The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2025): 3.5/5
“I’m a non-observant atheist.” I was surprised how satisfying this was in terms of sci-fi, near-future, world building. Classic Cronenberg, where one’s ex-lover’s rotting corpse could, through the intimacy of images, become an erotic experience. Considering this film with Crash and Videodrome (etc.), it seems that, to Cronenberg, focusing one’s attention on an intense experience (including pain, fear, dismemberment, and now putrefaction) is the very source of pleasure. Although this takes place in the (near) future, it’s the one movie that somehow feels most 2025—with its silent, gliding Teslas and phone-based AI assistants. The “plot,” which involves Chinese and Russian politics and surveillance, generated zero interest.
Pavements (Alex Ross Perry, 2025): 3.5/5
I stan Pavement, so seeing old live footage and people talking about their music was a great pleasure. The tongue in cheek biopic, museum show, and off-Broadway musical aspects allowed the introduction of some biographical information in a characteristically smart-alecy and non-cliché way (but were not the main attraction).
Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie, 2025): 3.5/5
Like a James M. Cain story except every character is sexually attracted to every other character, man or woman, young or old.
* Superman (James Gunn, 2025): 3.5/5
Lots of laughs and bright colors. Superdog rules. Certainly the best Superman movie.
KPop Demon Hunters (Chris Appelhans, Maggie Kang, 2025): 3.5/5
Fun and entertaining, with catchy tunes.
The Life of Chuck (Mike Flanagan, 2025): 3.5/5
Your reaction to this movie entirely depends on your capacity to appreciate sincerity and naked emotion. Mine is pretty high! Godlevel Matthew Lillard monologue (!)
A Minecraft Movie (Jared Hess 2025): 2.5/5
Jumanji: The Next Level (Jake Kasdan, 2019): 3/5
Swift, effects-heavy and a bit better than they strictly have to be. Jack likes these but even he seems to realize how weightless they are. Jack Black is cleanin’ up, man.
Bring Her Back (Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou, 2025): 2.5/5
I related to the protagonist’s predicament: a big, judgmental eye forcing him to behave in a way that is antithetical to his desires and personhood. But it takes too long to get to the plot, time that is filled with authentic and agonizing human suffering.
The Assessment (Fleur Fortuné, 2025): 2.5/5
Describes a concrete-bunker future that reminds me Ex Machina (also featuring Alicia Vikander, here deciding whether a couple can have a baby). When her judgement came down, I had a tremendous, job-hunting panic attack and started hating the film. I concede that this is not (necessarily) the film’s fault.
Materialists (Celine Song, 2025): 2.5/5
On its surface, this reads like a classic Austin-ish love triangle, with the protagonist deciding whether she will marry for love or money. But the movie lacks passion, and is instead chock full of overwritten monologues—clinical and not quite incisive or bravura—about the nature of modern love blah blah blah. A surprise, since my review for Past Lives called it “vibrating with feeling.”
A Desert (Joshua Erkman, 2025): 2.5/5
A naïve photographer runs into a couple he shouldn’t have, out in the desert. Then the private investigator looking into his disappearance, then the photographer’s wife run into the same couple. A grotty, nihilistic exercise. The director’s feature debut.
* The Naked Gun (Akiva Schaffer, 2025): 2/5
Hell is watching sporatically amusing movie in a theatre with two guys who find every joke hilarious.
Girlfriends (Claudia Weill, 1978): 4/5
A tremendously likable protagonist: smart and self-aware, smiley and awkward, but also very sure of herself and an artist. Quick with a joke. Open to new things. Proudly Jewish. Makes mistakes. An ur-text for stories of smart and neurotic modern young women trying to make it in New York, and in a precarious and shifting emotional landscape, regarding friendship, partners, career, and artistic ambition. Dunham paid off her debt of influence by giving Weill some episodes of Girls to direct.
Welfare, 2h47m (Frederick Wiseman, 1975): 4/5
Stories, stories, stories: Divorce, sickness, death, pregnancy, domestic abuse, homicide, racism, anger, prayer, hopelessness, having an apartment you like but that is $10 more than the $150 a month limit for housing support, patience and forbearance, frustration, and just doing the best you fucking can. The crux of the problem is that each individual has a complex story full of unique circumstances. Ideally, there would be a rule for each of them, but in the event the social workers try over and over to understand what rule applies to each person—frustrating to everyone. Full of empathy (or at least a lack of blame) for everyone involved.
Belfast, Maine, 4h8m (Frederick Wiseman, 1999): 3/5
A good long, benedictory look at the industry (fish cannery, mashed potato factory, bakery), institutions (court, church, social services), and hobbies (painting, bowhunting, drum circles, ceramics, flower arranging, taxidermy) of the people of Belfast, Maine.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek, 28m, rw (Robert Enrico, 1961): 5/5
A gem, very interested in expressing subjective experience. Full of anxious hyper-focus as well as dreams and reveries. The last minute is incredibly recognizable as one of my recurrent dreams: always almost approaching, over and over and over, a desired goal. Scorsese remakes this movie in 1988—watch it on Vimeo before you look that up.
Love and Anarchy (Lina Wertmüller, 1973): 2/5
A country bumpkin travels to Rome to assassinate Mussolini. Dramatically, the whole movie is just waiting around for Mussolini to show up in a certain square to give a speech, and In meantime our protagonist has plenty of time to fall in love with a prostitute. The movie concludes that fascism demands the degradation and destruction of the innocent as its lifeblood.
Seven Beauties (Lina Wertmüller, 1975): 4/5
I started out kind of hating this phantasmagorical, confused, and satiric presentation of ideas about women (good, bad, and what they are good for), the holocaust, the Italian’s role in WWII, etc.—for its grotesqueness and bad taste. One scene has our handsome protagonist in a concentration camp, complete with the ghastly iconic striped clothing, (comically) seducing the obese German woman who runs the camp. Later he very much sexually assaults a woman tied to a bed in a mental institution. Fernando Rey literally throws himself into a pool of shit. It’s funny, you see! But in the last 20 minutes of the movies I sort of came around and decided that if this was directed by John Waters I would have thought it a genius-level satiric provocation. In the end, it has a lot to say about the way fascism works: one must harm others and throw out one’s most central values and beliefs simply to survive. Wertmüller was the first woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for directing.
Cisco Pike (Bill L. Norton, 1971): 3/5
Driving around L.A. selling pot with Kris Kristofferson (doing a lot of hair acting), Gene Hackman, Harry Dean Stanton, and Karen Black. Cool views of Venice, Malibu, Hollywood, the Valley and all over. The Troubadour has tables and chairs!
Jane Eyre (Robert Stevenson, 1942): 3/5
Orson Welles plays brooding Rochester (with a false nose, of course) and reportedly contributed to the direction, including plenty of lovely, long, gothic candle-lit corridors. Joan Fontaine is a bit reserved as an eyes-downcast Eyre, and whoever designed her hair should be caged. Stevenson went on to direct The Shaggy D.A., (Herbie) The Love Bug, and That Darn Cat.
The Moon Has Risen (Kinuyo Tanaka, 1955): 3/5
Tanaka is a regular in many Ozu films as well as many of Mizoguchi’s (with whom it’s rumored she had a longstanding affair)—not to mention films by Naruse and Kurosawa. This film is also written by Ozu, features several more of his usual cast, and uses characteristic Ozu shots such as pillow shots, people speaking directly to the camera, and ground-level camera placement. Still, it has a different tone from Ozu—more romantic and even rom-com-like, with hints of Austin’s Emma.
The Eternal Breasts (Kinuyo Tanaka, 1955): 3.5/5
In the first act, a rural wife and mother of two (and poet) divorces her drug addicted husband who is having an affair. Soon she is diagnosed with breast cancer. Pretty deep stuff for 1955, much less in repressed post-war Japan. In its simplicity and directness, as well as its sepia color and boxy aspect ratio, it seems like a product of the 30s. Although one can also see how the domestic weepy melodrama qualities as coming right out of the 50s.
Dracula: Dead and Loving It (Mel Brooks, 1995): 2.5/5
Part of Brooks’ precipitous decline, but even so has a handful of killer bits.
Jacques Rozier Mini-Fest
An underrated French New Wave figure.
Rentrée des classes, 20m (Jacques Rozier, 1956): 3/5
All the kids are back to school after a long summer, except for our protagonist who throws his homework off a bridge and then, with remorse, sets out downriver to retrieve it. There follows a lovely reverie in nature before a comic resolution. Displays a great preference for the relaxed, spontaneous, and natural over order at any level.
Blue Jeans, 22m (Jacques Rozier, 1958): 3/5
There are worse things than hanging out in Cannes with a couple of young lads trying to pick up girls. But there’s not much going on here beyond a great freedom of camera, two year before Breathless and four before Jules and Jim.
Adieu Philippine (Jacques Rozier, 1962): 3.5/5
Interested in both young boys and young girls. Youth culture. buying cars, picking each other up, music they like (Elvis and Mario Lanza), their morays, television, advertising, crap jobs. Not that far from Girlfriends, Francis Ha, or Girls. Lots of shots on the Paris streets. A shot down two escalators in a 1960s Paris department store would still be noteworthy if done today. Our protagonist will be shipped off to Algeria in two months.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul put these three on his 2022 Sight and Sound Top 10
Le Nez, 11m (Claire Parker, Alexandre Alexeieff, 1963):
An adaptation on Gogol’s novella about a man whose nose leaves him and starts running around town. Animation, surrealism, with Asian sounding percussion score, sounding like the music in The Puppetmaster.
Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, 14m (Timothy Quay, Stephen Quay, 1988): 2.5/5
Precise camera movements within very abstract tableaux, sometimes with human dolls in an undefined heady emotional state and sometimes just balls and stairs—or discs with twine.
Quick Billy, 50m (Bruce Baillie, 1971): 4/5
A suite of abstract phases. Some pure color field stuff of great reds and oranges, also blues and purples. Lots of aqueous imagery and sounds on soundtrack. Can easily see Weerasethakul inserting 5-minute reveries of this beautiful and abstract stuff to connotate a drifty dream state—complete with tiger imagery. The second half starts with a (pretty sexy) sex scene/dream. Thoughtful and emotional soundtrack throughout, with meadowlarks, music, voices, in synch and out with the images. “Deep blue as emeralds would be if they were blue” The thanks at the end to “friends, family, animals, teachers, dear ladies, other critters” describes well the warmth and grab-bag quality of the piece. Baillie was the co-founder of the San Francisco Cinematheque.
Castro Street, 10m (Bruce Baillie, 1971): 4/5
A masterclass in using audio to create intensity and then reverie. Baillie is completely in control of tone and eager to use every aspect of cinema. Uniquely beautiful and overflowing with effects and feeling. Full of little triple-exposure eddies of image, sound, memory and emotion. Watched it twice.
The Dentist, 21m (Leslie Pearce, 1932): 3/5
W.C. Fields, playing an uncharacteristically high-status dunderhead, works with Max Senett to produce a comedy of frustration and pain. Frederick Wiseman (!) put it in his Sight and Sound Top Ten in 2022, saying “The Dentist is a great porno film because it leaves everything to the imagination of the viewer,” and I have absolutely no idea what he means by this.
Adebar, 2m (Peter Kubelka,1957): 3/5
A primitive, silhouette version of people dancing (to rock music?). Reminds me of the opening dance contest sequence of Mulholland Drive.
Allures, 8m (Jordan Belson, 1961): 4/5
A sizzle reel, well-mined by Hollywood. It looked cool in their movies and it looks good here. Plus some stuff and Nolan and Villeneuve (those hacks) should get up on ASAP. Remember: slow is the new fast.
9/11 Simulation in Roblox Environment, 7m (James Ferraro, 2017): 3/5
Subversive. The title says it all. Jack plays Roblox all the time, but this brings out a new tone, to say the least.
Les Maitres fous, 27m (Jean Rouch, 1955): 2/5
A dozen residents of Accra go a bit wild out into the jungle during a ceremony parodying the English governors of the country, complete with farcical outfits, eye-bulging, mouth-foaming, and a bit of dog sacrifice and eating. As with Pasolini’s Notes Towards an African Orestes, it’s wise (and easy) to be skeptical of these French takes on Africans.
