First things first: I'm sure my old friend Gabe Klinger would like me to point out that, for some reason, in the U.K. the film was released as My Night With Maud.
Far and away my favorite Rohmer so far, Maud strikes me as a fil...
2022-06-30 03:58:06 +0000 UTC View Post
In terms of my response to Crimes of the Future, I owe a significant debt to my friend Steve Carlson, whose comment on Twitter helped orient my viewing. Steve (who loves the film) suggested that it's a comedy, and that its portentous tone is primarily a misdirection. I will concede that Cr...
2022-06-29 00:58:59 +0000 UTC View Post
It's unusual for a popular Indian film to gain much critical or commercial traction in the U.S., apart from the Desi circuit, a parallel distribution network that occupies American multiplexes but is typically treated like another world. RRR is probably the most notable crossover hit since Aam...
2022-06-28 02:00:34 +0000 UTC View Post
In other writing, I've lamented the fact that so many showcases for experimental film have so fixated on discovering new talent that many old masters of the field have been left by the wayside. Recently I've reflected on this frustration, and I have realized a few things. First, the response comes from...
2022-06-23 02:35:55 +0000 UTC View Post
Perhaps because Rohmer knew that La collectionneuse was too subtle for idiots like me, he thoughtfully made Claire's Knee, a film that is perfectly frank about the lechery of its leading man. Jérome (Jean-Claude Brialy) is a middle-aged, retired diplomat, and that the fact that Rohme...
2022-06-23 01:47:35 +0000 UTC View Post
This is an extremely difficult film to evaluate. I will state for the record that I did not enjoy watching it, although enjoyment is of course only one reaction that a work of art can provoke. What makes Both Sides of the Blade so confusing is that its dominant formal features make it, to my m...
2022-06-21 01:44:30 +0000 UTC View Post
For In Review Online's Tribeca coverage:
"[...] As Joe treks through his best friend’s private land with a borrowed rifle, we see that he is an untrained buffoon who has no business wielding a fi...
2022-06-19 05:57:55 +0000 UTC View Post
Elisabeth Subrin is a filmmaker who uses her art to make interventions into feminist theory. This was the challenge that Laura Mulvey posed in the early 70s when she wrote "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," that only a new form of filmmaking could avoid the misogynist pitfalls of classic Hollywood...
2022-06-16 20:50:01 +0000 UTC View Post
The more work I see by Jean-Claude Rousseau, the harder it is for me to pin him down. He is a bit of an anomaly in the contemporary film world. He makes short films and featurettes that are clearly experimental in their overall approach. But they frequently have a subtle documentary element, and they a...
2022-06-16 02:38:24 +0000 UTC View Post
[NOTE: Because a lot of things have taken me away from Patreon work this month, I am continuing to focus on Rohmer through July.]
Just out of curiosity, I went back over my screening logs to see how often I'd engaged with Rohmer's cinema. And, well, it hasn't been terribly often. I saw Reinet...
2022-06-15 02:24:31 +0000 UTC View Post
TIFF WAVELENGTHS 2022
After the genre-redefining triumph that was Leviathan, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor took their Sensory Ethnography down a dead end street with Caniba, a literally unblinking portrait of infamous murderer-cannibal Issei Sagawa. It's difficult...
2022-06-13 20:37:01 +0000 UTC View PostHey, just a note to say I watched a couple of recent films, and I didn't think I had a lot to say about them. So I did quick write-ups on Letterboxd instead of putting anything here.
To wit:
Dark Glasses (Dario Argento, 2022)
"It'd sort of be special pleading to compl...
2022-06-10 03:50:25 +0000 UTC View Post
So the Director of the Month for June is the one and only Éric Rohmer. So looking forward to getting down with this guy at long last.
Stay tuned...
2022-06-06 06:21:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Following the artistic triumph of Day of Wrath, Dreyer made Two People, a film that has a fairly shaky reputation. By some accounts the production was troubled; Dreyer apparently did not like either of the two lead actors but was prevented from replacing them. (The Cowboy: "These are ...
2022-06-06 06:02:30 +0000 UTC View Post
TIFF WAVELENGTHS 2022
Since his feature film debut O Fantasma back in 2000, João Pedro Rodrigues has been one of the most protean filmmakers on the international scene. His emergence coincided with the general rediscovery of Portuguese film in the late 90s / early 00s, ...
2022-06-04 23:22:53 +0000 UTC View Post
This month, I want to be a bit more focused in my viewing. In light of this, I'm giving you a poll with a fairly limited slate of choices. This will probably not be a continuing thing.
2022-06-03 03:54:20 +0000 UTC View Post
If you are a filmmaker or group of filmmakers -- let's say, the Dardennes brothers -- the desire to combine a rough cinematic realism with contemporary sociopolitical problems is understandable. It allows one to employ techniques (close-ups, handheld camerawork, the intense observation of a restless ma...
2022-06-01 03:52:23 +0000 UTC View Post
While it's difficult not to marvel at Michael's candor regarding same-sex attraction, specifically for a film made in 1924, it may be useful to place it in context. One of Dreyer's German films made for UFA, Michael would probably be considered a canonical Weimar film had it been dire...
2022-06-01 00:55:32 +0000 UTC View PostAt the end of 2021, I set it as a personal goal to attend Cannes this year. Like many of my personal goals, I failed to achieve it. I'll spare you the details.
However I am reviewing a few Cannes titles for In Review Online, and I figured I'd mention it here.
2022-05-27 03:18:32 +0000 UTC
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Sometimes we want to explore the messiness of complex situations, the way that not every action, decision, or emotion falls in line with social or political orthodoxy. But that's not always possible. It can be very difficult to address certain hot-button topics, and there can often be a sense that if w...
2022-05-24 04:34:05 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the true unsung heroes of American experimental cinema, Jim Jennings has passed away, following a five-year mental and physical degeneration resulting from Alzheimer's. I will be writing a fairly extensive career summarizing obituary for the next issue of Cinema Scope, but for now I wanted to di...
2022-05-21 17:58:59 +0000 UTC View Post
There's nothing particularly wrong with Paris, 13th District (aka Les Olympiades). It has quite a lot going for it, actually. The black-and-white cinematography is crisp and dynamic, using the buildings of the titular arrondissement as a visual refrain, tying the various stor...
2022-05-21 05:36:58 +0000 UTC View Post
You know what? Women really do hold up half the sky!
There's nothing particularly complicated (or compelling) about this early Dreyer effort. It painstakingly details the plight of a family in economic straits, ruled by Viktor (Johannes Meyer) not so much with an iron fist as a relentles...
2022-05-17 04:15:30 +0000 UTC View Post
[MILD SPOILERS]
Bless this movie's heart. Fresh is an attempt at psychological body-horror that is so besotted with its own dominant metaphor that it can't be bothered to do such basic things as rounding out its characters, attending to its subplots, or building a recognizable world that...
2022-05-15 04:21:33 +0000 UTC View Post
I cannot say I necessarily disagree with the conventional wisdom on Vortex. In most respects it is a fine film, and there's certainly no denying its technical excellence, especially when compared with most of what passes for "cinema" on a daily basis. As J. Hoberman once wrote regarding Godard...
2022-05-15 03:57:43 +0000 UTC View Post
(Just a random-ass jawn for my Philly peeps.)
open sky / open sea / open ground (Martín Baus and Libertad Gills, 2022)
It's perhaps appropriate that the only image I can find from...
2022-05-12 04:09:08 +0000 UTC View Post
Although I was not able to completely devote my weekend to the Prismatic Ground online film festival -- a challenging and always intriguing selection of experimental documentaries -- I did get to sample a fair amount. (With the help of James Hansen, I have secured links for some of the films I missed, ...
2022-05-11 06:08:26 +0000 UTC View Post
Shakedown: 1979
Confession: I've never seen any of Ti West's other films, and so even though I spent a lot of X kind of wishing Rob Zombie had tackled the material instead, I eventually had to give The Other Mr. West props. X takes a lot more formalist care than it real...
2022-05-07 04:58:46 +0000 UTC View Post
This is the one major Dreyer film I'd never seen, and wow, what an oversight. Made twelve years after The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Vampyr picks up the Expressionist mantle and runs with it, producing a film that is more formally daring in almost every way. To be ...
2022-05-06 23:19:05 +0000 UTC View Post