msicism

Subscriber Lottery: "Winners"

So most likely tomorrow I will watch the remaining request from the last subscriber tombola. That would be from Matthew McGee, who made me smile by assigning me another Mikio Naruse. So next up is 1954's Sound of the Mountain (now on Criterion ...

Jimmy's Hall (Ken Loach, 2014)

Maybe I like minor Loach, when he and Paul Laverty are not trying to hard to make a statement and are content to explore Britain's rich history of class struggle. I ended up watching Jimmy's Hall since it seemed like it would be a useful point ...

Welfare (Frederick Wiseman, 1975)

BY REQUEST: John Powers

Aside from a few shots that follow clerks "upstairs" to another department, Wiseman's Welfare takes place in one large room. This is the main headquarters and waiting area of the New York City welf...

See You Friday, Robinson (Mitra Farahani, 2022)

One of the most disarming aspects of See You Friday, Robinson is the portrait it provides of one of its subjects, Jean-Luc Godard. An elderly man, frail but still quite active, Godard is seen editing videos, but also folding his laundry and mak...

Scarlet (Pietro Marcello, 2022)

After seeing three of his earlier films, Pietro Marcello finally made sense to me with Martin Eden. Not only was in anchored by a brash lead performance by Luca Marinelli; its literary roots provided the strong narrative and thematic bones that...

Asteroid City (Wes Anderson, 2023)

I changed my mind just a bit on this one, going back and watching a few key scenes after I'd come away with a mostly favorable impression. And although I do have very mixed feelings about Asteroid City, I have no trouble comprehending the fact ...

...ere erera baleibu izik subua aruaren... (José Antonio Sistiaga, 1970)

I was moved to finally watch this acknowledged experimental masterwork because its maker, the Basque artist José Antonio Sistiaga, passed away last month at the age of 91. Given the nature of ...ere erera..., I had been putting off watching it...

A Kitten For Hitler (Ken Russell, 2007)

A brief note about A Kitten For Hitler, which I watched out of perverse curiosity. Word is that Melvyn Bragg, producer of The South Bank Show, challenged Ken Russell to make a film that he himself would want to be censored. Of course, ...

Tchaikovsky's Wife (Kirill Serebrennikov, 2022)

It feels like I've been seeing an inordinate amount of this guy's films lately, but hey, blame Thierry Fremaux. Tchaikovsky's Wife is Serebrennikov's latest, and is the final film I still had to catch up with from the 2022 Cannes competition li...

Cave Painting (Siegfried A. Fruhauf, 2023)

A bit of context for the uninitiated. Siegfried Fruhauf might best be characterized as a B-player in the contemporary Austrian avant-garde. I wouldn't call him an "also-ran," exactly, and most of the films of his I've seen have been passable enough prog...

Four Nights (Scout Tafoya, 2023)

BY REQUEST: Scout Tafoya

Dear Scout,

Please excuse the possibly cloying approach of discussing your film in epistolary form rather than a conventional review. This is mostly my way of mitigating the awkwardness of writing ab...

The Grind Don't Stop

If you ever check my viewing logs on The Academic Hack, you'll know that I have been mainlining recent experimental films, mostly because I have my November program to begin thinking about, and also because I have been communicating with different progr...

In the Shadow of the Blue Rascal (Pierre Clémenti, 1986)

BY REQUEST: AR

-Basements were recently my thing. Do you know what I found? I swear I'll propose only good things. I see wooden boxes. Do you know what was inside?

-Corpses?

-Electric saws! 2023-07-07 04:26:30 +0000 UTC View Post

A Conundrum

What would you write about if an editor offered you the chance to write about anything you wanted to? I mean, within reason -- film or media related, at least tangentially -- but I am having a bit of trouble deciding what to do. So I thought I'd put the...

Subscriber Lottery: Fast Forward Selecta!

Side note: isn't it weird that the Unilever ice creams have, like, twenty different brand names? Theoretically, a brand benefits from international recognition, and yes, all the various brands (Magnum and/or Good Humor in the U.S., by the way) feature t...

DRIB (Kristoffer Borgli, 2017)

BY REQUEST: Emilio

It's fitting that as Kristoffer Borgli's newest film Sick of Myself is wending its way through theaters, I should be asked to have a look at the director's previous feature, which is available for viewi...

Matter Out of Place (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2022)

I have been a fairly consistent champion of the documentaries of Nikolaus Geyrhalter. He is an Austrian formalist whose visual essays ask us to look closely at aspects of the world typically hidden from view. At their best -- Our Daily Bread (2...

NEKO-MIMI (Jun Kurosawa, 1993)

BY REQUEST: Kevin Wall

We all have our aesthetic biases. It's unavoidable. The only thing a conscientious critic can do is keep trying to engage with works that fall in our blind spots. As I've written elsewhere, some of my very f...

Pacifiction (Albert Serra, 2022)

In many respects a radical shift for Albert Serra, Pacifiction is about history and delusion, the carving out of an imaginary place out of time and being brought up short when you discover, much too late, that time has been carrying you along w...

Godland (Hlynur Pálmason, 2022)

A title card at the beginning of the film informs us that it was inspired by a set of late-19th century silver collodion plates. Alas, Godland is very clearly a film organized by the logic of still photography, since Pálmason's stock-still cin...

The Wall of the Dead (Eugène Green, 2022)

Eugène Green's latest film begins with a quote from St. Augustine, relating to the nature of time. There is no past, present, or future, according to Augustine, but rather three distinct forms of the present: the present of the past, the present of the...

Subscriber Lottery Results

These three subscribers have gotten the short straws. Or the long ones. Depends on how you look at it.

#87: KEVIN WALL

#49: EMILIO

#10: AR

So you know what to do. Either message ...

Hello, It's Me! (Frunze Dovlatya, 1966)

BY REQUEST: Daniel Wood

Բարեւ, ես եմ
Ես երկար ժամանակ մտածել եմ մեր մասին*

A rediscovered classic of Soviet-era Armenian filmmaking, Hello, It's Me! is both an elegy to thos...

A Thousand and One (A. V. Rockwell, 2023)

If you follow my writing (which presumably you do, to some extent), you know I have a few hobby-horses I come back to again and again. And one of them relates to debut films, and the tendency of "tyro helmers" to stuff way too much plot, and way too man...

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Joaquim Dos Santos, Justin K. Thompson, and Kemp Powers, 2023)

Another of the handful of sequels that actually improves upon its predecessor, Across the Spider-Verse isn't bogged down by 45 minutes of the "normal" world, since Into the Spider-Verse already got that business out of the way. Instead...

Petrov's Flu (Kirill Serebrennikov, 2021)

If proof were needed that I can never leave well enough alone, I decided -- felt obliged, really -- to go back and finish Serebrennikov's 2021 Cannes entry. Part of this is plain old obsessive completism. However, even though I certainly did not like th...

Too Late (Dennis Hauck, 2015)

BY REQUEST: Luke Fowler

See, this is why I think this subscriber-request lottery is turning out to be a good idea. Mr. Fowler's request, Too Late, is a film I'd never heard of, and if by chance I ever stumbled across a me...

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Rodney Rothman, Peter Ramsey, and Bob Persichetti, 2018)

I'm sure this will come as a surprise, but I am not a devotee of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. When a specific film gets good notices, like Black Panther or Shang-Chi, I will give it a look. Since I don't really fuck with M...

¡Que Color!

Sorry for the inactivity, but man alive, it has been too hot to move, think, or write. The AC can only do so much to keep up when it's over 100 degrees (37.7 celsius if you're nasty) for much of the day. Still, I didn't want to fall too far behind, so I...

The Eight Mountains (Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, 2022)

While watching The Eight Mountains, more than once I thought about Brokeback Mountain, and not just because both films are about the love between two guys, or the fact that Luca Marinelli vaguely resembles Jake Gyllenhaal. No, the main...