How can one adapt James Baldwin's prose for the screen? How can you hope to retain that hard, mournful poetry?
Unsurprisingly, the director of Moonlight did not attempt a literal interpretation. He retained the plot points and the simmerin...
2018-12-19 05:01:14 +0000 UTC View Post
Roma is fine. At first I was rather irritated by Cuarón's insistence on cramming the film with so much incident -- brass bands and wildfires and unplanned pregnancies and civil unrest -- until I realized that this isn't really intended to be a...
2018-12-17 21:58:44 +0000 UTC View Post
A good friend of mine, cinephile Ryan Wu, once compared Lars von Trier's Dogville to a beautifully baked piss pie. The craft is impeccable, and by all reasonable judgment it is the best possible piss pie you could ever hope to encounter in the annals ...
2018-12-17 00:54:38 +0000 UTC View Post
I have already logged a review of this film in my coverage of TIFF Wavelengths 2018, based on having watched four of its eight hours -- not something I'm particularly proud of, but an absolute necessity given the sheer bulk of material I had to plow through in...
2018-12-17 00:11:08 +0000 UTC View Post
Any halfway decent critic should admit when he or she is out of their depth, and the truth is I am painfully unqualified to even scratch the surface of Terror Nullius, the astonishingly dense, politically scathing found-footage featurette by th...
2018-12-13 22:48:02 +0000 UTC View Post
...for a throwaway reference to these ads from the 1970s.
2018-12-13 19:29:54 +0000 UTC View Post
David Robert Mitchell is not an intuitive filmmaker, but that is no vice in itself. It Follows demonstrated that, if he had a single strong idea, he could track it to its logical conclusion. But that single guiding idea is what he lacks in Under t...
2018-12-13 16:11:06 +0000 UTC View Post
The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Desiree Akhavan, 2018)
I should begin by stating for the record, I have not seen Boy Erased. Nevertheless, it strikes me as curious, and more than a little sexist, that that film has eked its wa...
2018-12-13 11:51:46 +0000 UTC View Post
The "wild boys" are women.
(That's a "spoiler," but it's clear.)
Mandico plays with gender but
it's retrograde, I fear.
Wild boys join a crusty captain,
and he takes them captive
to an island that is queer.
He tries to...
2018-12-12 17:05:43 +0000 UTC View Post
Aside from its other virtues, Spike Lee's newest film serves as a scathing antidote to everything that is wrong, morally and intellectually, with Green Book. That wretched artifact of blinkered white liberalism purports to explore the alienation of a ...
2018-12-12 13:20:16 +0000 UTC View Post
DO NOT READ UNTIL CHRISTMAS!
Maybe Adam McKay is the Brechtian filmmaker we deserve. I found myself gritting my teeth through Vice, even though by any objective standard it's a very "watchable" film. It moves at a nice clip, has...
2018-12-12 02:54:58 +0000 UTC View Post
Could this possibly be more interesting than an officially "completed" version by Welles? It's hard to say exactly how close this is to the director's vision, although expects seem to believe it's awfully darn close. But this is above all a film about art in j...
2018-12-12 02:34:45 +0000 UTC View Post
Another film, like Happy as Lazzaro, that I found myself admiring more than liking, although I certainly enjoyed it more from moment to moment. In fact, that's part of the difficulty. Although I certainly wouldn't deny that the screenplay is impeccabl...
2018-12-10 22:51:58 +0000 UTC View Post
I discovered French director Guillaume Brac several years ago when two very different cinephiles, director Dan Sallitt and producer / actress Roxane Mesquida, recommended his debut featurette A World Without Women to me on separate occasions. It was a...
2018-12-10 04:02:08 +0000 UTC View Post
Happy as Lazzaro shares some clear stylistic affinities with Rohrwacher's previous film The Wonders, which I found irksome and affected. I had some difficulty again with the aggressively rough, deep-rural cinematographic approach, which satur...
2018-12-10 03:47:01 +0000 UTC View Post
British experimentalist Ben Rivers has produced some highly unusual films in his career, but nothing in his filmography prepared me for Now, At Last. A duration-based work that reminded me somewhat of the gallery-based structuralism of Tacita D...
2018-12-06 23:32:39 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the major surprises of 2015 was Field Niggas, Khalik Allah's gorgeous, haunting experimental feature. It was clearly the work of someone who'd come up through photography, as it was essentially an hour-long portrait film. Roving the streets of ...
2018-12-06 23:18:43 +0000 UTC View Post
One of those canonical titles that has been out of circulation for years, Daniel Barnett's White Heart is a major achievement. Experimental film history is not complete without it. Operating at the juncture between Hollis Frampton's system-building, J...
2018-12-03 23:12:15 +0000 UTC View Post
When the lineup was announced for the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, there were some of us who were wondering why Sergei Loznitsa's newest fiction feature Donbass was relegated to the Un Certain Regard sidebar, given that he has already played in Competit...
2018-12-02 15:39:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018)
There they are, our two mismatched heroes, enjoying a drink and potty break at a roadside Stuckey's somewhere along the Southern highways. I wonder if they split a pecan log?
Where do I begin? Firs...
2018-12-02 15:08:47 +0000 UTC View Post
As you know, I try to provide you with High-Quality Web Content (SM) on a regular basis. But it's that time of year, when the mad dash to the finish line of 2018 means I find myself watching 'em faster than I can write 'em up. This will not take the place of l...
2018-12-02 14:24:28 +0000 UTC View Post
A moderately upbeat, even Jarmuschian fable from Tibet's leading auteur, Jinpa takes its name from its lead actor, who also starred in Tseden's previous film Tharlo. Here, Jinpa plays a man with the same name as his own, although he is clearl...
2018-11-25 17:50:09 +0000 UTC View Post
"Well," as my lovely wife Jen put it, "they can't all be F For Fake." Quite right. There's nothing particularly wrong with Can You Ever Forgive Me? But it's a story that seems so rich with subtext that its makers -- director Heller (The D...
2018-11-25 15:10:19 +0000 UTC View Post
I don't have a great deal to say about this film. Overall I was impressed with Cooper's pacing and direction, which struck me as undergirded by a general respect for 1970s Hollywood. In fact, I'm a bit surprised the film is such a hit, because in certain forma...
2018-11-24 03:14:46 +0000 UTC View Post
[NOTE: This post contains spoilers]
Certainly one of the year's most mismarketed films, The Little Stranger came across in its ads as Gothic art-horror along the lines of The Others or Crimson Peak. But then, t...
2018-11-24 02:48:42 +0000 UTC View Post
When I first attempted to sum up the latest film by the Coen Brothers, my overall takeaway (with which I am no longer satisfied) was that the world is filled with horrible people (or "assholes," as I had it in my corresponding tweet), and that they were winnin...
2018-11-21 17:57:26 +0000 UTC View Post
A curious film. As I watched, I found myself wondering what my friends who are in Disability Studies would make of it, since in certain respects this strikes me as one of the most refreshing depictions of a paraplegic I've ever seen in film or television. John...
2018-11-19 22:30:29 +0000 UTC View Post
Despite all the hype, Jackson's colorization of the footage from the Great War is really the least impressive thing about this very moving documentary. Yes, it is jarring to see these men, whose like we have witnessed exclusively in degraded black and white, w...
2018-11-18 05:53:44 +0000 UTC View Post
Okay, this one's for real.
I realized that there were some anomalies in the previous lists. For one thing, I was primarily going by my iTunes playlists. However, there are some key tracks that I exclude from those lists, primarily because the sound level...
2018-11-15 05:07:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Well, for some reason, making selections from N-Z was not nearly as difficult as A-M was. So I went ahead and did it. They are not any better, mind you. One note, in case it wasn't obvious: I limited myself to one song per artist, lest I end up with an entire ...
2018-11-13 01:46:09 +0000 UTC View Post