msicism

Little Murders (Alan Arkin, 1971)

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 snags, Godard moved on, and Alan Arkin became the di...

The Killer (David Fincher, 2023)

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 theme: the arrogance and failure of masculinity. I my...

Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena: #59 (Joost Rekveld, 2023)

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 its course. Folks like Jordan Belson borrowed from B...

Passages (Ira Sachs, 2023)

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 on cable news, a nothingburger. Its flaws are fai...

We Are So-So Back

I'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, here's some stuff I've seen recently.

2023-11-17 21:38:30 +0000 UTC View Post

The Human Surge 3 (Eduardo Williams, 2023)

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 cinema. Using cameras that I presume look a great d...

Boonmee in Action

This is the last dead cat related post. I just think the video gives a really good sense of who he was.

Boonmee, and a Brief Pause

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 birthday, screeners, year-end polls, Christmas, lights ...

Samsara (Lois Patiño, 2023)

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 formalist showboating allowed a lot of critics and...

Light That Matters

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 interesting films, and I wrote about four of them...

Losing Steam

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 Arts tonight to see Cobweb, the newest film...

Brief Update on WTAF-Gate

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 know what has happened and asking if there is anythin...

WHAT (and I cannot emphasize this enough) THE FUCK

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 Patreon to be a private, subscribers-only affair....

The Royal Hotel (Kitty Green, 2023)

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 find themselves surrounded by dozens of horny macho ...

Marathon (Amir Naderi, 2022)

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 as an intellectual pursuit, and Marathon...

Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet, 2023)

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 attention. Inevitably, many of these films are "good enoug...

Here (Bas Devos, 2023)

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 loss. This is a mildly diverting observational fi...

The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, 1963)

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 in 35mm was certainly a fine introduction, an...

Tótem (Lila Avilés, 2023)

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 family bouncing off each other and getting under e...

Assorted Odds and Ends from InRO

The Shadowless Tower (Zhang Lu, 2023)

I wouldn't bother with the cross-posting, but I loved this film. I hope more folks get to see it.

2023-10-20 01:49:10 +0000 UTC View Post

Selection Time Again!

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

Okay, you know the routine. Select something for ...

Stop Making Sense (Jonathan Demme, 1984)

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 young!" I was genuinely taken aback by David Byrne's ...

The Night Visitors (Michael Gitlin, 2023)

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 track record when it comes to singling out the most...

The Fist (Ayo Akingbade, 2022)

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 Dziga Vertov certainly recognized. Then again, we ...

Man In Black (Wang Bing, 2023)

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 collision of Deng Xiaoping's capitalist reformism and X...

Saturn Bowling (Patricia Mazuy, 2022)

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 much so that it practically treats Freudianism li...

Elephant (Alan Clarke, 1989)

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 this attitude is always wrong, a way to justify on...

Some Early Wenders

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 trading days, since at that time they were extremely har...

A Few Selections from NYFF Currents

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 changes around us, and we either change with it or lap...

Wes Anderson's Dahl-House

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 similar treatment. But as we know, theatrical for...