zhang Lu, 2023)
I wouldn't bother with the cross-posting, but I loved this film. I hope more folks ...
2023-10-20 01:49:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Since I saw my last lingering Subscriber Request film tonight, it's time to select three more choosers. And here they are!
#105 - MICHAEL EWINS
#110 - MICHELLE BERMAN
#73 - JORGE
BY REQUEST: Lucas Holloway
Among the myriad feelings and revelations I had while revisiting Stop Making Sense (which I probably haven't seen since the late 80s), the first was both comedic and brutal. "My god, he's so you...
2023-10-18 03:20:42 +0000 UTC View Post
Over on Bluesky Social [got invites if you need 'em], I remarked that The Night Visitors is pretty much the Platonic Ideal of a True/False film. In case it need be said, that's a good thing in my book, because for the most part T/F has a good t...
2023-10-17 03:12:09 +0000 UTC View Post
There is an inherent fascination with learning how things are made. And while the production of the products in The Fist are secondary to the labor (and laborers) being observed, there is simply a poetry to industrialized production, something ...
2023-10-14 05:36:26 +0000 UTC View Post
Ambition is a strange thing. By most people's reckoning, Wang Bing's nearly four hour documentary Youth (Spring) is the more ambitious of the director's two 2023 releases. It is expansive, comprehensive, and relates directly to the social colli...
2023-10-14 03:47:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Saturn Bowling is a film that is so blatant in its construction that it often just feels stupid. That said, the stupidity is obviously a strategy. Just to clarify, Mazuy's film is one of the most aggressively Freudian movies I've ever seen, so...
2023-10-12 05:31:07 +0000 UTC View Post
I suppose I've thought about Clarke's Elephant in the same way most cinephiles think about Wavelength. I know what it is. I know what it does. I know why it does it. How much more could I get from actually watching the film? Of course ...
2023-10-12 03:52:53 +0000 UTC View Post
For obvious reasons, Wim Wenders has been back on my cinephile radar, and (for equally obvious reasons) there is quite a bit in his expansive filmography that I've never seen. A few of these early(ish) works were Great White Whales back in my VHS tradin...
2023-10-11 02:43:13 +0000 UTC View Post
I've been meaning to jot down a brief word about these films for nearly a month now. At a certain point I stopped watching the available screeners for NYFF's Currents selection, mostly out of a stultifying sadness. I recognize that the world of art chan...
2023-10-10 02:31:40 +0000 UTC View Post
Fucking Netflix. If 32 minutes of underbaked Almodóvar can open in commercial cinemas, then surely 91 minutes of Wes Anderson material, all based on Roald Dahl stories and all completely consistent stylistically (although I guess that's a given) merits...
2023-10-09 04:27:40 +0000 UTC View Post