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 Channel). As Nictate would say, "come at me, Narus...
2023-07-28 06:21:29 +0000 UTC View Post
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 of comparison for Loach's newest (and last?) film,...
2023-07-28 02:59:26 +0000 UTC View Post
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 welfare department. There are satellite offices (one o...
2023-07-26 17:52:33 +0000 UTC View Post
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 making some food in the kitchen. There is no sign of ...
2023-07-26 04:27:44 +0000 UTC View Post
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 I felt were missing in his previous feature film ...
2023-07-24 19:02:48 +0000 UTC View Post
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 that some longtime Wes-watchers feel that this is ...
2023-07-24 03:22:30 +0000 UTC View Post
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 in the hopes that an actual screening might event...
2023-07-21 03:02:06 +0000 UTC View Post
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, given Russell's penchant for pushing boundaries, t...
2023-07-19 03:26:03 +0000 UTC View Post
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 lineup. When it debuted there, the reaction was most...
2023-07-19 03:03:59 +0000 UTC View Post
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 programmers, short works that would fit comfortably wi...
2023-07-16 05:45:54 +0000 UTC View Post
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 about a film when I know its maker, and when (as was...
2023-07-15 03:42:14 +0000 UTC View Post
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 programmers via back-channels about what an uneven year...
2023-07-13 02:34:18 +0000 UTC View Post
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
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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 question to you.
What haven't I written abo...
2023-07-07 03:25:11 +0000 UTC View Post
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 that heart shape. Still, it's an odd strategy.
<... 2023-07-03 04:33:37 +0000 UTC View Post
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 viewing on a number of platforms (Amazon, Vudu, Tubi) b...
2023-07-02 05:01:24 +0000 UTC View Post
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 (2005), 7915 KM (2008), Over the Years<...
2023-06-30 02:46:18 +0000 UTC View Post
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 favorite films and filmmakers are ones I used to ha...
2023-06-28 00:59:40 +0000 UTC View Post
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 without your awareness. Depicted in wide establishi...
2023-06-26 20:52:14 +0000 UTC View Post
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 cinematography and fixation on landscape give the who...
2023-06-25 22:43:33 +0000 UTC View Post
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 present, and the present of the future. In other ...
2023-06-24 19:39:39 +0000 UTC View Post
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 me with your requests, or just drop them in the co...
2023-06-23 06:21:44 +0000 UTC View Post
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 those lost in World War Two and a subtle critique of t...
2023-06-23 06:04:18 +0000 UTC View Post
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 many ideas, into their films. It's a logical response...
2023-06-22 00:11:04 +0000 UTC View Post
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, we are almost immediately plunged into a series ...
2023-06-21 03:02:38 +0000 UTC View Post
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 the 30 minutes of Petrov's Flu that I saw b...
2023-06-21 01:15:49 +0000 UTC View Post
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 mention of it, I would probably have made firm plans...
2023-06-18 06:20:35 +0000 UTC View Post
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 Marvel, I can't say anything meaningful regarding t...
2023-06-16 18:26:52 +0000 UTC View Post
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'm going to try to knock some of these recent film...
2023-06-16 03:42:02 +0000 UTC View Post
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 thing was a nagging feeling I had that this film ...
2023-06-13 04:37:10 +0000 UTC View Post