Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991): 2.5/5

Jeez Louise what is with that score? Apart from a few moments where you can hear a traditionally African influence in certain pieces of the music, the score sounds as though it was borrowed from a 70s educational film that you would see on one of those old roll-y TVs in elementary school via an old VHS tape.

This is visually beautiful and culturally important, but man alive, did this ever fail to speak to me on almost any other level. I hesitate to lay this at the feet of the writer/director Julie Dash, because this is a highly specific vision that she’s assembled and realized here, and full credit to her for doing so. There is a definite ethereal, decidedly dreamlike vibe she’s established, I just wish the delivery was more of my thing. Again, this is significantly tilted towards the poetic end of the scale, meaning that you’re rarely clear as to who anyone is, what’s going on, or where you even are in the flow of narrative time. This is all intentional, of course, and something that only helps to build the atmosphere Dash is going for; however, it was something that hurled me to the margins with tremendous vigor. I wanted so badly to love this film but I just found myself disconnected.

The Last Emperor (Bertolucci, 1987): 3/5

A sumptuous film, meticulously crafted. It's full of arresting visuals filmed inside the Forbidden City itself. It covers fascinating events from the tumultuous history of 20th Century China, tracing its child emperor through coups, revolutions, and wars, taking him from supreme power as a toddler, only to become a powerless figurehead as a child, and an adulthood spent as an exile, a puppet leader of a shadow government, a prisoner, and finally as an ordinary man. And yet, there's an emptiness at its center. While that emptiness is certainly intentional and carries a thematic point, we never quite get under the guy's skin. It's beautiful but remote, interesting but not engrossing. It's exactly the sort of picture that opens to widespread acclaim and a bevy of awards, and then is hardly ever talked about again. Still, there’s some neat stuff in here, and the irony of Puyi’s life added enough interest to get me through 3 (freakin') hours.

The Scary of Sixty-First (Dasha Nekrasova, 2021): 1/5

Irredeemable, ugly, poorly acted, sloppily written - every decision on-screen is worse than the last. If it was trying to be funny or ironic, I didn’t laugh. If it was going for suspense, every character is so insufferable that there are no stakes and no reason to give a fuck about these people. It's certainly odd, yes, but only because it's formless and inept, not because it proposes a beguiling structure or anything like that. It’s just messy and has no clue what it's doing. Bad use of 16mm, incompetent modulation of a clumsy dramaturgy, clueless giallo cinematography aesthetics revamped to contemporary bloated bruhaha, a shallow imagination when taking Epstein's scandal to create horror...It has a kernel of an idea but it just never pops.

Sick (John Hyams, 2022): 2/5

I didn’t wanna claw my eyes out while watching this, and I consider that a win.

Beau is Afraid (Ari Aster, 2023): 2.5/5

First hour is fantastic. Aster knows fear. He has his own unique perspective on it and he is not without humor. But then it gets to where it feels like his real fear is that you’ll lose interest and stop watching so the movie tries to top itself every five minutes with absurd distraction and plot developments. It doesn’t build to much at all. Lots of great ideas but totally unfocused and not worth the 3 (freakin') hours.

Master Gardener (Paul Schrader, 2022): 2/5

Half-baked. Schrader has run his own formula into the ground. A lot of it is just awkward dialogue and fucking weird racial stuff peppered with characters reading basic Wikipedia entries on the history of horticulture and plant profiles.

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. (Kelly Fremon Craig, 2023): 3/5

Cheesy, simple, and sweet. Not quite as good as Kelly Fremon Craig’s criminally underrated THE EDGE OF SEVENTEEN.

Georgetown (Christoph Waltz, 2019): 3/5

Slow-burning and well-acted, it’s cold and clinical hiding behind a veneer of despair and depravity. Compelling screenplay by David Auburn, and Waltz is outstanding of course.

Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt, 2022): 2/5

The fuck you mean they had a stunt coordinator?

My mileage with Reichardt varies (e.g. loved FIRST COW, disliked CERTAIN WOMEN), and this didn't do much for me at all. Williams has some nice line deliveries, and the art college stuff is sort of fun. Unfortunately, this movie takes Reichardt's aversion to narrative right up to (and then well beyond) its limit. It is a painfully minimalist film that's as uninspired and flavorless as the cheese squares that they leave out at her sculpture exhibition. I also couldn't be less interested in discussing how it relates to making art when all of these artists and everyone in this is producing the most boring artwork you'll ever see. There's no real story here, aside from Michelle Williams vaguely needing to finish her work for a gallery showing and the various things that interrupt or deter that work. There's some family drama that shows up in like, the last 15 minutes, but it's not set up well at all, so there's no payoff for it. The film is pretty ugly to look at too. Reichardt shoots it in a low contrast, high grain, desaturated look that just makes everything look like a grey monotone mass that accentuates the monotone performances. It's "realistic," sure, to shoot a film about normal, boring people living normal, boring lives, but that doesn't really make it worth watching.

Blackberry (Matt Johnson, 2023): 3.5/5

A surprisingly engaging retelling of the smart phone's catastrophic implosion. Solid in all aspects. Most of these recent business biopics at least try to present their capitalists de jour as heroes. They’re the smartest and most headstrong guys in the room with an idea to match. In BLACKBERRY, all of that saccharine pretense is gone. BLACKBERRY positions itself as a tale of how acidic capitalist greed rots away everything good in a company and will leave you with nothing. Glenn Howerton has the juiciest role and makes it a supernova moment.

The Club (Pablo Larrain, 2015): 3/5

After his penetrating account on the 1988 Chilean plebiscite involving dictator Augusto Pinochet in NO (2012), director Pablo Larrain returns with a much intimate, but grim study of disgraced priests in exile. THE CLUB is set in a secluded house in a rural town where four former priests and a sister live to atone for their wrongdoings in the past. It’s ironic that these priests aren’t living in regret, forgiveness or in prayer, rather they feast themselves with such temptations and odd amusement like dog racing. But the conflict arise when a sudden victim of Catholic sexual abuse come to relive and expose their filthy past. Although this drags slightly for a film on the shorter side, I found it to be a really interesting interrogation and depiction of an issue so often swept under the rug.

World War Z ( Marc Forster, 2013): 3/5

The part with those motherfucking zombies on that motherfucking plane.

Hypnotic (Robert Rodriguez, 2023): 1/5

The type of movie that should only exist on the seventh page of a Redbox kiosk, DVD only, no Blu-Ray.

One Potato, Two Potato (Larry Peerce, 1964): 3/5

Earnest, well-acted drama about a child custody battle affected by an interracial marriage. Socially conscious and ahead of its time, which means that it can't help feeling a bit heavy-handed from a modern perspective.

Archipelago (Joanna Hogg, 2010): 2/5

A snoozy British domestic drama whose only real distinction is an almost total absence of close-ups. Writer-director Joanna Hogg keeps us at a - literal - distance from a wealthy family vacationing in a coastal area. Their repression is almost a parody of the stiff upper lip British reserve. We get a bit of class consciousness in the treatment of a young cook working at the house. A very slow boil drama with virtually no plot and largely unsympathetic characters.

The Reflecting Skin (Philip Ridley, 1990): 2.5/5

If you've ever wondered what a corn-field fever-dream mash-up of Days of Heaven and a really absurd episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? might look like, then take a trip through Philip Ridley's The Reflecting Skin. It's a gothic horror on the plains of Idaho as seen through the eyes of an 8-year old. Ridley bites off a lot of allegories here, but never follows through on any of them. The cruelty of unforgiving nature, loss of innocence, roaming, random violent death, human frailty, guilt and loss, homosexuality seen as sin and perversion, the atomic age and its consequences, a petrified baby corpse, and how the world and its adults appear to children. I've probably left a couple out, but as arresting as the images are, I didn't ever fully connect with anyone or anything.

High School II (Frederick Wiseman, 1994): 3/5

As a distinct contrast to his earlier High School doc from '68, here exploring an alternate learning public school in the Spanish Harlem, it's fantastic. Rigor and inflexibility versus freedom and open expression. Stark opposite visions of pedagogy. Seeing this particular school function as it does, with mindfulness and respect at the forefront of their engagement with the students, is inspiring. There are obvious deficiencies to their program and moments where the seemingly boundless course structure begins to tighten. Such as a scene where a student-governed body of activists is organizing amongst themselves to protest the beating of Rodney King (a significant throughline in the film). Cut to the administrators and teachers all meeting about a sudden fearfulness about how far they're willing to politically empower them. All in all, it kept me engaged, but couldn't entirely justify its runtime. And if you sideline the earlier film entirely then it loses a lot of its power. A minor though no-less effective Wiseman.

Winter Sleep (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2014): 2.5/5

I actually liked the first hour; it's the next two that feels like it's under the influence of a sedative. A few scenes here and there are compelling enough to match the cinematography. Most of them are not. Which is a problem in a 3 hour and fifteen minute movie. The film as a whole feels unfocused and plodding. Everything's also too rigid, too flat, too self-important: Ceylan's attempting a Rohmeresque naturalism in the way he writes his dialogue, except all the wit and humor is stripped away. What we ultimately end up with is a psychological drama in which people parse through their shit in an obtusely lifeless manner.

I Am Not a Witch (Rungano Nyoni, 2017): 2.5/5

Appreciated this exploration of how women are both demonized by society and yet exploited for the very same things claimed to be wrong, but ultimately it is less a cohesive story than a set of abstract ideas. The film follows Shula (Maggie Mulubwa, who is excellent), an 8-year-old banished to a "witch camp" by her village. Witch camps are real, and the film frequently feels as if Nyoni was torn between making a documentary and a narrative feature. I wish she'd chosen the former, honestly. The film swings between broad satire (look how dumb these people are, to believe in witches!) to cutting commentary on patriarchy, to magical realism that sort of undercuts both of the other points. It's occasionally funny, occasionally moving, and occasionally fascinating, but mostly, it's pretty muddled. I'm certainly interested in what Nyoni does next, but she doesn't quite nail this one.

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea (Lewis John Carlino, 1976): 2.5/5

Uncomfortable, overwrought bodice ripper/Oedipal thriller of the picturesque maritime variety with a distinctly queasy tone, intensified by some menacingly precocious kids and Kris Kristofferson's salty virility. Opening and closing shots are beautiful though - can a movie be saved entirely by its second unit direction?

The Silent Child (Chris Overton, 2017, 20 mins): 2/5

Painfully manipulative and needlessly saccharine, Chris Overton's THE SILENT CHILD tells the story of a deaf girl born to hearing parents who desperately want her to be "normal." They hire a tutor to teach her lipreading, who begins to teach her sign language against their wishes, and eventually they send her to public school with no support for the hearing impaired.

It's basically a 20 minute PSA for sign language interpreters in schools. Which is a noble cause, but no amount of slow motion or sweeping cinematography can mask this film's ham-fisted emotional artifice.

Monica (Andrea Pallaoro, 2022): 3/5

There’s a specific word that’s notably never spoken in MONICA—“transgender”—but that seems perfectly in keeping for a story that’s entirely about things remaining unsaid. The Monica of the title (Trace Lysette) is a transgender woman in California who unexpectedly receives a call from the sister-in-law (Emily Browning) she’s never met, informing her that her mother Eugenia (Patricia Clarkson), from whom she’s long been estranged, is dying of cancer. Co-writer/director Andrea Pallaoro follows the tentative reconnection between Monica and her family, including her brother Paul (Joshua Close), allowing the extended silences and tight Academy ratio to suggest the challenging awkwardness of the situation. Yet this isn’t at all a story about dramatic confrontations; it’s about whether it’s possible, or maybe even desirable, for people to heal emotional wounds without ever actually speaking out loud what those wounds were. Pallaoro adds layers to the story as Monica begins identifying with her possibly-gender-nonconforming nephew, offering the possibility that some of that healing occurs through helping make sure patterns don’t repeat. Lysette’s performance is at times almost too internalized to fully flesh out the character, but it’s serving a story full of gentle humanity, and which realizes that it’s not necessary to underline only one part of Monica’s existence.

Norte, the End of History (Lav Diaz, 2013): 2/5

Endless and pointless. This one is like watered down elements from Haneke and Weerasethakul; so a mix of sudden violence and the typical bird-chirp/cricket/air conditioning sound design; banal landscape shots; the typical pretentiously dour mood. Was mostly just indifferent for the first three (freakin') hours—Diaz has no feeling for duration, just an apparent knee-jerk notion that longer = artistic. Just not for me, I guess.

Victoria (Sebastian Schipper, 2015): 3.5/5

Finally, some good food! This film was shot in one take, in real life and in real time. Apparently, the script had less than 15 pages, and almost all the dialogue was improvised, and taking that into account, it’s pretty much a miracle that the final result ended up working so well. Not only a feat of filmmaking, but an endlessly compelling watchable portrait of bad decisions.

The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, 2011): 2/5

Stagy and overwrought. Despite the efforts of Hiddleston and Weisz the whole thing feels dated and turgid.

3 Hearts (Benoit Jacquot, 2014): 2/5

The amount of combined coincidence, contrivance, and character idiocy required to keep this movie's plot from collapsing is truly remarkable.

Of Time and the City (Terence Davies, 2008): 2/5

Like a cruder form of an under budgeted A&E documentary. Aside from a couple interesting, wholly superfluous observations (e.g. apparently old-style Liverpool swings were just massive nooses, which is unspeakably creepy) and stray moments of bliss, I found distressingly few reasons to remain interested, even for the sake of an artist’s commiseration. This is a method of detrimentally personal, reconstructive homesickness to which I simply do not respond meaningfully. (Unless you consider shrugging a meaningful response.)

The Professional (George Lautner, 1981): 2.5/5

A leathery Belmondo plays an ex-SDECE operator trying to assassinate a Francafrique puppet dictator and get revenge on his own people, who disavowed him and hung him out to dry in an African labor camp. It's not even a little bit stylish and beyond its blanket cynicism regarding French colonialism stakes out no political position at all. It's just a fairly icky slow-burn spy movie.

A Quiet Passion (Terence Davies, 2016): 3/5

Should appeal to poetry readers. Dickinson's poetry, an essential element of the plot, helps in transitioning from one scene to another. The film explores her cold, rebellious and solitary nature in a patriarchal society. Emily Dickinson (colorfully portrayed by Cynthia Nixon) didn't live the most cinematic life, but her work has made a profound impact and inspired the lives of many. Davies directs an appropriately titled story about the quiet but triumphant life of one of America's greatest poets. A QUIET PASSION is a well-drawn biopic elevated by its subtle beauty and strong central performance.

STILL: A Michael J. Fox Movie (Davis Guggenheim, 2023): 3/5

Interesting and reflective, with clips from his filmography creatively spliced together to work the narrative, cinematic re-enactments as well as exposing interviews that make the film much closer to a biopic on Fox’s Hollywood career and ideologies of life than just a dissection of his life changing illness. Often a very respectable piece, positively led by the layered, creatively thinking and charming actor.