War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude)
I’ll have nothing startling to say about War and Peace except where do I collect my merit badge for having read it? Tolstoy has one or two points he’s trying to make—that history and culture are not shaped by single individuals, i.e. Napoleon, especially, but that those individuals are simply pushed to the surface of the wave of historical momentum or, if he’s waxing more philosophical, God. Either way, we have little chance of figuring out what’s going on. The other point is the spiritual cleansing which suffering brings, though this cleansing doesn’t appear to alter anyone’s life significantly; they just feel better about it. He hammers these points over and over to us, as if we are resistant children refusing to listen.
There is great character work here, lovely observation, and a complex glimpse into the aristocracy of the day with all their petty intrigues. I found the two characters I was obviously supposed to relate to the most pretty annoying. Pierre, because, though we are told he has changed and become more grounded and spiritual, I don’t believe it; and Natasha whose entire arc is to learn to suffer and submit. Tolstoy’s attitude toward the serfs, and to women, was a bit shocking to me having read Anna Karenina first, where his thoughts are much less regressive, even enlightened, for the time. It’s a nice progression to see.
Two films by Man Ray
La retour a la raison (1923)
L’etoile de mer (1928)
Experimentation and play are the essential impulses—of course!—in Man Ray’s films, made 100 years ago. Both have a kind-of narrative, viewed as symbols, motion, and forms. But the real focus here is to discover what this new medium called film might be able to accomplish, and any idea of success or failure is secondary to the experimentation. This Criterion disc includes music written specifically for the films by director Jim Jarmusch’s band, Sqürl. Who knew Jim Jarmusch had a band?
The Hajar Book of Rage (Edited by Farhaana Arefin)
A collection of poetry, fiction, and essays centered on the destructive and transformation power of rage; the first in an elements anthology series from Hajar Press. This collection centers only writers of color, writing about motivation and passion in the act of resistance. It’s great in an age of the feeble ‘Hope is Resistance’ mantras to find a work that centers rage, not as a masturbatory exercise, but as an honest and constructive response.
Carnival of Souls Live (Herk Harvey 1962, live accompaniment by Ben Singer and Joe Dowdy)
Carnival of Souls is a vibe film, not so much frightening as creepy and odd. The oddness makes it strangely unsettling. Made by folks experienced in industrial films, that documentary quality brings a unique and subtle disorientation. I had seen the film before; this time I was impressed by Candace Hilligoss’s brittle performance as a woman estranged from the world she finds herself in.
Ben Singer and Joe Dowdy’s work with their original score, on organ and saxophone, is just right. Neither too much or too little, it weaves through parts of the film and falls silent when it needs to—not just to allow dialogue, but to underscore silence as well. The choice of organ, which resonates with the lead character’s profession, is inspired and brings a fullness of sound which the saxophone can wind itself around.
Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Doctor Moreau (David Gregory 2014)
Megadoc (Mike Figgis 2025)
Two documentaries about the work of making films. Lost Soul joins the ranks of docs on the fevered insanity and crushing boredom, as well as the attempt at monomaniacal vision, we’ve seen in Burden of Dreams (on Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo) and Hearts of Darkness: A filmmaker’s Apocalypse (on Coppola’s Apocalypse Now). Young director Stanley has a unified vision for his adaptation of The Island of Doctor Moreau that begins to break down as the tedium of shooting (and not shooting) drags on. Eventually, he’s replaced by John Frankenheimer, ‘an old-school shouter.’ Full of gossip and heartbreak, Lost Soul examines how projects limp to completion and the damage left in their wake.
On the opposite pole, Megadoc is really just a hagiography of Francis Ford Coppola who, whatever his strengths and weaknesses as a filmmaker, has always spent a good deal of his own time creating a mythology around himself. The film follows the development and shooting of Coppola’s Megalopolis and the tribulations involved. It always returns to The Great Man, attempting against all odds to bring his vision to life. There’s rarely a harsh word spoken in the film, except by Shia LeBouef, who can’t figure out a useful way to work with Coppola (or is just an asshole. You choose.)
Alan Sparhawk and Trampled by Turtles (2025)
I’ve been following ‘slowcore’ band Low for over 15 years. Comprised of Alan Sparhawk and his wife, Mimi Parker, the band was distinguished by slow building songs with ethereal vocal harmonies by the duo. In 2021, they released Hey What, the record primarily responsible for getting me through the pandemic, named Pitchfork’s Record of the Year. Hey What kept the harmonies and the spare instrumentation, adding feedback and noise. It’s record meant (I think) to be played straight through.
Mimi Parker died of ovarian cancer in 2022, and Low was no more. Sparhawk’s next record in 2024 was White Roses, My God. His voice was heavily treated throughout, as if he couldn’t bear to hear it. This year, he recorded this self-titled album with acoustic band Trampled by Turtles. It’s an album about grief and what comes after. Sparhawk is joined on vocals on some songs by his children. The music is angry, sad, and forgiving. And beautiful.
How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor)
Interviews with the writers of the Combahee River Collective Statement, an essential document of Black Feminism, forty years later and an additional interview with Alicia Garza, one of the founding members of Black Lives Matter, on the legacy of Combahee. It’s a snapshot of Feminism in the mid-70s and the frustrations of Black women, especially Black queer women, who felt they had no place within the White Feminist movement, because race nor class seemed to be part of the conversation. The Combahee River Collective felt the oppressive nature of both and foresaw the necessity of attacking both, and capitalism itself, as a system of oppression.
Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (Rob Reiner 2025)
I do not have a nostalgia bone in my body. I didn’t find this film fun at all only pleasantly boring, in that there’s nothing to offend anyone, and the actors seem to be having a nice time. That nice time does not spill off the screen.
Foxy Brown (Jack Hill 1974)
Semi-regular rewatch, partly due to Pan Grier being a badass (of course), but Foxy Brown is set apart by Kathryn Loder’s eccentric, slithery, downright weird performance as the villain. I’m so intrigued with the choices she makes as an actor and the strangeness of her character that want an entire movie about her. Sadly, it never happened.
Stuck: Maurizio Cattelan The Unauthorized Autobiography (Francesco Bonami, translated by Steve Piccolo)
“I wondered how the mirror guy had figured out he was an artist. If I’d had his phone number I would have called him from the first payphone and asked: ‘Sorry, but could you tell me exactly when you decided to be an artist, or to make art?’ Because, actually, I was wondering something else: Do you become an artist, or are you simply an artist?”
This playful and completely unpretentious ‘autobiography’ is full of curiosity, mischief, and joy. It’s a beautiful antidote to the work and reports from the darlings of the stratospheric regions of the art world. I loved it.
Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy 1931)
Without forethought, I watched Little Caesar and Scarface in the same week and the two films, made only a year apart, couldn’t be more different. Little Caesar is stagebound, the camera rarely moving from medium or full shots of people talking in rooms. Nothing is going on in those rooms other than those talking. In Scarface the frame is dense and alive, and the camera moves with, and around the characters. It’s easy to see how Hawks made a name for himself early on. Robinson is great here, though, wearing a sneer like a mask.
For Your Consideration (Christopher Guest 2006)
Surprisingly toothless satire of Hollywood and the hype machine in general. It holds the underlying humanity of many of Guest’s film—people trying to make something despite their limited means and talent—but that humanity never quite percolates to the surface. Nearly worth the price of admission for Catherine O’Hara’s face after her plastic surgery, a grim death mask in mid-shriek.
Lux (Rosalia 2025)
The wonder of listening to music sung in a language you don’t understand is that you can concentrate simply on the voice. Rosalia’s voice on Lux is so complex and expressive (at times operatic, in the emotional sense) that it often overwhelmed me. There’s an array of influences present here, from Bjork to Patti Smith to rap and other Spanish Influences I know nothing about. Pitchfork calls it avant-garde classical pop, which is ridiculous, but gives you a sense of diverse elements. Through it all, the voice and arrangements are grounded in complex emotions that play out over the course of the album. Stunning music. Maybe one day I’ll take a look at the lyrics.
The Left-Handed Woman (Peter Handke, no credited translator WTF)
Handke holds his characters at a distance, trusting how they move, what they do, how they find themselves in the world and, occasionally, what they say to reveal their inner landscape. Marianne suddenly decides she must leave her husband or, more specifically, that he must leave. She provides no reasons for the break, but Bruno obliges, assuming evidently that she needs time to figure some things out. What follows is Marianne rediscovering the alien landscape around her and, incrementally, finding a place in it. A quiet novel that uses stillness to great effect.
Carnival of Souls Live (Herk Harvey 1962, live accompaniment by Ben Singer and Joe Dowdy)
Carnival of Souls is a vibe film, not so much frightening as creepy and odd. The oddness makes it strangely unsettling. Made by folks experienced in industrial films, that documentary quality brings a unique and subtle disorientation. I had seen the film before; this time I was impressed by Candace Hilligoss’s brittle performance as a woman estranged from the world she finds herself in.
Ben Singer and Joe Dowdy’s work with their original score, on organ and saxophone, is just right. Neither too much or too little, it weaves through parts of the film and falls silent when it needs to—not just to allow dialogue, but to underscore silence as well. The choice of organ, which resonates with the lead character’s profession, is inspired and brings a fullness of sound which the saxophone can wind itself around.
El (Luis Bunuel 1953)
Astute psychological portrait of an abusive marriage and male insecurity with the occasional Bunuelian surreal touches. The film explores how society—culture, family, the church—conspire against women to isolate them and keep them in violent relationships. A great companion piece to Nicolas Ray’s Bigger than Life, made three years later. Yes, people understood the toxic male 75 years ago.
Scarface (Howard Hawks 1932)
Surprisingly brutal (especially for 1932) mobster tale where the titular character has no smarts at all; he simply bullies his way to the top by brute force. Hawks keeps the action moving. I hadn’t seen the film in a long time and was surprised by how closely Oliver Stone’s screenplay for the DePalma film hews to the original, even in the suppressed incest angle. Muni is good as the gorilla and George Raft is very cool as the silent enforcer who falls for the gorilla’s sister.
Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (Rob Reiner 2025)
I do not have a nostalgia bone in my body. I didn’t find this film fun at all only pleasantly boring, in that there’s nothing to offend anyone, and the actors seem to be having a nice time. That nice time does not spill off the screen.
Die My Love (Lynne Ramsay)
I have learned not to wish fame upon anyone; now I would simply wish they might make a decent living doing what they want to do. So, I don’t wish fame upon Lynne Ramsay but, in an alternate universe, her films would be lauded for the vital work they are. (On a side note, when I first saw Winter’s Bone, I wished with all my heart that Jennifer Lawrence wouldn’t become a movie star yet remain an actor. My wish didn’t come true, but Mother and Die My Love show she might be moving away from that horrible fate.)
Die My Love is a beautiful, confounding, emotionally resonant film that churned up emotions I couldn’t readily identify and left me exhilarated. Ramsay understands that our memory isn’t the past—what we actually remember is the visceral present, as is what we imagine, dream of, fear, and hope for. The world around us forces us into what it calls ‘the present’, but our own idiosyncratic present is deep and complex, functioning with entirely different rules, if in fact there are any rules at all.
Die My Love is a series of emotional states, sometimes discrete, sometimes sliding into each other or overlapping, circling around the definable and ineffable feelings of early parenthood. It’s raw, untethered, occasionally ridiculous, but it is true. It is always true.
Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) have moved to the Midwest with a newborn and Grace is left isolated. Many reviews will say that she slides into madness, but that’s not what’s going on here. This isn’t Repulsion with a baby. Grace is simply visibly, achingly, cycling through every emotion that buffets her in the essential change of motherhood. These emotions don’t make logical sense though they are inescapable and real.
Ramsay is a master at bringing emotional states into visual juxtaposition. Her exploration of Grace’s ‘present’ is ruthless but empathetic, and Jennifer Lawrence’s performance doesn’t ask for sympathy, but doesn’t cut us off from it either. Pattinson’s Jackson is disoriented and lost, and still in love with Grace; he operates on the outskirts of Grace’s awareness, even though she longs for the intimacy. Die My Love is not Jackson’s movie.
This is not a ‘puzzle’ film, where the audience is tasked with separating fact from fiction; It makes no difference which parts of the movie are ‘real’. Every moment is real for Grace, not because she’s insane, but because she is aware, and Ramsay captures that overwhelming, baffling awareness with a striking humanity.
House of Day, House of Night (Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) publishes December 2
In the world of Olga Tokarczuk, people are not much different from plants. And that’s not a bad thing. A woman and her husband move to a border region of Poland and the woman takes up with an old woman, almost a mythological crone, who both guides her to the mysteries of the region and rebuffs her questions. There’s a lot here about death, cold, survival, and mushrooms. This is what Tokarczuk calls a ‘constellation novel,’ where apparently disparate elements are arranged beside each other for resonance. Throughout are the stories of the seemingly ageless Marta, and her view of history, war, and vegetation.
Things that Disappear (Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Kurt Beals)
In these short essays, Erpenbeck considers things that are lost to time: recipes, architecture, friends, socks, and meditates on what it means to lose something, and whether they are lost at all. The theme is, of course, transience, and its looming shadow, death. I found there was a quiet, cumulative power to this slim volume and, in the end, an appreciation for the small things we appreciate, then lose, then sometimes find again.
Three Short Films by Women
Masquerade (Olive Nwosu, Nigeria 2021)
From the Reports of Security Guards and Patrol Services No. 1 (Helke Sander, West Germany, 1985)
Diary of an African Nun (Julie Dash, United States 1977)
A woman visiting a childhood friend she may have been in love with; a woman adopting drastic measures to find housing for her family; a nun torn between the strictures of the Catholic church and the freedom of her tribal background. Each film, across nearly fifty years, focuses on a woman alone, discovering how to live in the world.
Three Short Films by or About Native Americans
Hooghan (Blackhorse Lowe, 2018)
White Shamans and Plastic Medicine Men (Terry Lacy, Daniel Hart, 1996)
Long Line of Ladies (Rayka Zehtabchi, Shaandiin Tome, 2022)
Hooghan and Long Line of Ladies are about upholding and reclaiming traditions in danger of being lost, a communal building, and a ceremony to celebrate a young girl’s first period. What’s striking in both is the joy of community and a connection with the past. In a sense, White Shamans… is the opposite, about the appropriation of Native American culture by white hucksters and new agers, who have only a cursory understanding, if that, of the traditions.
Our Father, the Devil (Ellie Foumbi, United States/France 2021)
A woman confronts the man, now a priest, who may or may not have been the child soldier who killed her neighbors and raped her. An exploration of trauma and how it shapes our present, as well as complicated questions of morality. There are no easy answers here, and the characters struggle with events in the past for which they may never have closure. (If closure is a thing which exists in the real world, which I doubt.)
The Disembodied (Walter Grauman 1957)
A voodoo movie. You can imagine. No Black people have roles, but they get to writhe and shriek dance in grass skirts. The Voodoo princess, who is not Black, is so over the top in both evil and seduction, you’d think she was in on the joke. She’s not. Favorite lines of dialogue:
Two white guys, standing in the jungle.
Guy 1: It’s drums!
Guy 2: They’re coming from the jungle!
A King Alone (Jean Giono, translated by Susan Stewart)
The narrative trick of Giono’s novel is to tell the tale of an inscrutable newcomer to an isolated community in the way the community itself would tell it, with random asides, digressions into local history, and reminders of the genealogy of those involved (because everyone here has known each other forever). The book is built around a series of murders and, though the murderer is killed, we never know why the murders were committed. Likewise, we never learn much about the supposed central character apart from anecdotes and a few stories he himself tells. We do, however, learn about the community, how they think (collectively), and how they put their history into words.
Moderato Cantabile (Marguerite Duras, translated by Richard Seaver)
10:30 on a Summer Night (Marguerite Duras, translated by Anne Borchardt)
Duras writes about desire and its impossibility. The impossibility of containing or mediating it, of surrendering fully to it, of being satisfied by it, and of being left unchanged. Her characters are either in the grip of something unmanageable or they hardly exist at all. The language is never purple, never overwrought. It’s simple and observational. Her characters hardly know what is happening to them, buffeted by emotions they can hardly contain, and when they act, their actions puzzle them. They are always attempting to catch up to who they are and never arriving.
Halloween Impromptu Vincent Price Fest
Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves 1968)
The kind of film that really annoyed me as a child. Promising witches, it’s just flavorless English history, with occasional torture.
Oblong Box (Gordon Hessler 1969)
Surprisingly good first and mostly second act, which begins to deteriorate with an endless brothel scene, meant to supply requisite T&A, and never regains steam thereafter.
House of Wax (Andre de Toth 1953)
Fun, with absurd additions to accentuate the 3D process (Are there any other kind?)
Dr, Phibes Rises Again (Robert Fuest 1971)
Theater of Blood (Douglas Hickox 1973)
Late-stage Price renaissance with these two (and The Abominable Dr. Phibes) let’s-find-interesting-ways-to-kill-people films. The plot is essentially the same: wronged man, once thought dead, returns to exact revenge on those who harmed him. Phibes is campy fun, while Theater indulges in both the camp and the ham.
Slow Horses (Nick Herron)
The crime spree continues but morphs into spy/interoffice espionage. The major revelation of this book is how radically well the series develops and expands the novel, and how brilliantly cast the series is. Having seen some seasons, it’s impossible in the reading not to visualize the actors in their roles whereas, other adaptations might veer so broadly from the text that they become two distinct creatures. This is not an argument for or against faithful adaptation, only the recognition that a faithful one is a work of art itself. Herron created a seedy, dour, damp and untrustworthy world which the series creators grabbed with both hands.
Vengeance is Mine (Michael Roemer, 1984) Criterion
Brittle interpersonal drama in which everyone is damaged, visibly and invisibly. Brooke Adams returns home, then flees her family and becomes enmeshed in the psychodrama of another. Trish van Devere takes center stage as a mentally ill mother, but I found her performance all surface; I couldn’t make contact with her center, which made her character’s behavior, for me, more annoying than compelling.
On Book Banning (Ira Wells)
Ira Wells contrasts book banning in Canada (which originates from ‘the left’) with book banning in the US (which generally originates from ‘the right’) to zero in on what censorship is about and why it matters. Drawing on a long historical defense of free speech, from John Milton and John Stuart mill to now, his ultimate question becomes, what is a book and what does it do? A complex examination for our reductive times.
Krapp’s Last Tape with Stephen Rea (Skirball Theater)
Bare-bones production (that’s a good thing) of Beckett’s play whittled down to a desk, a tape recorder, and bananas. Rea is perfectly haggard, resigned, angry, and guardedly wistful. The magic of Beckett is that he can do so much with so few words, and the minimalist production illuminates the depth in this spareness.
The Secret Life of Pets (Chris Renaud 2016)
The script is repetitive, but at least everyone isn’t shouting all the time. Kevin Hart does his best Chris Rock impersonation. Yet, the animated character work and secondary bits of comedy business are pretty funny, and it’s not full of comedy lines that only the parents will get. Nowhere near as bad as Madagascar.
My Neighbor Totoro (Hiyao Miyasaki 1988)
Madagascar (Tom McGrath, Eric Darnell 2005) HBO Max
So, I watched both these films with my 2 ½ year-old granddaughter. Lots has been written about Miyasaki, so I don’t need to compliment the depth of his films or his deep understanding of the fears and joys of childhood, nor his beautiful images. Madagascar, on the other hand, is the worst. Loud, garish, and pitched to adult audiences. (This is a real and visible trend in both children’s films and books; they are created to appeal to adults. The kids are a secondary concern.) Chris Rock does his Chris Rock thing, penguins replace Illumination Studios minions here and Ben Stiller is a lion who, on a deserted island must learn not to succumb to his carnivore instincts and eat his friends. (He just doesn’t eat. Ever.) This is the central conflict of the film, but—no worries—it’s abandoned without a thought in the final fifteen minutes. These people can’t even write a story arc. Did my granddaughter enjoy it? Yes, she did.
The House on Haunted Hill (William Malone 1999)
This film, twitchy in that 90s horror movie way, is interesting primarily for Geoffrey Rush and Famke Janssen’ sideways interpretation of Who’s Afraid of Viginia Woolf? as the married couple who may or may not be trying to kill each other. Everything lit up when they were snarling and sneering at each other. Sadly, that wasn’t most of the film. Too much Ali Larter, not enough Jeffrey Combs. Janssen and Rush were having fun, though.
Dream Story (Arthur Schnitzler, translated by Otto P. Schinnerer)
What a wonderful weird-ass novel for 1925. It’s impossible to imagine what people thought, at the time, of this deeply psychological, nearly surreal examination of the desires, denials, and secrets held within a marriage. Schnitzler is a fascinating literary figure of the early 20th century, turned loose into explorations of sexuality and desire by the contemporary work of Freud, he found profound ways to enact his exacting search. His play, La Ronde, has been adapted and filmed numerous times.
Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1968)
The bickering couple from Weekend transform from caricature to something deeply human. Contempt is a lacerating portrait of male arrogance and insecurity, as well as an indictment of the film industry and JLG’s own producers. Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli are husband and wife; Paul is asked to re-write Fritz Lang’s script of The Odyssey and, even after an abusive outburst from the producer, he pockets the check. The middle section is an astonishing argument between husband and wife in which their voices rarely rise. The camera slides around them as they complete mundane tasks, the tension slowly rising. “Why have you fallen out of love with me?” the writer asks, again and again.
There are no Godardian intertitles, no shock cuts (though a couple of beautiful, brief montages), no abstract sound effects, no figures reading from books. Contempt is among his most traditional non-traditional movies.
Benbecula (Graeme Macrae Burket, pubs 11/4)
This book felt like a character sketch for a larger work. Burket works himself into the headspace of a man, living on an isolated Scottish island in 1857. He relates a number of events in his life, his brother going mad and killing his father, mother, and aunt and the subsequent investigation and arrest, but the book just seems to spin there, on and one, revealing secrets we see coming. This is a function of the character’s headspace, but that doesn’t make it compelling.
King Lear (Jean-Luc Godard 1987)
Godard’s King Lear is a film suffused with sadness and loss, as any film of Lear should be. Here, Godard is anticipating his own demise—though he would live much longer—as well as the ongoing demise of cinema. For him, these destinies are inextricably linked. Like Contempt, King Lear examines the male demand for love and inability to return it in kind, overlaid with questions about art, both as creator and audience.
Godard sees no reason to stage Lear in any way; his film presupposes your familiarity with the play. He’s more interested in juxtaposing the central conflict with other questions which disrupt or amplify the themes.
One of Godard’s ongoing questions is, How do we create anything new? How do we break out of the strictures of our own minds to see?
In the film, William Shakespeare, Jr V is attempting to recreate, reinvigorate, or reimagine the work of his famous ancestor, trying to breathe life into an old form, or beat a dead horse, depending on your perspective.
In Lear, Godard seems to be willing these questions to a younger generation. There is hope in that impulse, which makes the film bittersweet. Overlaid with the central tension between Lear and his daughter, Cordelia, this passing of questions forward takes on a more textured and demanding meaning. As in every Godard film, no solution arrives.
Madhouse (Jim Clark 1974)
The thing about Vincent Price is: he never phones it in. In even the worst films, he is there, a real character feeling real things. Madhouse is a slightly above average 70s horror film in the let’s-make-someone-think-they’re-losing-their-mind vein. It’s not meant to be believable, yet Price himself is believable as the character whose sanity might be in question.
Krapp’s Last Tape with Stephen Rea (Skirball Theater)
Bare-bones production (that’s a good thing) of Beckett’s play whittled down to a desk, a tape recorder, and bananas. Rea is perfectly haggard, resigned, angry, and guarded wistful. The magic of Beckett is that he can do so much with so few words and the minimalist production illuminates the depth in this spareness.
The Wax Child (Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken)
In a complete departure from her other novels, Ravn turns her attention to women accused of being witches in 17th century Denmark. The story is told by a wax doll made by one of the women but carried at times by a number of them. Like Tockarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night, this book is rooted in the earth, in the wisdom and the darkness it holds. These women understand herbs, plants, healing but, in the world of the novel, it’s their deep friendship which poses a threat. Ravn based the book on actual trial transcripts. Its best feature, however, is the strange vibrant world it thrusts us upon us.
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude) (Mubi)
Angela ( Ilinca Manolache) drives around Bucharest filming ‘safety’ videos with injured workers which are really just a way for the corporation involved to wash their hands of the injury. In her spare time, using a video filter), she makes TikTok videos as an Andrew Tate-like character spouting misogyny. Jude put the film in conversation with a 1981 Romanian film about a female taxi driver, and Angela visits some of the same spots. What Jude is best at is showing how a slight change, becomes a compromise, becomes complicity. The last section is a master class in the slow eroding of truth.
(Hi)storie du Cinema (Jean Luc Godard 1988-1998) Olive Films
Godard’s idiosyncratic 266 minute, eight-part (Hi)story of Cinema is not a standard historical account, of course, but a broad, discursive, associative trip. Juxtaposed images, sound, and text endlessly juggle for prominence. Loosely bound by themes, Godard wants us to learn to think in images, or to learn not to think at all, and let the images and their juxtaposition enter us. This is Godard’s story of cinema, full of paradoxes, contradictions, and epiphany. It’s a fascinating, disorienting work.
Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)
“What a rotten film. All we meet are crazy people.”
A squabbling, venal couple stumble their way through the excesses of capitalism and revolution, while plotting to kill their parents and each other for money. The landscape is crashing and burning around them; they are neither taken aback nor particularly interested when they meet figures from history, or God himself, and JLG often tests our patience with shots that go on longer than it seems they should.
He wants us to be aware at every moment we are watching a film. He constantly reiterates the form, and the viewers place within it—to respond, consider, to think. So, emotion in the film or the viewer doesn’t arise in the same way as standard American films, and when it does, it’s not milked or nurtured but disrupted.
Make Me (Lee Child)
This book felt like it took five years of my life to read, as I diligently continued my literary crime spree. Jack Reacher is a cut-rate Sherlock Holmes, in that he notices everything all the time and puts things together very quickly. Action scenes are slowed to a snail’s pace as we read Reacher consider every physical possibility before acting. The wallpaper and furniture in each room must be described in detail. Essential facts are withheld so obviously it brought me to a rage and the female secondary character fades in and out of the narrative, present only when she’s needed as a sounding-board or in need of rescue. It was a slog. Never again.
To the Devil a Daughter (Peter Sykes, 1976) Criterion
Slow British Satan movie. Richard Widmark looks tired, there’s not a lot of action, but Chriistopher Lee gets to be gleefully evil. Part of the Nunsploitation series on Criterion, and what could be better than Nunsploitation? Lots, really. Once you’ve seen The Devils, Bennedetta, and Ms. 45, the field narrows to mostly soft-core lesbian porn.
A Truce that is Not Peace (Miriam Toews)
Why do you write? Miriam Toews is asked to contribute a piece on the subject, and this book is her roundabout non-response. Lives are messy in Toews’ novels, spilling in all directions, careening between comedy and tragedy at breakneck speed. This book is a kind of memoir, and it is no less controlled or constrained—life spills from it in every page. She doesn’t come to an answer on why she writes but it’s fascinating to read as she picks up one shattered shard of her life after another to examine. She’s not looking for order or narrative; she’s not trying to make a story. But she believes—deeply—in writing and in the writing itself, and she can hold that belief, and her lack of faith in narrative simultaneously to create work that glows white-hot and tender.
Kubrick (Michael Herr)
I read this book again now and then just for the language and the way it approaches the man many see as an icon. Herr worked with Kubrick on Full Metal Jacket, had many late night phone conversations with him afterward, became a friend. The book, written as a series of articles for Vanity Fair after his death, is not a hagiography. It is an exploration, warts and all, of an artist and his prickly relationship to the world and his work. It also includes an appreciation of Eyes Wide Shut, savaged by critics upon its release. The book is humane and enigmatic, reflecting its subject, and lovely to read.
Dirty Dancing (Emile Ardolino, 1987)
Rich girl meets bad boy in a sports movie about dancing, meaning sex. Points for a frank description of backroom abortions and their aftermath, and for not making the father a villain (though the mother is nearly invisible). The movie frontloads the best dance sequence and everything after is more of the same. Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze are fine until they’re called upon to emote lust or love, then their eyes go dead. You sorta have to love the ending, in its full 80s ridiculousness.
Stupid TV, Be More Funny (Alan Siegel)
Breezy telling of the initiating days and early years of The Simpsons, told mostly from the perspective of the writer’s room. A show nobody cared about on a network no one watched suddenly became a global cultural phenomenon no one expected and no one could explain. The book is best for its evocation of the grueling nature of comedy writing and the occasionally soul-crushing ‘group re-writes.’
Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould (Francois Girard 1993) Criterion
Lovely film about an enigmatic man, played with energy and empathy and a little bit of skewed joy by Colm Feore. The film enacts scenes from his life, interviews, fictional encounters, telephone calls, and also includes animation by Canada’s legendary Norman McLaren. It surrenders the pretense of a narrative life for episodes, asides, and marginalia and succeeds in bringing us into something that might resemble Gould’s headspace. And, it’s filled with beautiful music.
Dog of the South (Charles Portis)
I think True Grit is an amazing book, so I was excited to begin this Portis novel but, while it is funny and well put together, it falls into the genre of Southern Grotesque that I just can’t appreciate. My kneejerk theory is that Southern Grotesque novels became popular because that is how people in other parts of the country wanted—and still want—to view the South. So, the wacky Southern characters and their hijinks began to wane on my quickly. But, True Grit! Read True Grit!
John (Annie Baker)
Annie Baker writes plays in which no one says much of anything but, magically, everything gets said. They are spare, filled with silences and hesitations. They’re funny, and they are heartbreaking. In her style, I’ll leave it at that.
Soundtrack from Twin Peaks (Clare Nina Norelli) 33 1/3
I love the 33 1/3 series, where a writer picks an album they want to explore and are free to do it in whatever way they choose. Sometimes it’s a straight history on how the music was made, sometimes it’s a memoir of what the music meant, sometimes it’s the exploration of an icon and a question about taste (as in Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk about Love). This book was mostly too technical for me, as I know nothing about music, but I enjoyed the insights into both how Badalamenti and Lynch worked together on the score, and how the musicians built different moods for the show using the same basic elements. I’m re-watching season one of Twin Peaks now and it can’t be overstated how the music makes that show (and was unlike any TV music of its time.)
Final Destination: Bloodlines (Zach Lipovsky, Adam Stein 2025) HBO Max
Long story short: A neighbor comes to visit Mullah Nasruddin and brings a plump rabbit as a gift. The Mullah’s wife cooks a fine meal for them all. A couple of days later, the neighbor returns, expecting a meal and again the wife cooks something tasty. By the fourth visit, with no contribution, the Mullah puts a bowl before the neighbor containing water, a sliver of bone, a piece of old carrot. “What’s this?” the neighbor asks. “It’s the soup of the soup of the soup of the rabbit you brought.”
I think of this every time I see a remake or prequel to a once-popular horror film.
Lancelot du Lac (Robert Bresson 1974)
I found this film the hardest of Bresson’s to enter. Perhaps it’s the themes of nobility, duty, and honor—virtues I don’t exactly buy—or I’m just had enough of the Arthurian legend, regardless I found Lancelot du lac a bit of a slog. I am, however, always intrigued by Bresson’s shot choices, his framing, and his decided anti-narrative stance. (We never see any actual dramatic event; we either come into it before or after, or it’s shot from a strange angle.) And, Bresson is always doing SOMETHING. With this film, I’m just not sure what it is.
Breakfast of Champions (Alan Rudolph 1999) Criterion
Two things: I’m an Alan Rudolph fan, and I haven’t read this book in 40 years. The film has a great cartoonish look and fantastic production design that highlights a glitzy world at war with itself, and it has a number of good lines. The basic problem is that nearly every performance starts out over-the-top and then has nowhere to go. Nick Nolte appears to be having a good time and Glenne Headly’s performance is less caricature, more nuanced. I enjoyed Albert Finney spouting misanthropic one-liners, as well as his total confusion when he finds someone has actually read his work. But, but, the film devolves into hysteria—not the funny kind but ragged, chaotic kind.
It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over (Anne de Marcken)
A story about loss and longing told as a zombie tale. At first, I was taken with the beautiful prose—and it is beautiful—but after a time, the book seemed so gleaming and polished that it had no texture. And, it’s not an attempt at a pun to say: it had no life. Still, it is very good at describing loss and how loss, over time, loses its feature a just becomes a slow, gnawing ache.
Attacking Earth and Sun (Mathieu Belezi, translated by Lara Vergnaud) publishes 10/14
Harrowing fictional telling of the French colonization of Algeria, written as two first-person accounts; one, the wife in a family duped into become settlers by the promise of a better life, and the second a blood-drunk soldier charged with subduing the natives (which usually simply means killing them). The settlers flee France to escape poverty, are left to themselves with promises in a land they don’t understand. The soldiers have no recourse but to attempt to satisfy the bloodlust of their commanders. The Algerians themselves are only seen as shadows or savages. This is how imperialism debases everyone except those getting rich in the process.
The Trial of Joan of Arc (Robert Bresson 1962) Criterion
Austere telling, in the Bresson mold, of the trial, using only the transcripts. The camera is kept tight on Joan and her inquisitors, giving everything a claustrophobic feel. Also in Bresson mold, the actors ‘enact’ their parts; there’s very little emoting here and never a raised voice. Bresson was trying to push past acting and representation to something approaching iconography, and there are moments when the film achieves this. And, because the text is from the transcript, we can marvel at the confidence and presence of Joan who, at that time, was only 14.
Third Reich of Dreams (Charlotte Beradt, translated by Damion Searls)
In this remarkable volume are the dreams of numerous people Charlotte Beradt recorded in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power, before she fled in 1939. They reveal not only the complexities of the unconscious but it’s understanding of what was happening even before the awareness reached the conscious mind. Complex and chilling, it’s a fascinating document of the slow rise of authoritarianism.
The French Connection (William Friedkin 1971) Criterion
Friedkin brings a pseudo-verite style to the cop-on-a-stakeout genre, but there’s a lot about this film that is difficult to watch now. While it doesn’t make its cops god-like, it does relish their ‘single minded devotion to the job,’ which means putting large swaths of the public in harm’s way. I actually saw this film when it opened and I was 13, and I remember being struck—even then—by the gratuitous nature of the traffic accident scene (not the car chase, the conversation at the accident). It’s as if someone said, ‘There’s not enough blood in this picture. Can’t we have dead bodies somewhere?” I still feel the same way; my 13 year-old-self is redeemed. Hackman and Schieder are great, though.
The Man Who Planted Trees (Jean Giono, no credited translator)
Giono was evidently asked to write about a person he admired and he couldn’t come up with one, so he created one. This lovely short piece is about a man who works for the future and makes no show of it, asks nothing for it. It includes lovely woodcuts by Michael McCurdy.
Devil in a Blue Dress (Walter Mosley)
Well-drawn characters (and a lot of them), a rich grounding in place, and a plot that would make Raymond Chandler proud, Devil in a Blue Dress is what gumshoe novels about people who aren’t gumshoes should be. It’s also very much about race, capitalism, and sex: the unholy American triumvirate, so completely intertwined that they become a singular force; Power. And power morphs and shifts in every situation. Mosley’s characters understand this in a visceral way.
Night Moves (Arthur Penn 1975) Criterion
Color noir in the true 70s mold. The person trying to do the right thing messes it up for everyone. Gene Hackman is a private eye who, of course, exposes the dark underbelly of society. Great performances and wonderful use of darkness and shadow by Penn and cinematographer Bruce Surtees who was really good at this kind of thing; in the 70s they knew how to use shadow and darkness without making the viewer squint to see what’s happening. How have we forgotten this skill? Anyway, a nice lowkey, existential noir.
Sinners (Ryan Coogler 2024)
It’s a big risk to attempt to make a film on the plane of the mythic. There’s always the chance it will come off as pretentious, or silly, or just plain wrong. John Boorman attempted it with Exorcist 2 and it was all of those things, then a few years later he achieved it with Excalibur. Charles Laughton accomplished it with Night of the Hunter. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners operates on the plane of myth where archetypes voice and enact age-old joys and conflicts. Occasionally, in the film, we might realize this, but Sinners is so well put together, so well-constructed that that particular subtext can rise and fall and never intrude. Because we have entered a world, a fully formed environment with its own history and rules. The essential brilliance is to ground the film in music, all types of music, not so much to carry emotion—though it does that—but to carry history. Sinners is a film with layers upon layers of subtext, but you don’t have to pay attention that to enjoy it.
Oh, and there are scenes at night, and in darkened rooms, where you can actually see what’s going on. So, if every other cinematographer in the film industry can’t seem to manage that, Autumn Durald Arkapaw can.
Diane Arbus – Constellations (Park Avenue Armory)
Arbus’s photographs aren’t as shocking or grotesque now as they must have seemed when she was working. She was most interested in the marginalia of society: nudists, circus folk, drag queens, and normal people living their lives. Almost all of these photos were posed, so the subject knew they were being photographed and presented themselves accordingly in whatever way that meant to them. Her subjects often seem to be swallowed by, or taking form from, their environment, their faces sometimes in shadow, highlighting their clothes, their stance, their surroundings. There’s a startling humanity to these photographs as a whole, a humanity not of presentation but of being.
Senorita Etcetera (Arqueles Vela, translated by Juliana Neuhouser)
Three novellas by an underrepresented leader of the Mexican surrealist movement, written in the 1920s. Vela is interested in the many faces we wear, both those we present in public and those we use to mask our selves from ourselves. Part of the point here is to twist language in new ways while exploring the social constructs—the games—we all use to manage ourselves in society. And, like most good surrealism, it’s also fun: fun to read aloud, fun to savor, fun to hold on the tongue.
Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa 2024)
A fable of late capitalism and the grievance culture nurtured by the online world. Kurosawa’s film is pretty straightforward. Ryosuke is an online reseller who doesn’t care who he sells to or whether the products actually work. As bad reviews build, his online customers try to find his identity to exact revenge. The third act is a bit long, but it makes sense as Ryosuke eliminates everyone in his way. Yay, capitalism!
Repetition (Peter Handke, translated by Ralph Manheim)
Handke’s power of observation, and his ability to get those observations on the page is so acute, he can paint both an internal world and an external one existing at the same time. Sometimes they complement. Sometimes, like magnets, the two sides repel each other. This constant friction is the dance his work embodies. In 1960, Filip Kobal sets out in search of his missing brother. His journey, on foot or by train, carries him far from home and his search becomes less about finding his brother than finding his identity. In Filip’s observation and interaction with the changing landscape, we begin to see who he is. Maybe he does too.
Scarecrow (Jerry Schatzberg 1973) Criterion
I wanted to like this movie more than I did. There are some very nice quiet moments in it, and the friction between Hackman’s character and Pacino’s—much of which was due to different acting styles—creates a vibrant tumult in which their friendship can develop. They meet hitchhiking and have small adventures along the way. Yet, there’s a 70s existential gloom over the film that tips into melodrama as it progresses. Points for the indecisive ending and the quiet scenes. No points for the melodrama.
Blue Belle (Andrew Vachss)
The crime spree continues! The sexual politics of this book almost made my eyes roll into the back of my head and stay there, but it has a great cast of eccentrics, a sensual feel for the city of New York and a slow-burn plot of mounting dread. I especially liked Vachss’ writing on fear—how it feels, how it persists, and how to handle it. Protagonist Burke is a tough guy, but he’s not stupid. He admits to fear when there’s reason for it and I appreciate that.
Key Largo (John Huston 1948) Criterion
Lauren Bacall! Lauren Bacall! Holy hell, Lauren Bacall!
The Notebook (Agota Kristof, translated by Alan Sheridan)
If you’re looking for a cross between David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers and Jerzy Kosinki’s The Painted Bird, this is your jam. Written in the first-person plural, a set of male twins somewhere around 9 years old narrate being left with their grandmother on the frontier during an ongoing war in an unnamed country. As the brutal incidents pile up, we find the narrative voice growing more and more chilly, more self-involved between the twins. They create ‘exercises’ to toughen themselves up, make money to survive and, occasionally, hoodwink the townspeople. An unsparing look at what war can do to children.
The Intermediaries: A Weimar Story (Brandy Schillace)
The story of Magnus Hirschfield and the Institute for Sexual Science—the first organization of its kind—in Weimar Germany. Hirschfield was the first to separate sexuality from gender and propose the concept of a sexual spectrum. It’s a fascinating look at the burgeoning science of sexology, as well as the political machinations of the attempt to achieve equal rights for all on the sexual spectrum. Trans people were identified in the late nineteenth century and sexual transformation surgeries were taking place as early as 1920. Obviously, this phenomenon is not new, nor invented by the Left. The book also draws a harrowing parallel to what is happening in the US now. The Institute was eventually dismantled, all its books and research burned by the Nazis, and many of the doctors who didn’t escape were sent to the camps.
Godard on Godard (translated by Tom Milne)
These are early critical essays by Godard—the book was published in 1972—in which it’s clear he’s working to find his critical voice and aesthetic. Many of them were written for Cahiers du Cinema. Godard’s opinions on film can be baffling, capricious, and deeply felt. My sense is that occasionally he makes a statement just to see if he can rationally defend it. Sometimes he can, sometimes he can’t. What we as readers get here is a bone-deep passion gradually being honed into an instrument: of criticism, of filmmaking, of an artist’s life.
Queer (Luca Guadangnino 2024) Max
Queer is best for me when allowing Daniel Craig to pine, in love or lust, for another man. There’s pain there, and fear, and thrill, and danger, as well as an inkling of the awareness that capturing the prize might be a disappointment. That’s a lot of balls (pardon the pun) to keep in the air, but Craig does it. Throughout, Guadangnino’s storybook framing, surrealist dream sequences, and use of color heighten the sense of distance our characters have from the world around them. Guadangnino loves deep, oversaturated reds and I love seeing them in his films.
Public Enemies (Michael Mann 2009) Max
The politics of this film are confusing. It continues the American myth of the gentleman outlaw while portraying the FBI—Hoover, especially—as self-aggrandizing. The anchor for the audience identification with Dillinger as a hero is two-fold. First, he’s played by Johnny Depp at the height of his media darling phase and, second, Dillinger has a great love. These are supposed to endear us to him. It didn’t work for me. Maybe, I’m simply bored with Michael Mann telling the same story over and over. Public Enemies is ugly to watch, not particularly insightful and, worst of all, kind of boring.
Spree (Eugene Kotlyarenko 2020) MUBI
Superficial look at internet influencer culture, filmed through Go-Pros and phone cameras. A Spree driver (think Uber) decides to kill his passengers to get more clicks, but killing them doesn’t increase his numbers until he murders another influencer with a broad following. The film doesn’t make any points you haven’t already thought of, but the constraints in the way it was filmed makes it occasionally interesting. For my money, the best movie about the internet and what it does to us remains Unfriended (2014).
The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman 1973) Criterion
Radical interpretation of Marlowe as a dim-witted slob, meandering through a 1970’s LA. If you hold Marlowe dear, or expect each plot point of the novel, you’ll be sorely disappointed. On the other hand, the film has a kind of shambling grace anchored by Eliot Gould’s fuzzy performance and sterling Hayden’s roar as Roger Wade. Beautiful photography by the always-amazing Vilmos Zsigmond and a tune that, unlike in The Magic Christian, shows up often (and often diegetic), but always in a different form. A very 70s movie.
The Long Goodbye (Raymond Chandler)
Marlowe finally gets a girl (for one night). An epic Marlowe story with murder, betrayal, and a broad cast of vividly drawn character. Marlowe is more philosophical here, commenting on the rich, on friendship, on justice while finding himself increasingly involved with a rich neighborhood where everyone knows everyone’s secrets. The mystery is less important than the journey through it.
Silent Catastrophes (WG Sebald, translated by Jo Catling)
This volume is a compilation of three previously published, which examines Austrian literature from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. Some of the authors considered—Schnitzler, Kafka, Bernhard, Handke—I was very familiar with while others I knew little or nothing about. Yet, Sebald’s writing is so compelling that I wanted to read them all. The subtext here is examining a nation trying to find itself in the modern world and what makes a nation, or a home, a place to return to.
Turn in the Wound (Abel Ferrara 2024) Criterion
Aimless yet compelling documentary that juxtaposes Patti Smith reading Artaud, Rimbaud, and Daumal with interviews of Ukranians about the war, and footage of burned buildings and artillery attacks. It never quite comes together as a complete package—that’s true of many Ferrara films—but it’s emotional nonetheless, as victims of the war share their stories.
The Lady in the Lake (Raymond Chandler)
Dashiell Hammett is great, but Chandler is like sipping a really good scotch on a starry night, you just slowly melt into the rhythm and bounce of his sentences. Marlowe is a philosopher of people and their motives—both conscious and unconscious—and the way their motives leak out from their eyes, the set of their mouth, the tremor of their voice. He gets beaten up a lot, but it’s all a part of the racket and he knows it. He’s dogged, but he has a sense of humor about it.
Three Short Films about Desire (MUBI)
Pussy (Renata Gagorowska, Poland 9 mins)
Bug Diner (Phoebe Jane Hart, US 8 mins
27 (Flora Anna Buda, Hungary 11mins)
Wildly different visual takes on stories of desire. The jittery red and blue lines of Pussy reflect the jitteriness of our character as she tries to masturbate, is interrupted numerous times, but finally succeeds, her body melting then reconstituting. Bug Diner, stop motion animation with lovely characters (the mantises wear textured green sweaters), introduces us to a diner where everyone is hot for someone. Somewhere in the middle with vibrant, pulsing animation is 27, about a young woman who wants to be left alone with her fantasies.
The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine (Mario Levrero) translated by Annie McDermott and Kit Schluter
Levrero’s stories unfold like magic boxes, revealing new surprises with every page. It’s a bit like being told a bedtime story by an adventurous teller who isn’t afraid to bend into an unforeseen direction you couldn’t have thought of, then continues to improvise from there. Funny, surprising, and always rooted in a mundane world, Levrero’s stories are shiny baubles and it’s fun to hold them in my hand.
In the Distance (Hernan Diaz)
An off-kilter novel about the American West which follows a young Swedish immigrant from puberty to adulthood. It’s a book about solitude, both internal and external, and its gradual acceptance. It presents a hostile West, mired in the struggle to survive and a willingness to kill to do it. Uncanny descriptions of the landscape mirror the inner desolation of our protagonist.
The Magic Christian (Joseph McGrath 1973) Criterion
Essentially, a series of sketches on the theme of money and what we will do for it. A bit dated and toothless now, but possibly sharp at the time, it still has its moments; as well as early appearances by John Cleese and Graham Chapman of Monty Python fame. It does have that distressing late 60’s habit of using the same song, and variations of it (Come and Get It), ad nauseam, which made it a bit difficult to get through for me.
The Dain Curse (Dashiell Hammett)
This plot just keeps going and going until it seems half the folks in San Francisco must be dead or in on the grift. There’s murder (of course), paranormal phenomenon, ancient curses, explosions, and more murder. Our Continental Op remains steadfast, though, plodding or racing from one clue to the next. Hammett’s tough guy dialogue and way with description make the whole thing fleet and fun, even if you can’t keep up with who the villain is at any given moment.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller ) Everywhere
Somehow, George Miller continues to make installments in the Mad Max series that aren’t simply retreads of previous films. Furiosa adds a chapter in the series that moves past Max into a new direction. No one directs action sequences like Miller and those in Furiosa are a wonder to behold. Previous Max films have always been grounded in the sheer physicality of the machines involved. My only complaint here is, try as they might, computers can’t generate the same visceral thrill.
Sister Deborah (Scholastique Mukasonga) translated by Mark Polizzoti
Mukasonga tracks the appearance of Sister Deborah, a miracle-working Christian woman from Harlem and her transformation into Mama Nganga, a prophetess and a champion of Rwandan women. The book explores the political and religious tensions as they bloom and wither in a patriarchal society in which the women are expected to work the fields while the men drink beer and talk.
Enter the Dragon (Robert Clouse 1973) Max
For my age, it’s sort of amazing that this is my first Bruce Lee film. I mostly know Enter the Dragon from its parody in Kentucky Fried Movie. Lee certainly has a charisma, and an off-kilter smile that says he knows a lot more than he will reveal. There’s lots of single camera action, and a fight scene in a mirrored room that’s quoted in one of the John Wick films. Action films of the 70’s seem hopelessly stagey compared to the choreography and editing in today’s film, but they have a great DIY cheesiness that I love.
The Seers (Sulaiman Addonia)
“Stop, Hannah, he said. BB, I said, we’re black. We earn visibility when we’re on the verge of breaking the law. This is our moment to shine.”
You make it to London from war-torn Eritrea on a fake passport which you shred in the airplane toilet. You’re placed in a program for ‘illegals’ awaiting the possibility of refugee status. You’re not allowed to work or go to school. You don’t know anyone in England, and the only thing you have from home is your mother’s diary. She died when you were young and, since your father’s death, it has passed to you.
Addonia’s book posits that, in these circumstances, the only thing you have control over is your body, and you must use that body to assert yourself against the world. Hannah, somewhere in her early 20’s, discovers sex as an expression of her self. She doesn’t apologize for this; she revels in it.
Brilliantly ferreting out humanity in unexpected places, Addonia’s novel burns with desire, sensuality, and rage. My favorite so far this year.
The People’s Joker (Vera Drew 2022) Mubi
Inventive, low budget coming-of-trans story that appropriates both the Batman comics and the Joaquin Phoenix film to tell the story of misfits, mostly Joker the Harlequin (Vera Drew), coming to terms with themselves in a Gotham City that doesn’t care. Fun back projections and miniature sets, animation, a song or two, and lots of irreverent humor. (If you’ll be offended by the idea that Batman may not only be gay, but also a ‘groomer,’ maybe you should stay away.) Great DIY filmmaking, somewhat reminiscent of Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
Occupation Journal (Jean Giono) translated by Jody Gladding
Giono is a much-loved French author, little known in the States, who created a vast body of work in multiple genres. This book is taken from the journals written during the occupation of France in World War 2. It provides a lucid snapshot of a man attempting his creative work with planes overhead and bombs going off around him. In the meantime, he has to make enough money to keep his family alive, occasionally rescue friends from the German authorities, harbor a member of the Resistance, consider rumors of his own possible arrest, and accept an endless string of deaths. Through it all, he works on projects and outlines others. A quiet, nuanced look at an artist just trying to get by.
Final Destination (James Wong 2000) Max
The Final Destination films can occasionally hit a Rube Goldberg meets the Marquis de Sade aesthetic in the ingenious ways they manage to kill off their characters. This one is no different. But it’s prime distinction is in featuring the quietest bus in the world.
Alone, Australia – Season 3 (2023) Netflix
I am a terrible person. I was actively rooting against the contestant who was constantly professing his faith in God and the purity of his Christian faith. At first, I just wanted him to give up, but after a few episodes I would have cheered had he fallen to his death from a great height. Anyway.
The Alone series has a genius concept. Drop ten people in some wild hinterland, far away from each other, and ask them to survive on their own and film themselves nearly constantly. Their only contact with another soul is the occasional medcheck. They can’t know how the other contestants are doing. The first couple of seasons were the best: no one quite knew what they were doing. A couple of seasons in, the contestants had watched the previous—they had strategies, etc. But most disconcerting was that their monologues became more and more about the prize money.
This season is fascinating, both for its incredibly harsh conditions and for the resilience of the final two. Who rarely talked about money.
Companion (Drew Hancock 2025) Everywhere
Tight little horror film about a sex-bot gone wrong, or lured toward wrongdoing by its owner. The movie knows what it wants to do and does it with little fuss and a couple of surprises. Do we want to live in a world where we’re not sure who is human and who isn’t? The film only raises this question tangentially, though it does consider the ways humans would adopt then mistreat their robot friends. Mostly, it just wants to be a good little thriller, and it achieves that.
Little Murders (Alan Arkin 1971) Criterion
Feiffer’s comedy keeps you switching sides; who do we sympathize with here? In the end, the answer id no one. What begins as a skewed meet-cute comedy becomes more paranoid as it develops, with New York serving as a world in which there is everything to fear. All of the performances are over the top except, Elliot Gould, whose character and delivery suggest a kind of somnambulant acceptance, a predecessor to Chance the Gardener in 1979’s Being There.
Ed Wood (Tim Burton 1994) Criterion
Is this the last Time Burton movie that was any good at all. Mars Attacks has its moments, but it’s been a downhill slog since. You can see the beginnings of Johnny Depp’s pick-one-affectation-and-make-it-a-character approach here, but the movie is still fun. It pretty much refuses to be cynical about Wood’s wild-eyed enthusiasm, creating a world of misfits around him who have nothing better to do than have faith in him.
Ennemonde (Jean Giono) translated by Bill Johnston
Bookended by ravishing descriptions of landscapes, Ennemonde is about people (and families) who live in solitude in various harsh landscapes and how they survive and even flourish. The title character, a wily mountain woman with an appetite for romance and occasional violence, is rendered lovingly, as are those around her. Giono’s style is deceptively straightforward, yet captivating and humane, tempered with a sly, dry humor it might be easy to miss. His plots—well, he doesn’t so much have plots as incidents that begin to form into something approaching a story.
Speaking in Tongues (J.M. Coetzee/Mariana DiMopulos) publishes 5/25
J.M. Coetzee (Disgrace, Waiting for the Barbarians) discusses the issues and intricacies of translation with Dimopilous, a translator he’s worked with extensively. They talk about the colonization of languages by culture and the state (That is, the languages and dialects lost when an official language is mandated), the complexity of translating gendered language into ungendered language, as well as the role, and duty, of the translator. The book is written as a dialogue. If you read much translation and sometimes wonder how it works, this isn’t a bad place to start.
World without End (Edward Bernd 1956) HBO
Virile American males teach the pale and over-intellectual Earthlings of the future how to defend themselves from mutants by, basically, just beating them up. Needless to say, the women of the future fall in love with our virile Americans. In the end, all is well in the future. Rest easy.
Antwerp (Roberto Bolano, translated by Natasha Wimmer)
A deconstructed noir detective novel in which the author has a speaking part, Antwerp is told in short sections which resemble photographs we can enter and walk around in, and its scenes are generally the scenes which would be left out of a noir, the things happening on the fringes of the action, the life of the characters before, or after, the murder. The vitality of the book derives from these images and its understanding of the aimlessness of poverty and loneliness.
The Golden Notebook (Doris Lessing)
I first read this novel over forty years ago. It was during a period in my life when I was reading Lessing, Didion, and Marguerite Duras, as an offset to the white male writers I’d been told were the pantheon. (Virginia Wolff didn’t even make the list at the time.) Perhaps you can imagine the state these three authors put early-twenties Steve in. It was a mixture of confusion, exhilaration, and doubt. Above all, I felt I’d found types of writing that spoke more deeply to me than much of the male canon. Lessing’s novel profoundly influenced me, both in its ruthlessness toward the self, and in its form.
In the late fifties and early sixties when she was writing it, Lessing had left the Communist Party after years of dedicated Party work, as the first hints of Stalin’s atrocities began in whispers. She had also entered psychotherapy. The relentless self-criticism in the Party and the relentless self-examination of therapy created a perfect storm, enabling her to address the fragmentation of the modern human, the endless romance and disgust of gender relationships, and the ways one might begin to write about all of these things at once.
The result is a kitchen-sink novel, in which she attempts every form at hand, and layers them in ways that intersect, contradict, and confuse. While the relentless self-examination can become tedious at times, the sheer force of will driving the novel is overwhelming. Above all, she’s attempting to document the way a self can fracture, dis-integrate, then put itself back together. Her attempts don’t always work, but they are honest and compelling. And she gives herself no quarter, as the novel is clearly somewhat autobiographical, in the same way the protagonist, Anna, a writer; in the same way Anna’s writing about Emma, her character, is clearly autobiographical.
A novel about friendship, mirrored in ways by Ferrante’s, about gender and its aspirations and humiliations, about the discovery of self, as well as about the ways creativity manifests to compel the artist, The Golden Notebook retains much of its original power to seduce and shock.
Harrow (Joy Williams)
A young girl navigates a world after ecological disaster. Sometimes preachy about the ways humanity denies and defiles the environment, Williams has a Flannery O’Connor-esque disdain for humans and their many sins., which is a reputable stance. Just not one I have a lot of patience for.
Season of the Swamp (Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa Dillman)
Herrera imagines the 18 months Benito Juarez spent away from Mexico in the midst of political struggle there. (He eventually became the first indigenous President of Mexico.) Season of the Swamp drops Juarez in New Orleans and, in many ways the book is a love letter to the city. But, more than that, it’s about the wonder and anxiety of finding yourself in a new world and learning to navigate it. Here, America is a land of chaos, of many worlds , languages, and terrors.
Grand Theft Hamlet (Pinny Grylls, Sam Crane) MUBI
In the height of the pandemic lockdown, two out of work actors who spend too much time gaming decide to attempt to stage a full production of Hamlet inside the cars and carnage game, Grand Theft Auto. This film takes place entirely inside the game as they audition, rehearse, and mount Hamlet, while attempting to avoid being shot, run over, or killed in ways involving blimps. It’s ridiculous, sometimes hilarious, occasionally compelling, and fun to watch. The full production was finally staged in the game, but I can’t find the date of the event.
The Utopian Generation (Pepetela) translated by David Brookshaw
A novel of idealism, disillusionment, and resignation. Pepetela documents the war for Angolan independence through five Angolans over thirty years. We meet them first in Lisbon, in school, arguing politics, communism, and colonialism, then follow the through the war and after. I didn’t expect to like this book as much as I did, but I found myself drawn to the characters and their conversations, as they attempted to work out what they thought and felt, as well as how each responded to the broken promise of independence.
The Villain’s Dance – Fiston Mwanza Mujilla
Clearly influenced by jazz, Mujilla’s vibrant, rhythmic language propels us into the 90s streets of Zaire as Mobuto’s regime is crumbling. Our characters are boys who live on the street,hustling for whatever they can, not always legally, and observing the decay of a government at ground level. From the danger of the diamond mines to their tenuous survival on the street, The Villain’s Dance shares a colorful, unstable world with compassion and a humor that is borne of desperation.
Dahomey (Mati Diop) 2024/You Hide Me (Nii Kwate Owoo) 1970
Two short films about the theft of African art and culture by their colonizers. You Hide Me pulls no punches in laying out how the museumification of African relics was meant to promote and support a white supremacist agenda. In Dahomey, about the repatriation of 26 artifacts (among the thousands held) to the Republic of Benin, Diop imagines the artifacts themselves speaking, of their homelessness and their anxiety for return, then she turns the film over to students, discussing how much these objects should or should not mean to them.
The Substance (Coralie Fargeat) Everywhere
A beautifully over-the-top scream of rage about objectification, aging, and the terror of becoming invisible. Fargeat pulls out all the stops in this gruesome feminist body horror tale, continuing her mission to make genre films from a feminist perspective and she joins a number of brilliant French women making films, including Julie Ducournau and Celine Sciamma.
Wasp – Andrea Arnold. (Mubi)
Zoe lives in the projects and is too young to have the four kids she has, and she doesn’t really have the skills to take care of them. Still, she’s young and desperate for someone to care for her. So, she drops her kids in the parking lot of a pub to attempt a date with someone inside. The beauty of Arnold’s film is that we can feel empathy for Zoe and her need for romance, even as we are horrified by what might happen to the children.
The Tube with a Hat – Radu Jude. (Mubi)
A short film in which a man and his son lug a large TV across field, mud, and highways into the neighboring town for repair. Not miserabilist. An offhand, touching story about parenthood.
North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock) Criterion
Not my favorite Hitchcock, though it’s full of bravura sequences but man, that final cut is great.
Big Fiction: how Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature (Dan Sinykin) Columbia University Press
Sinykin tracks the American publishing industry from the late 19th Century to now, from personal publishing houses with dedicated (and underpaid) staff to an industry run by accountants, beholden to huge multinational conglomerates that expect endless growth. He focuses on the transformations of particular houses, but also uses the books and authors being published at the time as a guiding principle for changes in the industry. Big Fiction explains how Big Money decides what we can read and what is unavailable and how that has changed over the last century.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Linda Poitras) HBO
This documentary packs a lot in: Nan Goldin’s early life and career, the devastation of the AIDS crisis, specifically on the NY art scene, the reprehensible acts of the Sackler family in marketing Oxycodone, and the Goldin-led attack on art museums around the world who allowed the Sacklers to whitewash their reputation by buying wings and financing collections. It’s also a master class in finding how you can resist in your corner of the world, and doing it.
Nosferatu (Robert Eggers)
Pretty isn’t interesting for very long and this film is very long.
World’s Greatest Sinner (Timothy Carey) (1962) Criterion
Laughably bad (occasionally) but mostly boring and misguided, this film has that garish no-set noir lighting that always spooked me as a kid and became my visual representation of Hell. It can still creep me out. Music by Frank Zappa (!) but, not being a Zappa fan, I didn’t notice.
The Bloodiest (Jean-Pierre Bekolo) (2005) Mubi
DIY Afrofuturist film from Cameroon that begins with a placard asking: “How can you make a science fiction film in a country with no future?” The Bloodiest follows a pair of young sex workers who find they have supernatural powers and go about dispatching heads of state. Fiercely feminist, it’s also a great example of creating effect with a little smoke and blue light. Pairs well with the Rwandan film Neptune Frost.
Fragments of a Paradise (Jean Giono) translated by Paul Eprile
Giono (with others) was the first to translate Moby Dick into French, and he wrote a novel about Melville. Fragments of a Paradise is about a sea voyage and it basks in the oceans of islands of Melville. It seems everyone on the ship wishes to escape the ‘civilized’ world of 1940 and much of Fragments alternates between the powerlessness of surviving on the winds, and the transcendent beauty of the natural world. These fragments celebrate searching, friendship, and reverence in equal measure.
The Passenger Seat (Vijay Khurana)
Two boys, or men, attempt to escape from the backwater town where they grew up by getting in a truck and ‘heading north.’ The Passenger Seat is finely controlled, compulsively readable first novel about the masculine rituals involved in male friendship when the males are unsure whether they are men or still boys. It takes us inside their heads as they attempt to negotiate how to enter a larger world, and the horrible mistakes that arise from a performative masculinity.
Civil War (Alex Garland) HBO
Civil War really doesn’t have much to say beyond the hoariest of cliches and it can’t be called prescient by anyone who’s been paying attention over the last ten years. Alex Garland films always seem like they’re about big ideas, but they generally have no core, as if he couldn’t be bothered to think things through. The actors are given little to do but react to the horrors around them with a stoic we’re-journalists-after-all set jaw. Runtime is nearly (but not really) worth the four minutes or so that Jesse Plemons is onscreen.
The Antarctica of Love (Sara Stridsberg) translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner
This is not a miserablist novel, though the description may make it sound like one: the nameless victim of an assault and murder floats above her world, looking back at her life, while following the continuing lives of those she loves, most of whom are marginalized members of Swedish society struggling in sex work or with addiction. Stridsberg (who also wrote Valerie, a fantasia on the life of Valerie Solanas) writes about the marginalized with a gentle approach and a lack of judgment. The book is grounded in the voice of our narrator and her tenuous connections to the people of her life, and often stunning in its imagery and insight.
/Atlantiques (Mati Diop) (2009) / L’Avance (Djiby Kebe) (2024) Mubi
Two short films about difficult decisions. In Atlantiques, young Senegalese friends discuss getting on an illegal boat again in an attempt to reach Europe, even though they nearly dies and were deported the first time. A matter of fact presentation of the reasons people risk their lives. In L’Avance, a young African painter is offered a lot of money by a famous white collector for a painting of his mother and must decide whether he can live with the decision. An understated look at the currencies of exchange around art.