msicism

Smoking Causes Coughing (Quentin Dupieux, 2022)

The title Smoking Causes Coughing is a statement of direct causation. Doing this will lead to that. This is ironic, because nothing in Smoking Causes Coughing leads to anything else. It...

Blue Jean (Georgia Oakley, 2022)

Debut films are hard, and it's often easy to overlook some formal or narrative missteps. Everyone has to start somewhere, and besides, the sheer gumption it takes to get your work in the can and on the s...

A Respectable Woman (Bernard Émond, 2023)

Despite a 20-year career, Quebecois director Bernard Émond remains a bit of a mystery even to many of the most hardcore cinephiles. While on some level this is simply the fate of all but a very select f...

The Divide [La Fracture] (Catherine Corsini, 2021)

As incongruous as it may seen, I found myself thinking about the recent films of Adam McKay while watching La Fracture, the latest film from Catherine Corsini. Needless to say, it wasn't a flatt...

Coconut Head Generation (Alain Kassanda, 2023)

I don't have a lot to say about Coconut Head Generation, an informative but flawed documentary about activism at Nigeria's University of Ibadan. At first, it centers on the university's Thursday...

Yanagawa (Zhang Lu, 2021)

Back in 2014, when TIFF was still doing its City to City program(me), I covered the entire slate of films that year. The focus was on Seoul, and as often happens when cramming for festival coverage, a lo...

Cruces (Maximilien Luc Proctor, 2023)

BY REQUEST: Florian Weigl

The usual disclaimers apply. Max and I are friends, and have worked together on some writing projects. But another disclaimer might be in order here. MLP ...

Eight Hours Don't Make a Day (Rainer Werner Fassbiner, 1972)

BY REQUEST: Jacopo Fiorancio

Having now watched all five episodes (and indeed, all eight hours) of Eight Hours, I find it all very much of a piece with Fassbinder's mature...

Enys Men (Mark Jenkin, 2022)

One benefit of going to commercial cinemas to see movies no one else wants to is that, when a few other people do show up, it can create an unexpected bond. I had a nice chat in the lobby with a...

Knock at the Cabin (M. Night Shyamalan, 2023)

Read the room, Night. This is a terrible time to be making such an incoherent statement about gay parenting, in part because that incoherence can easily be mistaken for insight. Why have a family with tw...

The Lottery (Subscriber's Choice)

This weekend I'll finish Eight Hours Are Not a Day, and hopefully post about it by Monday.

But since it sometimes takes folks a minute to see that they've been tagged, I wanted to go ahead...

Leila's Brothers (Saeed Roustaee, 2022)

“Dostoyevsky Iranian style,” reads one positive review of Leila’s Brothers, the third feature film by Saeed Roustaee, and in a way that writer (Frédéric Da) has a point. Like the Russian...

Almost Entirely a Slight Disaster (Umut Subaşı, 2023)

Umut Subaşı’s debut feature is a curious beast. In many regards it is quite accomplished, and displays some very decisive stylistic choices. Basically a roundelay involving four young adults in Insta...

The Face of the Jellyfish (Melisa Liebenthal, 2022)

In 2019, Argentinian filmmaker Melisa Liebenthal released a short film called Aquí y Allá (“Here and There”), in which she used Google Earth to pinpoint the exact location in which she was...

Astrakan (David Depesseville, 2022)

Astrakan, the debut feature from David Depesseville, is a film that is at once deeply humanist and utterly pitiless. Essentially a character study, the film depicts the precarious and often horr...

A Few Preliminary Words about....

Eight Hours Don't Make a Day (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972)

At this point I've seen the first two of the series' five episodes, and wanted to jot down some thoughts.

-- Thi...

Two Upcoming Reviews

Today I started watching Fassbinder's Eight Hours Are Not a Day, and what do you know? It's about eight hours long. I will report back once I "binge" the whole thing. But I've also been doing re...

A Flower in the Mouth (Éric Baudelaire, 2022)

The more films I see by Éric Baudelaire, the less I understand what he's up to. They all seem so different, from his look at the breakaway republic of Abkhazia (2014's Letter to Max), to his ri...

Utama (Alejandro Loayza Grisi, 2022)

BY REQUEST: Gavin Petty

Over the years I've discovered a common trait among many, if not most, debut films. The filmmaker has spent years working toward the project in question, an...

Parafango (Charles Atlas, 1984)

Among the major video artists of the 80s and 90s, Charles Atlas doesn't have the reputation he deserves. This is probably because he works in a very narrow genre, one that he may not have invented but ha...

There Once Was a Singing Blackbird (Otar Iosseliani, 1970)

BY REQUEST: Kirk Johnson

Well, it was kind of inspiring to see that even at the start of his career, Iosseliani had most of his primary obsessions firmly in place. In particular, <...

Brother and Sister (Arnaud Desplechin, 2022)

There has been a strong surge of anti-Desplechin sentiment brewing over the past few years. The critical response to his last few films, along with the fact that major film festivals have started ignorin...

in water (Hong Sang-soo, 2023)

Allegedly kept out of the Berlinale competition for being "too weird," in water certainly has the hallmarks of radical new direction, for any filmmaker really but especially one who so often get...

Laberint Sequences (Blake Williams, 2023)

The usual disclaimers apply. Blake and I are friends, and while I have been a pretty consistent fan of his work, I've done my best to remain quasi-objective. Now, I've already enthused about Laberint...