• Past Lives

    Past Lives

    Shrug emoji, nod emoji

  • Bone

    Bone

    ★★★★★

    “He’s not worth a damn, mechanically!”

    This gave me the same thrill as when I discovered HI, MOM! (1970) and THE SWIMMER (1968). Love the choppy editing and the decision to go for the jugular.

  • About Time

    About Time

    Bro he told you not to use it to find a girl !!!!!!!!!!

  • That Obscure Object of Desire

    That Obscure Object of Desire

    ★★★★★

    Yep: this explains everything.

  • Typhoon Club

    Typhoon Club

    ★★★★½

    Along with A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY, the great "what-the-fuck-are-we-doing" teen movie we need our artists, writers, and filmmakers to experience and learn from. BREAKFAST CLUB wishes. Will shamelessly steal certain ideas of Somai's (with proper credits, of course) for a youth film I'm drafting. Somai's delays, his monotonous repetitions, his hesitancies, the bravely sudden mood swings of his characters, his willingness to stretch the scene to breaking point: this is the honest stuff of life, the tolerable heaviness of being.…

  • The Trial

    The Trial

    ★★★★★

    ….yeah this is the best Welles film. An endless text. Pair it with THE HOURGLASS SANATORIUM for Greatest Dream Films. Off to read those bloody letters to Milena.

  • The Angel Levine

    The Angel Levine

    ★★★★½

    Do yourself a favor and watch this tonight, tomorrow night, all the nights. Rest in goddamn power Mr Belafonte.

    youtu.be/ELf5y0_h8JQ

  • The Permissive Society

    The Permissive Society

    ★★★★★

    Mike Leigh at the BBC, SparkNotes edition: what do we talk about when we talk about love? Sex as distraction, as talk, as waiting, as lingering in a luscious void, as rejection, as an absence that structures the daily misery when a long-delayed lift once again unappears. But sex is never sex. Never just. There is no sexual relation. An insane 30 minutes — one of my new favorite texts. There’s a short story I’m writing and Mike Leigh and…

  • Dante's Inferno

    Dante's Inferno

    ★★★★

    Well who of us HASN’T spent a lifetime writing poems in honor of a woman better than you in every respect, burying them with her when she ODs on laudanum because you ignore her while she’s alive in service of your real muse Art — only to then dig up her grave 7 years later in order to publish them in a final desperate take-backsies act of mass ornamental self-branding to feed a chloral and whiskey addiction as your socialist utopian buddies drink themselves into moral-aesthetic-sexual oblivion? Who among us has not “Been There”?

  • Mildred Pierce

    Mildred Pierce

    ★★★★

    Completely ludicrous but compulsively watchable. All these arrogant lifeless little HBO shows like White Lotus and Succession could never. That said: I do now want to see Old Man Haynes’ 5-hour miniseries version with Kate Winslet, given that (from what I understand) Todd Haynes, by being more faithful to the Cain novel, sets a stately patient pace instead of the manic scramble that this is—and, moreover, explains more thoroughly than Curtiz why Veda turned out to be a monstrous little…

  • PASSION

    PASSION

    ★★★★

    …this was a STUDENT film?

    Hamaguchi, under the influence of HUSBANDS, pleas for some decorum in love but knows that is a losing game: interlocutors will stick the knife into you the first chance they lose themselves. He only got better from here!

    Violence of Desire.

  • Showing Up

    Showing Up

    ★★★★★

    For Frieze Magazine, I talked to Kelly Reichardt and Hong Chau on bones, carrier bags, and their latest masterpiece SHOWING UP. Read on here: www.frieze.com/article/kelly-reichardt-hong-chau-showing-up-interview-2023

    Excerpt:

    Kelly Reichardt’s latest film SHOWING UP opens in the US this week. Reichardt’s films start with small concerns and an endless series of questions, then branch out to reveal fresh, pinecone-sized insights into human relationships in the crumbling antisocial, anti-art United States. Like most of her films, Showing Up is set in Oregon. Taking…