The Martinican writer Édouard Glissant, whose play Monsieur Toussaint forms the core of this film, wrote of the "right to opacity." In his theoretical work Poetics of Relation, Glissan...
2020-10-05 21:46:43 +0000 UTC View Post
As I briefly mentioned on Letterboxd, I wasn't really prepared for The Last City, which as far as I am concerned is Heinz Emigholz's "Hal Hartley film." Think about it. Much like Hartley's F...
2020-10-05 20:01:56 +0000 UTC View Post
There is an essential monumentality that is sealed into the very making of this film, fired like clay, such that it seems designed to flout the typical standards with which we evaluate cinematic objects....
2020-10-05 19:11:25 +0000 UTC View Post
Just a brief word on the Rose Garden Massacre super-spreader event, and the illness of President Trump and others.
I have seen all sorts of things on social media, mostly written in desperation, by...
2020-10-04 16:25:01 +0000 UTC View Post
This is a film that is probably less suited to home streaming than anything else I've seen so far in 2020. It really requires the complete, enveloping atmosphere of the darkened cinema to fully accomplis...
2020-10-02 17:13:00 +0000 UTC View Post
I turned this off after 48 minutes.
I didn't realize until after I stopped watching (and checked in with Letterboxd, where I saw Steve Erickson's comments) that Ewing has been making documentaries ...
2020-10-01 22:45:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Here's a hypothesis. Just as Stan Brakhage was the defining figure in experimental film for a particular generation, and Hollis Frampton sort of became the dominant figure for the subsequent generation, ...
2020-09-30 04:42:03 +0000 UTC View Post
[SPOILERS. BUT FRANKLY I WISH SOMEONE HAD SPOILED IT FOR ME.]
As was the case with The Year of the Discovery, My Mexican Bre...
2020-09-30 03:34:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Based on the rapturous reviews in the trades, we can probably expect to see Mangrove staking out some significant real estate in this year's admittedly-unorthodox Oscar race. That's fine; it's c...
2020-09-30 02:55:20 +0000 UTC View Post
My lovely wife Jen, who is, shall we say, "cinema adjacent," came in and out while I was watching Nomadland, and after it was over, she said flatly, "seems like that should've been a Kelly Reich...
2020-09-28 00:30:09 +0000 UTC View Post
A consensus seems to be building that Isabella is a bit of a disappointment from Pineiro. I'll have to disagree, although I certainly see that it represents a somewhat different path for this fi...
2020-09-27 21:14:18 +0000 UTC View Post
As it happens, I was tasked with writing the catalogue blurb for the Viennale for this one. Here's what I came up with:
"Working primarily in English for the first time, Pedro Almodóvar adapts Jea...
2020-09-27 19:28:20 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the most undeniably impressive films of 2020, The Year of the Discovery is also one of the most frustrating. A fiction / documentary hybrid, or perhaps more properly, a creation of a supp...
2020-09-27 17:52:46 +0000 UTC View Post
A fascinating first effort, Slow Machine belongs to a grand tradition of highly ambitious American independent cinema whose reach exceeds its grasp. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and will ...
2020-09-27 06:33:25 +0000 UTC View Post
Despite its obvious third-person perspective, this is probably the Currents feature I've seen that comes closest to the intensely personal first-person cinema that we've tended to associate with the avan...
2020-09-27 05:50:14 +0000 UTC View Post
Well, like it or not, the "supercut" is now officially a film genre. This means we're going to be seeing a lot more of these found-footage slice-and-dice efforts devoted to all manner of themes -- intern...
2020-09-27 05:06:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Pereda, now on this ninth feature, seems like a director who should have made the leap to Main Slate status by this point. This year, in particular, Pereda is joined in NYFF by two filmmakers whose work ...
2020-09-27 03:33:09 +0000 UTC View Post
It's weird. Streetscapes [Dialogue] was such a tonic precisely because, after so many years of silently walking us through some of the world's most important buildings, Emigholz suddenly burst f...
2020-09-27 03:07:59 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm actually a bit envious of those viewers for whom the righteous glory of The Inheritance appears to be coming out of nowhere. This often when an experimental filmmaker crosses the threshold a...
2020-09-27 02:53:07 +0000 UTC View Post
I wanted to take a quick break from NYFF-mania, and so I thought I'd check in with an experimental film that wasn't programmed by the team, from a maker who has shown at TIFF, Rotterdam, Crossroads, and ...
2020-09-24 23:04:57 +0000 UTC View Post
See You In My Dreams (Shun Ikezoe, 2020)
Neither flesh nor fish, not exactly a narrative short but not particularly avant-garde either. A grainy para-narrative work with shades of ...
2020-09-23 05:32:06 +0000 UTC View Post
At the risk of the sort of hyperbole that rightly gets you put in Critic Jail, I'd love to mail a copy of this film to every citizen in the United States. But then, of course, would that do a damned bit ...
2020-09-22 10:03:23 +0000 UTC View Post
This one is getting roundly panned by the NYFFers, and I can understand why. "Tasteful" is being thrown around as a pejorative, and there is indeed a strange despondency to Song's film, like it isn't cer...
2020-09-21 21:30:30 +0000 UTC View Post
[SPOILERS, IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS TO ANIMALS ON THE FARM...]
At the risk of national stereotyping, Gunda represents one serious case of Russian-style whataboutism. Designed to tug ...
2020-09-21 04:02:37 +0000 UTC View Post
Ekphrasis (Riccardo Giacconi, 2019)
"Ekphrasis" is a term from classical art history, and it means the detailed description of the contents of an image. It was one of the key princ...
2020-09-20 06:18:19 +0000 UTC View Post
For quite some time now, I've been struggling to come up with some sort of parallel or analogy for the highly evocative, poetic formalism of Mary Helena Clark's films. Clark tends to organize her work in...
2020-09-18 02:12:15 +0000 UTC View Post
In 2007, filmmaker and scholar John Gianvito made Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, a feature documentary / landscape study that followed a trail of forgotten historical markers and gravesi...
2020-09-17 23:56:48 +0000 UTC View Post
Mostly because I have been focused on the Currents selections, I have not paid a great deal of attention to the Main Slate, at least apart from knowing what's in it. I am not reading reviews, and have mo...
2020-09-17 18:29:52 +0000 UTC View Post
An Arrow Pointing To a Hole (Steve Reinke, 2020)
This is a sufficiently complex work that demands more analysis than I can provide at the moment, unfortunately. I have grown more a...
2020-09-17 06:08:09 +0000 UTC View Post
If The Wandering Soap Opera was analogous to Eyes Wide Shut -- a work that a master had all but completed, that only needed minor technical finishes in order to bring to fruition -- the...
2020-09-17 04:32:16 +0000 UTC View Post