Dracula (Radu Jude Romania 2025)
Jude’s film is an extended, episodic burlesque on both the hype and reality of AI and, by extension the hype and reality of Hollywood special effects driven blockbusters. His recent films, like Dracula and Don’t Expect Too Much from the end of the World, respond to the world around them in near real-time. As such, they can be shambling and unfocused, but what they lose in concision, they gain immediacy and a sense of dark, freewheeling fun. In Dracula, a young filmmaker is in conversation with his iPad. He wants to make a new version of the time-worn Dracula, so he asks an AI for script ideas. These ideas are then translated into filmed vignettes. Whenever a vignette calls for special effects, Jude uses the worst AI effects possible so that we realize, unlike in the supposedly seamless special effects of $300 million dollar movies, that we have left the world of humanity behind. By the last vignette, Dracula has become a nationalist politician spouting vehement political nonsense.
Two Short Films by Dwayne LeBlanc
Civic (USA 2022)
Now, Hear Me Good (USA 20250)
Two gorgeous shorts in the elliptical style of Claire Denis, both centering place—the leaving and returning to. Partially comprised of conversations we only hear in snatches, each observes a young Black man returning ‘home.’ All the action in Civic takes place in a car (hence the title), while the action of Now, Hear Me Good takes place at a party. Throughout both, there’s the sense of displacement, and an exploration of how we can cling to, or walk away from, a physical location which binds us.
Hale County This Morning, This Evening (Ramell Ross USA 2018)
This documentary was shot over the course of a few years and follows a number of black inhabitants of Hale County, Alabama. It never pushes a point or contrives to force an opinion, rather it is content to observe and to find a certain lyricism (But not romance) in the lives of the people it follows. It’s point of view struck me as much like that of the angels in Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire—floating, compassionate, non-intervening.
By Night in Chile (Roberto Bolañ0, translated by Chris Andrews)
A fevered monologue by a priest on his deathbed. The priest was also a poet and literary critic, writing under a pseudonym, so he traveled in both Chilean religious and literary circles (and claims to be a member of Opus Dei. These are the words of someone attempting to make peace with his life and failing time and again to come to a sense of it, swept between politics, shady deals and Bolaño’s notorious ambivalence toward the literary scene—any literary scene. Still, the author is tender with his narrator, allowing him a few moments of transcendence. It’s a satire, it’s a character study, it’s a lament.
An Investigation on the Night that Won’t Forget (Lav Diaz)
Erwin Romulo talks, in a 71-minute single take, about the murder of his friend, film critic Alexis Tioseco, and his girlfriend Nika Bohinc. Diaz, know for his long takes and even longer films, gives us the opportunity to get to know Romulo through the shock and grief of the murder, as well as the frustration of pressuring the police to solve it. Watching it, I realized what we lose in the documentaries that cut and paste sentences from subjects as if they were pitches for toothpaste; the pauses, the searching for words, the struggling to remember before we speak. It’s the way humans interact, instead of the way our movies say we should react.
Call Me Ishmaelle (Xiaolu Guo)
I was disappointed in this one. Guo makes Melville’s Ishmael a woman, pretending to be a man, which could have been interesting but doesn’t lead to much here, except the occasional reminder to the reader that she is, indeed, a woman pretending to be a man. The book is essentially a YA retelling of Moby Dick with all the life and wonder drained from it, and nothing replacing it as a substitute. It’s readable; the sentences are short and it moves along quickly, but that’s the best that can be said of it. Also, Ahab is black—and you know, Moby Dick is white, and there’s Zen and Yin-Yang symbolism, for what it’s worth.
In Water (Hong Sang-soo 2023)
Gentle film about the creative process and the pressure it brings. A young actor decides to make a film and brings his cameraman and the female lead to an island. Only he doesn’t have a script. The conceit of the film is that it is shot out of focus to varying degrees, as a visual analog to the actor’s lack of focus in coming up with something to film. They waste time, they wait, they explore locations without knowing what they are looking for. They wait, together, for inspiration; for the fog to lift and reveal an idea.
Two Short Films
Untitled 77-A (Han Okhi 1977)
Experimental film in which Okhi explores ‘cutting’ both as the physical process of editing and the cinematic process of juxtaposition. Very 70s, but loose and serious and fun.
Dead Knot (Sek Kei/John Woo 1969)
Very much a student film by Kei and Woo, starring Woo, who looks likes he’s 15. (In fact, he was 23). Boy meets girl, boy has ongoing S&M relationship with another guy, boy loses girl. Lots of 60s camera angles. Is this the first film appearance of Woo’s signature doves?
Weapons (Zach Cregger 2025)
Nicely creepy, occasionally jolting, horror film that is smart enough to let the tension and mystery build slowly. The characters are not heroes; they’re just muddling through a tragedy. I especially appreciated Julia Garner’s Justine, a mess of a person sympathetic now and then, who also appears to be a really good teacher. Still, at 2 hours and 8 minutes, it could have been 20 minutes shorter.
Rumblefish (Francis Coppola 1983)
An exercise in style that would reach its rickety zenith with 1992’s Dracula. There’s a lot of fancy black and white photography here and carefully choreographed movement, but Coppola doesn’t seem to know what to do with the actual characters in the film. As is often the case, he’s shooting for something mythic, but he can’t connect with any emotion which might intensify to an operatic level. Poor Mickey Rourke, at the height of his charisma, is only allowed to brood. But good God, does Diane Lane look beautiful and, the one thing Coppola does accomplish is to film her like a modern-day Veronica lake.
Middlemarch (George Eliot)
An epic study of life in a small mid-century English village rendered in glorious observational detail with wit and sly commentary. There’s gossip, estranged children, unrequited love, secret pasts, secret presents, estranged children, and more. The great thing about a novel Ike this is that you slowly watch the gears of circumstance move into place to sometimes grind people to dust or, occasionally, relieve them of their burdens. Also, stunningly beautiful passages which spark in the writing alone.