Hamaguchi's most interesting and boldest film from what I've seen of him. Four hours of subtly daring visual and narrative movements that continually take your breath away without ever for a moment distracting from the film's understated "naturalism." Hamaguchi tips his hat in the 30-minute long workshop scene which effectively introduces the main thematic registers of the film: this is a movie about bodies trying to connect, balance, and center themselves around each other. That the film starts with the…
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History Is Made at Night 1937
A Lubitsch film without the winky innuendo, Borzage is too direct and matter of fact for that, History is Made at Night embodies the best of Hollywood melodrama and comedy without falling into either. Borzage embarked upon the film without a script, only a title, and the breathtaking pacing, yo-yoing back and forth between romance and tragedy throughout, gives it, according to Kent Jones "a "boldness that approaches sublimity." The final sequence itself is an all-timer in terms of sheer…
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I'm a Virgo 2023
It’s hard to be too critical of a work like I’m A Virgo, which so clearly has its heart in the right place. It’s a comic book-inspired Marxist critique of contemporary policing and economic disenfranchisement, replete with Michel Gondry-esque visual charm and an endearing sense of oddball humor. It’s also directed by Boots Riley, avowed communist, frontman of iconic rap group The Coup, and director of one of the most distinctive American debuts of the past decade, Sorry To Bother…
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The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed 2023
Joanna Arnow could be the millennial Brooklynite Charlie Chaplin if she keeps making movies so hilarious, so incisively critical, and so human as this one. She's got the sentiment and grace of Chaplin as well as the ability to mine richly textured gags from the simplest of sources: the way we eat ice-cream or microwave meals; the way we text and flirt; the blocky, bouncy interfaces of conference calls; the loving resentments of family life. Yet the rhythm is all…
