Return to Seoul (Davy Chou, 2022)
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 pe...
2022-12-28 06:01:28 +0000 UTC View Post
msicism posts
Dos Estaciones (Juan Pablo González, 2022)
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 ri...
2022-12-27 23:56:21 +0000 UTC View PostTouki-Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1973)
It seems to me that the revelatory thing about Touki-Bouki (and yes, I'm going with the onscreen hyphen) is that while Mam...
2022-12-27 04:15:57 +0000 UTC View PostAll the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras, 2022)
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...
2022-12-26 07:02:21 +0000 UTC View PostBouquets 31-40 (Rose Lowder, 2014-2022)
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
Nostalgia Ain't What It Used to Be
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 as...
2022-12-23 20:20:58 +0000 UTC View PostTriangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund, 2022)
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-inte...
2022-12-22 20:31:07 +0000 UTC View PostThe Best Experimental Films (That I Saw) in 2022
As 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 ca...
2022-12-20 06:28:25 +0000 UTC View PostDecision to Leave (Park Chan-wook, 2022)
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 Deci...
2022-12-19 06:31:26 +0000 UTC View PostA Bit of Year-End Cramming
The Whale (Darren Aronofsky, 2022)
Piss poor.
Confession: I HandBraked a copy of this from the screener dis...
2022-12-19 01:01:52 +0000 UTC View PostThe Maiden (Graham Foy, 2022)
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...
2022-12-14 19:52:23 +0000 UTC View PostThe Most Wonderful, Albeit Stressful, Time of the Year
[CW: groveling apologies]
Well, my final papers are in. 120 beautiful seven-page essays plus MLA bibliography, all waiting for my attent...
2022-12-13 16:28:53 +0000 UTC View PostTwo Auteurs' Shorts
The Potemkinists (Radu Jude, 2022)
Jude's short film is not so much a tribute to Sergei Eisenstein as it is a reconsideration of t...
2022-12-10 23:25:31 +0000 UTC View PostSkinamarink (Kyle Edward Ball, 2022)
Few recent films have initially seemed as original, or as inscrutable, as Skinamarink, the debut feature from Kyle Edward Ball. Seemingly on its...
2022-12-09 00:20:39 +0000 UTC View Post
The Kegelstatt Trio (Rita Azevedo Gomes, 2022)
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 th...
2022-12-07 05:29:10 +0000 UTC View PostThe Inspection (Elegance Bratton, 2022)
The Inspection is an autobiographical debut feature that shows Bratton's onscreen avatar, Eliis French (Jeremy Pope) hitting rock-bot...
2022-12-06 06:26:43 +0000 UTC View PostA Couple (Frederick Wiseman, 2022)
Only Wiseman's second excursion into fiction filmmaking*, A Couple displays a fairly radical idea of what fiction actually is. His first non-doc...
2022-12-05 05:33:57 +0000 UTC View PostThrough the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami, 1994)
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 ...
2022-12-04 06:18:29 +0000 UTC View PostSight & Sound Poll (Poll)
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 ...
2022-12-03 06:48:18 +0000 UTC View PostRewind and Play (Alain Gomis, 2022)
One of the year's best films, Rewind and Play might best be characterized as a forensic documentary. French-Senegalese director Alain Gomis acqu...
2022-12-03 06:07:16 +0000 UTC View PostGlass Onion (Rian Johnson, 2022)
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
NE Corridor (Joshua Solondz, 2022)
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....
2022-11-28 06:23:19 +0000 UTC View PostEO (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2022)
Plenty has already been written about EO, Jerzy Skolimowski's very strange, often exhilarating new film. And while the director himself has conf...
2022-11-27 20:07:23 +0000 UTC View PostBlind Date (Jan Soldat, 2022)
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 claim...
2022-11-25 02:03:19 +0000 UTC View PostMutzenbacher (Ruth Beckermann, 2022)
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 ...
2022-11-24 06:45:22 +0000 UTC View PostThis AND That!
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 a...
2022-11-24 06:35:19 +0000 UTC View PostThe Choice is Yours
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 pos...
2022-11-20 05:36:12 +0000 UTC View PostDevil's Peak (Simon Liu, 2021)
Hong Kong filmmaker Simon Liu has gained greater exposure over the past few years, and...
2022-11-20 05:26:09 +0000 UTC View PostTori and Lokita (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2022)
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...
2022-11-19 06:42:46 +0000 UTC View Post