Letterboxd — Your life in film

"As crucial as the smells and tactile impact of the performances were to Pauline’s vision, Reiss’s films package the carnage into Lynchian nightmares transplanted from the open-air parking lots and fairgrounds to unreal space at once infinite and claustrophobic. His films synthesize footage from multiple primitive video cameras, depriving the film audience of the live attendees’ ability to scan the chaos from a distance."

Patrick Dahl for Screen Slate. “Survival Research Laboratories: Selected Video Works” features 1/23/23 at Spectacle Theater.

"Scorsese’s killed hundreds of men onscreen, but this film is his most human and engaging exploration of death. Mortality here is presented not as a quick bullet to the head, but a grotesque teetering between this world and the next. Even Scorsese’s most lurid episodes of mob violence (the vise grip in Casino, for example) inspire less disquiet than the sights and sounds of this film’s emergency rooms, which are choked dry by the boredom and agony of the nearly dead."

Patrick Dahl for Screen Slate.

"Walking a fine line between mockumentary and something decidedly more repellant, Man Bites Dog is a harder film to swallow than either Cannibal Holocaust or Snuff because of its attempts to be funny; it offers scenes of homophobic rants, sexual violence, and child murder in the name of satire. It speaks to the ’90s audience’s obsession with blurring the lines of the real, implicating the filmmakers and viewers alongside the murderous Ben for all of his heinous acts."

Justin LaLiberty for Screen Slate. Featured 1/20/23 through 2/5/23 at Metrograph.

"Despite the producers’ evidently homophobic pressure, Times Square is impossible not to read as a deeply queer text. Pamela and Nicky’s love for one another is entwined with their rejection of doctors, cops, and politicians. After a plainclothes officer busts them for running a game of Three-card Monte on a street corner, the girls evade capture by sprinting away through a porno theater whose patrons cheer them on."

Lucy Talbot Allen for Screen Slate. Featured 1/18/23 at Nitehawk Prospect Park.

"In one such remarkable sequence of Thamp, Aravindan intercuts between the circus performances and the audience, who are viewing such bewitching and dangerous stunts for the first time in their lives. The juxtaposition of the rapt viewers with the stoic veteran performers creates moments of sublime potency. But the fulcrum of Thamp is Aravindan's preoccupation with ephemerality. Through piercing close-ups of anguished, aging performers, the film reflects on the brutal indifference of the material world, which artists navigate with graceful resilience."

Arun A.K. for Screen Slate. Features 1/16/23 and 1/31/23 at the Museum of Modern Art in a new digital restoration.

"Though the impressionistic lighting of Two Small Bodies mimics the style of contemporaneous erotic thrillers, there is nothing remotely "erotic" about its stomach-turning climax. Rather, the film is—quite radically—a portrait of an exhausted and imperfect mother, one who admits that "it was nice to get dressed in quiet" the morning before she realized her children were missing from her home."

Jeva Lange for Screen Slate. Featured 1/15/23 and 1/22/23 at Anthology Film Archives.