In 1975, Los Angeles painter Edward Ruscha made one of his definitive works. A "drawing" made with onion juice on paper, it consisted of the piece's title stenciled in block letters, white on light beige...
2019-05-18 22:53:44 +0000 UTC View Post
This is Alex Billington. He is one of the worst film critics on the planet. And he always gets to go to Cannes. Just a reminder: there is no such thing as meritocracy.
2019-05-18 19:27:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Woe be to the Un Certain Regard level film that somehow gets bumped up to Competition. After all, considering the fact that Yomeddine is a debut film, it is fairly accomplished. It's a relativel...
2019-05-17 06:41:33 +0000 UTC View Post
A document of various performances from the 2005 Art Rock Festival in St. Brieuc, France, Noise has very little to distinguish it from any of the other run-of-the-mill concert films that once cl...
2019-05-14 20:03:50 +0000 UTC View Post
Just a quick note to say, I've been busy at my day job, watching a passel of student films made for my Diary Film class. They were required to make pieces of at least 30 minutes, to insure that enough fo...
2019-05-10 05:08:47 +0000 UTC View Post
Note to self: when the world of cinema is letting you down, just see a Stephen Chow movie.
For one thing, even when the plot is silly, even preposterous, Chow's films are just so well directed. He ...
2019-05-06 22:56:21 +0000 UTC View Post
Sorry, I'm afraid it doesn't quite work. Certainly from the very first shot, Denis and cinematographer Not Agnès Godard (real name: Yorick Le Saux) generate an impeccably sumptuous atmosphere, with the ...
2019-05-06 01:34:36 +0000 UTC View Post
...but thus far Taskmaster gets a [7].
2019-05-06 01:03:57 +0000 UTC View Post
Big news! It seems that Stan Brakhage produced a heretofore unknown-to-me sequel to 23rd Psalm Branch. In it he explores eerie suburban light textures and the luminous faces of the Christians of...
2019-05-03 15:26:24 +0000 UTC View Post
Sunset is a film I quite like in theory. It has a relentless formal style from which it never swerves. It uses a personal story, rather minor in the grand historical scheme of things, as a kind ...
2019-05-02 19:55:57 +0000 UTC View Post
You know, at this point I've been pretty much all over America. And everywhere I go, people want to know one thing.
That seems like a pretty limited knowledge base.
2019-04-30 21:02:51 +0000 UTC View Post
Jeez, what a slog. I've quite admired Jiang Wen as a director in the past, and although there's a very good chance that he will never top the exquisite chaos of Devils at the Doorstep, I think t...
2019-04-27 20:29:27 +0000 UTC View Post
So yeah, sorry, I haven't posted in a minute. In addition to things being intensely awful around the English department even by the usual end-of-term standards, I have been slogging through a ...
2019-04-27 18:23:53 +0000 UTC View Post
I have only just minutes ago learned that filmmaker Phil Solomon has passed away. Phil had been in poor health for many years, having periods of greater or lesser infirmity. But I was unaware that he had...
2019-04-22 03:34:04 +0000 UTC View Post
It's been two-and-a-half weeks since logging off social media. Generally I feel fine about it. When I get the itch to waste time online, I turn instead to Wikipedia, which has proven to be an edifying su...
2019-04-21 02:16:23 +0000 UTC View Post
This is without question Perry's most emotionally direct film since The Color Wheel, although making that statement sounds unnecessarily evaluative. I quite appreciated the fact that Listen ...
2019-04-20 20:13:21 +0000 UTC View Post
I suppose a question exists as to how fully I can evaluate My Ain Folk, given that it is the middle section of an autobiographical trilogy, the first and final parts I have not yet seen. (I have...
2019-04-20 19:40:03 +0000 UTC View Post
This is a somewhat unconventional effort from Mike Leigh, who has tended in his period pieces to avoid "big history" and to explore important matters from the inside out. Mr. Turner used its pro...
2019-04-16 00:36:49 +0000 UTC View Post
Thanks to my friend James Hansen, I got to see the video portion of Sondra Perry's multimedia installation It's In The Game, which is an impressive piece of social criticism. As the debate rages...
2019-04-16 00:07:39 +0000 UTC View Post
Who is the director behind the mask?
Recently I heard a set by British comedian Nish Kumar in which he explained that while there may be no good right-wing comedy, you could just as easily...
2019-04-12 18:18:00 +0000 UTC View Post
This semester I have been teaching a "Literature and Film" course, and overall it has been reasonably successful. The students are generally quite bright and engaged, and on the whole they have proven wi...
2019-04-11 04:00:16 +0000 UTC View Post
As Mike D'Angelo will happily tell anyone in earshot, I love to read spoilers. If it's going to be awhile before a see a particular movie, I will frequently read a precis of the plot, mainly so that I ca...
2019-04-08 05:50:45 +0000 UTC View Post
You gotta give M. Night some credit. When it came time to jumpstart his floundering career, he didn't go back to the obvious well, creating sequels or prequels to The Sixth Sense, still his defi...
2019-04-08 02:32:13 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey, I'm not saying that any of my patrons would do anything as shady as bittorrent. But FYI, the uploader called BiPOLAR has just dumped a whole lot of rarish art films on the RARBG torrent site. So if ...
2019-04-07 22:18:54 +0000 UTC View Post
From what I recall, the reaction to Shadow was pretty muted coming out of Venice and Toronto last year, although the film did go on to scoop up the Golden Horse for Best Film. I suppose one coul...
2019-04-07 03:40:27 +0000 UTC View Post
In "A Lecture," Hollis Frampton turns on the projector and begins with the basics. He allows the projector light to simply cast itself at the screen without any piece of celluloid blocking the way. The r...
2019-04-03 20:04:43 +0000 UTC View Post
A film so hybridized as to at times feel amorphous, So Pretty is nonetheless a singular, often hypnotic artifact. It is a highly formalized cinematic examination of a tight-knit group of friends...
2019-04-01 04:50:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Like a strange hybrid of Pialat and Bergman, Dan Sallitt's new film explores the vicissitudes of a close, possibly codependent relationship between two women over the course of many years, observing how ...
2019-03-31 19:32:14 +0000 UTC View Post