It's alright! It's alright! It's all been approved! I'm an American!
1. Two Pianos 2. Spectateurs! by Arnaud Desplechin "Cinema is part of your life experience..." Every film is both a personal history and a romantic gesture. You have to believe to keep making movies until you can just make the sort you so enjoy. The ones that flow out of you. Like Wes Anderson or Thomas Pynchon, he did his best work to get to his best work. The old formulas are intact in the…
A movie about Brent Hinds.
Favourite Fiction Film Two Pianos The Shrouds The Ice Tower Kontinental '25 28 Years Later Dry Leaf Young Mothers The Woman in the Yard The Secret Agent The Mastermind Le dernier souffle It Was Just An Accident Black Rabbit White Rabbit On Becoming A Guinea Fowl Death Will Come Favourite Non-Fiction Film Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat Spectateurs! L'histoire de "Scénario" Life After Cover Up All I…
Here's the page for every edition of my Oscar corrective and superlatives, The Monsieur Oscars, named for the lead character in Leos Carax's Holy Motors, played by Denis Lavant. The tradition started in 2011, so the name didn't take effect until 2012, so when I went back to 2010 I had to make a new one, as I hadn't had the idea yet... Convoluted, but here's a good display of the craft and artistry…
My friend Gary Chun reminded me he'd made a spotify playlist of this original list of songs, my votes for the best of the century thus far. The year was 2018 and now in 2025 Gary has asked me to update it. 1. "Bang Theory" - World Leader Pretend 2. "Sky Starts Falling" - Doves 3. "Pace is the Trick" - Interpol 4. "Sick Talk" - Wye Oak 5. "I'll Believe in Anything" - Wolf Parade 6. "Eyesore" -…
1-2. Familiar Touch / Last Summer by Sarah Friedland / by Catherine Breillat Two diametrically opposed studies of women in the autumn of their lives, with time running out and pleasures and comforts no longer guaranteed. In the former Sarah Friedland show the search for dignity as the mind goes and the world is what you remember of it in a feedback loop betraying you to your surroundings.…
Favourite Fiction Film Familiar Touch Last Summer Air Shadow of Fire Megalopolis The First Omen Black Tea Here Suspended Time Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1 Juror #2 Hard Truths Cuckoo Trap La Bête Kubi The Bikeriders The Room Next Door Scorched Earth Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Favourite Non-Fiction Film Union No Other Land It's Not Me Dahomey Strike: An Uncivil War Sugarcane Pictures of Ghosts…
Mubi only accepted one this year, so here were some from the reject pile: NEW: The Bikeriders (Jeff Nichols, US) + OLD: Lenin: The Train (Damiano Damiani, 1988) "The whole point of these guys is that they can’t follow rules, you know. You put ’em together, and they get in this club, and all of a sudden, oh, they start makin’ up all these rules for everybody to follow." NEW: Hard Truths (Mike…
Here is a round-up of all of my video essay work available for public consumption made in the last calendar year. The big project was An Aim Not Devoid of Merit, a look at the complete works of Steven Spielberg , created with Tucker Johnson. I added several titles to my ongoing series Other West, about offbeat westerns: John Frankenheimer's Andersonville , Jordan Peele's Nope , and Bruce…
1. Close Your Eyes by Victor Erice "The unluckiest filmmaker in the world," was how Ben Sachs described Victor Erice. The funding cut or witheld entirely for projects realized and unrealized, years without financing, dear friends dying before their time, and lately a great movie going undistributed after of a fiasco of a Cannes premiere. As always the central tragedy of film history is people not…
Favourite Fiction Film Close Your Eyes Godzilla Minus One The Pot-Au-Feu The Killer Silent Night Revolution+1 Kidnapped Killers of the Flower Moon Winter Boy Brother and Sister Unrest Showing Up Asteroid City The Holdovers The Old Oak Shin Kamen Rider Anatomy of a Fall Scarlet May December Leo Favourite Non-Fiction Film Menus-Plaisirs les Troisgros Rewind and Play Renaissance Desperate Souls, Dark…
I thought I'd take a moment to post the links for The End of History, the video essay series by myself and Tucker Johnson. This was my most ambitious video essay project to date from the outset. It's funny to think of The Unloved about to make it to its 120th episode later this year because heaven knows I had no idea if it would last that long, so I can't say it was my intention to make something…
1. The Fabelmans by Steven Spielberg Though it's tempting to say he waited his whole life to let us in, it's more accurate to say he drew us a map and then finally, after decades on the path, we got to where X marks the spot. A man famous for softening us for life's bitter disappointments has finally shown us his own, let us know that all that fantasy, all those impossible things, they were for…
Favourite Fiction Feature The Fablemans EO Earwig The Eternal Daughter Crimes of the Future Hold Me Tight Detective vs. Sleuths Shin Ultraman Living Vikram Broker Lingui, the Sacred Bonds Ambulance Nope Both Sides of the Blade Three Thousand Years of Longing The Munsters Deception RRR Deep Water Kimi One Second Decision to Leave Nobody’s Hero X Favourite Non-Fiction Film This Much I Know To Be…
In the following piece critics Scout Tafoya and Tucker Johnson take a look at Jordan Peele's Nope. Scout Tafoya: When you live in a colonizing state, and you look like the people who founded it, everything you say carries with it a kind of privilege, even if you criticize the state. Straight white Americans have a responsibility with which almost none of them are prepared to fully grapple; every…
1. West Side Story by Steven Spielberg As good as movies get. The kind of pure-hearted spectacle that cameras get built to capture. Every second of it carries sixty years of planning, of care, of hope. If you weren't whistling the Sondheim and Bernstein tunes, you'd be humming the steadicam and snapping along with the edit. Steven Spielberg fulfilling a destiny I don't think any of us knew was his…
1. Yellowjackets I'm in the middle of writing a video essay on why this show is so meaningful to me but suffice to say for now this show managed to combine survival horror, teen girl dystopia, folk horror hallucinations, and still have time to be among the most sharp pieces of media about lost youth and wasted potential I've ever seen. The second it started I fell in love. It's rewarded me by not…
Favourite Non-Fiction Features Faya Dayi Procession All Light, Everywhere A Glitch in the Matrix Taming the Garden Sabaya Mariner of the Mountains Get Back Velvet Underground The American Sector Village Detective: A Song Cycle Babi Yar. Context / State Funeral Marx Can Wait A Crime on The Bayou Joy Ride Favourite Fiction Features 1. West Side Story 2. The Matrix: Resurrections 3. Benediction 4.…
Three writers offer their thoughts on Paul Thomas Anderson's newest film Licorice Pizza. Scout Tafoya Is it enough for a film to be joyous? Does that forgive its odd shape and amoral longings? So much of the broad project of the popular American cinema seems to depress a person, whether through unimaginative militarism or dour rumination on the human condition thrice filtered through generic…
1. last night I dreamt that somebody loved me / A letter to adolescence / The Tale of Eurydice by Haaniyah Angus The most exciting new voice in film lays out a perfect hand of short form work and waits for us to blink. I was stuck to the screen watching these, pint-sized rhapsodies for not just lost happiness but depth of feeling. It isn't that Angus misses feeling good, it's that she knows that…
Favourite Fiction Feature Film 1. About Endlessness 2. It Must Be Heaven 3. Tesla 4. Lovers Rock 5. On a Magical Night 6. Night of the Kings 7. His House 8. Emma. 9. Wolfwalkers 10. Gretel & Hansel 11. Joan of Arc 12. Alone 13. Possessor 14. Saint-Narcisse 15. Siberia Favourite Non-Fiction Feature Film 1. City Hall 2. Bad Trip 3. Notturno 4. Dick Johnson is Dead 5. Love and Death in Montmartre 6.…
Favourite Dramatic Feature 1. Peterloo 2. The Souvenir 3. A Hidden Life 4. Deadwood 5. First Cow 6. The Irishman 7. Uncut Gems 8. 3 From Hell 9. Fourteen 10. “I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians” 11. Killing 12. Sunset 13. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood 14. Portrait of a Lady on Fire 15. Atlantique Favourite Non-Fiction Feature 1. Varda By Agnès 2. Absence 3. A Story From Africa…
1. Peterloo by Mike Leigh Mike Leigh's life was spent making films about us and for us, whether we appreciated them or not. The servants in wealthy houses, the struggling newlyweds on welfare, mothers too poor to have children, people living in caravans housed between a dozen others in a cramped trailer park. Working class people; those are Mike Leigh's people. He's looked after us in his fiction.…
"I was so worried you had changed. You didn't call me 'kid' when you walked in." She was the most fragile I'd ever seen anyone. Tremor in her voice, uncertain about her grip on her glass. We drank coffee and talked about Rachel. She'd been sleeping in Rachel's bedroom and 'talking' to her through tarot cards. Rachel had died a few weeks ago and Brettney had come down for the service. Her…
1. Black Mother by Khalik Allah 2. Personal Problems / Something Good - Negro Kiss by Bill Gunn / Anonymous 3. Piu Piu by Naima Ramos-Chapman 4. If Beale Street Could Talk by Barry Jenkins The homgenous grammatical development of cinema across the last 100 or so years has had a couple of natural side effects that have less to do with the possible than the Pavlovian. This works, and so it is…