Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (Dean Fleishcer-Camp, 2022): 4/5

I accidentally watched this one with Jack. I was (quietly) crying almost immediately at how beautiful, sweet and poignant it was, but the kid was sobbing inconsolably and at length by the end. So, yeah, emotional experience.  

Where the Crawdads Sing (Olivia Newman, 2022): 1.5/5

I read the book recently and really liked it. It’s written by a murderous naturalist, and it’s really about the same. The protagonist grows up alone in (and of) a marsh and gets to know it intimately, and the narrative pauses often to describe the landscape with great feeling, knowledge and eloquence. In the movie, though, she’s just another mumbly princess. She’s not even friggin’ tan!!

 

Neptune Frost (Saul Williams, Anisia Uzeyman, 2022): 3.5/5

When I thought this Afrofuturist head trip was made by an African filmmaker, I was genuinely excited by its rejection of Western editing rhythms and unmotivated songs—a weird, poetic, visionary, spooky spiritual journal full of arcana, myth, philosophy, and mysticism a la Jodorowsky. Then half-way through, I found out that it’s actually a (mere) art object/long-form video from American rapper Saul Williams (collaborating with Rwandan-born artist). Why is one better, I ask myself. 

 

Emily the Criminal (John Patton Ford, 2022): 2/5

Confess, Fletch (Greg Mottola, 2022): 2.5/5

This is how “movies” are being ruined by prestige TV, with its cardboard-y, sit-commy mise-en-scène and a pedestrian emphasis on dialogue and plot. Emily is sub-Ozark nice-person-gets-involved-in-crime. Confess is mildly amusing but crammed with sweaty exposition to explain an over complicated plot. Both movies would have made fine first episodes of Apple TV shows that I wouldn’t feel the need to watch any more episodes of. 

 

Pinocchio (Robert Zemeckis, 2022): 1.5/5

Fails to improve on a single aspect of the original (which I’m no fan of anyway), and fails to justify its existence with any level of (re)interpretation. Jack was utterly terrified by it (although the original is arguably even darker). 

 

Funny Papers (Owen Kline, 2022): 3.5/5

The darkly comic tale of a young cartoonist in Trenton, NJ, surrounded by sweaty, anti-social weirdos and scumbags. You know…good people. Produced by the Safdies. 

 

Accident (Joseph Losey, 1967): 3/5

At a certain age, this is exactly what I thought adults were like: blasé zombies being mysteriously moved by deep, tragic feelings of passion they don’t half understand. 

 

Panique (Julien Duvivier, 1946): 3.5/5

A glittering, beautifully dark noir involving a doomed romance (or two) and Fury-like scapegoating. The protagonist is a voyeur who is an all-knowing outsider—until he meets his femme fatale, dreams of integrating and is punished.  

 

Au Hasard Balthazar, rw (Robert Bresson, 1966): 5/5

“You must forgive. Everyone. Much will be forgiven you. You have suffered.” Encounters with the uncanny, full of mystery and deep thoughts about chance and suffering. Drama reduced to its essence, almost wordless and full of silence—just a series of hands doing stuff. Balthazar is compared to a stone but also called a genius and a saint. He’s all of it without even being the protagonist of his own story, “doomed to spend all [his] days watching the same fools pass by.”

 

Stavisky (Alain Resnais, 1974): 2/5

The anxious, manic ennui of a rich Jewish businessman in France of the 1930s. The movie sums up Belmondo’s character like this: “He was a man who wanted the world to talk about him. Au contraire, he should have wanted it to forget him.”

 

A Room with a View, rw (James Ivory, 1985): 5/5

A refutation of the traditional wisdom that a great book makes a lousy movie. I just read the book and I loved it. Then was delighted by how the screenwriter selected and crafted the dialogue and Ivory made it glow. Funny, romantic and beautiful. 

 

Unrelated (Joanna Hogg, 2007): 3/5

Another incisive portrait of a sad, passive outsider from Hogg. Hiddleston is very young and terrific.

 

The Outskirts (Boris Barnet, 1933): 4/5

It’s 1914, and WWI comes to a sleepy Russian town to give its striking factory workers something new to think about. A complicated relationship between a German POW and a girl in the town ensues. When the film jumps to 1917, things get even crazier. A witty, free and almost improvisational mix of tones keeps every scene lively. Expressive use of sound, and great dogs. 

 

By the Bluest Sea (Boris Barnet, 1936): 4/5

A tale of adventure and a romantic triangle on the Caspian Sea, with a surprisingly light tone for a Soviet film of the 30s—a semi musical, even. A most expressive use of the (titular) sea in all its moods—and many innovative/amateurish film techniques, including an interior boat set that pivots and rocks in a most nauseating way. At 68 minutes, it’s a great length for a dreamy bauble such as this.

 

 

Nazis Film Fest

These movies ask over and over: “What can yesterday’s Nazis be convicted of, considering that pretty much every German can be seen as guilty on some level, even some of the Jews—and you can’t hang everyone (can you?).” I note that almost all of these are extraordinarily long. I suppose the subject justifies it.

 

Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer, 1961): 4/5

Superb acting in scenes addressing issues of the highest importance. Spencer Tracy expresses the deepest wells of thoughtfulness and empathy. And with Tracy, Monty Cliff, Richard Widmark and Judy Garland on set, there must have been some fun parties. The key strategic move the movie pulls is to put the true damning denunciation of the German people into a German character’s mouth (Burt Lancaster, stiff and hollow-eyed). Like Hotel Terminus, it dramatizes how quickly, once the Nazis were defeated, Communists became the enemies and Nazis the valuable assets against Russia.

 

Mephisto (István Szabó, 1981): 3.5/5

Here’s a familiar character: someone who avails themselves of the opportunity to align with a stupid but powerful regime to feed their vanity and gain opportunities—and soon find themselves on TV mouthing whatever destructive invective is required. After all, it’s too late to turn back now—you can’t unsell a soul. “Freedom? What for?”

 

Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (Marcel Ophüls, 1988): 3/5

What begins as a portrait of the sadist head of the Gestapo in Lyon quickly spirals out to indict French resistance infiltrators and stoolies, “the majority of Germans citizens,” and especially the Americans who used Barbie to fight the Communists after the war—and let him escape to South America. Unfocused, but a picture of the paranoia and moral ambiguities of war that cause so much invisible damage. 

 

Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004): 3.5/5

Schadenfreude, The Movie. Also, Suicide! The Movie. Amazing acting and intensity. A Masque of Red Death. 

 

The Last of the Unjust (Claude Lanzmann, 2013): 3/5

The story of Theresienstadt, “Eichmann’s favorite ghetto,” could have been told more fully with a third-person documentary, but that’s not Lanzmann’s way. Instead, the last of the Jewish administrators of Theresienstadt tells his story his way, and his personality brings idiosyncratic humanity to the history. 

 

Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015): 3.5/5

1944 Auschwitz. Saul is one of the prisoners forced to help newcomers into the showers and clean their bodies up afterwards. But the camera stays riveted closely on Saul’s face and the horrors are in the corners, in the background, out of focus. In the midst of devastation and, having given up all hope, Saul fixes monomaniacally on a dead boy he feels he must give a proper burial. Is such a gesture morality or madness?

 

A Hidden Life (Terrence Malick, 2019): 2.5/5

There’s much to like here, including a great many beautiful images, a preference for silence and image over dialogue, and a meaningful moral inquiry into ultimate issues. But it gets repetitive fast and stays that way for three hours. In Judgement at Nuremberg, we sneer at the evil of anyone who would sign the loyalty oath in ‘39. Although “everyone did,” say all the accused and even one of the accusers. In contrast, this movie depicts the stupid, saintlike and unnecessary suffering of everyone involved with someone who refuses—the ironic monstrosity of doing the right thing.

 

 

One Thousand and One Nights Film Fest

I admit to having no particular attraction to the Arabian Nights stories or about “stories about stories." Still, it’s interesting to see how many filmmakers want to take them on, usually to their own ends entirely.

 

The Thief of Bagdad (Michael Powell, Ludwig Berger, Tim Whelan, 1940): 4/5

This was released the year after The Wizard of Oz and is its equal in terms of immersion in a colorful fantasy world. A boy’s adventure with state-of-the-art set work and matte painting. Nice use of scale—the genie is huge. Extra full star because I immediately re-watched the film with commentary by Coppola and Scorsese, gushing about one of their favorite films (which I can understand if one saw it as a child). Thanks Criterion Channel!

 

Arabian Nights (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1974): 3/5

“Truth isn’t found only in one dream, but in many.” Pasolini openly reveling in pornography, rape and slave fantasies, “innocent” and free in tone, with stories (and penises) breaking out everywhere. At one point, Franco Citti (the charismatic protagonist of Accattone, antagonist of Mamma Roma, and bit-player in the Sicily portion of The Godfather) shows up as an orange-haired (and worse for wear) demon and brutally cuts the hands, feet, and head off of a princess. But, big picture, Pasolini is perhaps saying: hey, this isn’t my transgression, it’s that of a revered text.

 

Arabian Nights: Volume 3, The Enchanted One (Miguel Gomes, 2015): 1.5/5

The film that fits this theme most loosely. Although Scheherazade does wander around the (gorgeous) Iberian Peninsula for a while at the beginning, this is mostly a documentary about finch trappers. It’s really just all finches, finches, finches! On-scene narration lets us know that what we are watching is a tale Scheherazade is telling King Shahryar. 

 

Three Thousand Years of Longing (George Miller, 2022): 3/5

This is in many ways the most traditional of the Arabian Nights movies here, although this time it is the genie who tells the stories, mostly. It’s also akin an End-of-the-West Western, in that it addresses the fact that storytelling like this is becoming more and more driven away by the static in the air. 

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (Dean Fleischer-Camp, 2022): 5/5

Don't really know how to talk about this yet other than to say it felt like my soul was a flower and it was being watered.

 Don't Worry Darling (Olivia Wilde, 2022): 2/5

Viewing experience was a bit unbearable. Trapped in a theater full of Harry Style fan girls where every time they would squeal and overreact to everything he was doing in the film. Just a theater of 16 year old girls cackling for two hours.

Anyway, this diet-Stepford mystery is too concerned with surface-level "interrogations" of intriguing and layered ideas that have already been explored and dissected more thoroughly and rewardingly in numerous other films. (The flick ends where it would actually starts getting interesting.) One wishes its script wasn't such a wretched waste of time, given the immaculate polish of the picture. It is really incredible how quite literally nothing happens or is developed for the first two-thirds of this film. It is entirely constructed like: inert scene of ironic 50s glamour -> Florence Pugh has a cheap-O David Lynch vision -> repeat for 90 minutes.

Beast (Baltasar Kormakur, 2022): 1/5

Love to shoot a movie in Africa, but confine 90% of the story to a 150 yard radius.

Goodnight Mommy (Matt Sobel, 2022): 2/5

The 2014 Austrian version is better - more tense, more disturbing. The twins are less annoying. Nobody asked for this remake except for Naomi so she could pay the rent.

Do Revenge (Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, 2022): 0.5/5

Excruciating. Godard being mentioned in this movie must have been his final straw.

Sharp Stick (Lena Dunham, 2022): 1.5/5

I was a fan of Tiny Furniture and HBO's Girls, but here there's no life, no charisma, no humor. The most interesting elements are on the fringes - namely, Jennifer Jason Leigh's character and Jon Bernthal and Lena Dunham's marriage. They're refracted through our quirked up lead character who seems to be miscalculated at every turn.

Antibirth (Danny Perez, 2016): 2/5

IFC Midnight stoner oddity I'd been meaning to see since it came out because it stars Natasha Lyonne AND Chloe Sevigny, AND we also get Meg Tilly's first big-screen role since like, 1994. Lou (Lyonne) and her best friend (Sevigny) are party girls whose lives are surrounded by drug dealers, pimps and various other scumbags, so when she's told that she's probably pregnant, she refuses to accept the obvious explanation that she was raped at a party while completely out of it. The subsequent fast degradation of her flesh, and the even faster gestation she undergoes, makes it clear that the actual truth is even scarier. Basically a white trash version of Rosemary's Baby.

Italian Studies (Adam Leon, 2021): 1.5/5

i know i was supposed to care about this lady wandering around manhattan confused about everything for 90 minutes but i was more concerned about the dog she left behind at the hardware store. The film presents the protagonist's memory loss as the central conflict of the film but then abandons it halfway to present itself as a documentary that doesn’t mesh together with the film’s opening act. Italian Studies is only intriguing for about 15 minutes before losing itself in a cinematic void of nothingness.

The Salt of Tears (Philippe Garrel, 2020): 1/5

“He suddenly wanted to see her again, thinking he could sleep with her.” This is a real line in this goddamn movie.

Impressively embarrassing, especially for a 72-year-old man who should know how a relationship functions by now. Some of the worst dialogue I've seen in a fair bit, some bad implications for consent and the male ego, and even worse it's not even enjoyably bad, just mostly boring.

Emily the Criminal (John Patton Ford, 2022): 3/5

I support women's rights and women's wrongs.

Fall (Scott Mann, 2022): 1/5

I, for one, simply wouldn't have climbed up there.

Pinocchio (Robert Zemekis, 2022): 1/5

Pathetic. How is it that someone watched this in post-production and thought "yea that's heat, release it."

We need to stop the live action Hercules while we still can.

Where the Crawdads Sing (Olivia Newman, 2022): 1/5

More like crawBAD amirite? No wait, more like this is where the crawdads SHIT amirite?

Barbarian (Zach Cregger, 2022): 3.5/5

Walked into this knowing next to nothing. I recommend the same if you want the optimum experience. Best horror film I've seen all year.

Funny Pages (Owen Kline, 2022): 3.5/5

A chaotic, grimy feature directorial debut from Owen Kline that’s just as messy and darkly funny as the underground comics he’s paying tribute to. Definitely could feel the Safdie influence all over this one. Equal measures anti-social, heartwarming, discomfiting and goofy — this is a fun little coming of age romp thru a comic book underground perspective, where fringe characters are at the center. Kids always need to see shit like this in their teens.

rewatched My Bodyguard (Tony Bill, 1980): 2.5/5

The late, great Robin Wood makes reference to MY BODYGUARD in his book HOLLYWOOD FROM VIETNAM TO REAGAN in a chapter on the homoeroticism of "buddy films," citing this one's "extraordinary motorbike-riding montage sequence in which the two male teenagers are seen trying out all available positions."

rewatched Charly (Ralph Nelson, 1968): 2.5/5

Having Ravi Shankar compose the score was a bold choice. His Indian instruments give the movie a slightly off-kilter aura, avoiding the usual saccharine, violin-based melodies a traditional Hollywood veteran would have favored. Appropriate for the unconventional romantic sci-fi adaptation that is Flowers for Algernon.

Le Pont du Nord (Jacques Rivette, 1981): 1/5

just french girls geocaching and larping, showing their disdain for kurosawa, screaming and waving guns around, you know, being french girls.

Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957): 3/5

Acerbic and searing down to its wistfully unapologetic core. The scene in which Falco brokers an assignation between the sad floozy who's hot for him and a columnist from whom he needs a favor ranks among Hollywood's ugliest spectacles.

The Banishment (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2007): 1/5

Lumbering, clumsy, overly long. Has all the elements of a good movie except a script. Typical director`s mistake after 1st film success.

8:46 (Steven Bognar, Julia Reichert, 2020): 3/5

Chappelle is such a talented storyteller and an emotive speaker (wanted to write "well-spoken" but unfortunately, white people have co-opted that as a racist dog whistle) that there's something incredibly powerful and generationally emblematic about seeing him scream the truth of George Floyd's death. But I don't know that he wants to be seen in that way. I think he just wants to tell pussy jokes without living with the heightened responsibility that exists at the strange intersection of celebrity and blackness. Who wants the pressure of having to be "powerful" or "generationally emblematic" while emotionally arguing for the basic humanity of your own life?

Three Thousand Years of Longing (George Miller, 2022): 2/5

More like Three Thousand Years LONG!!!!

Top Gun: Maverick (Joseph Kosinski, 2022): 1.5/5

Don't have too many thoughts on this - more propulsive than the original in many technical areas but probably less enduring over the concessions on the cheese factor. Would’ve liked to see the hot guys kiss. Merica.

Living in Oblivion (Tom DiCillo, 1995): 3/5

Come for Buscemi as Art House director. Stay for Dinklage critiquing David Lynch dream sequences.

Game of Thrones (Seasons 1-8): 3.5/5

Never been a medieval, knights, swords & dragons kinda gal, but I guess I can now understand the hype. And I'm actually fine with how it ended. Who cares about House of the Dragons, they should do a Brienne of Tarth spinoff. Love that big woman.

Cha Cha Real Smooth (Cooper Raiff, 2022): 4/5

Refreshingly warm and open-hearted. Sob sob sob at the bittersweet ending not unlike that of Call Me by Your Name. 

 

Better Call Saul, season 6 (Vince Gilligan, 2022): 4/5

Great acting and pacing all around. The time-tripping and ghost-visiting of the last several episodes were a great pleasure. My "save Kim at all costs" stance is satisfied.

Nope (Jordan Peele, 2022): 3/5

A modest sci-fi story, simply told. Not burdened by the need to examine and solve systematic racism, thank god. I wish I had seen it in the theatre.

 

Prey (Dan Trachtenberg, 2022): 1/5

I can’t think of a worse-directed movie—with the action chopped up and reassembled in random order. Of course, I never liked the original one either.

 

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (Sophie Hyde, 2022): 2/5

Sex-positive but oh so boring. The male lead, Daryl McCormack, is a charmer, and I look forward to seeing him in a good movie.

 

Minions: The Rise of Gru (Kyle Balda, 2022): 1.5/5

The Sea Beast (Chris Williams, 2022): 2/5

Yep, I have an 8-year-old.

 

Husbands (John Cassavetes, 1970): 2/5

Packed with strained acting exercises and disgusting misogyny or, to put it charitably, misanthropy. These characters don’t know what they want, and subsequently the actors flounder in many of these long scenes, not knowing what to do. 

 

Un Coeur en Hiver (Claude Sautet, 1992): 3/5

Reserved, intelligent, cold and remote, like it’s main character, who can’t (and doesn’t want to) get out of his own head. Maybe 35 years ago, I could have related, but thank Christ I don’t any more.

 

The Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1934): 3/5

Ethnography, with a typical interest in ritual, religion, dance and other art, shelter-building, harvest—but atypically poetic and idiosyncratic. Curious use of Western music throughout. 

 

Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra, 2015): 3/5

A (double) trip upriver, with plenty of “never get out of the boat” moments. But it never really went cosmic for me, not for lack of trying.

 

Anything for Jackson (Justin G. Dyck, 2020): 2/5

Deservedly obscure Satan-themed horror movie without enough Old Nick. 

 

 

Wilder/Brackett Mini Fest

 

Five Graves to Cairo (Billy Wilder, 1943): 3/5

A British soldier stumbles into an Egyptian village moments before Rommel himself (a smoldering and pouty Erich von Stroheim) and serves as a kind of spy, posing as a porter. A packed screenplay, with lots of business in a variety of tones and a screwball pace. I wonder what Hitchcock could have done with the material, streamlining and slowing down what’s there to draw the tension out of the scenes of near-discovery. 

 

The Lost Weekend, rw (Billy Wilder, 1945): 4/5

“Don't wipe [the ring his glass makes on the bar counter] away, Nat. Let me have my little vicious circle.” Full of wonderfully anti-social behavior. Shirking duties. Breaking promises. Theft (“I assure you I’m not a thief. I’m not a thief!”) Being unshaven and sweaty. Indulging in self-loathing as well as grandiose fantasies about being an artist or some shit. Killing oneself for pleasure. 

 

A Foreign Affair (Billy Wilder, 1948): 3/5

“Fly off back home. Wash your hands. Wash your lips. You’ve got so much soap in the United States.” She’s a judgmental prig. He’s a cynical player of the black market, in love with a nightclub singer and ex-Nazi (Marlena Dietrich) in post-war Berlin. Some crackling dialogue ensues, of course: “That’s where he married Eva Brawn, and that’s where they killed themselves. A lot of people say it was the perfect honeymoon.” However, the light, satiric tone feels a bit glib in such a decimated city. The characters in this movie should be introduced to those in Germany Year Zero. It would straighten them all out. 

 

 

Noir in Color Mini-Fest

 

Leave Her to Heaven, rw (John M. Stahl, 1945): 4.5/5

In Technicolor, and with coloring so bold and unreal that it almost looks like a comic book, favoring blues and oranges as well as insanely glowing skin tones. Our main character is a brand of maniac rarely, if ever, seen on screen, and the famed scene on the lake is one of the iciest in all of cinema and worth the price of admission alone. This is the only John Stahl movie I’ve seen (of 37). 

 

Niagara (Henry Hathaway, 1953): 3.5/5

Produced and co-written by Charles Brackett who wanted to “do something with Niagara Falls,” and, in fact, the falls itself is pretty powerful and passionate. Shot in Technicolor, the movie is full of hallucinatory reds, yellows and greens as well as a rainbow motif (truly putting a hat on a hat). Features a Hitchcockian use of the falls themselves as well as of Joseph Cotton as a morally ambiguous character. Marilyn Monroe is about as good as I’ve seen her outside of The Misfits, but, sorry, she’s still mostly terrible. 

 

A Kiss Before Dying (Gerd Oswald, 1956): 3/5

Photographed in CinemaScope, color by DeLuxe, from a novel by ira levin, 14 years before Rosemary’s Baby. Cinematography by Lucien Ballard, who shot Morocco, The Devil is a Woman, The Killing, Mikey and Nicky, and The Wild Bunch. Robert Wagner plays a very modern character: a bland, suave, brooding, good-looking and well-dressed psychopath. The movie efficiently delivers some thrills, and Wagner is perfectly cast as someone undisturbed by any deep feelings. 

 

Party Girl (Nicholas Ray, 1958): 2/5

In CinemaScope and Metrocolor, but unlike the other films in the series I’ve watched, it looks like shit—displaying horrible vomits of colors. Cyd Charisse likewise is stiff and dowdy. The exceptions to both of these observations are during the two dance numbers, where suddenly Charisse reveals herself as long-legged and graceful and the lush pinks and reds show her off like a queen/stripper. Lee Cobb is good but Robert Taylor is a stiff, and hatchet-faced John Ireland is criminally underused. More of a gangster movie than a noir.

 

 

Aki Kaurismäki Film Fest

Simple stories, told with maximum efficiency and minimum dialogue. Still, the feelings come through clearly. Half-funny and half-sad in the way of Tati, Jarmusch, Wes Anderson, Hal Hartley, Chaplin. Live music is often lovingly presented, with beautiful authenticity, fingers-on-strings-wise. 

 

Shadows in Paradise (Aki Kaurismäki, 1986): 3/5

(A bad title.) Love among the barely-holding-on. This is a good time to talk about ensemble players because Kati Outinen (who makes 10 films with Kaurismäki) and Matti Pellonpää (my favorite, who makes seven (and Night on Earth) and dies at 44) are very good and, as time goes on, bring so many lives to each new character. 

 

Ariel, rw (Aki Kaurismäki, 1988): 5/5

“Take the car keys. They’re your inheritance,” says the protagonist’s father, “I’ve had it with this shit.” Cocking a pistol, he leaves the room, a shot rings out, and our protagonist is away in his huge Cadillac convertible, symbol of American-brand freedom. There follows a deadpan crime epic in one hour and 14 minutes, complete with desperation, romance, irony, revenge, a prison break, a bank robbery, lovers on the run and a flight to Mexico. 

 

The Match Factory Girl, rw (Aki Kaurismäki, 1990): 3.5/5

In the running for the most despairing and lonely of Kaurismäki’s films (which is saying something), but at least the main character takes her fate into her own hands. That’s a kind of control. 

 

La Vie de Boheme (Aki Kaurismäki, 1992): 4/5

Aki en Français, in beautiful b&w, and in a lighter register than usual (until it isn’t), with plenty of actual whole-jokes. It must have tickled Kaurismäki to borrow the same source material as La Boheme, playing off the huge emotions of the opera with his own deadpan, matter of fact style. And indeed, it is quite droll. Weirdly, the film features Jean-Pierre Leaud, Louis Malle and Sam Fuller cameos. (Parenthetically, Fuller also shows up in The American Friend, Hammett, The State of Things, and The End of Violence for Wim Wenders; in Sons and Somebody to Love for Alexandre Rockwell; in 1941 for Spielberg; in The Last Movie for Dennis Hopper; and in Pierrot le Fou for Godard).

 

Drifting Clouds (Aki Kaurismäki, 1996): 3/5

A genuinely sad-feeling film (although with usual deadpan distancing devices) about a normal couple, suddenly unemployed. It has an unearned happy ending, and I’m here for it.

 

Le Havre (Aki Kaurismäki, 2011): 3.5/5

It takes a village to deal with sad immigrant teenagers, especially when the people in said community are all also sad about their dying wives, etc. Lead André Wilms returns 19 years after La Vie De Bohème, which adds great gravity and melancholy (of course) to the role.

 

The Other Side of Hope (Aki Kaurismäki, 2017): 3.5/5

“All melancholics get sent back.” That’s Kaurismäki expressing, in the script, why he identifies so much with the immigrants in his two most recent films. As always Kaurismäki privileges image over dialogue and demonstrates the power of music from one’s own region for conveying self. 

 

 

Miklós Jancsó Film Fest

Jancsó is interested in how moments flow together and uses long, long shots—often containing power and mood-flips as gentle as the wind. Usually long shots (as used by, say, Scorsese or Angelopoulos) are headed somewhere or travel along with characters; Jancsó’s camera instead stalks around restlessly, turning this way and that, searchingly. Most of these movies are semi-musicals, with gorgeous camera movement, choreographed moments and literal dancing. Plus, Jancsó often has his characters sing their thoughts as if no one could hear them—including the rebels at the end of The Round Up as well as the Red who, once he knows the jig is up, sings his pro-Red song right into the White guy’s face. 

 

The Round-Up (Miklós Jancsó, 1966): 3.5/5

Advanced Interrogation Techniques, the Movie. Also: Mustache, the Movie. Seriously, every person on screen has a mustache, even the horses. Trademark radical and ironic flips of fate.  Deliberately confusing (and confusingly deliberate) but, once all the cards have been played, devastating. 

 

The Red and the White, rw (Miklós Jancsó, 1967): 5/5

A god’s eye view of war, full of irony and “the bewildering suddenness of combat” (Richard Brody). Jancsó’s largest-scale work, it confirms and vindicates his interest in groups over individuals.

 

The Confrontation (Miklós Jancsó, 1969): 3.5/5

Turns a jaundiced eye on the revolutionaries once they have achieved power. A group enters a seminary and, at first, it’s all “Let’s debate,” with questions such as “What is the role of the individual in history?” and “Is the world knowable?” However, soon enough it’s “I suggest we set up methods of revolutionary terror.” Of course, Jancsó punctuates this with many, many revolutionary songs and dances.

 

Sirrocco / Winter Wind (Miklós Jancsó, 1969): 3/5

A hero of the war becomes a paranoid fugitive, in 13 long, prowling shots. Lots of stalking around, pointing guns, giving orders, changing one’s mind and giving opposite orders, uncovering plots real and imagined—none of it making much actual sense.

 

Red Psalm (Miklós Jancsó, 1972): 3.5/5

Young socialists stand up to the authorities. Surprisingly it does not go well. The long take from 10:30-15:15 (to take one example) flows across many hundreds of extras, through a dozen set-ups, drop-ins, dramas and moods. 

 

Electra, My Love (Miklós Jancsó, 1974): 4/5

A retelling of the Greek play in 12 beautiful, flowing shots—and the Jancsô film that most explicitly embraces the abstraction and serenity of a musical. A field, a crowd of about 500 people, dance and other ritualized movement, music, a Bob Dylan type with guitar serving as a Greek chorus, three dwarves, 50 horses, a team of men cracking whips, a dozen hawks and 100s of doves, a giant rolling ball, a hill covered with candles, ample (if chaste) nudity, and general socialist hippy vibes. For those needing ties to Hungarian politics, Electra works to overthrow the current, anti-freedom regime. The voice of Young Hungary saying, “Our discontent will not be silenced, and this is something we are willing to die for.”

 

 

The Gorky Trilogy

A project much like The Apu Trilogy—Maxim Gorky at three points in his early life. Stalin loved Gorky and personally invited him back to the USSR in 1932, after years of exile—possibly because of Gorky’s sentimental peasant stories, representing the nobility of “the people of the land,” etc. (This is ignorant speculation on my part, of course). 

The Childhood of Maxim Gorky (Mark Donskoy, 1938): 3.5/5

Village life, including a beloved grandmother. A portrait of the artist as a young man approximately 100 times better than Belfast, encompassing multiple touching emotional arcs. My favorite involved one of the kindest characters, a young man, being asked to carry a really heavy cross up a hill to a graveyard (for someone else’s wife); he stumbles and the cross crushes him to death. 

My Apprenticeship (Mark Donskoy, 1939): 3/5

Wherein the protagonist brings his natural honestly into the petty, cruel and dishonest world as a servant to a selfish rich family, on a steamboat surrounded by slippery and thieving characters, and within a casually grueling icon-making workshop. Preaches the simple act of standing up for what you believe in.

My Universities (Mark Donskoy, 1940): 2.5/5

By this final film, the messages get more blatant, quoting Schopenhauer and having people ask our protagonist (now looking like River Phoenix) questions like “What is the truth you believe in?” (which is something like “We must act and fight together, collectively”)

 

 

 

 Better Call Saul (Vince Gilligan, 2015 - 2022): 5/5

Done with a degree of narrative complexity and cinematic style that is rare. Time is played with, motivations are obscured, sounds resonate in unexpected ways, views and angles are unexpected but seldom simply flashy show-off tricks.

So many characters have issues and challenges. It is almost the opposite of the classic idea of an evolving hero and stationary helpers and opponents. No one has what they want. Just about everyone evolves in the quest to get it. A few are rocks of dependability in terms of conduct but that is not the same as predictability. Their strength and resolve can often surprise as much as a change of character would.

And the acting remains superb. They form a great ensemble and you just sense that the opening situations and issues in Breaking Bad are looming just out of sight.

The Princess (Ed Perkins, 2022): 2.5/5

While the "archival footage only" aspect is well executed, the Diana story is so well known, and so exhaustively explored in legions of books, films, series and podcasts, that it is simply impossible for Ed Perkins and his team to really add anything new to the narrative, especially since The Princess does essentially just retell that story.

Vengeance (BJ Novak, 2022): 3/5

East Coast millennial journalist gets caught up in a West Texas Neo-noir. A muddied up mystery and crime story more than astutely told by B.J. Novak in an impressive debut. Ashton Kutcher has a small but terrific role.

Prey (Dan Trachtenberg, 2022): 2.5/5

Great movie dog! Extra half star.

Lingua Franca (Isabel Sandoval, 2020): 3.5/5

In Lingua Franca, Isabel Sandoval deftly designed a beautiful, authentic, straightforward-yet-profound, film about an undocumented trans Filipino caregiver navigating paranoia and would-be suitors to obtain a green card. I impatiently wait more from her.

Man Push Cart (Ramin Bahrani, 2005): 3.5/5

I really dig '00s NYC movies. The city doesn't have the cinematic look that it did in previous decades. It's more of a "feeling". This subtle tensile energy that seemingly only the indie auteurs knew how to capture. Man Push Cart is simply executed but absolutely compelling to watch. Sisyphus rolls a boulder and Ahmad pushes a cart. It is that simple, but that’s all it needs to be. The city, desperation, and loneliness get finely captured as does New York City's paradoxically dirty splendor. A profoundly authentic film in displaying estranged ends, the kindness of strangers, and the tedium of everyday work.

Nightmare Alley (Edmund Goulding, 1947): 2.5/5

Better than GdT's overwrought remake, but that ain't sayin' much.

Minions: The Rise of Gru (Kyle Balda, 2022): 2.5/5

Attention casting directors everywhere please cast julie andrews in literally anything her last ever film role cannot be minions 2 the rise of gru.

Elvis (Baz Luhrmann, 2022): 2.5/5

Still not a fan of Mr. Luhrmann and Ms. Martin (Luhrmann’s wife, co-producer, production designer and costume designer) and their maximalist style. (Not to mention I have complicated feelings towards The King.) However, it's not as terrible as I anticipated. Luhrmann manages to make Elvis feel like the tragedy of America itself: a promised land of electrifying popular art that is always undone by greed and fear. Ah Elvis! Ah humanity!

Resurrection (Andrew Semans, 2022): 2.5/5

I admire that this film really "went there." Probably would have worked better as a short film or crazy one act play though, but as a feature film...meh. Extra half star for Rebecca Hall who bows to no man.

Bullet Train (David Leitch, 2022): 2.5/5

So this is what it's like when an actor I enjoy (Brad Pitt) plays what studio execs must call "a Ryan Reynolds role"...

Predestination (Spierig Brothers, 2014): 3/5

Or, No Matter Where You Go, There You Are: The Movie

Exponentially unsolvable time travel movie (as with essentially any causal loop) with its convoluted quadfecta form. Still, Sarah Snook though. *chef's kiss* And I don't even want to begin analyzing the strange pit of desolation that consumed me the moment John says to his former, female-self, "You're beautiful. Somebody should've told you that," with the faintest whimper in his voice.

An Officer and a Gentleman (Taylor Hackford, 1982): 1/5

A 2 hour long military training video that’s occasionally interrupted by the most benign romance you could possibly conjure up. Hearing that Debra Winger hates this movie makes me like her even more.

The World According to Garp (George Roy Hill 1982): 2/5

So many things happened in this movie and yet simultaneously nothing happened in this movie. Also, Glenn Close plays the mother of Robin Williams. She is only four years older than him. They look the exact same age. This bothered me very, very much.

Eternity and a Day (Theo Angelopoulos, 1998): 3/5

Sweet little movie about a writer and his act of kindness towards a child with no one else, as well as his reflections on a life lived and one that's about to end, so of course all of those things work for me.

City Hall (Frederick Wiseman, 2020): 3/5

The usual (for recent Wiseman) mix of fascinating and tedious, extended in this case to an ass-numbing 4.5 hours. There's a good 90 minutes' worth of meetings in which you can plainly see that the people who are actually in the room would love to be elsewhere. Highlights are strong, though. And though Trump is mercifully never seen or heard in the film, Boston’s Mayor Walsh is offered up to us as his antithesis, a rebuke to everything he stands for and the embodiment of public service. Show this to any anarcho-capitalist jackass who thinks government is a dirty word.

 Nope (Jordan Peele, 2022): 2.5/5

In gymnastics, when someone attempts a really hard move but can’t land it, you still applaud the effort. So, I'm glad Peele is out here swinging, and I don't want him to stop. But he didn't land this one. Fun ideas with some great moments, but ultimately has the depth of a sketchbook. One thing I find interesting is how Peele is carving out this monopoly on what I’m calling “non-scary horror” (it's a shit name, open to suggestions). He’s using the aesthetics of horror and tension films to make interesting but ultimately widely palatable movies for people who normally can’t fuck with the genre. They're not scary, they're just wearing the clothes. And it's obviously tremendously effective. Make of that what you will.

Nekromantik 2 (Jorg Buttgereit, 1991): 1/5

Like most infamous shock cinema, this is more notorious than it is actually any good. The first one at least rubbed up against some vague post-war Berlin Wall-era anti-establishment anger with its antics. There's a hint of mistrust of German reunification here, but mostly this is interested in what it can get away with, which even then isn't particularly shocking.

The Blob (Chuck Russell, 1988): 3/5

Solid semi-solid movie!

The Gray Man (Anthony and Joe Russon, 2022): 1.5/5

I think if someone watched Bourne Ultimatum, got a concussion, and then went to sleep immediately after, this movie would be the dream they'd have.

The Russo brothers cement themselves as dull corporate hacks with this film.

Leaving Las Vegas (Mike Figgis, 1995): 2/5

The pre-credits scene is a superb little 15-minute short. It's only when he meets Shue that the whole thing turns putrid.

Broadcast News (James L. Brooks, 1987): 3/5

Some days I'm Al Brooks, some days I'm Holly Hunter. But every day I'm Joan Cusack running full-speed into a water fountain.

Citizen Ashe (Sam Pollard, Rex Miller, 2021): 3.5/5

The film is a monument to the gentlemanly and cerebral Ashe, the way he met the challenges of his times, and the toll it took on him. I wouldn’t call him the anti-Ali since Ashe and Ali wanted the same outcomes, they just had completely different styles of going about it. I loved when Dr. Harry Edwards acknowledged that Ashe, whom he initially wrote off as an Uncle Tom, was in some ways more radical than himself while maintaining an elegant, soft-spoken persona. He learned something from Ashe that I think far too few of us (who prefer loud performative defiance to quiet efficacy) have learned.

Persuasion (Carrie Cracknell, 2022): 1/5

A "Fleabag" style punch up of an Austen novel. Horrendous miscalculation. The anachronistic language was another awful decision. AND it's completely UN-HORNY, lacking any real sensuality or romantic vibes. Also, Dakota is just that person who can't be in a period piece...She looks like someone who knows what an iPhone is.

Parallel Mothers (Almodovar, 2021): 4/5
Fantastic. Should have been in a neck-and-neck race with Power of the Dog for the Oscar, but maybe Almodovar's color fetish and flirtations with kitsch and excess don't appeal as much as a good-old stolid drama. How the mothers/lovers' lives and the lives of their babies intertwine is the reason to see this film. It is a film of power and honesty, without a single false note along the way.

Secrets & Lies (Mike Leigh, 1996): 3/5

“We’re all in pain.

Why can’t we share our pain."

A bit dated and melodramatic but I found it moving at times.

The Secret Lives of Dentists (Alan Rudolph, 2002): 3/5

Harrowing trip into the reticent male psyche with Campbell Scott, plus nimble assistance from a beautifully flustered Hope Davis, and Dennis Leary in the Tyler Durden-esque motormouth role he was born to play; shows a family unit with neither sentimentality nor garish caricature.

The Automat (Lisa Hurwitz, 2021): 3/5

Nice and sweet. Like any good American film it slowly convinces you its subject is somehow integral to understanding modern America even if you knew nothing about it beforehand. Some might think it frivolous or a trifle but I think the film has something to say about the shift in American capitalism before and after World War Two and what we lost as a country in the modern age. Also liked how the editors used the subjects asking questions of the director (which most docs would have cut) and also allowed the subjects to ask questions of one another.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (Sophie Hyde, 2022): 3/5

Never really transcends its dull overlit look or PSA mindset, but charming enough on the strength of its leads. Obviously I knew Emma’s performance would be spellbinding but goddamn where has Daryl McCormack been hiding? Goes from holding his own to fully stealing scenes.

The 355 (Simon Kinberg, 2022): 1.5/5

Women…we gotta do better than this

Chastain if you don’t stop bussin down for the CIA…

Peggy Sue Got Married (Francis Ford Coppola, 1986): 2/5

Where Kathleen Turner and Nicolas Cage have weird fucking faces that somehow pass as both 18 and 43 years old.

JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991): 2.5/5

This movie is almost as long as the actual Kennedy administration. The whole thing is just one long argument and every detail of that argument is wrong.

Dog (Channing Tatum, Reid Carolin, 2022): 1/5

More like Dog SHIT. This is probably Tucker Carlson's favorite movie.

Clean (Paul Solet, 2021): 2/5

Adrien Brody must be going through a midlife crisis. Lead, Co-Writer, Producer, and Original Music & Score.

The Bob's Burgers Movie (Loren Bouchard, Bernard Derriman, 2022): 3/5

“Cotton Candy Dan? Is that the guy who sold corn dogs?”

Delightful and accessible. (Never seen one episode of the show. I might change that.)

The Black Phone (Scott Derrickson, 2022): 2/5

You’re telling me kids in this small town are being kidnapped and murdered every few weeks and no one is hip to the giant black van circling the school that says “Abracadabra” on the side?

Miracle Mile (Steve de Jarnatt, 1988): 3/5

Essentially Los Angeles AFTER HOURS meets THREADS. Who wouldn't want to die at Canter's Deli?

Ozark (Bill Dubuque, Mark Williams, 2017-2022): 3.5/5 

Our anti-heroes are the Byrde family, with Jason Bateman and Laura Linney as the wily, resourceful "our means are better than your means" parents who are digging out of their drug cartel obligations and on the road to "normal" backdoor deals and power brokering that are part and parcel of the free world of a democratic society. On the one hand, the ending begs for continuation, on the other, the cycle of vengeance is never complete as those hillbilly mainstays, the Hatfield and McCoys remind us.

The series is best in the family dynamics with the Byrde kids moving from pre to post-adolescence over the course of the series (as they actors themselves age) and taking polar opposite stands vis a vis their parents, but then there's the cartel family dynamics and Ruth's and Darlene's families as well, all of which reveal flaws that if not classically tragic are still tragic enough to bring death and woe upon those who survive.

And the Byrde parents, though capable of just about anything, never commit violence themselves. Both are supremely skilled at talking their in and out of pickles and devising bad ends for others but always at arm's length. It's a tribute to smarts of a peculiar but vivid kind and is one of the qualities that makes this a worthwhile series to check out. 

SUCCESSION (Jesse Armstrong, Seasons 1-3): 4.5/5

I love Shiv (Sarah Snook's) facial expressivity. She lights up or dims down in a 100 different ways and contrasts with the semi-frozen monster dad, Logan (Brian Cox) and her two brothers Roman (Kieran Culkin) with his straight-faced witty, naughty and sometimes stinging quips, and Kendall (Jeremy Strong) with his slightly tensed, not quite there look and seething anger. Unlike Lear, Logan never turns power over. Instead, maybe because we have much more time to fill, he flatters and seduces one offspring after another with promises that never quite materialize. The betrayals and undercutting piles up, dirty secrets leak out, crises recur, and much of the time the series is a mix of intense close ups and barbed dialogue. It keeps one's focus, and, apart from the predictably musical chairs, interest. It's not quite over but you can bet it won't be changing stripes either.  There's a reason I didn't want to be in the world of business.