msicism

Ghost Town Anthology (Denis Côté, 2019)

For years now, I have greatly admired the work of Quebecois director Denis Côté without ever exactly falling in love with it. Granted, I am not well acquainted with his earliest features. I first becam...

Just Don't Think I'll Scream (Frank Beauvais, 2019)

Is cinephilia healthy? It's a question I suspect a lot of us ask ourselves from time to time, and although we may have our doubts, we keep coming back to the cinema, that artificial world, for pleasures ...

MS Slavic 7 (Sofia Bohdanowicz, with Deragh Campbell, 2019)

This midlength film, about Audrey (Campbell), a young literary executor researching the correspondence between her great-grandmother, Polish-Canadian poet Zofia Bohdanowiczowa, and Polish-American writer...

High Flying Bird (Steven Soderbergh, 2019)

Although Soderbergh's latest opened in a few theaters (NY and LA, I think), this is a Netflix production. So in one respect, it's a film without film, a piece of cinema that exists in a still-evolving ne...

I Wrote an Ad for the Democrats.

They can use it for free.

---------------------------

From the very beginning, Donald Trump has done very little to hide the fact that he was using the Presidency to make himself richer. He has laughed off the accusation, but never denied, that he was making policies for his own perso...

More Than You Bargained For

I should be writing about Steven Soderbergh's (quite lovely) High Flying Bird in this space, but that can wait for a little while. While I used to enjoy the practice of writing a short something...

Soleil Ô (Med Hondo, 1970)

Med Hondo, one of the key figures in the history of African cinema, passed away on March 2 at the age of 82. Although his work is not nearly as well known anywhere as it ought to be, it has made more sig...

Sauvage (Camille Vidal-Naquet, 2018)

A filmic portrait of a young man on the margins of society, Sauvage is precisely the kind of misguided liberal exercise that betrays a condescending attitude toward its subject under the guise o...

Vever (Deborah Stratman, 2019)

Deborah Stratman's lovely new film is a collaboration with Barbara Hammer, comprised mostly of footage that Hammer shot in Guatemala in 1975 but never fashioned into a completed work. This material is bo...

The Magic Life of V (Tonislav Hristov, 2019)

The Magic Life of V is an interesting specimen, in that it actually becomes less compelling of a film the more we learn about its protagonist. In the beginning, we don't know a great deal about ...

The Hottest August (Brett Story, 2019)

In what strikes me as a rather direct nod to Chris Marker and Edgar Morin's classic Le Joli Mai, Brett Story's new film has her traveling around New York City asking semi-random individuals whet...

Now something is slowly changing (mint film office, 2018)

Just a brief note on this one, since I turned it off at the 45 minute mark (with an hour left). This film is a highly objective, deeply unprejudiced look at "coaching" culture, from business retreats to ...

The Chambermaid (Lila Avilés, 2018)

Although The Chambermaid is a strong film on its own merits, I found myself mentally comparing it with Roma as I watched it. Both films focus on relatively young women in service profes...

The Plagiarists (Peter Parlow, 2019)

In different circumstances -- referring to highly abstract works of the avant-garde -- I have argued that the biggest risk that a work of art can take is being willing to be mistaken for nothing. In its ...

Polishing Off Cannes 2018 (or trying to)

Leto (Kirill Serebrennikov, 2018)

On the face of it, Leto ["Summer"] is the sort of film that is probably better suited to the Un Certain Regard sidebar than the rare air ...

Two Things I Read Today, or, Doing Cinephilia Better

Quite by chance, I read two articles today that worked in tandem to make me reflect, not only on what I'm doing here, but what I am accomplishing or not accomplishing in my (minor) career as a writer and...

Brief Notes on a Couple of Films, or "Meh"

Everybody Knows (Asghar Farhadi, 2018)

Or, as I'm sure Mike D'Angelo would say, "Everybody Whiffs." After going from strength to strength for four films straight (possibly even mor...

I'm Still Here (Casey Affleck, 2010)

Sorry for the lack of posts, guys. I just had a writing deadline, followed by a spike of activity in my copy editing job, and now followed up with a stack of papers to grade. But I will be back very shor...

Chinese Portrait (Wang Xiaoshuai, 2018)

It seems like only a few weeks ago (and in fact it was) that I was commenting on Wang Xiaoshuai's Shanghai Dreams in this very spot. And my overall assessment of the filmmaker was not very posit...

Tempting Devils (Jean-Claude Brisseau, 2018)

French cinema's favorite pervy uncle is back, and he's using a MacBook Pro to create a strange approximation of the sublime. Brisseau's latest exhibits the nubile flesh to which his audience has become a...

Les Proies (The Game) (Marina de Contes, 2018)

The English title of Les Proies, "The Game," is a bit misleading. I suppose de Contes did not want to call it "The Quarry" because of the multiple meanings of that word, and "The Prey" sounds fa...

Present.Perfect. (Shengze Zhu, 2019)

This compilation film, which won the Tiger competition at Rotterdam, is subtle in its construction, so you might not immediately notice that it actually proposes a radical new relationship between specta...

No Data Plan (Miko Revereza, 2019)

(Over the next few weeks, I'll be writing about films that are screening at the True/False Festival, that screened at Rotterdam, or are coming up at Berlin. If you are curious as to which festival(s) a g...

Pigs and Battleships (Shohei Imamura, 1961)

Wow, this one's a doozie. I had forgotten just how much anarchic activity and social commentary Imamura could layer into a film, and at times both the plot and the frame are full to bursting with wild im...

Anarchy vs Ennui: The Tiebreaker

The choice is yours:

You can get with this:

Or you can get with that:

2019-02-06 05:34:52 +0000 UTC View Post

Rotterdam (or Anywhere)

What should I watch next? One of these exciting new selections from IFFR, or a classic I haven't seen, or a new release? 

Gone Fishin'

A Wild Stream (Nuria Ibáñez Castañeda, 2018)

Ashore (aka Terra Franca) (Leonor Teles, 2018) 

There's something about fishing that just seems to appea...

Pig (Mani Haghighi, 2018)

This film was my first extended exposure to Iranian independent Mani Haghighi. I say "extended," because several years ago I started watching, but did not finish, his debut film Men At Work, abo...

Our Time (Carlos Reygadas, 2018)

How to we distinguish between between art and real life? The Russian Formalist Victor Shklovsky argued that art was a process of estrangement, putting us at a distance from the familiar so that, in a dia...

At Eternity's Gate (Julien Schnabel, 2018)

The real question here is, do we really need another film about the Vincent Van Gogh story? While there's no denying his stellar achievements or his influence on the modern art that followed in his wake,...