Ouvertures (The Living and the Dead Ensemble, 2019)
The Martinican writer Édouard Glissant, whose play Monsieur Toussaint forms the core of this film, wrote of the "right to opacity." In his theo...
2020-10-05 21:46:43 +0000 UTC View Post
msicism posts
The Last City (Heinz Emigholz, 2020)
As I briefly mentioned on Letterboxd, I wasn't really prepared for The Last City, which as far as I am concerned is Heinz Emigholz's "Hal Hartle...
2020-10-05 20:01:56 +0000 UTC View PostThe Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) (Anders Edström and C.W. Winter, 2020)
There is an essential monumentality that is sealed into the very making of this film, fired like clay, such that it seems designed to flout the typical s...
2020-10-05 19:11:25 +0000 UTC View PostDear GOP: Take the L
Just a brief word on the Rose Garden Massacre super-spreader event, and the illness of President Trump and others.
I have seen all sorts of things ...
2020-10-04 16:25:01 +0000 UTC View PostBeginning (Dea Kulumbegashvili, 2020)
This is a film that is probably less suited to home streaming than anything else I've seen so far in 2020. It really requires the complete, enveloping at...
2020-10-02 17:13:00 +0000 UTC View PostI Carry You With Me (Heidi Ewing, 2020)
I turned this off after 48 minutes.
I didn't realize until after I stopped watching (and checked in with Letterboxd, where I saw Steve Erickson's c...
2020-10-01 22:45:06 +0000 UTC View PostHer Name Was Europa (Anja Dornieden & Juan David González Monroy, 2020)
Here's a hypothesis. Just as Stan Brakhage was the defining figure in experimental film for a particular generation, and Hollis Frampton sort of became t...
2020-09-30 04:42:03 +0000 UTC View PostMy Mexican Bretzel (Nuria Giménez, 2019)
[SPOILERS. BUT FRANKLY I WISH SOMEONE HAD SPOILED IT FOR ME.]
As was the case with ...
2020-09-30 03:34:23 +0000 UTC View PostMangrove (Steve McQueen, 2020)
Based on the rapturous reviews in the trades, we can probably expect to see Mangrove staking out some significant real estate in this year's adm...
2020-09-30 02:55:20 +0000 UTC View PostNomadland (Chloé Zhao, 2020)
My lovely wife Jen, who is, shall we say, "cinema adjacent," came in and out while I was watching Nomadland, and after it was over, she said fla...
2020-09-28 00:30:09 +0000 UTC View PostIsabella (Matías Piñeiro, 2020)
A consensus seems to be building that Isabella is a bit of a disappointment from Pineiro. I'll have to disagree, although I certainly see that i...
2020-09-27 21:14:18 +0000 UTC View PostThe Human Voice (Pedro Almodóvar, 2020)
As it happens, I was tasked with writing the catalogue blurb for the Viennale for this one. Here's what I came up with:
"Working primarily in Engli...
2020-09-27 19:28:20 +0000 UTC View PostThe Year of the Discovery (Luis López Carrasco, 2020)
One of the most undeniably impressive films of 2020, The Year of the Discovery is also one of the most frustrating. A fiction / documentary hybr...
2020-09-27 17:52:46 +0000 UTC View PostSlow Machine (Joe DeNardo and Paul Felten, 2020)
A fascinating first effort, Slow Machine belongs to a grand tradition of highly ambitious American independent cinema whose reach exceeds its gr...
2020-09-27 06:33:25 +0000 UTC View PostThe Plastic House (Allison Chhorn, 2019)
Despite its obvious third-person perspective, this is probably the Currents feature I've seen that comes closest to the intensely personal first-person c...
2020-09-27 05:50:14 +0000 UTC View PostThere Are Not Thirty-Six Ways of Showing a Man Getting On a Horse (Nicolás Zukerfeld, 2020)
Well, like it or not, the "supercut" is now officially a film genre. This means we're going to be seeing a lot more of these found-footage slice-and-dice...
2020-09-27 05:06:04 +0000 UTC View PostFauna (Nicolás Pereda, 2020)
Pereda, now on this ninth feature, seems like a director who should have made the leap to Main Slate status by this point. This year, in particular, Pere...
2020-09-27 03:33:09 +0000 UTC View PostThe Lobby (Heinz Emigholz, 2020)
It's weird. Streetscapes [Dialogue] was such a tonic precisely because, after so many years of silently walking us through some of the world's m...
2020-09-27 03:07:59 +0000 UTC View PostThe Inheritance (Ephraim Asili, 2020)
I'm actually a bit envious of those viewers for whom the righteous glory of The Inheritance appears to be coming out of nowhere. This often when...
2020-09-27 02:53:07 +0000 UTC View PostA Potentiality (Dana Berman Duff, 2020)
I wanted to take a quick break from NYFF-mania, and so I thought I'd check in with an experimental film that wasn't programmed by the team, from a maker ...
2020-09-24 23:04:57 +0000 UTC View PostNYFF Currents (Short Takes 5)
See You In My Dreams (Shun Ikezoe, 2020)
Neither flesh nor fish, not exactly a narrative short but not particularly avant-garde ei...
2020-09-23 05:32:06 +0000 UTC View PostThe Monopoly of Violence (David Defresne, 2020)
At the risk of the sort of hyperbole that rightly gets you put in Critic Jail, I'd love to mail a copy of this film to every citizen in the United States...
2020-09-22 10:03:23 +0000 UTC View PostThe Calming (Song Fang, 2020)
This one is getting roundly panned by the NYFFers, and I can understand why. "Tasteful" is being thrown around as a pejorative, and there is indeed a str...
2020-09-21 21:30:30 +0000 UTC View PostGunda (Victor Kossakovsky, 2020)
[SPOILERS, IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS TO ANIMALS ON THE FARM...]
At the risk of national stereotyping, Gunda represents one serious ca...
2020-09-21 04:02:37 +0000 UTC View PostNYFF Currents (Short Takes 4)
Ekphrasis (Riccardo Giacconi, 2019)
"Ekphrasis" is a term from classical art history, and it means the detailed description of the...
2020-09-20 06:18:19 +0000 UTC View PostFigure Minus Fact (Mary Helena Clark, 2020)
For quite some time now, I've been struggling to come up with some sort of parallel or analogy for the highly evocative, poetic formalism of Mary Helena ...
2020-09-18 02:12:15 +0000 UTC View PostHer Socialist Smile (John Gianvito, 2020)
In 2007, filmmaker and scholar John Gianvito made Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, a feature documentary / landscape study that followed a...
2020-09-17 23:56:48 +0000 UTC View PostLovers Rock (Steve McQueen, 2020)
Mostly because I have been focused on the Currents selections, I have not paid a great deal of attention to the Main Slate, at least apart from knowing w...
2020-09-17 18:29:52 +0000 UTC View PostNYFF Currents (Short Takes 3)
An Arrow Pointing To a Hole (Steve Reinke, 2020)
This is a sufficiently complex work that demands more analysis than I can provide...
2020-09-17 06:08:09 +0000 UTC View PostThe Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror (Raúl Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento, 1967/2020)
If The Wandering Soap Opera was analogous to Eyes Wide Shut -- a work that a master had all but completed, that only needed minor techn...
2020-09-17 04:32:16 +0000 UTC View Post