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This one’s got all the hallmarks of a late 40s police procedural: location shooting (Boston and the Cape), a police detective deploying new scientific techniques, and some sordid sex-murder stuff. This one’s a little better than most because John Alton does some cool cinematographic work, John Stahl gets some melodrama out of his lead actress, and Ricardo Montalban (one of my odd but obsessive obsessions) is the lead. Nifty stuff.

Jia returns to his recurring obsessions, once again documenting the effects of China’s dramatic economic changes over the course of an entire generation. This one has more of a documentary feel than others: he concentrates on faces from a distance—faces that are never quite socioeconomic types, exactly, but mere faces, nonetheless. He portrays the nation from an analytical distance. Even Tao Zhao is more opaque than usual: she barely speaks; she moves through the whole thing like a ghost anxious about making her presence known. There is something deeply moving here, as often with Jia, with his tender affection for the marginalized masses. But I couldn’t help feeling a nagging worry with this one. His disregard for psychological interiority is part of his plan: as with his other films, he’s interested in showing how the economic miracle has left the masses behind: exhausted, confused, alienated. But by deciding to ignore—or perhaps to deny—his characters any psychic depth, doesn’t he run the risk of portraying the masses as merely shallow victims devoid of autonomy?

I first saw this as a high school senior (on VHS, rented from Tower Video) and was utterly confused. Then I saw it again my first year of college and fell hopelessly in love with it. That ion has faded over the years. Fellini seems outdated these days. I don’t think I’d seen the movie in fifteen years (and only went today because my semester came to a merciful end yesterday and I wanted to celebrate). But it’s always great to revisit it. What a movie. So cinematically lush and sumptuous. Seeing it again, I can understand why the younger me was so confused: it doesn’t follow basic rules of plot or scene construction. It’s mostly a plotless, episodic structure organized around the idea of futility, a plot that can’t move forward because of its ongoing tripartite critique of itself: from the scriptwriter intellectual collaborator, who’s constantly criticizing the movie we’re watching; from Guido himself, who’s constantly frustrated by the movie we’re watching; and from virtually every woman in the film, who all look him in the face and tell him what a worthless dick he is because of his hopeless idealization of them. But because of this episodic structure (and because of its gorgeous cinematography by Gianni di Venanzo (whose name is not well known to American cinephiles, I don’t think, even though he also did major work for Antonioni, Visconti, and Monicelli)), I found myself focusing on and loving seeming peripheral elements: the way the older women swaddle the young boys coming out of their wine baths, the vast, de Chirico-esque spaces of Guido’s dream sequences, the crumbling brick walls along the beach where Saraghina dances, Mastroianni’s random dancing leg-kick as he walks down a hallway, the way Mastroianni wears his hat. Self-indulgent? Certainly. Or, we might say… punishingly introspective. Filled with banal, mushy epiphanies? Certainly. And yet, Fellini follows almost all of them with a self-reflexive critique of that very epiphany. ittedly, it would’ve been better if Luisa had told Guido to fuck off in the penultimate sequence. But the final sequence, with the Nino Rita score and the dancing around the spaceship: pure cinematic splendor.

ps: This new 35mm print is gorgeous. But unreadable white subtitles in this day and age?

This had some fun popcorn moments, but as an explicit allegory about cultural appropriation, it was bit too explicitly allegorical for my taste.

Appropriately, given this particular subject matter, Perry intentionally deconstructs the traditional biopic structure (which is, let's face it, the single worst genre (though which, to be honest, I usually enjoy)). And, given Pavement's particular aesthetic, he also understands that he can't make a movie that hits all the marks. It has to be loopy, like Malkmus's lyrics themselves, a bit meandering, a bit nonsensical. So I loved this movie's messiness, its coherently incoherent mixture of tones. And, of course, it brought me back: lots of Oberlin and mid-90s Brooklyn flashback vibes. I don't know if the non-cinephile, popcorn-munching, aging alternative rock fans surrounding me got it; I suspect that despite their lyrical tastes, they would've preferred the full-on James Mangold treatment. Not me.

As usual with Cronenberg, the premise is creepy/great—the surprising confluence of mourning, an erotic obsession with corpses, digital technology, international espionage, and pseudo-incestuous rear entry/anal. An unusual collection of fascinations, to say the least. That's what I love about Cronenberg. And yet… it felt to me, at least, that this movie was all premise, all world design. For all this batshit wacko-ness, it was a surprisingly boring experience. Despite some wonderful set design, sometimes this felt like a student film; I felt this especially with the shot-reverse shot set-ups. They don't flow. With amateurs, you can pinpoint techniques: a lack of overlapping dialogue or bad ambient sound matching; but sometimes you can just sense that two ading shots lack any kind of emotional/spiritual/psychological/philosophical/sexual tension between the actual actors who were on the set. Mostly it felt like Diane Kruger and Vincent Cassel were simply reading lines from a script out loud while looking into off-screen space. Maybe this was the result of Vincent Cassell, whom Cronenberg cast, it seems, because of his obvious age and hairstyle resemblance to Cronenberg himself. But hairstyle is (typically) not the source of good acting. All the best Cronenberg protagonists—James Wood, Jeremy Irons, Michael Fassbender, or Viggo Mortensen—managed to draw out of themselves a creepily melodramatic deranged sex compulsion energy. But Cassell seemed emotionally uninvested in the idea of having sex with his wife’s rotting corpse. Which is a shame. Because with James Wood, that might’ve turned into a really wonderful scene. I can picture it now…

Amnesia noirs are always great. Or maybe at least solid. Here, a decorated soldier with amnesia walks out of Los Angeles’s Union Station, not knowing who he is, and the very first person he bumps into is a figure tied to crime who re him. What could possibly be a better set up? Speaking of amnesia, I had the strangest experience watching this. I’d been at Union Station in L.A. myself just a month or so ago and I telling my friend there about the beginning of this movie. But I couldn’t which movie it was. Then, watching this, I kept thinking to myself, two movies with the exact same beginning? Brilliant! Amnesia resonates so deeply with us because amnesia is such a central aspect of the human condition.

This is a Benedict Bogeaus production, released through United Artist. Bogeaus had the reputation of being the cheapest producer among all the cheapies at the time, but in this one he was punching above his level—by industry standards, still a low-budget quickie—because he hired Robert Florey to direct (one of the masters of the Bs in the 1930s) and John Alton as cinematographer. Bogeaus isn’t quite in the same stratosphere as Edward Small over at Eagle-Lion, so Alton doesn’t have the same freedom and creative inspiration that he had with Anthony Mann. This one is occasionally beautifully shot, but functional. It lacks the wildly poetic ambition that Mann allowed him to pursue in their collaborations. The lead actor John Payne is a second-rate Macdonald Carey. The script isn’t as tight or poetic as it could be. This is a noir about amnesia, but twenty minutes into it, you forget that there’s been an amnesia theme at all, which is a shame, because amnesia is one of the greatest themes in all of cinema—up there with movies about face transplants where the gauze-covered protagonist wakes up from surgery to discover their new persona.

Cheap movies are always able to reach these Jungian and/or Freudian pinnacles/depths better than big budget productions.

Most astute lovers of the narrative arts seem to ire a unified aesthetic: a story where all the parts fit together in perfect harmony. I often find myself, though, drawn to the very opposite—like this one, a real hodge podge of aesthetic flourishes. It’s hard to say in this case, exactly, how much of this stylistic bricolage is Welles and how much is Harry Cohn’s forced re-shootings. A little of both, from what I’ve read. Welles mixes and matches whatever he can here: location shooting with obvious rear projection from the same setting; sync sound with obviously dubbed studio recordings. And then there’s Rita Hayworth. The film treats her as pure icon: glistening close-ups and tortured sultry voice-overs that pop out of the narrative flow like flashing neon. Many astute observers would call her character one-dimensional. True. But her backstory in Chifu and Macao (not quite Shanghai—she’s not really that classy) and her obvious scheming with Michael from the opening sequences reveal another character behind the glossy facade: a desperately amoral chiseler who’s crafted her appearance as a shallow icon as the only way to survive. Welles’s screenplay is both tight and loose: tight in that he draws hints of tension that hang suspensefully in the air for a few sequences before they’re inevitably touched upon again (e.g., the fact that Michael killed a man in the Spanish Civil War); loose in that the three-way double-cross at the end is still a bit too complicated for me (even after six or seven viewings) to entirely understand. On the surface level, a lot of it doesn’t quite hold together. But that’s also the seed of its curious allure. A lot of what’s so fascinating is watching Welles the inveterate stylistic adventurer trying to push the envelope of what this tawdry B material might allow him to get away with. The echoey narration allows him the occasional tracking crane shot or a few dramatic high contrast compositions with the rear projector. There’s O’Hara’s unusually poetic monologue about the sharks. Or the Chinese opera sequence. And the aquarium, sequence, of course, more poetic than just about anything noir ever produced—except wait, that’s not even the most daringly beautiful sequence of the film. No. That is, of course, the funhouse mirror sequence. Dear Lord. Does that sequence really actually exist? Superimpositions over superimpositions over mirrored images of mirrored images? Are filmmakers allowed to have this much fun? And in the rough cut, this sequence was originally 17-minutes longer than what survives? As always, if the studios had just left him alone…. At his core, Welles really wasn’t any kind of highbrow intellectual; he really was just a commercial ham (hint: that’s why he liked Shakespeare and Cervantes). He could’ve made two movies this inventive every single year.

I’ve long thought—and think again tonight after this reviewing—that this is probably Orson Welle’s 2nd-least interesting feature*—and yet (because I am unrepentant, fanatical Wellesian) that comment only points out how great Welles is, because this is still a neat little stylish crime thriller, the kind of movie that would’ve been the best film for dozens of other journeymen directors with a dozen movies under their belt. Welles managed to churn this one out for producer Sam Spiegel during that brief window of time when William Goetz was running International Pictures before he consolidated with Universal (this was released through RKO), so Goetz was trying to line up some top-notch talent to work on super-slim budgets in the off chance that he might chance upon a hit. Welles was, meanwhile, invested in demonstrating that he could turn out a cheap thriller on time and on budget. And it works. ittedly, this is not Welle’s best acting job. He loved to play fascists, and he does so here again. But in his best roles, as with Kane or Quinlan, he managed to infuse his characters’ nastiness with a playful naughtiness and winning charm; here, though, his protagonist is a stuffed shirt. It’s all stiff jaw. Pure Nazi. His acting greatness comes out here and there in brief moments where he lets his radio voice take over, making love to the mic with his hammy, luscious baritone. The best parts for me, though, are Welles’s occasional wildly stylistic experiments. Early on, he has a great 4-minute-long tracking shot through the woods, followed by a sixty-second tracking shot, both with overdubs in order to give him the freedom of camera movement. In a following sequence, rather than resorting to simple shot-revers-shot structure like any other journeyman director in Hollywood for a simple conversation in a shop, he shoots Edward G. Robinson in a two-minute-long take where Robinson walks back deep into the frame and then into the foreground again, moves left, back into the depths of the image, and then back to the foreground again. It’s little flourishes like these—which most other people probably don’t notice or care about—that make this movie so interesting for me. Welles could’ve made one or two movies like this every year for a decade and they all probably would’ve been good, and at least one of them would’ve been a masterpiece. As always, it’s a shame what happened to his career; as always, it’s Hollywood’s fault, not his.

I assumed that I’d seen this one, but apparently, I hadn’t. Either way, it’s pretty awesome. Another low-budget police procedural released by Eagle-Lion, this one produced by Bryan Foy (who ran the cool B-unit at Warners in the 30s). As usual, though, the real auteur here is cinematographer John Alton. It’s not just that Alton creates deep blacks contrasted with bright whites, but that he sets up almost every shot with diagonal, dynamic framings. You never feel like you’re looking at a set; nor, surprisingly, do you feel like you’re looking at actual street scenes of L.A. No. It’s that you’re always looking at a carefully crafted image. Visual sculpture, even.

The very first shot was poetic and gorgeous. But then the credits rolled, multiple screens of fine print, like reading a drug prescription: every single international governmental or pseudo-governmental funding agency seems to have a finger in this. My heart sank. Oh no, I thought. This sure smells like a festival film. And sure enough.... No plot, no soundtrack, scenes that don't connect, characters without personality, long slow takes that keep getting slower and slower, but without any sense of formal play or authorial majesty.... ittedly, there were a couple good scenes of naked gay guys kissing on a bed of coal in a mine. Other than that: nah.

This is another great Mann-Alton collaboration for Edward Small, distributed through Eagle-Lion, again with Dennis O’Keefe as the star. This time, Alton’s cinematography is gorgeous but not quite as ostentatious as it was in T-Men (maybe because this one revolves around a thousand-mile road trip on a rural highway). This one’s defined mostly by Claire Trevor’s breathy, echoey, desperately yearning voice overs, backed, incessantly, by a moodily swooning theremin. For 78 minutes, the movie packs in a lot of plot: O’Keefe breaks from prison, but he’s got two women in the car along with him, both of whom want him and both of whom he uses for his own ends. I liked his character: completely amoral, gruff, and emotionally withholding; apart from his extremely deep and gravelly baritone, he has no redeeming values. But that’s precisely what draws these two women to him. There’s some double-crosses and some shootouts in dimly lit interiors, as you’d imagine. Everyone who deserves to die does die. I love movies like this. Also: someone should program a retrospective of crime films set around Lake Tahoe (this one, Out of the Past, Godfather II, A Place in the Sun, Beyond the Forest, etc.).

A personal favorite. This kind of inventiveness born of low-budget production was maybe possible only in the late 40s when the studio system was beginning to crumble, but the ethos of the studio system was still suffusing the atmosphere. It’s an Edward Small production, released through Eagle-Lion, so there was no studio head to impose his will. Small was lucky to take what he could get. And in this case, Anthony Mann took advantage of that freedom—ironically (but wisely) by ceding most of the important aesthetic decisions to his cinematographer John Alton. I’ve always been drawn to documentary-style police procedurals because the fact-based, by-the-numbers approach leaches out all possibility of ideological nuance or emotional expressivity. The only options left are purely formal. Mann peoples the screen with mulch-faced, C-grade character actors. Alton seemingly shoots every scene at midnight, with low angles, acute diagonals, reflective glass, multiple planes of space, and, of course, extremely dark, no-key lighting. The steam bath sequences, especially, are gorgeous. Less art, please. More of this.

I love postwar police procedurals, and this is probably the apotheosis of the cycle. Not a Dassin picture so much as it is a Mark Hellinger production, as Hellinger makes clear with his own narration. Because he wanted to make a hard-hitting, socially engaged picture in the realist vein, Hellinger (following the liberal logic of the time) hired two communists, Jules Dassin and screenwriter Albert Maltz, as his main artistic personnel. But communist aesthetics of 1940s America was never quite as radical as people in power worried that it might be. This is a straight-up commercial entertainment police procedural detective mystery story that treats the police department (and government forces in general) with uncritical respect. A communist aesthetic at the time thus consisted mostly of various arbitrary tropes of realism: It was shot on location on the city streets of New York—often with hidden camera—with a few working-class character actors like Barry Fitzgerald. That’s about it. This one focuses less on the industrial mechanics of the new police investigative procedures and emphasizes instead old-fashioned police work of cops working the streets, digging up leads, and acting courageous. Barry Fitzgerald is awesome. And the street footage is wild: kids roller-skating across the Williamsburg Bridge, horse-drawn carts in lower Manhattan in 1948!

I was thinking (on the N train to Astoria) that I liked the movie's weirdness. But that it managed to be, somehow, too plodding and (yet) filled with too many plot twists. But the more the movie went on, the more I liked it, the more I sunk into its uneasy transmogrifications. Then, in Astoria, at a middling bar that served middling tacos, a friend said that he really loved the movie, that he thought it was really "intellectual." Then I felt ashamed about my own middling response. ittedly, the movie was kind of slow. The various plot twists in which sexual desire went this way and then that way never quite felt real to me. The whole thing felt like a screenplay experiment more than it did an organic work of art. But the character of the priest was pretty funny. What can I say? I'm no expert. Now, hours later, after a friend's party, on the N back to the F, everyone feels exhausted; it's like I can hear the whole world slowly creaking open. Movies. Good or bad? Who can say? Maybe too complicated for me.

This one’s pretty groovy. Another one of the great hard-hitting, realist, socially conscious Mark Hellinger productions at Universal-International in the last years before he died. This one’s directed by Jules Dassin, who I always thought was, along with Abrahma Polonsky, one of the most talented of all the men who got blacklisted (sorry, Dalton Trumbo, but you don’t make the cut). As a general rule, I’ve always thought that there should be only two genres allowed: bank robbery films and prison break films. So this one works for me. Lots of great characters actors in this one. Lancaster’s great. Hume Cronyn is oddly powerful cast against type. Lots of great cinematography by William Daniels.

LAX --> JFK

This must be the most beautifilly paced film I've ever seen.

I'm in Los Angeles and wanted to drop by the Egyptian. In the first half, I was thinking that despite his reputation for physical acrobatics, Keaton's humor is, as always, quite reserved. Jokes consist of two men sitting down on a table at the same time, Buster walking into a wrong door, or simply staring off into space. But then the second half is purely physical gag insanity. The chase of the boulders, my God!

The racial dynamics in this one, btw, are "odd" (to put it politely). But then there's the politics of visibility: a direct reference to then-famous "female impersonator" Julian Eltinge.

I saw this twenty years ago and thought it was really underrated, and I really enjoyed it again this time around. It’s one of these torn-from-the-headlines, shot-on-location productions that Zanuck liked so much: a big budget that feels like a quicky. Richard Widmark plays the head of public health who fears that the plague might be spreading through New Orleans. He and a police detective try to track down the gangsters they think are the carriers. Kazan (who’s not usually my favorite (since he’s often stage bound and actorly)) draws on his theatrical background to create something unusually cinematic for him: lots of great work with extreme long takes and moving camera, staging in depth with characters moving in and out of frame. The night cinematography is deliciously inky. He cast lots of potato-faced working-class locals to add color. And all the bit parts are great: Jack Palance has a statuesque profile, Zero Mostel has an amazing comb-over. I loved the way they talked over each other. Genre conventions work wonders for directors who think of themselves as artists.

2004 Screening Notes: This was Fassbinder’s take on a film noir. I liked it. It had this really beautiful high-contrast grainy cinematography (by Dietrich Lohmann, whose work I’m unfamiliar with). All the characters – as it often the case with Fassbinder – were complete ciphers, which might bother me in other contexts, but this one was so funny (albeit in a very dark way) and so stylized and so twisted I didn’t mind at all. And the final shot – absolutely brilliant.

As always with Fassbinder, though, it’s the career more than it is the individual films. I wouldn’t put this movie on any sort of top ten list, which is true of most of his movies; but Fassbinder is top ten. No: Top Three!

2004 Screening Notes: Pretty much like I expected: really “powerful,” with lots of grotesque MTV-style editing. Enjoyable, but… whatever. This seems to be the type of movie that the non-cinephile would think is “artistic.” I guess most people would think I was being intentionally difficult by saying that the Matt Damon movie was better. But really… it was.

2004 Screening Notes: I really liked it, though it got to be a little too long and a bit too much excitement at the end in Moscow. I was thinking of writing about 2,000 words on the director’s representation of physical space through montage in relation to the chase films of the early 1910s, but I’ll spare the world… and myself. And make myself a cocktail instead.

This one’s an oddity: three movies in one. It begins as a Louis de Rochemont production, with all his signature stylistics: shot on location with a voice-of-God narration explaining that what we are about to see is all based on actual facts. The middle part feels like Kazan: it’s a low-budget crime thriller, sure, but he stuffs it with some of his old Group Theater colleagues: Lee J. Cobb and Arthur Kennedy, who are both quite good because the genre conventions dampen Kazan’s melodramatic inclinations. Then, finally, the last third is pure studio pap: a bat-shit melodramatic courtroom drama starring Dana Andrews, which was loads of campy fun, but which didn’t exactly harmonize with de Rochemont’s opening assertions of realism. I’m sure that lots of cinephiles more sophisticated than me would be turned off by this hodgepodge approach. But what can I say? I’m drawn to incoherent mess more than most people. It seems more honest than the seamless, well-made film.

I’d only seen this once before—maybe 24 yrs ago or so—back when I was steeped in my pre-dissertation research. At the time, I thought this was really underrated. And it was great to see it again today. It really holds up. The story is extremely unusual for Hollywood. It takes place in 1933 Cuba; it’s about a handful of wannabe revolutionaries who hatch a plan to assassinate the Cuban dictator and his entire cabinet by digging a tunnel under a cemetery and detonating a bomb at a funeral, even though they know that dozens—maybe even a hundred—of innocent people will have to die. But that fact doesn’t deter them. Can you think of another Hollywood film where the protagonists are a revolutionary, leftist terrorist cell planning mass murder? Not me. Given the subject matter, the majors wouldn’t finance this, and Huston had to go through Columbia to get it made, so you can see the low budget bursting through the seams here and there. There’s lots of cheap rear projection for most of the street scenes in Havana. But Huston gave free reign to his cinematographer Russell Metty (who worked on both Sirk’s color films and Touch of Evil, so he’s one of the greatest). So this movie is uncharacteristically beautiful for Huston, with extremely dark chiaroscuro and lots of dramatically lit, diagonal staging in depth. Beautiful to look at. Also: as a general rule, movies about people digging tunnels are always good. Also: Pedro Armendariz, Gilbert Roland, and Ramon Novarro are all in this! I really love movies like this: a hard bitten, cynical ode to political violence done up in a commercial style for the masses.

This one's pretty great.

This one was based on a play and it feels like it: an unlikely band of characters trapped in the main room of a hotel during a hurricane. I’ve never liked this one as much as other people and I didn’t again this time. It feels stage bound. In The Maltese Falcon, the characters are types, but they’re one-dimensional types, so they take on an iconic aura. Here, because it’s a play, the characters have two dimensions. But that’s worse—because the actors end up emoting, trying to express their dual nature, two aspects of character that end up, inevitably, as two shallow stereotypes. Also: noirs shouldn’t take place on the beach in Florida.

One of my favorite noirs. It gets better and better every time I see it. I don’t usually like plot, but I think that what Tourneur understood about Mainwaring’s script (as Hawks did with Chandler) was that the convoluted plot gives you the freedom to make the film’s real subject its own iconic style. The story is not really labyrinthine, but bifurcated, and then trifurcated within those halves. The geographical sweep itself is convoluted: New York, Mexico City, Acapulco, San Francisco, L.A., Lake Tahoe. The femme fatale doesn’t just double-cross, but triple cross. There are four dead bodies, three murders, and two murderers, but we can barely two of the victims or why they had to die. The femme fatale herself is mirrored by another double-crossing femme fatale as well as a good girl who’s also the fulcrum of another love triangle. All of this confusion makes the narrative logic dissolve so that all that we have left is a beautifully rendered meshwork of hardboiled tropes: Nicholas Musuraca’s gorgeous black and white tonality, Jane Greer’s icily statuesque face, and most importantly, Mitchum himself, with his profile, his trench coat, his ubiquitous cigarettes, his lush baritone narration, and his enigmatic moral vacillation.

2004 Screening Notes: A beautiful film. It stars the very young Sandrine Bonnaire (love her!) as a teenage girl who sleeps around, infuriating her family. Like all of his other films, Pialat puts a lot of distance between us and the subject, so we’re never given the opportunity to judge her, and he stages a lot of wonderful family fights with great physical acting. Lots of beautifully orchestrated movement within the frame. Like Cassavetes, but not quite as operatic. It’s a sad, ugly film. I loved it. Why the hell aren’t there any books on Pialat in English? Seriously. After all these decades, the field of cinema studies is still a provincial and impoverished discipline.

2004 Screening Notes: Great movie.

2004 Screening Notes: I know a lot of people who think that this is one of the most important American avant-garde works. I enjoyed it. Some of it was quite beautiful. Jacobs started off with one of those ten-minute Biograph films from 1905 (apparently shot by Billy Bitzer) that consists solely of static, theatrical shots that together make up a narrative with no internal coherence. Then he manipulated the whole thing to make something brand new – there's lots of extremely fuzzy extreme close-ups so it just looks like white and black globs. The best parts were when he sped through one image so that the whole screen became a blurry wipe of blacks and whites. Jacobs said people should forget about meaning and pay attention only to pure sensation. The last few years I've been thinking just the opposite.

2004 Screening Notes: This wasn’t as brilliant as I would’ve liked it to be. Though I did laugh now and then.

2004 Screening Notes: This one’s about an ugly love affair. At first I didn’t like it as much as Naked Childhood because I didn’t care for either of the protagonists and it’s just torturous watching them fight then get back together again, fight, then get back together again. But as the movie dragged on (and it does drag – but in an intentional art-film mode), I appreciated it more and more – more for its narrative structure than for its conception of the human condition. It was kind of brilliant the way he repeated the same scene (ugly fight, he curses her, he throws her around the room, she says she’s leaving, cut to: shot of him picking her up again in his car after their reconciliation) almost exactly the same way over and over and over again without ever delving into why they fell in love or why they got back together. Pialat doesn’t have much of a reputation here in the States. Which seems strange, because he’s obviously great. I think it’s because his work doesn’t fit neatly into the standard narrative trajectory of the development of film; historian-critics don’t know where to place him in the “triumphant” story of the French New Wave. He’s too idiosyncratic to fit into any historical narrative; but that’s exactly why he should be treated with more respect, I think. That being said, I do think his lack of human appeal in this film prevented it from reaching the plateau that Fassbinder (or even Bergman) achieve on the same themes. This is my third of Pialat’s films now, and I think I’m leaning towards putting him into the He’s Really Fascinating and Underrated and I Need to See All His Movies Twice Before I Can Think About it Him Category. Unfortunately, given his current critical status, that might not happen for another ten years.

2004 Screening Notes: Today I saw three movies, starting with a Maurice Pialat double feature. This one was really fantastic. It’s about a kid who’s shipped from foster home to foster home. Pialat’s style is very clinical – lots of slow, long shots, not much sound, no close-ups, extremely reserved acting style. The whole movie’s about a working class milieu and Pialat captures it really well – so well that all the actors seem like non-actors (but who can say?). Throughout, Pialat prevents us from identifying with the boy (we rarely hear his voice, and we don’t see close-ups of his face – the kid is often shot from far away, with his face obscured, or far from the center of the frame) so that we feel as confused and detached as the clinicians who can’t comprehend why he’s so troubled. Beautiful movie.

2004 Screening Notes: This one wasn’t my favorite. It was one of these things with a seemingly random conglomeration of shots and scenes – a psychedelic boy playing a violin against paisley wallpaper, a newscaster repeatedly mispronouncing the name of a Panamanian general, a man snoring, a close-up of a flower, an audience clapping in a continuous loop. Typical mid-century experimentalism. 22 minutes.

2004 Screening Notes: Beautiful – just a lot of superimpositions of abstract shapes and train yard scenes with intense colors and a soundtrack of clanging bars and whatnot. 10 minutes.

2004 Screening Notes: This one’s about a poor guy who gets magical powers to cure people and then bad shit happens or something. It was pleasant. But overrated.

Lots of twists and turns in this one. Two interconnected love triangles. I really loved the prologue with the three kids.

I’d never seen this one before, which surprised me. It’s good, not great. Bogart’s amazing, of course—like a Rodin sculpture—but he’s not the best Bogart he could be here. Cromwell’s no Huston or Hawks. Too much plot circling back to the same locations with the same bad guys from five scenes earlier. Not enough comic fun. I know some cinephile nerds have a thing for Lizabeth Scott. I’d never really give her much thought. But it’s revealing to see her play opposite Bogart because the studio so obviously intended her as a Bacall stand-in. She’s got the same facial features, the same hairstyle, and an equally husky voice. But she’s not Bacall. Bacall is more playfully sultry and perceptive. If anything, her naughty sexuality is the product of her intelligence. But Scott doesn’t have the same mischievous charm, nor the proud independence. She desperately needs Bogart. But Bacall never needs him. She and he are always just playing a fun game with each other, making up the rules as they go along. On the plus side, there’s about twenty seconds near the end that have now become (after a sequence with Lana Turner in Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful) my all-time second-favorite sequence of crazily avant-garde use of rear projection in a car crash.

I'd only seen this once before. Back in the 1990s. On VHS. At the time, I liking it a lot, but not loving it—maybe because I wanted it to have the same meandering, poetic reverie as Killer of Sheep. But it’s fun to revisit movies after a quarter century. This time I really loved it. It’s true: this one isn’t as poetic, and visually it seems pretty straightforward. But this time I ired what Burnett was doing with the screenplay. It's much more classically constructed than his earlier independent films (e.g., if you see a close-up of a knife in Act One...). But I was drawn to the way that Burnett both adheres to and disrupts that classicism. Danny Glover (who’s fun… because he’s Danny Glover) plays a classic trickster character here. He sweeps in—a ghost from the past, a poet-philosopher of a radically anti-egalitarian ethics—and disrupts everyone's lives. He's a harbinger of evil. But what was interesting to me was that I didn't necessarily think his philosophy was all that crazy. In fact, some of his little nuggets of wisdom actually made a lot of sense to me. So he’s a disrupter of the status quo, but like a classic fool, also a wise critic of that status quo. I also love the way Burnett organizes scene construction here. Most scenes don't connect or build off each other. We see disparate moments that don't amount to anything: Glover speaks a few words of his playful anti-wisdom, then the screen fades to black. My favorite was a scene where Glover asks someone to run an errand for him, then spreads out a newspaper to cut his toenails. That’s it. The most disturbing non-scene is a seeming throwaway conversation about a lynching from the past, which no one ever discusses again, but which seems to undergird the entire film and all these characters’ lives. But I think it's only because of Burnett’s slow, episodic, non-narrative construction that the few scenes of dramatic conflict feel so powerful. Burnett both adheres to and disturbs the classical ending, too. You can vanquish the trickster, but that maybe only creates a new world of illusions. The wounds are still there. The trauma of the past is still irrecoverable, unresolvable. IMDB voters give this a 7.2. I dunno. I’m no expert, but I think a 7.5 might be more accurate. Also: what a great title, huh?

As a random aside, if you ever find yourself in the Metrograph men's room, the sink on the right has no hot water, but the sink on the far left can get nice and toasty. I always forget this basic fact. But I suspect that if I write this fact down here, I will never forget again.

Perhaps the classic Poverty Row gem. Great to revisit it. The dialogue is snappy. The mood is dour. Ann Savage is a fantastically crude harridan. Half the film is voice-overs and rear-screen projection. The final sequence, though, feels like it was imposed by the PCA. He should’ve gotten away with it.

2004 Screening Notes: A really great movie.

2004 Screening Notes: Ripstein was on my list of directors whose work I’d been dying to see for years but had never gotten around to yet. I loved this movie. It was very much in that Fassbinder-Brocka school of melodramatic filmmaking from the 70s I like so much in which life is portrayed as pure shit. It took place in a whorehouse in one of those small, abandoned Mexican villages without electricity that’s supposed to serve as a metaphor for the human condition. The protagonist (played wonderfully by Roberto Cobo, who – shockingly – also played Jaibo in Los Olvidados) was a queen named Manuela who lived with his daughter (a prostitute) in the whorehouse. The movie had an unrelenting ugliness in which Manuela is humiliated over and over again. As Manuela watches local tough Pancho rough up his daughter through a window in one exquisitely painful long shot, it becomes clear that Manuela wants to break them up not to save his daughter, but to have Pancho’s violent affections for himself. I seem to be drawn towards utter degradation.

2004 Screening Notes: I’d been avoiding the movie – I was sure I wouldn’t like it. In political discourse, I can’t stand extremist, knee-jerk partisan posturing (maybe because that’s the way I am in real life myself). I’d read some of Moore’s stuff online recently and it rubbed me the wrong way – especially his penchant towards conspiracy theory. He tends to lob broad accusations that never quite stick. Is he, for instance, actually implying that George W. Bush wanted 9-11 to happen because it would enrich his family and friends? At times like that, Moore becomes just as silly as those right-wing assholes who kept harping on about how the Clintons conspired to murder Vincent Foster. Why not just focus on the disgusting Bush policies that are staring at us right in the face?

That being said, I was surprised to discover how much I liked the movie. It has all the weaknesses I expected but many more strengths that I’d anticipated. The weaknesses are chiefly in the first half – he has all this stuff about the Saudi-Bush connection that never quite makes much sense, and he can’t come up with a single example of the Patriot Act gone wild (no, the Fresno police investigating local peace activists, while annoying, doesn’t entirely get my blood boiling)(which is not to say that I like the Patriot Act (because I don’t), but that as a rhetorical movie-argument, this part felt lame). Other parts, though, were really quite moving – the scenes where he interviews poor teenagers in Flint about g up for the military, the scenes where he follows military recruiters around, the scenes with the mother who lost her son, the scenes of 9-11 footage. And all the parts of uncensored Bush moments are hilarious and incredibly ugly – how could someone that stupid be elected to a school board, much less to the presidency? In the end, the movie didn’t make me angry (as I feared it would). I left feeling incredibly sad. Afterwards, I walked over to the promenade and stared at the Manhattan skyline downtown for a long time.

The first ten minutes, I thought this was embarrassingly bad. Then James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave sat down to play gin rummy, and for the next hour or so, I thought that it was a charmingly oddball curio. Then, near the end, I started to think that it was quietly moving.

2004 Screening Notes: This de Fuentes movie was also great – this one about six men from a small town who Pancho Villa’s forces and how they die one by one in what becomes a years-long senseless slaughter. De Fuentes has a really despairing view of human motivation – unlike most lesser artists, de Fuentes makes his good protagonists commit the worst deeds.

2004 Screening Notes: Today I saw two by Fernando de Fuentes—both of which were great—de Fuentes is a real find. Both of them are really punchy—lots of plot and no sentimentality. El Compadre Mendoza was especially good—about a rancher who tries to play both sides during the revolution but who ends up inevitably betraying his best friend to stay alive. It’s one of those great early talkies where there are scenes with a musical score but no ambient diegetic sound followed by scenes where the ambient sound shifts in pitch from shot to shot—all the film school assholes would roll their eyes at that, but I found it indescribably beautiful—it really was an example of an artist struggling poetically with a new technological medium against all odds. De Fuentes plays emotions wonderfully well—everything’s implied, nothing’s spelled out. We can tell the protagonist’s wife and best friend are in love before they realize it themselves— all by observing how the friend plays with her child. And then the ending—really tragic— happens quickly and the movie’s over just like that before he lets you indulge in any sort of sticky feelings over it.

2004 Screening Notes: Two films by Emilio Fernandez. These are now the second and third of Emilio Fernandez’s films that I’ve seen; I like them, but I can’t say I’m a humongous fan. They’ve all starred Pedro Armendariz and either Dolores del Rio or Maria Felix. Fernandez is filled with mushy feelings for the peasants. His characters are types with little flair for individuality (ittedly, intentionally so). Felix is so haughty she often strays into unintended campiness. And Fernandez is no stylist – it’s all long slow scenes filled with extraneous dialogue, full shots as masters, and shot-reverse-shot setups for the dialogue. Even the cinematography by the famed Gabriel Figueroa seemed tame to me (he’s no John Alton, that’s for sure (though to be fair, no one else is, either)). The crowd was much more taken with these movies than I was, so perhaps I’m being unfair. I don’t mean to imply that they’re bad films – they’re good, just not as great as I wanted them to be.

Watched on Saturday July 3, 2004.

The Schrader script of the Kazantzakis novel challenges the traditional Christian narrative of a coherent Jesus. Instead, we see a man who’s confused—tortured, even—by his own identity and his relationship with God. Then, once he accepts his mission, his itinerant crusade is just as incoherent. Some days he preaches love, as if that one word is all he needs. And I love how they portrayed the Sermon on the Mount (let’s face it: Jesus’ single greatest hit) as a bunch of incoherent ramblings to a dozen shitbags on a desolate hill. On other days, he reminds people that he comes with a sword—and significantly, he’s much more successful at drawing followers with his talk of the sword than he is with his mushy, pathetic talk of love. As a director, Scorsese emphasizes local color. This is not the pristine Jesus of Renaissance paintings or of the Hollywood studio system: Dafoe is unwashed, his disciples are shifty losers, his crowds are thin, isolated in a barren landscape. We see goats’ innards, blood, people fucking. The risen Lazarus seems haunted, ungrateful at his return. Dafoe is great, as he always is, with intense eyes. Scorsese emphasizes his muscular body. I love the way they transposed the King James language into the vernacular. And I love that they portrayed Saul/Paul as a cheap manipulator (played by Harry Dean Stanton as a kind of chiseling used car salesman) who is the true (and cynical) founder of the religion. I hadn’t seen this since its initial release, when I went to see it on opening day in Phoenix with friends in my pre-auteurist consciousness just because we wanted to be part of the carnivalesque atmosphere of the protests. But it’s a shame that I hadn’t seen it since because this is a really great film. I usually have no interest in Q&As—in fact, I consciously avoid them—but the most interesting thing to me about the talk between Scorsese and Dafoe afterwards was that they both acknowledged that they didn’t talk much on the set. No need to, I guess. They’re both just good at what they do.

2004 Screening Notes: I was really looking forward to this one, so it’s obvious I’d be a bit disappointed. The first twenty minutes were shockingly bad, but once Rip Torn showed up, everything became much funnier. I love stupid humor and this one was exceptionally stupid – I especially liked any moment when someone got smashed in the face with a dodge ball or a wrench. That being said, it’s a shame that people who make stupid-humor movies think that just because the humor is stupid the movie itself has to be stupid. There’s still a love interest (with an average guy and an exceptionally pretty girl), there’s still good guys and bad guys, and the characters still learn lessons about themselves at the end. Pee-ew. That being said, I did like it when people got smashed in the face.

This was another middle-of-the-road moviegoing year for me. I only saw 151 movies! Pretty lame, if you ask me. And like most years recently, I found myself drifting a bit from the contemporary art cinema.

I’ve been skimming through other international friends’ favorite films of the year lists here on Letterboxd and I’ve been feeling uneasy. In many cases, it’s not just that I haven’t seen the films they’re raving about; it’s that I haven’t even heard of them. My European friends who are tied into the machinery of that continent’s cultural policy and film festival culture seem to be existing in a different dimension than me. Seeing these lists reminds me that counterfactual speculation doesn’t exist solely in the realm of fiction. Even the hard-nosed facts of this world often appear as a counterfactual dimension folded up into our own. There are worlds within worlds, even in just this one.

But here in this dimension, as a working stiff in New York, I’ve been stuck with the typical art house fare that can garner a Stateside theatrical release. As with most years, I peruse the critics' lists compiled by outlets like Film Comment and Slant at the end of the year, and I just shrug and say to myself, “Huh….” Most of them don’t seem to thrill me anymore. I liked the Radu Jude film a lot because it was vulgar, and I like vulgarity. I liked the Mike Leigh and the Victor Erice, too. But I wished there had been a new Tom Cruise Mission Impossible movie; that kind of thing—not the art cinema—seems to be my cup of tea these days.

I the experience of watching Film Comment’s #1 movie of the year, Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light. A perfectly nice film. I liked it. I was moved by it, even. But I had the strange experience of seeing it just days after I had watched, then re-watched, carefully studied, and taught Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa, made almost seventy years earlier. You can see why most people today would say that the Kapadia film is, on the surface, so much more “artistic” than Dutt’s melodrama. Yet the two films are surprisingly similar to my mind. They each work through similar narrative tropes: instead of a male protagonist choosing between two different types of female love interest, we now have two female protagonists dealing with two different types of male love interest. In neither one are the characterizations particularly deep; and I don’t mean that as a criticism—that’s just how movies function. But I find myself drawn much more to Dutt because he’s so much more sophisticated cinematically, with recurring images of doorways and stairways, parallel sequences of forward-tracking shots following the female protagonist and forward-tracking shots following the male protagonist, lots of dialogue-less scenes that seem ripped from the late silent era. I also prefer the heightened, “unrealistic” emotional of that earlier era much more than the sophisticatedly muted emotions of the present age.

I was struck by an article in the last issue of The New Yorker by Manvir Singh, where he covered a few recent pop-science books about “neo-Whorfian” studies of the relationship between language and our cognitive understanding of the world. (A Whorfian linguist is one who believes that the arbitrary structure of a language determines how its speakers conceive of and interact with the world. Long derided by the linguistic elites, a soft form of Whorfianism is making a comeback among some contemporary scholars. I want to believe in this new Neo-Whorfian project simply because it expands or challenges our normal ways of conceiving of how we conceive of the world).

I raise all of this because I was struck by various studies that Singh writes about related to a language’s verb tenses and its speaker’s spatial understanding of the relationship between various modes of pasts, presents, and futures. Singh, for instance, notes that “Aymara, an Andean language spoken by millions of Indigenous Bolivians and Peruvians, likewise uses space to talk about time but favors a metaphor about sight. In Aymara, nayra, or last year, translates literally to something like ‘the year I can see.’ The past, visible, thus stands in front of the speaker, while the future, unseeable, looms behind.”

That notion of perception and memory resonates with me. The present and the future are illusions. We cannot see them. They are, thus, not ahead of us, but behind, where they will remain, forever invisible, forever unreachable. We can see only the past. It’s right there in front of us, directly in our line of vision. Thus, when we move forward, we are actually always just roaming through our past once again.

I say all this maybe just as a roundabout way of saying that I don’t seem to resonate very much with the critics’ favorite movies this year (as I haven’t for most of the past few years), maybe because they simple don’t exist in the past as deeply as they need to for me to see them clearly. In Aymaran , new movies exist only within a hand’s reach. But the deep past is simultaneously within hand’s reach, about ten feet away, and on the edge of the horizon. The past has more space to wander through, and the more you wander through it, the deeper you can expand it.

This year I think I’m going to try to revisit more of the old classics. Maybe a project like that will give my mind more space to extend and amplify itself.

The list here includes the old movies I saw for the first time this year that affected me the most.

• Sailor Suit and Machine Gun
• Three Crowns of the Sailor
• The Wrestler and the Clown
• The Sealed Soil
• Autumn Days
• Toute une Nuit
• Drug War

1. 3 Women
2. The 36th Chamber of Shaolin
3. Bad Girls Go to Hell
4. All My Babies... A Midwife's Own Story
5. All That Heaven Allows
6. Armored Car Robbery
7. L'Avventura
8. The Band Wagon
9. Beau Travail
10. The Boxing Cats

...plus 102 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

I once joked to a cinephile friend that I'd like to make a second Top 100 list, with every single movie different from my original Top 100. So today, after sleeping in late and deciding that 18 degrees was too cold to go outside (that's -8 celsius for our international readers!), I did just that.

What surprised me the most was which movies from the original were difficult to exclude. Undisputed masterpieces like CITIZEN KANE and VERTIGO were surprisingly easy to ignore; even all-time personal favorites like ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS and TOUCH OF EVIL were easy to chuck aside; no, the ones that were hardest to exclude were those real curios that I've loved to champion over the years -- George Stoney's ALL MY BABIES (1953), Joris Ivens' TALE OF THE WIND (1988), and, of course, The Edison Manufacturing Company's THE GAY SHOE CLERK (1903), without a doubt the single most perfect film ever made.

It's fun to look at this list now. So this is who I am today? Huh.

• All That Jazz
• Annabelle Serpentine Dance
• Army of Shadows
• Assault on Precinct 13
• Au Hasard Balthazar
• Back and Forth
• Battleground
• The Big Sleep
• Black Narcissus
• Boy

...plus 96 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

It’s an uncanny experience looking back at this list, which I found in an old journal I kept way back in 2003. It’s striking (both touching and pathetic) how little my tastes have changed (but also how much they’ve changed?). I’ve had the same experience with music (and other cinephiles and audiophiles my age have confirmed the same phenomenon): the movies and music you fall in love with most intensely when you’re in your twenties define your adult personality and thus tend to stick with you. (And yet, I rarely listen to the Velvet Underground anymore these days. Why would I need to?) Maybe it’s that it's hard to become as ionately invested in an aesthetic experience when you’re middle aged. Or maybe it’s just that by now I’ve already seen all the films I’m capable of loving.

That being said, my tastes have shifted, of course. About 1/3 of these films don’t appear on my most recent Top 100 list from 2015 (and that was a long time ago). Some of these movies don’t mean much to me anymore: Battle of Algiers, Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman, La Dolce Vita, Foolish Wives, Intolerance, Lola Montes, Lust for Life, Syberberg’s Our Hitler, Rocco and His Brothers, Safe, Speedy, The Sweet Smell of Success, Travelling Players, and Umberto D. All good movies, probably. They just don’t seem part of any inner essential core anymore, that’s all. Who was I back then that I loved these films?

Letterboxd tells me that I haven’t seen 50% of the movies on my most recent Top 100 list (from 2015) any time in the last ten years. And some of those are (ostensibly) my all-time favorites! There are movies that have appeared on every Top 100 list I’ve ever made (4 of them from 2003 to 2015), but which I haven’t seen even once over the last decade. They no longer exist in active memory. The Searchers, for instance, is probably the one movie I’ve seen most frequently and studied most thoroughly, yet I haven’t seen it even once in (I’m guessing) fifteen years. Other all-time faves I haven’t seen in more than ten years include: The Band Wagon (still my all-time #1), Citizen Kane, Hou’s City of Sadness (still maybe the single most underrated film of all time, in my humble opinion)(and yet, how can I say that if I haven’t seen it in twenty years?), Color of Pomegranates, Fanny and Alexander, High and Low, His Girl Friday, In a Year with 13 Moons, Jean Dielman, Kiss Me Deadly, The Lady Eve, The Long Goodbye (my God I need to see this ASAP! ), Make Way for Tomorrow, A Man Escaped, Red Psalm, Fred Zinneman’s The Search (trust me: it’s a tearjerker), Touch of Evil (still my all-time #1), Trouble in Paradise, and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (still my all-time #1).

On the other hand, there are some movies that are incredibly important to me these days that don’t appear here at all. The three movies I’ve studied most intensely over the last few years, for instance—Rear Window, In the Mood for Love, and Mulholland Drive—don’t even make an appearance on this list from 2003. Who was I then that I did not adore these films? Who am I now? Who do I want to become? What to watch next?

• The 400 Blows
• All My Babies... A Midwife's Own Story
• All That Heaven Allows
• Andrei Rublev
• Aparajito
• Assault on Precinct 13
• Back and Forth
• The Band Wagon
• The Battle of Algiers
• Beau Travail

...plus 110 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

This was a decent year, maybe a bit disappointing. I seem to have slowed down on my moviegoing. It looks like I had 168 entries this year for 153 distinct films (the discrepancy because there were several movies that I watched multiple times in a week when I was teaching them in class).

As usual, I find myself drawn towards strange, formally idiosyncratic, imperfect works rather than excellently well-made movies (in that sense, Shinji Shomai was the revelation this year). I feel bad about not including either of the two Straub-Huillets I saw for the first time this year. Maybe I’ve ed through that phase. I’ve included Abel Gance’s La Roue here, even though I’d seen it before, because this year I saw the seven-hour rather than the four-hour version.

• The Wounded Man
• Eight Deadly Shots
• The Sky on Location
• P. P. Rider
• Typhoon Club
• La Roue
• The Stranger and the Fog
• A Simple Event

This was a pretty good year for me. Apparently, I saw 223 features this year, back to my middle-aged average after a slow year in 2021. I managed to get back to the revival houses a lot last spring, but the highlights were definitely the month I got to spend haunting the revival house scene in Paris, followed by ten days at the Locarno Film festival. That being said, preparing for and watching new arthouse films for Locarno and for the NYFF Currents this year made me realize what I already know: I’m not in tune with the aesthetics of the present day or with arthouse cinema. I prefer the sensibility of old movies. And genre pictures.

It’s always fun to do my annual January 1st ritual and re-read my Letterboxd entries for the previous year: as usual, I’d forgotten almost all of the movies I’d seen! (If I always forget the movies I see, why, then, do I go to see movies? Good question) I guess I’ll just have to watch them all over again someday.

So here’s my annual list of discoveries: old movies I saw for the first time this year.

• Seven Beauties
• Bless Their Little Hearts
• Hanagatami
• The Ascent
• The Asthenic Syndrome
• The Confrontation
• The Killing Floor
• Antonio das Mortes
• The Human Pyramid
• A Simple Story

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

This was my worst moviegoing year in more than a decade. I think I saw only 110 features. Unlike most people, this pandemic made me even more unlikely to watch movies at home. Next year will be better.

• Pictures from a Revolution
• The Story of a Three-Day
• Working Girls
• Chess of the Wind
• Brief Crossing

This was the second disappointing moviegoing year in a row for me. Up until Mar 10th -- the day NYU closed for the virus -- I was on pace to see about 250 movies this year. I felt like I was back in the saddle. The old Doug. But then... bleh. In the end, I only saw 150. Most on my projector at home. I don't like watching movies at home. Home viewing is NOT the cinema! I have now gone longer between screenings in a theater than any time since I was probably nine years old. I feel like I'm not really human anymore. I want this vaccine so badly. Only so I can go back to the Metrograph.

That being said, as I say every year: I am still pleasantly shocked how many fascinating movies I'm still able to discover at my ever-advancing age. Yasuzo Masumura was the real treat this year.

• Bush Mama
• Reichsautobahn
• La Cecilia
• Female Prisoner Scorpion: #701
• Blind Beast
• Red Angel
• One More Spring
• A Woman in Revolt
• Aquarela
• Elephant

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

This was my worst moviegoing year since 2012 or 2013, I think. Letterboxd tells me I saw only 136 movies this year. This was partly because of the ongoing effects of the collapse of Movie, partly because of a lack of money, partly because gentrification has pushed me so far out in Brooklyn, but mostly because – as with that last major dip six or seven years ago – I was extremely busy, writing furiously day and night, trying to finish another book (which is now, thankfully, finished)(but, alas, on to the next one, now maybe half-finished). Maybe 2020 will be better. I sure hope so. That being said, as always with these end-of-the-year lists, I was surprised how many great movies there are still out there for me to discover. These eight films were all pretty revelatory in one small way or another.

• Girlfriends
• How to Survive a Plague
• Nostalgia for the Light
• Despair
• Fat Girl
• La Flor
• Play Dirty
• Mother

This was an average moviegoing year for me -- I saw 202 films, which is less than 300 but more than 200. I had two high points of binging this year -- Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna and the NYFF press screenings -- and at home I watched a lot of Hugo Haas and low budget independent noirs. The demise of Movie kicked me in the butt. Maybe I'll figure out a new system for next year. That being said, I was surprised when I was compiling this list how many totally rad new old movies I saw this year. As with every year, it's always refreshing to realize that there's still so much to learn.

• Pickup
• Dillinger
• 99 River Street
• Murder by Contract
• Soft Fiction
• On Top of the Whale
• Two Acres of Land
• Conflagration
• My Name
• Tomahawk

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

This wasn't my best moviegoing year. Letterboxd tells me I saw only 161 features in 2017, my lowest count since that dreadful year when I was finishing my dissertation. Still, looking back, I'm grateful that at my increasingly advanced age, I can still make exciting new discoveries every year. It's enervating to know that there are still thousands of fascinating movies that I still haven't seen or are yet to be made. My discoveries this year included some obvious ones among the British Angry Young Men that I'm slightly embarrassed I'd never seen. But there were three revival series that were especially revelatory: the films of Alan Clarke, Shuji Terayama, and the great West German series at Lincoln Center.

I'm really excited to see more movies in 2018; I'm going to try to program more series at home, taking advantage of various secretive file-sharing sites and my projector

• The Entertainer
• Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
• Mur Murs
• Scum
• Rita, Sue and Bob Too
• Road
• Rabid Dogs
• Day of the Dead
• The Fair
• Black Gravel

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

This was a surprisingly good year for old discoveries, despite being a disgusting year in general. I keep getting older and surprisingly keep discovering new films. I saw only 205 movies this year -- not so great, not so bad.

I guess the big change for me this year was that I bought a projector for the first time, so I’m watching more movies at home. I didn’t go to the NYFF this year for the first time in ages, so I didn’t see many new movies at all. I hardly ever go to Film Forum anymore.

The high points this year were the Marlen Khutsiev retro at MOMA, the Tomu Uchida retro at MOMA, and the Koji Wakamatsu retrospective in my apartment. Mind-blowing discoveries, all three.

These are the 14 old movies I saw for the first time this year that I really loved.

• I Love You, I Don't
• Doomed Love
• The Errand Boy
• The Student Nurses
• Salesman
• I Spit on Your Grave
• Every Revolution Is a Throw of the Dice
• Les Sièges de l'Alcazar
• I Am Twenty
• Violent Virgin

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

I only saw 184 features this year, a fairly low number for me (I've been averaging about 225 over the last five years, while I used to see about 350 a year back in my heyday (ah, youth)). This list of eight movies represents the old movies I saw for the first time that made a big impression on me.

It was a strange year in that I saw many, many more new movies than usual and very few movies from the classical period (and only three silents all year -- ugh!). This year I saw 31% of the movies on DVD, which is much too high, but which I blame mostly on teaching and research (and Charlie Chan). Douglas Sirk was my most-watched director (all of which took place in the last week!). And BAM and Film Forum tied for my most-visited venue, with 22 each (which surprised me, since I thought I'd pretty much written Film Forum off because they show so much stuff on D these days).

Another fun list would be old movies that I saw again that meant a lot to me -- OUT 1 would top that list.

Here's to more movies in 2016!

• Blue Collar
• The Gold of Naples
• The Honeymoon Killers
• Je Tu Il Elle
• Kings of the Road
• The Mouth Agape
• Poto and Cabengo
• Red Beard

I saw many more new movies than usual this year, mostly due to having Movie. This list is ittedly arbitrary and nonsensical, but these were the two new movies in 2015 that made me really happy while watching them.

• The Forbidden Room
• Tangerine

These are the ten old movies I saw for the first time this year that moved me the most. It was hard to whittle this down to ten, so there are actually 13 here -- and still no place for THE EPIC OF EVEREST (J.B.L. Noel, 1924) or Fassbinder's NORA HELMER! I saw 11 of these on film, 2 on DVD. And I saw them in three cities this year: New York, Berlin, and Bologna. If I had to pick one, I'd pick WESTWARD THE WOMEN. Wow! What a movie! I saw it in Bologna and after the screening all the movie nerds were crying. I was crying. I love movies!

• Crossroads
• Coonskin
• The Blue Bird
• The Regeneration
• Cria!
• Mother India
• The Only Son
• Westward the Women
• Trafic
• The Kidnapper

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.