Beckomberga (Sara Stridsberg, translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner)
A novel on the intertwining influences of family, centered around a massive psychiatric hospital in Sweden. Jackie’s father, Jim, contends with a near-constant debilitating sadness and is hospitalized at Beckomberga. Jackie visits him often and comes to know the other patients, doctors, and nurses. While Jackie is attempting to know her often-distant father, her mother Lone, is pulling away from him. Narrated by Jackie, the story covers decades in their lives and sheds light on the inscrutable and often invisible ties of family and of love, as well as a growing adolescent and adult’s impossible drive to know their parents.
The Devil, Probably (Robert Bresson France 1977)
How can a man whose vision is so bleak make films so starkly beautiful. Of course, Bresson’s films are idiosyncratically beautiful—there are no stunning vistas or sweeping crane shots. They are beautiful in their simplicity, their refusal to dramatize, and in their rhythm. Charles is a young man well-aware of the decaying world around him; he can see a hopeless future. He casts around for something to inspire him to live but in the end finds nothing. We see him cycle through politics, sex, religion, and psychoanalysis. Bresson observes his hopelessness dispassionately but with sympathy, which might sound like a contradiction but isn’t. Evidently, Richard Hell called this film ‘the most punk movie ever made.’
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer UK/Poland 2023)
A film of crystalline detachment about compartmentalization and detachment. We watch the commandant at Auschwitz only during his time at home, where he discusses finances with his wife, plays with his children, and entertains friends. The concentration camp is just on the other side of the brick wall, but we never see it. We only hear occasional gunshots. The house is lovely, the food is lovely, the gardens are immaculate, and there’s a pool for the children. Call it something like a documentary, or a metaphor for capitalism and imperialism. Or call it what is happening now.
My Undesirable Friends, Chapter 4 (Julia Loktev USA 20240
Chapter 4 of this remarkable documentary, which follows the independent journalists at Russia’s TV Rain, begins with the invasion of Ukraine, a military action they have difficulty believing because it is so pointless. (Sound familiar?) On the heels of the invasion, there is a nationwide crackdown on any news sources not parroting Kremlin propaganda, aided by the designation, a year earlier, of many journalists as ‘foreign agents.’
Most of the female journalists we have been following decide it is time to leave the country, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. Funds are frozen, some don’t have visas, many European countries aren’t accepting Russian visas.
Over the previous three hours, we’ve watched as these journalists attempted to adjust their work and their life to the constantly changing whims of the State. Now, they will soon have no work at all, they will probably be imprisoned if they stay, and, if they go, where will they go? It’s a gut-wrenching watch and still another lesson that fascism moves very slowly for a while, then happens all at once. This sounds familiar too.
My Undesirable Friends, Chapters 1-3 (Julia Loktev USA 2024)
A remarkable documentary that begins in 2021 and follows the journalists of TV Rain, an independent news channel in Moscow and the journalists who work there. After the return, jailing, and death of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, Soviet authorities begin new crackdowns on legal and human rights in Russia. One element of this was labelling all kinds of people (heads of charities, activists, and journalists, among others) as “foreign agents,” even as other journalists were jailed incommunicado with no charges. Being designated a “foreign agent” leads to all types of ridiculous, incomprehensible bureaucratic issues.
Chapter 1-3 follow these journalist and other activists as the vise tightens and concludes on the eve of the Ukraine war. Over the course of three hours, and two years, we see the toll the police state takes, the ways journalists adjust to do their work, the occasional bouts of hopelessness, the meals and community. Loktev draws a compelling intimacy from her subjects who often struggle to articulate what they’re feeling but do because, after all, they are journalists.
Most of the types of “laws” and “court proceedings” and ‘police actions” described here have already begun in the US, and it’s clear many in the current administration take Putin as the figure to model themselves after. It’s all nationalistic bullshit meant to oppress (beginning with marginalized groups—immigrants, the homeless, people who are gay) while he and his cronies loot the country for more and more. Sound familiar?
But, the shops are open in Moscow. There’s Netflix. Driving around Moscow, as these folks often do because they can’t be certain their home isn’t bugged, everything looks normal. One of the journalists remarks about this normalcy to Loktev. Can’t people see what’s happening? Can’t they see what coming? Sound familiar?
I’m Not Everything I Want to Be (Klára Tasovská Czechia 2024)
A film comprised exclusively of photographs by Libuse Jarcovjakova, taken over nearly 40 years, with Jarcovjakova’s journal entries, read by the author. She was born in the early 50s in Czechoslavakia and began documenting her life and the life around her in her teens, so this period includes Communist Eastern Europe, as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall. She’s bisexual, drawn to the underground clubs that support the LGBTQ scene, as well as the lives of ordinary workers, of which she is one. It’s a chronicle of sadness, of feeling out of place, and of constantly struggling for recognition as an artist (which begins to happen as she reaches her 50s. It’s also an unfiltered document of a face over the years. Her own.
One Battle after Another (Paul Thomas Anderson 2025)
This is not really a political film, in very political times, thus it disappoints in a particular way on first viewing. Someday soon, I’ll rewatch it.
Paul Thomas Anderson isn’t interested in pulling on your heartstrings from the jump. Jonny Greenwood scores his films and there are no sweeping or lyric John Williams moments to tell you what to feel. The first third of One Battle works on the rush of violent actions of resistance; the cult-like intimacy, the adrenaline, even the performance of it.
It takes a minute to adjust to the middle section, about the mundane life of a past revolutionary who may or may not be paranoid. In this section, Anderson is interested in the everyday levels of oppression we might be engaged with or gently pass over. It’s in the way Sensei Bob calmly phones others and tells them how to respond to an ICE action, in the way the families line up to escape. Anderson doesn’t shoot crying children or panicked parents. These people know what to do and they do it.
There’s a long tracking shot at a protest where a man gets out of a car, walks to the front line, throws a Molotov cocktail, then returns to the car. He’s an agitator; he’s done his job. That’s it.
The third section is action-movie mode, but the focus here is on Willa, the teenager, trying to figure things out as she goes along.
A complaint can be made that One Battle engages with the current American landscape on a more superficial level than we might like, and it’s a valid claim. But, I think many were simply bothered by the lack of movie-emotion here. It’s one of the things I always appreciate about Anderson’s movies.
And, not that I care about the Oscars (and haven’t in a long time). But, why don’t we give one each to Delroy Lindo and Benecio del Toro? Fuck, they both deserve them and have for a while.
Sweet Smell of Success ( Alexander Mackendrick 1957)
It’s bracing to realize that people could be just as deeply cynical in 1957 as they are today. This film presents both Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster as completely loathsome characters and examines the havoc they wreak. Both actors ruthlessly commit to their roles, giving us characters who can’t allow themselves to reveal any redeeming qualities. Shot on location on the streets of New York, the film is dirty and gritty with a polished high society sheen. And Clifford Odets dialogue is a razor-sharp treat. Among my favorite lines: “The cat’s in the bag…and the bag’s in the river.”
The International (Tom Tykwer USA 2009)
Clive Owen is great at being haggard and dissolute here, in a crime film made by folks who’ve read David Graeber and Naomi Klein. The centerpiece is a thrilling shoot-out at the Guggenheim. As always I wonder where the bad guys find so many henchmen willing to die for their job.
Stagecoach (John Ford 1939)
Notable for its humane treatment of questionable characters (drunks, prostitutes, gamblers, and ex-cons), Stagecoach introduces John Wayne as a more sensitive character than he would become as he froze into an icon. This is an ensemble piece, with great character work, and a couple of thrilling stunts, punctuated by a climactic gunfight that occurs completely off-screen. A bold choice.
The Interrogation (written by Edouard Louis, directed by Milo Rau, Skirball Theater)
Louis admits upfront that his writing is fueled by rage and the need for revenge—revenge on those who taunted and abused him as a child for being ‘artistic’ and gay in a poor, rural French village, revenge on those who could never see him, revenge on the capitalist system that humiliated his father, who then humiliated his mother, who humiliated Louis.
The Interrogation struggles with what art has meant in his life, both the art of others (Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On, for instance) and his own writing. Louis doesn’t believe art makes us better people, but he does believe that art can place us now and then in the present, forgetting our past and future, for a burning instant.
A monologue show in which Louis occasionally appears onscreen while Arne De Tremerie performs as Louis. De Tremerie has an open face with clear blue eyes, a face deceptively open while smiling and shrugging as he reveals his pain and his occasional epiphanies. When he lip syncs to Celine Dion (as Louis did throughout his childhood), he is jubilant in a way I’ve never seen on stage.
What We Did before Our Moth Days (Greenwich Theatre written by Wallace Shawn, directed by Andre Gregory)
Wallace Shawn is a writer of moments, the moments something becomes clear or muddy, the moments something happens or doesn’t. His characters feel a need to explain themselves, and they do it in a conversational way. It doesn’t come across as a confession. There are four characters in Moth Days and, for the most part, they address the audience directly. One of them is dead.
It’s a play about lost hope, confused choices, and the havoc we can bring to other people’s lives, and our own. There are beautiful and poignant moments in this play but, for me, it didn’t come together as a whole. And maybe that’s the point: the lack of resolution, the resistance to narrative form.
Moth Days is performed in a small theater (about 100 seats) which is the perfect size for theater that doesn’t require light shows, flame, and revolving sets. It allows us to see the actors up close, and I was reminded of what can be remarkable about theater: how, with the right script, an actor can juggle ten emotions at once as a coherent whole and become a complex, fully conceived character. The expression of this is different in film because we are aware of how a film is constructed. Watching it onstage, we enter the world of the actor. It’s pretty great.
Seduction: The Cruel Woman ( Monika Truet West Germany 1985)
West German film not so much exploring as enacting sado-masochistic events, lorded (and I do mean lorded) over by a woman in the guise of avant-garde theatre. I loved the use of blue, the constant sharp sounds of heels on bare floors, machinery and passing barges. And a young Udo Kier is just deliciously decadent. But, maybe it’s my age. I just kept thinking: Sado-masochism looks like a lot of work.
Three Short Films by Anocha Suwichakornpong (Thailand)
Black Mirror (2008), Jai (2014), The Ambassador (2018)
Black Mirror is an arty film school exercise with a nice thrumming score. Jai and The Ambassadors mix archival footage (The Ambassadors), or behind-the-scenes footage (Jai) to explore the distinction between reported history and memory or fact in Thailand.
Algorithm of the Night: Film Writing 2019-2025 (A.S. Hamrah)
It’s difficult to know how to categorize Hamrah’s ‘film writing’ (he doesn’t call them reviews). Usually no more than two paragraphs, they often bore in on a single detail or riff into over interests. Some don’t seem to be about the film at all. But, he has an abiding love of film and what film can do, and an equally deep revulsion toward the way movies are made and marketed. He’s not a snob, but he see movies as embedded in the culture from which they spring, writing often about that culture and what it means. So, one comes to him not to hear an opinion on whether a movies is good or bad—though sometimes he will tell you what he thinks—but to consider film in a broader context.
The Giverny Document (Ja’Tovia Gary US 2019)
Mixing archival footage from different sources with new footage and animation painted directly on film, Gary is concerned with the place of black women in culture, their safety, and how the precarity of that sense of place can affect them. It took me a while to find the rhythm of this film, but once I did, I found it compelling in a nearly subversive way.
Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos 2025)
I was pretty invested in the latest provocation from Lanthimos for most of the runtime, but realized an hour later that the film left almost no lasting impression. Sure, it fondles ideas around conspiracy theories, corporate speak, and Qanon followers, and has the hard edged look and feel of a contemporary horror film, but it doesn’t have anything to say about any of it. What it does manage to do—no small feat—is not condescend to its conspiracy obsessed protagonist. I’m not sure Jessie Plemmons would let that happen. His performance here is stunning.
Fixer Chao (Han Ong)
A cult novel I had never heard of, now reissued, Fixer Chao follows a young, queer Filipino immigrant to takes a job scamming rich NYC elites as a Feng Shui master and doing all the wrong things. (He’s put up to it by another NYC elite who wants to fuck up the lives of those who have wrong him.) Funny, cutting, and sad, Fixer Chao skewers the ultra-wealthy, but doesn’t really expose anything we don’t already know. Still, there are stunning passages and the book is full of acute observational detail.
Fargo (The Coen Brothers, 1996)
To my mind, the Coen Brothers made two movies close to perfect, Fargo and Miller’s Crossing. Everything here works and the film is edited to within an inch of its life, which doesn’t mean there isn’t time for stillness and silence. Macy grows slowly unhinged, McDormand is a rock, Buscemi and Stormare are scumbags, and everything in between is diamond hard, all set to the mourning, resolved music of Carter Burwell. Fargo has the inevitability of a 19th century novel, where the weight of circumstances grinds some to dust.
The Cut Line (Carolina Pihelgas, translated by Darcy Hurford)
Liine has left her husband/lover of many years and taken up residence in an old family cottage near a military training ground in Estonia. While she finds comfort in the history the house carries and the nature which surrounds it, this comfort is often interrupted by the sound of gunfire or explosions from the nearby training facility. It’s a novel of finding your place again, or finding a new place within which to stand, as the changes you have undergone begin to take root in you. This, with the full awareness that the world is raging all around you.
I Am Not A Witch (Rugano Nyumi. Zambia/UK 2017)
I don’t know if the image of women tied to unfurling spools of ribbon has any root in Zambian culture, but it’s a stunningly precise image of oppression in Nyumi’s film, which follows a young girl, accused of being a witch by her townspeople wo is taken to live with a group of older women, all called witches, and groomed to perform her ‘witchery’ to the profit of a government official. Shula is told she is lucky her ribbon is so long; one witch had ribbon so short ‘she couldn’t even turn around.’ Centering a strong performance by young Maggie Mulubwa, the film is a raw-edged commentary on cultural and everyday misogyny.
Tarantula (Eduardo Halfon, translated by Daniel Hahn, publishes 5/19)
Jewish-Guatemalan Eduardo and his younger brother are sent back to Guatemala from America to a Jewish Children’s camp for the summer. There, after a few weeks of the usual camp activities, they are subjected to a re-enactment of WWII German concentration camps in which they are the prisoners and their counselors are the guards. Tarantula explores the ongoing effects of victimhood against the strident dictum that ‘we must never forget,’ and how this tension shapes identity.
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.