Ouvertures (The Living and the Dead Ensemble, 2019)
The Martinican writer Édouard Glissant, whose play Monsieur Toussaint forms the core of this ...
2020-10-05 21:46:43 +0000 UTC View Post
msicism posts
The Last City (Heinz Emigholz, 2020)
As I briefly mentioned on Letterboxd, I wasn't really prepared for The Last City, which as far...
2020-10-05 20:01:56 +0000 UTC View PostThe Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) (Anders Edström and C.W. Winter, 2020)
There is an essential monumentality that is sealed into the very making of this film, fired like clay, ...
2020-10-05 19:11:25 +0000 UTC View PostDear GOP: Take the L
Just a brief word on the Rose Garden Massacre super-spreader event, and the illness of President Trump ...
2020-10-04 16:25:01 +0000 UTC View PostBeginning (Dea Kulumbegashvili, 2020)
This is a film that is probably less suited to home streaming than anything else I've seen so far in 20...
2020-10-02 17:13:00 +0000 UTC View PostI Carry You With Me (Heidi Ewing, 2020)
I turned this off after 48 minutes.
I didn't realize until after I stopped watching (and checked ...
2020-10-01 22:45:06 +0000 UTC View PostHer Name Was Europa (Anja Dornieden & Juan David González Monroy, 2020)
Here's a hypothesis. Just as Stan Brakhage was the defining figure in experimental film for a particula...
2020-09-30 04:42:03 +0000 UTC View PostMy Mexican Bretzel (Nuria Giménez, 2019)
[SPOILERS. BUT FRANKLY I WISH SOMEONE HAD SPOILED IT FOR ME<...
2020-09-30 03:34:23 +0000 UTC View PostMangrove (Steve McQueen, 2020)
Based on the rapturous reviews in the trades, we can probably expect to see Mangrove staking o...
2020-09-30 02:55:20 +0000 UTC View PostNomadland (Chloé Zhao, 2020)
My lovely wife Jen, who is, shall we say, "cinema adjacent," came in and out while I was watching N...
2020-09-28 00:30:09 +0000 UTC View PostIsabella (Matías Piñeiro, 2020)
A consensus seems to be building that Isabella is a bit of a disappointment from Pineiro. I'll...
2020-09-27 21:14:18 +0000 UTC View PostThe Human Voice (Pedro Almodóvar, 2020)
As it happens, I was tasked with writing the catalogue blurb for the Viennale for this one. Here's what...
2020-09-27 19:28:20 +0000 UTC View PostThe Year of the Discovery (Luis López Carrasco, 2020)
One of the most undeniably impressive films of 2020, The Year of the Discovery is also one of ...
2020-09-27 17:52:46 +0000 UTC View PostSlow Machine (Joe DeNardo and Paul Felten, 2020)
A fascinating first effort, Slow Machine belongs to a grand tradition of highly ambitious Amer...
2020-09-27 06:33:25 +0000 UTC View PostThe Plastic House (Allison Chhorn, 2019)
Despite its obvious third-person perspective, this is probably the Currents feature I've seen that come...
2020-09-27 05:50:14 +0000 UTC View PostThere Are Not Thirty-Six Ways of Showing a Man Getting On a Horse (Nicolás Zukerfeld, 2020)
Well, like it or not, the "supercut" is now officially a film genre. This means we're going to be seein...
2020-09-27 05:06:04 +0000 UTC View PostFauna (Nicolás Pereda, 2020)
Pereda, now on this ninth feature, seems like a director who should have made the leap to Main Slate st...
2020-09-27 03:33:09 +0000 UTC View PostThe Lobby (Heinz Emigholz, 2020)
It's weird. Streetscapes [Dialogue] was such a tonic precisely because, after so many years of...
2020-09-27 03:07:59 +0000 UTC View PostThe Inheritance (Ephraim Asili, 2020)
I'm actually a bit envious of those viewers for whom the righteous glory of The Inheritance ap...
2020-09-27 02:53:07 +0000 UTC View PostA Potentiality (Dana Berman Duff, 2020)
I wanted to take a quick break from NYFF-mania, and so I thought I'd check in with an experimental film...
2020-09-24 23:04:57 +0000 UTC View PostNYFF Currents (Short Takes 5)
See You In My Dreams (Shun Ikezoe, 2020)
Neither flesh nor fish, not exactly a n...
2020-09-23 05:32:06 +0000 UTC View PostThe Monopoly of Violence (David Defresne, 2020)
At the risk of the sort of hyperbole that rightly gets you put in Critic Jail, I'd love to mail a copy ...
2020-09-22 10:03:23 +0000 UTC View PostThe Calming (Song Fang, 2020)
This one is getting roundly panned by the NYFFers, and I can understand why. "Tasteful" is being thrown...
2020-09-21 21:30:30 +0000 UTC View PostGunda (Victor Kossakovsky, 2020)
[SPOILERS, IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS TO ANIMALS ON THE FARM...]
At the risk of national ster...
2020-09-21 04:02:37 +0000 UTC View PostNYFF Currents (Short Takes 4)
Ekphrasis (Riccardo Giacconi, 2019)
"Ekphrasis" is a term from classical art his...
2020-09-20 06:18:19 +0000 UTC View PostFigure Minus Fact (Mary Helena Clark, 2020)
For quite some time now, I've been struggling to come up with some sort of parallel or analogy for the ...
2020-09-18 02:12:15 +0000 UTC View PostHer Socialist Smile (John Gianvito, 2020)
In 2007, filmmaker and scholar John Gianvito made Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, a fea...
2020-09-17 23:56:48 +0000 UTC View PostLovers Rock (Steve McQueen, 2020)
Mostly because I have been focused on the Currents selections, I have not paid a great deal of attentio...
2020-09-17 18:29:52 +0000 UTC View PostNYFF Currents (Short Takes 3)
An Arrow Pointing To a Hole (Steve Reinke, 2020)
This is a sufficiently complex ...
2020-09-17 06:08:09 +0000 UTC View PostThe Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror (Raúl Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento, 1967/2020)
If The Wandering Soap Opera was analogous to Eyes Wide Shut -- a work that a master h...
2020-09-17 04:32:16 +0000 UTC View Post