msicism

Come Coyote (Dani and Sheilah ReStack, 2019)

In 1975, Los Angeles painter Edward Ruscha made one of his definitive works. A "drawing" made with onion juice on paper, it consisted of the piece's titl...

Cannes It, Buddy

This is Alex Billington. He is one of the worst film critics on the planet. And he always gets to go to Cannes. Just a reminder: there is no such thing a...

Yomeddine (Abu Bakr Shawky, 2018)

Woe be to the Un Certain Regard level film that somehow gets bumped up to Competition. After all, considering the fact that Yomeddine is a debut...

Noise (Olivier Assayas, 2006)

A document of various performances from the 2005 Art Rock Festival in St. Brieuc, France, Noise has very little to distinguish it from any of th...

Busy in the Land of Due Diligence

Just a quick note to say, I've been busy at my day job, watching a passel of student films made for my Diary Film class. They were required to make piece...

The New King of Comedy (Stephen Chow, 2019)

Note to self: when the world of cinema is letting you down, just see a Stephen Chow movie.

For one thing, even when the plot is silly, even prepost...

High Life (Claire Denis, 2018)

Sorry, I'm afraid it doesn't quite work. Certainly from the very first shot, Denis and cinematographer Not Agnès Godard (real name: Yorick Le Saux) gene...

I Don't Rate TV Shows...

...but thus far Taskmaster gets a [7].

Unexpected Brakhage Discovery

Big news! It seems that Stan Brakhage produced a heretofore unknown-to-me sequel to 23rd Psalm Branch. In it he explores eerie suburban light te...

Sunset (László Nemes, 2018)

Sunset is a film I quite like in theory. It has a relentless formal style from which it never swerves. It uses a personal story, rather minor in...

Fuck Camp

These Are the Jokes, Folks

You know, at this point I've been pretty much all over America. And everywhere I go, people want to know one thing.

That seems like a pretty limite...

Hidden Man (Jiang Wen, 2018)

Jeez, what a slog. I've quite admired Jiang Wen as a director in the past, and although there's a very good chance that he will never top the exquisite c...

Uncle Waz's Corner for Unsolicited Advice

So yeah, sorry, I haven't posted in a minute. In addition to things being intensely awful around the English department even by the usual end-...

Phil Solomon (1954-2019)

I have only just minutes ago learned that filmmaker Phil Solomon has passed away. Phil had been in poor health for many years, having periods of greater ...

I Wasn't Missing Twitter, But...

It's been two-and-a-half weeks since logging off social media. Generally I feel fine about it. When I get the itch to waste time online, I turn instead t...

Her Smell (Alex Ross Perry, 2018)

This is without question Perry's most emotionally direct film since The Color Wheel, although making that statement sounds unnecessarily evaluat...

My Ain Folk (Bill Douglas, 1973)

I suppose a question exists as to how fully I can evaluate My Ain Folk, given that it is the middle section of an autobiographical trilogy, the ...

Peterloo (Mike Leigh, 2018)

This is a somewhat unconventional effort from Mike Leigh, who has tended in his period pieces to avoid "big history" and to explore important matters fro...

It's In The Game (Sondra Perry, 2017)

Thanks to my friend James Hansen, I got to see the video portion of Sondra Perry's multimedia installation It's In The Game, which is an impress...

Dragged Across Concrete (S. Craig Zahler, 2018)

Who is the director behind the mask?

Recently I heard a set by British comedian Nish Kumar in which he explained that while there may be n...

A Bit of Feedback

The Kids Don't Stand a Chance

This semester I have been teaching a "Literature and Film" course, and overall it has been reasonably successful. The students are generally quite bright...

Shiny Happy People (Holding Hands)

As Mike D'Angelo will happily tell anyone in earshot, I love to read spoilers. If it's going to be awhile before a see a particular movie, I will frequen...

Glass (M. Night Shyamalan, 2019)

You gotta give M. Night some credit. When it came time to jumpstart his floundering career, he didn't go back to the obvious well, creating sequels or pr...

Public Service Announcement

Hey, I'm not saying that any of my patrons would do anything as shady as bittorrent. But FYI, the uploader called BiPOLAR has just dumped a whole lot of ...

Shadow (Zhang Yimou, 2018)

From what I recall, the reaction to Shadow was pretty muted coming out of Venice and Toronto last year, although the film did go on to scoop up ...

What's Better Than Silence?

In "A Lecture," Hollis Frampton turns on the projector and begins with the basics. He allows the projector light to simply cast itself at the screen with...

So Pretty (Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli, 2019)

A film so hybridized as to at times feel amorphous, So Pretty is nonetheless a singular, often hypnotic artifact. It is a highly formalized cine...

Fourteen (Dan Sallitt, 2019)

Like a strange hybrid of Pialat and Bergman, Dan Sallitt's new film explores the vicissitudes of a close, possibly codependent relationship between two w...