msicism

Return to Seoul (Davy Chou, 2022)

One of the year’s most acclaimed films, Return to Seoul is also notably absent within the so-called “discourse.” It seems that a lot of people like it, but don’t have a lot to say, perhaps because they believe that its quality is self-evident. I did not care from director Davy Chou’s...

Dos Estaciones (Juan Pablo González, 2022)

Just a quick word about a film that kind of snuck up on me. In its first twenty or so minutes, Dos Estaciones seems pretty familiar. From its rigid compositions to its setting in a small-batch tequila factory, it seemed as though González was making another film, half-doc / half-fiction, abou...

Touki-Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1973)

It seems to me that the revelatory thing about Touki-Bouki (and yes, I'm going with the onscreen hyphen) is that while Mambéty clearly has something to say about colonialism, modernity, and superstition, he allows himself to communicate those ideas in a sidelong, almost ...

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras, 2022)

Poitras's brutal documentary about the life and work of Nan Goldin, while not exactly critic-proof, does present certain challenges for someone who means to write about it. That's because All the Beauty and the Bloodshed does a fairly good job at analyzing itself. It is a rather classical docu...

Bouquets 31-40 (Rose Lowder, 2014-2022)

For those of you unfamiliar with Rose Lowder's work, I have written about an earlier set of Bouquets about ten years ago. For decades, she was u...

Nostalgia Ain't What It Used to Be

In a time of all-encompassing irony, it's hard to know whether sincerity as an antidote or just another pose. Two of America's leading auteurs decided to go back in time with their latest films, offering their own Freudian origin stories on the assumption that their personal memories might resonate more broadly, giving us some historical explanation for How We Got Here. The results are suitably...

Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund, 2022)

Look, no one is more surprised than me. As far as I was concerned, Ruben Östlund was a smug, self-righteous alt-right troll, using irony and pseudo-intellect to "own the libs." In short, the cinematic equivalent of an 8chan troll, someone who took saw himself as the latest arthouse moralist and teller...

The Best Experimental Films (That I Saw) in 2022

As with all such lists, a grain or two of salt is advisable. There are always more experimental films produced and released within a calendar year than can ever be watched by any given human being, regardless of how hard they may try. And in my case, I was unable to travel to any film festivals this year, so I have no doubt that I missed a few key titles along the way. But it’s the end of the...

Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook, 2022)

I had jotted some notes on this film back when I watched it, but they went missing from my desk. I mention this just to explain that I have owed Decision to Leave a full-length review for quite awhile, and I will undoubtedly rewatch it once the year-end crunch is over.

I will say that I ...

A Bit of Year-End Cramming

The Whale (Darren Aronofsky, 2022)

Piss poor. 

Confession: I HandBraked a copy of this from the screener disc I got, because I need to send the disc out to a friend. (It's going out tomorrow! Promise!) But I looked at the file and assumed it was copyguarded,...

The Maiden (Graham Foy, 2022)

The Maiden is the first feature film from Graham Foy, a Calgary-based director who released a number of short films under the moniker Fantavious Fritz. It's a solid debut, and this past September at TIFF, it was heralded as part of a mini-New Wave in Canadian filmmaking, along with two other n...

The Most Wonderful, Albeit Stressful, Time of the Year

[CW: groveling apologies]

Well, my final papers are in. 120 beautiful seven-page essays plus MLA bibliography, all waiting for my attention. There's simply no avoiding it. Meanwhile, the end of the year approaches, and I am trying to get through as many of the major 2022 releases as po...

Two Auteurs' Shorts

The Potemkinists (Radu Jude, 2022)

Jude's short film is not so much a tribute to Sergei Eisenstein as it is a reconsideration of the actual mutineers of the Russian ship the Potemkin, using a little-known historical footnote to address the broader problem of cultural history in t...

Skinamarink (Kyle Edward Ball, 2022)

Few recent films have initially seemed as original, or as inscrutable, as Skinamarink, the debut feature from Kyle Edward Ball. Seemingly on its way to becoming a cult object 2022-12-09 00:20:39 +0000 UTC View Post

"Vox Populi, Vox Dei"

Sorry for invoking a bit of Muskese there, but indeed, the people have spoken. This month, my subscribers have made...

The Kegelstatt Trio (Rita Azevedo Gomes, 2022)

Artistic experiments don't always pan out, and the important thing is to learn something along the way. Trite as that may sound, this conviction marks the difference between a noble failure and a time, unenlightening success. Azevedo Gomes' latest film is a cinematic adaptation of a work that is was an...

The Inspection (Elegance Bratton, 2022)

The Inspection is an autobiographical debut feature that shows Bratton's onscreen avatar, Eliis French (Jeremy Pope) hitting rock-bottom as a result of having been turned out of his home by his Christian bigot mother (Gabrielle Union) at the age of 16 because he's gay. With no optio...

A Couple (Frederick Wiseman, 2022)

Only Wiseman's second excursion into fiction filmmaking*, A Couple displays a fairly radical idea of what fiction actually is. His first non-documentary, 2002's The Last Letter, was also a compact, intensive examination of a single female performer, Catherine Samie. But that ...

Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami, 1994)

It's taken me awhile to get to the final film in Kiarostami's Koker trilogy, and this is one of those instances when I really wish I hadn't waited. It's hard to say how I would have reacted to Through the Olive Trees in 1994, or 2004, or even 2014, although I'm fairly sure I'd have still consi...

Sight & Sound Poll (Poll)

It's still hectic over here, with the end of the semester grading compounded by end-of-year cramming. And I know there are some films from the last poll (esp. Through the Olive Trees) that I still need to watch.

But what the fuck. With the S&S poll dominating "the discourse," I thoug...

Rewind and Play (Alain Gomis, 2022)

One of the year's best films, Rewind and Play might best be characterized as a forensic documentary. French-Senegalese director Alain Gomis acquired the unseen rushes from an episode of the French TV program "Jazz Portrait," created and hosted by one Henri Renaud, an interviewer whose smug off...

Glass Onion (Rian Johnson, 2022)

It wasn't my intention to write about Glass Onion on the day that Sight & Sound released the results of their 2022 critics' poll. This event, which happens once every ten years...

NE Corridor (Joshua Solondz, 2022)

This is the first of several catch-up posts, so I won't be going into as much detail as I probably should. But some of these films I honestly couldn't write about because I programmed them, and it felt vaguely like a conflict-of-interest. So here goes.

Although Joshua is very clear that ...

EO (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2022)

Plenty has already been written about EO, Jerzy Skolimowski's very strange, often exhilarating new film. And while the director himself has confirmed what most viewers detected immediately -- that EO is a loose adaptation of Bresson's Au hasard, Balthasar -- I actually notice...

Blind Date (Jan Soldat, 2022)

Soldat is a German filmmaker who doesn't have much of a festival profile in North America, which is a shame. While I would make no grand claims for his films, he does shine a light on queer marginality with a gaze that is simultaneously dispassionate and empathetic. His 2020 film Residen...