From its first shot, here is a film that invites its own phenomenology, another potential description or requirement of the art film. We slowly zoom into a line of men…
Pépé le Moko (dir. Julien Duvivier, 1937) – A masterpiece of setting and staging. It’s in Algiers, within the Casbah, and it treats its environs and those native to it…
Breathless (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1960) – Other than obligatory and ubiquitous clips, have probably only sat through Breathless twice. What can you say about it that hasn’t already been said ad…
Magic Mike (dir. Steven Soderberg, 2011) – Despite a lot of time trying to find reasons to validate this film from a critical perspective, it seems mainly noteworthy for being…
Skyfall (dir. Sam Mendes, 2012) – Really want/need to see it again, but here’s the first of the Craig-era Bond films that tries to get away from the Bourne legacy…
We’ll see how this goes. It’s going to start as a list, with attempts to fill in the space between titles with whatever jumps to memory. All About My Mother…
Nashville (dir. Robert Altman, 1975) – Amazing how much you can forget about a film in five days. Nashville came across as so much more scathing this time around than…
Albatross (dir. Niall MacCormick, 2011) – An “independent,” acting-driven story about how “coming of age” is accompanied by lots of challenges, although these challenges seem quite avoidable and fairly atypical.…
The Bourne Legacy (dir. Tony Gilroy, 2012) – It rewards fluency in the first three, although not in a deeply satisfying way. It shows itself as something different not just…
Mouchette (dir. Robert Bresson, 1967) – And that completes half of Bresson’s oeuvre. Still need to see the first two and the last four. Mouchette contains many clear similarities with…
The Passion of Joan of Arc (dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928) – Paul Schrader calls this a key example of the “transcendental style in film,” from his book by that…
Play Time (dir. Jacques Tati, 1967) – This was goofy but not only that, maybe something approaching a Chesterton comedy, Father Brown or something. A clear critique of all things…
