Tantalisingly, in an interview with director Lucrecia Martel, writer José Teodoro speaks of the potential to trace a line that goes straight from Zama to La Ciénaga, an unbroken line of people who, despite hundreds of years of geography, refuse to think of themselves as americanos. They want to think of themselves as Europeans enduring some protracted exile. […]
Category: Film
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Streaming Recommendations: July/August 2020
Instead of twenty capsules alongside recommendations, from now on I’ll just provide a list of titles. That way I’ll have more time to write fuller capsules elsewhere on here and link to them if need be. Also, I’ll include both July and August in this edition because these would make so much more sense coming […]
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New-to-me Favourites: July 2020
La Captive (Chantal Akerman, 2000) Time Regained (Raúl Ruiz, 1999) Tailpiece (Margaret Tait, 1976) Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 1955) Shirin (Abbas Kiarostami, 2008) Alexandra…Why? (Youssef Chahine, 1979) The Holy Girl (Lucrecia Martel, 2004) Ganja & Hess (Bill Gunn, 1973) Faithless (Liv Ullmann, 2000)
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Krabi, 2562
Scan a representative sample of the writing about Anocha Suwichakornpong and Ben Rivers’s co-directed feature, Krabi, 2562, and two things are likely to be found: variants of the word “slip” and offshoots of the word “shift.” “Slip” is particularly good in two senses: first, it suggests a lack of friction, that the surfaces of the […]
Beach Rats opens with a montage central to the film’s discourse about desire, in this case a desire partially exposed, partially in shadow. The resulting images will be familiar to anyone who was growing up on Facebook between 2009-2012: a guy’s reflection in a mirror, a selfie of the top off and flash on variety. […]
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The Booksellers
Here are two things I know to be true: there aren’t enough documentaries about books; when one can be found, it’s almost always disappointing. Well, sigh. D.W. Young’s film, about New York’s rare book dealer and collector scene, promises to be a quaint, easy-going glance in at the lives of those who have made collecting […]
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New-to-me Favourites: June 2020
Hyenas (Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1992) The Long Farewell (Kira Muratova, 1971) I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone / Stray Dogs / Journey to the West (Tsai Ming-liang, 2007/2013/2014) The Love Eterne (Li Han-hsiang, 1963) Places in Cities (Angela Schanelec, 1998) Café Lumière / Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2003/2007) Let the Fire Burn (Jason Osder, 2013) Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins, […]
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Streaming Recommendations: June 2020
MUBI: —Marseille: A confession: I don’t find the films of Angela Schanelec cold. On occasion I find them alienating, or primarily works to comprehend rather than feel, because they attain near-Straub/Huillet levels of rigour and precision in matters profilmic and narrative, actorly and sonic. But why then did I cry so persistently during the Joni […]
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New-to-me favourites: May 2020
The More the Merrier (George Stevens, 1943) My Neighbours the Yamadas (Isao Takahata, 1999) All is Forgiven (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2007) The Hole (Tsai Ming-liang, 1998) Centre Stage (Stanley Kwan, 1992) Toute une nuit (Chantal Akerman, 1982) Like Grains of Sand (Ryosuke Hashiguchi, 1995) Ornamental Hairpin (Hiroshi Shimizu,1941)
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Streaming Recommendations: May 2020
MUBI: —Let the Sunshine In: I have watched this movie (minor Denis, I’m told) a silly number of times. On each new occasion it grows: it becomes more accommodating, funnier, sadder. Binoche’s Isabelle, an artist, suffering through interminable dates with a panoply of men who are either wrong from the start or time their arrivals […]
