Murmur (Heather Young, 2019)
Debut films are often tricky melanges of shopworn cliches and the unique ideas that made the artist want to make the movie in the first place. It's almos...
2019-09-15 20:59:16 +0000 UTC View Post
msicism posts
Ghost Strata (Ben Rivers, 2019)
Although Rivers is getting most of his festival exposure this year with Krabi, 2562, the feature he co-directed with Thai helmer Anocha Suwichak...
2019-09-14 02:01:37 +0000 UTC View PostLetter to the Editor (Alan Berliner, 2019)
In his characteristic essay-film way, Berliner uses a framing device -- his personal relationship to the New York Times -- to consider a range of broader...
2019-09-13 21:53:26 +0000 UTC View PostJordan River Anderson, The Messenger (Alanis Obomsawin, 2019)
For all my dedication to Canadian cinema, this is the first time I have watched a documentary by Obomsawin, the revered filmmaker who is at this point th...
2019-09-13 01:21:58 +0000 UTC View PostWe Still Have to Close Our Eyes (John Torres, 2019)
Among the various directors of the Filipino New Wave, John Torres (Todo todo teros, Lukas the Strange) has always been one of the stran...
2019-09-07 00:45:41 +0000 UTC View PostRemembrance: A Portrait Study (Edward Owens, 1967)
The films of 60s experimentalist Edward Owens, which were rediscovered and restored not too long ago, provide a voice that had been missing from American...
2019-09-07 00:18:08 +0000 UTC View PostBook of Hours (Annie McDonell, 2019)
A brief film composed of gentle, quotidian gestures, Book of Hours is elegant in its subtlety. In the film, McDonell focuses on the domestic sph...
2019-09-06 23:56:03 +0000 UTC View PostWho's Afraid of Ideology? (Marwa Arsanios, 2019)
Beginning with a woman thumbing through a notebook of pressed plants, detailing the ailments that can be cured with each one, Who’s Afraid of Ideol...
2019-09-06 22:49:58 +0000 UTC View PostHrvoji, Look at You From the Tower (Ryan Ferko, 2019)
Ryan Ferko has presented a number of films in festivals past, although those previous entries have been co-directed by Faraz and Parastoo Anoushahpour. T...
2019-09-06 17:47:40 +0000 UTC View PostSecond Generation (Miryam Charles, 2019)
A film that hints at a narrative but is presented as an assemblage of fragments, Second Generation suggests a love affair, a pending marriage, a...
2019-09-06 05:07:30 +0000 UTC View PostTranscript (Erica Sheu, 2019)
I had the good fortune to first come across Erica Sheu's Transcript back in March when I was previewing films for the SF Crossroads Festival, wh...
2019-09-05 23:25:35 +0000 UTC View PostThe Bite (Pedro Neves Marques, 2019)
Another form of tropical malady has taken hold in Sao Paolo, and it's up to a group of renegade entomologist-epidemiologists to stop the plague, not by f...
2019-09-05 07:58:21 +0000 UTC View PostSaF05 (Charlotte Prodger, 2019)
SaF05, the latest video work by Turner Prize winner Charlotte Prodger, could perhaps be considered a video essay, although to call it that would...
2019-09-05 03:36:40 +0000 UTC View PostSun Rave (Roy Samaha, 2019)
Roy Samaha's Sun Rave is a complex, knotty little film that, like the espionage agents described in it, does not give up its secrets easily. By ...
2019-09-04 18:57:25 +0000 UTC View PostSlow Volumes (Mike Gibisser, 2019)
A bit of domestic abstraction, Slow Volumes employs a 35mm camera at the center axis of both a living room and a particular point in a field out...
2019-09-04 18:29:42 +0000 UTC View PostBlack Sun (Maureen Fazendiero, 2019)
Taking as its ostensible topic the recent partial solar eclipse, Fazendiero’s film is a meditation on the role that light plays in shaping reality and ...
2019-09-02 05:38:32 +0000 UTC View PostThose That, at a Distance, Resemble Another (Jessica Sarah Rinland, 2019)
For the Viennale catalog, I wrote the following:
Not all reproductions are mechanical, even in our age of digital imagery, 3D printing, and instant...
2019-09-01 23:46:30 +0000 UTC View PostSan Vittore (Yuri Ancarani, 2019)
It is easy (if nonetheless necessary) to criticize power in its most heinous manifestations. If we consider, for example, the Trump administration's disg...
2019-08-30 04:44:22 +0000 UTC View PostThis Action Lies (James N. Kienitz Wilkins, 2018)
Commissioned last year by a Swiss gallery but world premiering only now, Kienitz Wilkins' latest featurette nevertheless arrives piping hot. In fact, it ...
2019-08-30 00:06:22 +0000 UTC View PostCircumplector (Gastón Solnicki, 2019)
In Latin, circumplector means that which is all-encompassing. True to form, Argentinian experimentalist Solnicki (Kékszakállú) enfol...
2019-08-29 23:39:41 +0000 UTC View PostCézanne (Luke Fowler, 2019)
Live from Aix-en-Provence comes an unusual new film from Luke Fowler. Although his work tends to be discursive in its exploration of cultural history, he...
2019-08-29 23:34:41 +0000 UTC View PostBilly (Zachary Epcar, 2019)
Billy is a talkie.
Epcar is one of the most interesting among the current crop of younger filmmakers, in part because his stock in trade s...
2019-08-26 05:09:26 +0000 UTC View PostHeavy Metal Detox (Josef Dabernig, 2019)
In recent years, there has been considerable interest in the intersection of experimental cinema and horror. A lot of this was occasioned by work coming ...
2019-08-25 22:22:34 +0000 UTC View PostE-Ticket (Simon Liu, 2019)
Simon Liu, who grew up between Hong Kong and the U.K. and is now based in New York City, has a distinctly urban sensibility in his films, even when the s...
2019-08-25 05:22:18 +0000 UTC View PostAmusement Ride (Tomonari Nishikawa, 2019)
Q: What's a 'structural film'?
A: That's easy! Everybody knows what a structural film is! It's when engineers design an airplane or a ...
2019-08-24 05:57:32 +0000 UTC View Post(tourism studies) (Joshua Gen Solondz, 2019)
Joshua Gen Solondz consistently makes some of the most unusual films around. Part of this has to do with a polymorphic sensibility that I have not quite ...
2019-08-24 04:06:05 +0000 UTC View PostLow Tide (Eva Kolcze, 2019)
Some films are small, intimate gestures that simply take stock of the world around us, using sound and image to describe natural cycles that tend to elud...
2019-08-24 00:42:36 +0000 UTC View PostGeometric Becomings 2 (Manuel DeLanda, 2019)
Manuel DeLanda is a truly odd case. In the late 1970s and throughout the 80s, he was kind of an enfant terrible even within the world of experim...
2019-08-21 05:20:25 +0000 UTC View PostA Topography of Memory (Burak Çevik, 2019)
The relative clarity of the image above is a bit deceptive. If you actually watch Burak Çevik's new medium-length video piece, one of the main things yo...
2019-08-21 04:36:52 +0000 UTC View PostAaaaaaaand we're back!
Sorry for the week-long absence. It was (is) the beginning of classes, Matt is starting a new school, and it's just been kind of a madhouse around here. ...
2019-08-21 04:12:44 +0000 UTC View Post