Challengers (Luca Guadagnino, 2024): 3.5/5

An unusual relationship drama, with good characters and good storytelling—defying my expectations right up to the last moment. You know a movie has you when every time an on-screen legend announces something like “Three years earlier,” you laugh. The acting is just OK; still, definite comeback after the lugubrious Susperia remake and that cannibal one.

 

Hundreds of Beavers (Mike Cheslik, 2024 (in U.S.)): 5/5

A sui generis, half-animated movie chock full of laughs (for me and Jack, anyway) indebted to Buster Keaton and Loony Toons. Classic repeat-and-build joke structures.

 

Do Not Expect Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude, 2024 (in U.S.)): 4/5

Garbage aesthetic but whip smart. Long, but with a shark-like sense of movement—and a shark’s sense of humor. References to Elena Ferrante, Andrew Tate, the death of the queen, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, etc., make me realize how removed from actual life most movies are.

 

* Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Adam Wingard, 2024): 3/5

Moves right along, and works whenever humans are off-screen, which thankfully is often. Weird how both of these former monsters have become good guys. It’s the My Bodyguard syndrome—there’s something so satisfying when the bully moves over to our side.

 

The Last Stop in Yuma County (Francis Galluppi, 2023): 3/5

It could have used one more twist—or to be a nice hour and 10 minutes. Still, the Blood Simple/Reservoir Dogs vibes are fun, and I appreciated the carnage.

 

Late Night with the Devil (Cameron Cairnes, Colin Cairnes, 2024): 2/5

No scares, but worse: formally it’s a disaster. It sets up different visual styles for on air vs. off air but just as quickly abandons them so it’s all just a garbage of black and white vs color, film vs video. No real stylistic resemblance to watching Carson or Letterman. Fuck, have a take and do it well.

 

Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass, 2024): 2/5

Remarkably free from authentic human emotion. What am I supposed to be feeling while all these cartoony behaviors are playing out on screen? Uncool the way the filmmakers normalize the body builder’s (obviously hot) muscled body but then immediately punish her for it in a broad and plot-driven way. Kirsten Stewart is good as usual 

 

The Fall Guy (David Leitch, 2024): 1.5/5

The chemistry between Blunt and Gosling is good for about 5 minutes, but the rest of the movie is cartoonish and oh so boring. I’m glad it was a flop, so we don’t get more of this “it’s bad but we know it and that’s the joke” action stuff. How about if you make it good instead?

 

Yannick (Quentin Dupieux, 2024 (in U.S.)): 1.5/5

Fucking Dupieux got me again. His movies are just one-joke set ups and no pay off—half movies. (Although I kind of liked Deerskin. That was a nice coat.)

 

A Night of Knowing Nothing (Payal Kapadia, 2021): 2/5

How you know when you’re watching a Godard(like) film: words on screen; incorporation of other texts such as quotes and scenes from other films; divorce of sound and image; mixes the political and personal, documentary and fiction, the esoteric and mundane. A probing and poetic (and ultimately dull and self-mythologizing) document about the anti-caste movement in India and the limits of protest. Her next film, All We Imagine as Light, was well received at Cannes.

 

Petrov’s Flu (Kirill Serebrennikov, 2021): 2/5

Petrov has a fever, and he wanders around Moscow and in and out of fantasy, nightmare, memory. No point is really made (other than that Russia life is extreme and unreal), nor is it exactly entertaining. “Yesterday I wanted to die, but today I feel kinda fine.” His most recent movie, Limonov: The Ballad, was not particularly well received at Cannes.

 

The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino, 2013): 2/5

A shallow film full of shallow, performative people trying and failing to live life to its fullest (including the miserable-yet-disdainful protagonist). His most recent movie, Parthenope, was not particularly well received at Cannes.

 

The Favourite, rw (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018): 4/5

Witty and wicked enough for five movies, and Emma Stone is a joy to watch. As with Poor Things, I wonder at all the fisheye stuff, but I guess it’s just a visual wake-up call and your mileage may vary. His most recent movie, Kinds of Kindness, was fairly well received at Cannes.

 

Face to Face (Ingmar Bergman, 1976): 5/5

This title was unavailable when I was going through my Bergman phase, and now it’s easy to re-appreciate the emotional directness that makes many of his movies so great. The characters in so many movies remain unable or unwilling to express what they are feeling and want. Instead, Berman’s characters go right at their feelings, spilling them everywhere, and it’s exhilarating. There’s a 7-minute shot at the :50 mark where Liv Ullman is pouring it all out on screen, and it’s as thrilling as any action sequence. Like Beau is Afraid, this movie tries to claw down to the bottom of where all this anxiety is from (of high relevance to me), and sure enough they both point to the anxieties, punishments, worries and neuroses of ones parents, experienced in childhood. I can’t disagree.

 

The Serpent’s Egg (Ingmar Bergman, 1977): 2/5

David Carradine and Liv Ulmann are Jewish artists in Weimar Germany. Things are going great for them. Sweden remained neutral (??) during WW2, which broke out in 1939 when Berman was 21; did he feel guilty about his country not attempting to stop the atrocities the war brought? It’s tempting to see his whole career through this lens. Lots of despair, sickness, and waiting—until a metaphoric, over-the-top paranoid Winter Kills-type conspiracy conclusion.

Children of Paradise, rw (Marcel Carné, 1945): 5/5

Engaging and, yes, novelistic, which here means that events occur to these characters that change them, and the movie continues with them in that changed state. Jean-Louis Barrault is riveting and charismatic as the pantomime artist. A full meal of emotions.

 

Born to be Bad (Nicolas Ray, 1950): 2/5

Joan Fontaine is a manipulative social climber but never quite earns the contempt that all the characters have of her—much less the film’s title. Still, if you’re living a life such that even Robert Ryan disapproves of you, it’s time to consider your choices.

 

The File on Thelma Jordon (Robert Siodmak, 1949): 2/5

Barbara Stanwyck is always worth watching, of course, but here she plays a femme fatale … with a heart of gold. The drama is laborious and neither her plan nor her character makes much sense. The destructo finale, criticized at the time, is the best moment.

 

The Garden of Words, 46m (Makoto Shinkai, 2013): 2/5

And the Japanese emo boys with a foot fetish go wild. Stunningly beautiful animation, tho.

  

Night Mail (Harry Watt, Basil Wright, 1936): 2/5

Like Jennings’ (risible) Listen to Britain and Fires Were Started this is filled with the vibes of: “English people are like Titans astride the Earth!” But what is in fact being shown are completely mundane acts committed by the British version of hicks. The hubris is galling.

 

Monster (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2023): 4/5

Has a beautiful, empathetic storytelling strategy where we circle through a set of mysterious events, picking up more information each time as to what really happened. In this way, the “monster” identity is passed from character to character—enriching and eventually forgiving everyone in the process. The mystery is great, but I found the solution to be a bit reductive.

 

Broker (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2022): 2/5

Asks the question, “Would Little Miss Sunshine work if they all planned to sell the little girl to a new family at the end?” As is always threatened in Kore-eda’s work, this tale of another make-shift family tips from broad-but-surprisingly-effective to broad, schmaltzy and on-the-nose. I mean, when the murder-sex-worker-child-abandoner goes around the room and tells everyone that she’s glad they were born, you either break down in sobs or hurt yourself eye-rolling so hard, and for me it was the latter.

 

This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, 2019): 2/5

One very old lady’s quixotic fight against a dam that will render her village and all their land (in Lesotho) underwater. Told in a ponderous, ecstatic, mystical, color-saturated style that I have seen before in African films. Director lives in Berlin.

 

Bless Their Little Hearts (Billy Woodberry, 1983): 3.5/5

A short kitchen-sink drama of great authenticity and feeling. Just a family trying to get along in the world. Pervasive sadness and disappointment, shading into hopelessness. Written and lensed by Charles Burnett.

 

There It Is, 19m (Charles R. Bowers, 1928): 3.5/5

Great comic timing. And tons of fun editing tricks and other magic. Wes Anderson would (and probably does) approve of the intermittent use of stop motion creatures.

Bimbo’s Initiation, 6m (Dave Fleischer, 1931): 3/5

Along with This is It, proof that there are/were many paths forward for the surrealism of Dali and Buñuel, especially if you add (even more) humor.

 

 

Kevin Jerome Everson on Criterion Short Film Fest

Ears, Nose and Throat, 11m (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2016): 4/5

A riveting experience that is formally interesting, beautiful and also emotionally direct, even harrowing.

Sound That, 12m (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2014): 4/5

Everson’s movies are poetic documentaries, and they are formally rigorous, which here means repetitive and durational (though also funny, observant and vivid.)

IFO, 9m (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2017): 3.5/5

While also always investigating the relationship between what is heard and what is shown.

Glenville, 2m (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2020), 4/5

Beautiful, unexpected, joyful. I took great pleasure in it even before I read it was a recreation/homage to this amazing 23-second film from 1898, called Something Good – Negro Kiss. www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIKU5kncg8U

 

Peter Tscherkassky on Mubi Short Film Fest

Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine, 16m (Peter Tscherkassky, 2005): 4/5

By manipulating The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Tscherkassky makes it both more abstract and more intense, while also creating an object of beauty in itself.

Dream Work, 10m (Peter Tscherkassky, 2001): 3.5/5

A further statement on Barbara Hershey and The Fury (after my beloved Outer Space), but this time even more abstract. In all these movies Tscherkassky fetishistically obsesses over one part of a frame, or 4 seconds of film—and burrows into them excavating emotion and meaning

Manufraktur, 3m (Peter Tscherkassky, 1985): 3/5

While the mood of the pieces morph and intensify.

Get Ready, 1m (Peter Tscherkassky, 1999) 3/5

Hauls Barbara Hershey out one last time as a kind of commercial/calling card for the Venice film fest. No judgement.

 

Hondaverse Film Fest

Something I did not realize when watching all those Godzilla-type movies on Channel 9 and Family Film Festival: they were all directed by one guy, Ishirō Honda. And that he always teamed with special effects guy Eiji Tsuburaya. Upon these sorta-rewatches, I really appreciated the great beauty and charm of all the intricate cityscapes—handmade miniatures, expressed with joy. Watching them be destroyed is satisfying  like watching an elaborate domino set-up all go down.

Gojira (Ishirō Honda, 1954): 3/5

Primitive but entertaining. The destruction of the town with fire baldly and painfully re-creates the firebombing of Tokyo a decade before.

Rodan (Ishirō Honda, 1956): 3.5/5

Honda’s first color film (in Technicolor) and it’s a beauty. As he flies, Rodan produces a sonic heat wave that looks remarkably like the footage of atomic bomb tests liquidating buildings.

Mothra vs. Godzilla (Ishirō Honda, 1964): 3/5

Eerie, tiny twin girls talk in unison and communicate with Mothra, who looks a bit like a kite, to help protect humanity against Godzilla (still a villain).

 

Shin Godzilla (Hideaki Anno, Shinji Higuchi, 2016): 4/5

A loving and enjoyable recreation of the kaiju vibe, with excellent creatures, and lots of miniatures and nuclear anxieties. Plus ample authentic (to Honda) scenes of men sitting around tables, dispensing exposition and discussing strategy.

 

Luc Moullet Film Fest

The least beloved of the Cahiers du Cinema-adjacent directors, possibly because he seems to have worked in comedy exclusively. Wikipedia informs me that he was the first to write at length about Fuller and Ulmer and the first at Cahiers to champion Buñuel. Bardot is seen reading Moullet’s book on Fritz Lang in Contempt. Adored by Jonathan Rosenbaum.

Les sièges de l’Alcazar, 54m (Luc Moullet, 1989): 3.5/5

A funny portrait of cineastes, mostly taking place within a small and rundown cinema during a retrospective of the Italian director Vittorio Cottafavi. Says a critic who champions Cottafavi, upon seeing a smattering of people showing up for the director’s latest: “I was proud to have convinced everyone of the genius of Cottafavi, but I was also sad. Cottafavi was no longer mine alone. This success worried me. Did this mean it was a bad film?”

Barres, 14m (Luc Moullet, 1984): 3/5

Dozens of examples of how people get into the Paris subway without paying, proving (with tongue in cheek) that “national solidarity exists among all classes.”

Genèse d’un Repas, 5m (Luc Moullet, 1979): 3/5

Briefly sketches out how implicated we all are in the exploitation inherent in capitalism. Oil-adjacent conglomerate Gulf+Western, “produced The Godfather and Love Story.” Even the film stock we are watching requires oil from a third-world country.

Le Système Zsygmondy, 18m (Luc Moullet, 2000): 2/5

Two women go mountain climbing, but the hardships are caused not by nature (mostly glimpsed through the small windows of the lodge), but by bureaucracy and pettiness.