msicism

'Tis the Season (2)

And here's the other. Enjoy.

'Tis the Season (1)

I really only like two holiday songs. Here's one of them.

Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

I happen to be of the opinion that Christopher Nolan's best film is The Prestige (with Dunkirk a close second). The Prestige, of course, is explicitly about stage magic, and th...

Nature (Artavazd Pelechian, 2020)

Armenian experimentalist Artavazd Pelechian has built a reputation on very little work, if by "work" we mean the actual length of film in circulation. But in fact he is a meticulous craftsman who spends ...

ND/NF: Is This Anything?

Since I am banned from Twitter, I have limited access to the Cinephile Hive Mind (CHM)™️. So I have to put the question to you. Have any of you seen some of these New Directors films? I'm wondering whether any of them seem to be worth a $12 rental. What say you? Also, you can vote more than o...

The American Sector (Pacho Velez & Courtney Stephens, 2020)

I seem to be in a distinct minority on this one, since most reviews I've read are fairly glowing. I wasn't all that impressed by The American Sector, since it struck me as an inferior iteration ...

Mr. Arkadin (Orson Welles, 1955)

I'd never seen Arkadin before, and I was partly prompted to see it because of all the discourse circling around David Fincher's Mank. That very tedious film seems to imply that everythi...

Somebody please tell me why...

. . . The Prom is 130 fucking minutes long? Haven't we suffered enough?

Cold Meridian (Peter Strickland, 2020)

I have no interest in ASMR. Not only do I find the videos boring; the sound stuff doesn't work on me. I wonder if avant-garde film has inured me to this response, since hearing whispery noises or seeing ...

Spring Blossom (Suzanne Lindon, 2020)

One of the films that apparently would have been featured in Un Certain Regard if Cannes 2020 had actually happened, Spring Blossom (aka Seize printemps) is an impressive enough debut f...

Tommaso (Abel Ferrara, 2019)

Tommaso is a film that virtually compels us to read it as autobiography. It's about an American film director (Willem Dafoe) now living in Rome, who is married to a somewhat younger woman, Nikki...

The Midnight Sky (George Clooney, 2020)

NOTE: This "social reaction" is EMBARGOED. So let's keep it entre nous, fam.

I haven't checked in with George Clooney, Film Director sinc...

City Hall (Frederick Wiseman, 2020)

The great Frederick Wiseman will turn 91 on New Year's Day. Like a handful of old masters (Godard and Michael Snow come to mind), Wiseman is still going strong and shows no signs of slowing down. At the ...

Dear Comrades! (Andrei Konchalovsky, 2020)

With the exception of his brother Nikita Mikhalkov, Andrei Konchalovsky may be the most well-connected filmmaker in Russia. This may be irrelevant in evaluating his new film Dear Comrades! But o...

The Maltese Cross Movement (Keewatin Dewdney, 1967)

Quite unexpectedly, I finally had the chance to see Keewatin Dewdney's The Maltese Cross Movement, a film I've read about for as long as I've been studying experimental fil...

David Byrne's American Utopia (Spike Lee, 2020)

"Utopia -- the more impossible it seems, the more necessary it becomes." (Yvonne Rainer)

Of course it isn't Stop Making Sense. Nothing else is. However, one of the most striking t...

Minari (Lee Isaac Chung, 2020)

Let's see: Dreamer dad (Steven Yeun), steadfast but skeptical wife (Han Ye-ri), mostly nondescript older daughter (Noel Kate Cho), adorable little boy with a congenital health problem (Alan Ki...

Collective (Alexander Nanau, 2019)

Over on Letterboxd, I discovered a Romanian writer, a graduate student in Leeds, who'd had enough of...

White Lie (Calvin Thomas and Yonah Lewis, 2019)

White Lie is almost intolerable. It creates a scenario of fundamental tension -- a liar and grifter continually on the verge of being discovered -- and slowly, methodically turns the screws, sho...

A Modest Proposal:

Someone should loop this soundbite into a kick-ass EDM cut called "Hit Those Speakers."

Uncle Frank (Alan Ball, 2020)

Ball gonna Ball. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's mystifying, in a way, that Uncle Frank arrives on global streaming the same week as Happiest Season. Both films are bizarre throwbacks to an er...

The Mole Agent (Maite Alberdi, 2020)

An unconventional documentary in a number of respects, The Mole Agent is effortlessly entertaining and often quite touching. But it seems that some critics find the film uniquely untrustworthy. ...

Routine Pleasures

Black Bear (Lawrence Michael Levine, 2020)

Back in 2014, I saw Levine's film Wild Canaries, but I didn't remember much about it except that I did not like it. When I looke...

After Lucia (Michel Franco, 2012)

Michel Franco is not Michael Haneke. This strikes me as an obvious enough point that I really shouldn't need to articulate it, but everywhere I look, it seems that critics and programmers insist...

The Nest (Sean Durkin, 2020)

With its insistence on atmosphere over plot, The Nest is kind of a perfect sophomore film, the sort of work that a young stylist gets to produce after establishing themselves as a rising talent....

Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds (Werner Herzog and Armando Christian Pérez, 2020)

Cinetracts '20 (various filmmakers, 2020)

Omnibus films. We all have traumatic memories of them. Do you remember where you where when you saw 11'09"01, the cosmically atrocious international gang-bang intended to pay homage to the memor...

Two Films by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese

It's a cliche, but it's unavoidably true. A critic experiences few pleasures greater than that of discovering a major new talent, partly because it's so rare. As the saying goes, 90% of everything is cra...

MLK/FBI (Sam Pollard, 2020)

The documentary as preamble, or perhaps as prolepsis. It is understandable that every generation requires its reintroduction to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., given the active myth-making that surrounds hi...

Make Way For Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937)

Back when I taught Film 101, I always showed Tokyo Story. In general, students responded well to it -- as well as they responded to anything foreign and in black-and-white, which was a tepid rea...