msicism

A Note About Beyoncé's "Black Is King"

I'm of two minds about this. Overall I think it's great how Ms. Knowles-Carter has essentially taken millions from the Disney Corporation under the auspices of reimagining The Lion King only to ...

Two Shorts by Matthew Rankin

Although I quite enjoyed Matthew Rankin's feature debut The Twentieth Century, there was a nagging voice in the back of my head that I couldn't silence, reminding me that Rankin's work seemed a ...

Fireworks Wednesday (Asghar Farhadi, 2006)

Objectively "good," just not for me. The thing that has impressed me so much about both A Separation and The Past, and to a lesser extent The Salesman, is the way Farhadi artic...

Klute (Alan J. Pakula, 1971)

This is one of those classics that I feel a bit sheepish about writing up. Is there really any more to be said about Klute? Not only is it one of the key paranoid thrillers of the 1970s; it has ...

Una película en color (Bruno Delgado Ramo, 2019)

First off, thanks to Jordan Cronk for alerting me to the existence of this experimental gem, a new work from a Spanish filmmaker of whom I was only dimly aware. Delgado Ramo works in Super-8, which is so...

Shirley (Josephine Decker, 2020)

By far my favorite film by @josephinejambox, although that admission makes me feel a bit guilty, I suppose, as if I am not properly standing up for Auteurs' Rights. But unlike Decker's more freeform effo...

Rest in Peace, Regis.

A TV legend, a man of great talent and integrity who never took himself too seriously. For non-American readers unfamiliar with Regis Philbin, his closest international peer would be Bruce Forsyth -- an axiomatic presence on the tube who undersold his talents and had an incredibly long, distingui...

Martha (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974)

One of the handful of Fassbinders I had not seen, Martha is striking for a number of reasons. Even now, I find myself struggling as to whether to label it "minor Fassbinder," or "B-level," becau...

Post-Twitter Waste of Time

I should really know better.

Lately I've been wasting time at a site called futurerocklegends.com. It's an unaffiliat...

I Am Somebody (Madeline Anderson, 1970) + two others

A truly stunning document, Madeline Anderson's I Am Somebody is a complicated film to watch right now, but also absolutely necessary. A close-up record of a 1969 strike by workers at Charleston,...

Glen or Glenda (Edward D. Wood, Jr., 1953)

I've always been a fan of Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space, despite the protestations of tastemakers that it is "the worst film ever made." Yes, it is filled with unintentional comedy, but there i...

Family Romance, LLC (Werner Herzog, 2019)

Herzog's latest -- a fiction film that often resembles a documentary -- is a frustrating film that I often wanted to exist in a form much different than it does. In the end, it won me over, for the most ...

The Long Haul

Watching an eight-hour film on F******l S***e, with its shoddy-ass streaming, is going to take some time. So be aware that I am watching it intermittently, and other things will be popping up in this spa...

Oh Mercy [Roubaux, un lumière] (Arnaud Desplechin, 2019)

[CONTAINS SPOILERS]

To say that Desplechin's latest film is "odd" would be accurate, but misleading. Odd is a word that can imply some sort of quirky effort from an auteur we know well, an instance...

Idiotboxing

Okay, so when you're under quarantine with your partner, you do things you might not otherwise do, to insure domestic tranquility. As some of you know, Jen is not much into movies. She prefers the pacing...

Maggie's Farm (James Benning, 2020)

Well, I wake up in the morning
Fold my hands and pray for rain
I got a head full of ideas
That are drivin' me insane
It's a shame
The way she makes me
Scrub the floor

The...

It's That Time Again, Friends!

Having exhausted many of my options, yet wanting to remain semi-relevant to the critical conversations that are happening somewhere, without my social-media participation, I ask you: which inevitably dis...

Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Eliza Hittman, 2020)

Eliza Hittman's third feature film is difficult to evaluate. In some ways it's tempting to simply give it a pass, because there are certain things it obviously does "right." It focuses on a very narrow, ...

One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk (Zacharias Kunuk, 2019)

Zacharias Kunuk is the world's leading director in the Inuktitut language. Why doesn't that translate to more interest outside of Canada?

Kunuk made a major splash in 2001 with his epic debut film,...

One Way Boogie Woogie (James Benning, 1977) and 27 Years Later (James Benning, 2005)

Some of my readers may be surprised that I had not already seen One Way Boogie Woogie, which may be James Benning's absolute masterpiece. I had seen small portions of it over the years, but had ...

A Couple of Quick Thoughts

NOTE: Now that I am summarily banned from Twitter, I will occasionally be dropping quickie posts like this, just to comment on various things that I would have tweeted about in the past. But relax! This ...

Crime Wave (John Paizs, 1985)

One of those films I always meant to catch up with just based on its reputation, Crime Wave, the debut feature by Winnipeg's John Paizs, turned out to be quite a bit different than I expected. I...

Color Out of Space (Richard Stanley, 2019)

The Fuschia is Now....

One of the most interesting things about Color Out of Space, for me, is reading what others have to say about it. I have never been an aficionado of horror ...

Days of Cannibalism (Teboho Edkins, 2020)

While watching films for the Visions du Réel festival, I caught Teboho Edkins' medium-length documentary Shepherds, which, like Days of Cannibalism, examines on conditions in the encla...

Martin Eden (Pietro Marcello, 2019)

Pietro Marcello is a director who, for me, has been hovering in the "interesting" zone for quite some time. The work I have seen from him up to this point has suggested that he might produce something th...

Miss Juneteenth (Channing Godfrey Peoples, 2020)

A reasonably promising debut film, Miss Juneteenth speaks to the difficulty of funding and producing a truly independent African-American cinema, even today when there is so clearly a hunger for...

HyperNormalisation (Adam Curtis, 2016)

By popular demand, here is the brief review I wrote about Curtis's 2016 iteration of his usual libertarian, Chapo-approved cant. I am not going to pretend that he does not make a few good points here and there. But my main problem with the guy is that he is one of those unreconstructed Marxists w...

Say Their Names.

Tete Gulley (Portland, OR -- May 27)

Malcolm Harsch (Victorville, CA -- May 31)

Dominique Alexander (New York, NY -- June 9)

Robert Fuller (Palmdale, CA -- June 10)

Tshegofatso Pule (Roodepoort, So...