In the off hours, I've tried to stay busy, but often this has meant a lot of projects begun with the best of intentions that have proven destined to remain half-finished. Recently, I thought I would attempt to construct a crossword puzzle, mostly as a lark but also as a tribute to my pal Kameron ...
2020-04-14 11:20:36 +0000 UTC View Post
Bruce Baillie: consummate filmmaker of the West Coast avant-garde. Co-founder of Canyon Cinema. Instigator of what would become SF Cinematheque. We know he is one of the all-time greats. Why has it taken...
2020-04-11 05:19:58 +0000 UTC View Post
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.
Above is a still from the first shot of Tsai Ming-liang's latest film, his first feature in seven years and an apparent coming-out of retirement. It ...
2020-04-09 11:02:23 +0000 UTC View Post
It's strange. It seems patently obvious that Denis Côté is the most consistently interesting director currently working in French Canadian cinema, but you wouldn't necessarily know that to judge by his...
2020-04-09 02:20:15 +0000 UTC View Post
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS.
Destined to go down in the Wacky Title Hall of Fame, alongside Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine in Daehakno and On the Marria...
2020-04-04 04:18:18 +0000 UTC View Post
As a special presentation during these days of international lockdown, filmmaker / artist Zia Anger has been recently conducting live streams of her film-performance My First Film, which has pla...
2020-04-03 23:37:59 +0000 UTC View Post
Signal 8 (Simon Liu, 2019)
Simon Liu's films are characterized by a tactility that lands somewhere between the grungy and the ethereal, which perhaps has to do with the unique qual...
2020-03-31 21:40:44 +0000 UTC View Post
SOME SPOILERS FOLLOW.
I understand why so many critics are impressed with The Invisible Man. There's a lot that's impressive here, which is why I found it so disappointing...
2020-03-30 00:34:07 +0000 UTC View Post
As Guzmán states in the voiceover of his latest essay film, this is the twentieth film he has made about his native Chile, most of them having been made from the distance of exile. As he has gotten olde...
2020-03-27 22:39:52 +0000 UTC View Post
Sadly, thanks to the unmatched global distribution of COVID-19, there will most likely be no 2020 Cannes Film Festival. When you consider that Cannes is essentially the magnetic north of the art film uni...
2020-03-26 23:52:54 +0000 UTC View Post
This is the second feature, and the first fiction work, from Galician auteur Lois Patiño, whose short film Night Without Distance, from 2015, was in my estimation the single best entry in that ...
2020-03-24 02:15:05 +0000 UTC View Post
Sky Hopinka is a fascinating filmmaker for a number of reasons. Not only is he one of the most prominent experimental filmmakers of the moment; he is also probably the highest-profile Indigenous media ar...
2020-03-19 00:10:44 +0000 UTC View Post
It's just been a bit crazy, you know?
And also, if you need to unsubscribe at this time, seriously, don't give it a second thought. Don't be spending your TP money here!
2020-03-18 17:22:53 +0000 UTC View Post
Although this film has certain specific points of reference -- I'll get to that in a minute -- there is something rather singular in the way it is assembled that makes The Metamorphosis of Birds...
2020-03-14 23:19:45 +0000 UTC View Post
Honestly, I'm not going to pretend that I understand film distribution anymore. Here's a film that was very successful in its native Germany, won the (now discontinued -- oops!) Alfred Bauer Prize at the...
2020-03-06 22:31:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Romanian director Radu Jude's previous film, "I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians" (quotations marks are part of the official title), was an intellectual endeavor whose ambition...
2020-03-06 08:35:56 +0000 UTC View Post
In French, the word for photographic developer -- the chemical itself -- is révélateur, which is a reminder of the power contained within what we now call "analog images." The body leaves a ph...
2020-03-06 02:51:14 +0000 UTC View Post
Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome (Andrew Norman Wilson, 2019)
I enjoyed this structuralist mini-narrative quite a bit more than I liked Wilson's 2018 film Kodak<...
2020-03-02 05:12:49 +0000 UTC View Post
Although Marina de Van has made two feature films in the interim, it feels very much like her latest, My Nudity Means Nothing, is a conceptual follow-up to her 2002 breakthrough In My Skin 2020-03-01 20:33:30 +0000 UTC View Post
Although I am sure to see films this year that are somewhat better than The Wolf House, I will be quite surprised if I see one that is as unique. A combination of fake documentary, stop-motion a...
2020-03-01 06:31:27 +0000 UTC View Post
In Bart Testa's essay on Jack Chambers' experimental classic The Hart of London, he compares the film to two other feature-length Canadian avant-garde works that were made around the same time: ...
2020-02-27 04:51:15 +0000 UTC View Post
Filmmaker Bette Gordon is probably best known for her 1983 feature film Variety, an experimental narrative from New York's Downtown scene that actually attained some commercial and critical traction. Focused on a young woman (Sandy McLeod) who is a ticket-taker at a porno theater, Va...
2020-02-27 01:47:25 +0000 UTC View Post
I've been on the fence about this guy for a while now. I thought his second film Rubber was a clever bit of deadpan surrealism, and I appreciated that while Dupieux did thoroughly exhaust his pr...
2020-02-17 07:32:48 +0000 UTC View Post
No, I didn't forget. But my review of Beanpole will be in the next issue of Cinema Scope. Here's a sample sentence:
" Shot through with a grungy period style virtually overlaid with a pain...
2020-02-12 22:27:26 +0000 UTC View Post
I don't know Bellocchio's work as well as I should, having seen only four of his films to date. However, the other three films of his I've seen -- My Mother's Smile, Good Morning, Night...
2020-02-12 22:22:32 +0000 UTC View Post
What a dazzler. Chytilová's fifth feature, and her follow-up to her stone masterpiece Daisies, Fruit of Paradise actually played in competition in Cannes back in 1970. (Allegedly the c...
2020-02-07 23:23:46 +0000 UTC View Post
Miss Americana (Lana Wilson, 2020)
Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, 2019)
These two very different documentaries, pro...
2020-02-07 18:08:34 +0000 UTC View Post
This lovely short film (just under 30 minutes) is a poetic study of the titular port city in Chile, and it's an instance where physical geography lends itself to a uniquely cinematic experience. ValparaÃ...
2020-01-31 21:21:37 +0000 UTC View Post
I run hot and cold with Loznitsa. He pretty much make three different kinds of films: narrative fiction films, contemporary documentaries, and archival found-footage compilation films. And within each of...
2020-01-30 23:20:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Much to my surprise, I ended up quite liking Midsommar. I don't want to give too much credence to this dodgy "elevated horror" concept, but I think it's worth noting the things that Aster does r...
2020-01-28 21:23:24 +0000 UTC View Post