msicism

June Director of the Month

I'll have at least one more Ray write-up (for The Big City), possibly another, before May is over. But now, let's set the agender for Pride Month.

Betrayal (Lewis Milestone, 1929)

That feeling when you discover your wife with your best friend.....

Road to Nowhere (Monte Hellman, 2010)

Neither a disaster nor an auteurist triumph, Road to Nowhere tells us a few things about the changes in B-movie logic since Hellman made his genre masterworks. In the age of cable TV and streami...

Devi (Satyajit Ray, 1960)

Faith and reason, at it again. As is often the case in Ray's films, Devi provokes crucial questions regarding the treatment of women in Bengali society. But he does this by taking their dehumani...

Final Destination Canada (and more!)

Due to my short attention span recently, I have been watching a ton of public service announcements on YouTube. Just from a filmmaking perspective, a lot of these are really fascinating and demonstrate a...

The Big Experimental Rundown (Part Two)

ABOVE: a pharmacist working at a Steenbeck

Reach Capacity (Ericka Beckman, 2020)

Madalena (Madiano Marchetti, 2021)

I had previously watched half an hour of Madalena during Rotterdam, and although it was certainly impressive enough formally, it left a bad taste in my mouth. First-time director Madiano Marchet...

Slower Traffic Keep Right

Since I have not been producing writing as quickly or as often as I have been in the recent past, I figured I owed you all some explanation. You are, after all, paying customers, without whom I'd probabl...

The Big Experimental Run-Down (Part One)

Despite the fact that avant-garde film and video are sort of my bailiwick, I've been spending much of my time on this Patreon focusing on feature-length narratives. This is mostly due to laziness; really...

Gull (Kim Mi-jo, 2020)

Gull is a rather simple film, although its depiction of the aftermath of sexual assault is undeniably disturbing. In her first feature film, Kim clearly wants to get one very important point acr...

Aparajito (Satyajit Ray, 1956)

Considering Aparajito in relation to Pather Panchali, I began having significant doubts about Ray's approach to narrative construction, especially with respect to character. There's an ...

The Killing of Two Lovers (Robert Machoian, 2020)

The Killing of Two Lovers is a film that focuses most of its attention on things that don't happen. From the opening scene, Machoian introduces David (Clayne Crawford) as a sort of rura...

Moon, 66 Questions (Jacqueline Lentzou, 2021)

As has been the case with several of this year's New Directors / New Films selections, Moon, 66 Questions is a bit frustrating, since it seems to promise much more than it delivers. To be a bit ...

An Enemy of the People (Satyajit Ray, 1989)

There are a few particularly interesting things about Ray's take on Ibsen. First, until about a year ago, Ganashatru (An Enemy of the People) was largely considered to be one of Ray's v...

Faya Dayi (Jessica Beshir, 2021)

This is a uniquely frustrating documentary, because it has so much potential. First-time director Beshir uses an intellectually impressive approach to the problem of depicting contemporary life in e...

Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955)

As I've addressed here and on other forums, I had no direct exposure to the Official Film Canon as such. Coming to cinephilia from a focus on painting and sculpture, I gravitated toward experimental cine...

Downstream to Kinshasa (Dieudo Hamadi, 2020)

In recent years, the documentaries of the DRC's Dieudo Hamadi have started receiving more recognition in the West. (True/False awarding him the 2018 True Vision award certainly helped raise his profile.)...

Comedy Corner (workshop material)

Konstantin Chernenko and Pope John Paul I walk into a bar. "One vodka and one cabernet," Chernenko announces, but the bartender points to two gentlemen on stools. "They're already having your drinks," he says.

"The Lord giveth...." remarks JP1, but the Soviet president is visibly irritated....

Film About a Father Who (Lynne Sachs, 2020)

This is a difficult film to evaluate. It's the latest in a recent spate of auto-portraits of filmmakers and their families, and obviously one of the difficulties with these projects is that the filmmaker...

Wood and Water (Jonas Bak, 2021)

Clocking in at a lean 80 minutes, Wood and Water is one of those films that gets so much right for so long that it's actually a bit nerve-wracking. Is the filmmaker going to make a misstep? Firs...

Sleepwalk (Sara Driver, 1986)

I did not care for this movie. But it has undeniable significance as an artifact.

I'm probably in the minority here, but I just don't think this 1980s NYC downtown filmmaking has aged very well. Af...

Mask ON! Lights DOWN! Roll FILM!

I do believe that Zhang Yimou is going to lure me back into the theater. I don't know who this Cliff Walker guy is, but he's got me intrigued.

Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943)

I decided to close out Hitchcock Month with Shadow of a Doubt mostly because I read that it was the director's personal favorite. I think I can see why. In certain respects it's a very strange f...

Fixing a Hole

Hello, friends.

I am writing this quick note to "put out feelers" on a topic of no real importance, unless you are an obsessive-compulsive like me.

I am missing a few issues in my complete ru...

The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938)

"There is definitely something queer on this train..."

I don't know that I have a great deal to say about The Lady Vanishes beyond my one-sentence Letterboxd review, which declare...

Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

And it is here that the exactitude of Hitchcock's filmmaking runs up against the intractability of my personal taste. Rebecca is formally magnificent. Its use of the preposterously grand Manderl...

Irradiated (Rithy Panh, 2020)

Just a few days ago, Strand Releasing picked up the U.S. rights to t...

But Wait! There's Moor!

The Tragedy of Othello -- the Moor of Venice (Orson Welles, 1951)

First of all, let me say that I am happy that no one has gotten around to "cancelling" Welles or his Othello 2021-04-24 03:34:44 +0000 UTC View Post