One of the year’s most acclaimed films, Return to Seoul is also notably absent within the so-called “discourse.” It seems that a lot of people like it, but don’t have a lot to say, perha...
2022-12-28 06:01:28 +0000 UTC View Post
Just a quick word about a film that kind of snuck up on me. In its first twenty or so minutes, Dos Estaciones seems pretty familiar. From its rigid compositions to its setting in a small-batch t...
2022-12-27 23:56:21 +0000 UTC View Post
It seems to me that the revelatory thing about Touki-Bouki (and yes, I'm going with the onscreen hyphen) is that while Mambéty clearly has something to say about coloniali...
2022-12-27 04:15:57 +0000 UTC View Post
Poitras's brutal documentary about the life and work of Nan Goldin, while not exactly critic-proof, does present certain challenges for someone who means to write about it. That's because All the Bea...
2022-12-26 07:02:21 +0000 UTC View Post
For those of you unfamiliar with Rose Lowder's work, I have written about an 2022-12-23 21:14:59 +0000 UTC View Post
In a time of all-encompassing irony, it's hard to know whether sincerity as an antidote or just another pose. Two of America's leading auteurs decided to go back in time with their latest films, offering their own Freudian origin stories on the assumption that their personal memories might resona...
2022-12-23 20:20:58 +0000 UTC View Post
Look, no one is more surprised than me. As far as I was concerned, Ruben Östlund was a smug, self-righteous alt-right troll, using irony and pseudo-intellect to "own the libs." In short, the cinematic e...
2022-12-22 20:31:07 +0000 UTC View PostAs with all such lists, a grain or two of salt is advisable. There are always more experimental films produced and released within a calendar year than can ever be watched by any given human being, regardless of how hard they may try. And in my case, I was unable to travel to any film festivals t...
2022-12-20 06:28:25 +0000 UTC View Post
I had jotted some notes on this film back when I watched it, but they went missing from my desk. I mention this just to explain that I have owed Decision to Leave a full-length review for quite ...
2022-12-19 06:31:26 +0000 UTC View Post
The Whale (Darren Aronofsky, 2022)
Piss poor.
Confession: I HandBraked a copy of this from the screener disc I got, because I need to send the disc out to a ...
2022-12-19 01:01:52 +0000 UTC View Post
The Maiden is the first feature film from Graham Foy, a Calgary-based director who released a number of short films under the moniker Fantavious Fritz. It's a solid debut, and this past Septembe...
2022-12-14 19:52:23 +0000 UTC View Post
[CW: groveling apologies]
Well, my final papers are in. 120 beautiful seven-page essays plus MLA bibliography, all waiting for my attention. There's simply no avoiding it. Meanwhile, the...
2022-12-13 16:28:53 +0000 UTC View Post
The Potemkinists (Radu Jude, 2022)
Jude's short film is not so much a tribute to Sergei Eisenstein as it is a reconsideration of the actual mutineers of the Russian ship the Potemk...
2022-12-10 23:25:31 +0000 UTC View Post
Few recent films have initially seemed as original, or as inscrutable, as Skinamarink, the debut feature from Kyle Edward Ball. Seemingly on its way to 2022-12-09 00:20:39 +0000 UTC View Post
Artistic experiments don't always pan out, and the important thing is to learn something along the way. Trite as that may sound, this conviction marks the difference between a noble failure and a time, u...
2022-12-07 05:29:10 +0000 UTC View Post
The Inspection is an autobiographical debut feature that shows Bratton's onscreen avatar, Eliis French (Jeremy Pope) hitting rock-bottom as a result of having been turned out of his h...
2022-12-06 06:26:43 +0000 UTC View Post
Only Wiseman's second excursion into fiction filmmaking*, A Couple displays a fairly radical idea of what fiction actually is. His first non-documentary, 2002's The Last Letter, was als...
2022-12-05 05:33:57 +0000 UTC View Post
It's taken me awhile to get to the final film in Kiarostami's Koker trilogy, and this is one of those instances when I really wish I hadn't waited. It's hard to say how I would have reacted to Throug...
2022-12-04 06:18:29 +0000 UTC View Post
It's still hectic over here, with the end of the semester grading compounded by end-of-year cramming. And I know there are some films from the last poll (esp. Through the Olive Trees) that I sti...
2022-12-03 06:48:18 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the year's best films, Rewind and Play might best be characterized as a forensic documentary. French-Senegalese director Alain Gomis acquired the unseen rushes from an episode of the Fren...
2022-12-03 06:07:16 +0000 UTC View Post
It wasn't my intention to write about Glass Onion on the day that Sight & Sound released the results of 2022-12-02 02:54:55 +0000 UTC View Post
This is the first of several catch-up posts, so I won't be going into as much detail as I probably should. But some of these films I honestly couldn't write about because I programmed them, and it felt vaguely like a conflict-of-interest. So here goes.
2022-11-28 06:23:19 +0000 UTC
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Plenty has already been written about EO, Jerzy Skolimowski's very strange, often exhilarating new film. And while the director himself has confirmed what most viewers detected immediately -- th...
2022-11-27 20:07:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Soldat is a German filmmaker who doesn't have much of a festival profile in North America, which is a shame. While I would make no grand claims for his films, he does shine a light on queer ma...
2022-11-25 02:03:19 +0000 UTC View Post
Having now seen three films by Ruth Beckermann, I'm more confused than anything. Does she have a discernible unified project? Her work seems to have the rigorous conceptual bent one so often finds in Aus...
2022-11-24 06:45:22 +0000 UTC View Post
Befitting such a close result, I am going to attempt a compromise. I will focus on the major titles with longer reviews, and drop a couple of drive-bys along the way.
Meanwhile, enjoy Edward M...
2022-11-24 06:35:19 +0000 UTC View Post
As the year-end crunch keeps crunching, I am inevitably falling behind in my reviews. I have thought about how to handle this, and I came up with two possible solutions. And, since we haven't done a poll...
2022-11-20 05:36:12 +0000 UTC View Post
Hong Kong filmmaker Simon Liu has gained greater exposure over the past few years, and rightly so. In an avant-garde film environment th...
2022-11-20 05:26:09 +0000 UTC View Post
At their best, the films of the Dardenne brothers embody a critical realism. Part of what has made their work so powerful over the years, so original and affecting, is the way that they construct charact...
2022-11-19 06:42:46 +0000 UTC View Post
