Jost doing something like proto-mumblecore, though the ordinary, placid surfaces gradually come to tremble with some spiritual, cosmic ache. A year in the lives of a small circle of old friends and ex-lovers and co-workers in San Francisco told as a series of casually exquisite poetic moments; Jost's camera as likely to delicately pinion them in tight close-up as it is to drift off to contemplate the ceaseless lapping of waves. That the unbearable vastness of infinite distances and how…
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Tempest 1982
“The problem is, I found a white hair on my chest.” Drearily self-indulgent wealthy-man-goes-through-midlife-crisis mechanics, all the more annoying in that Mazursky seems wholly convinced such material merits both the film’s epic length and its intertextual ambitions. Strangely pointless as a Shakespeare adaptation, with all the most interesting parts relegated to flashbacks of the life in New York Philip walked away from; this also probably has something to do with the thrillingly electric, lived-in chemistry between Cassavetes and Rowlands, which…
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Stroszek 1977
Herzog mordantly gazes into the void, which for him seems to amount to the same thing as trying to pursue the American dream. “They don’t kick you here.” “No, not physically. Here, they do it spiritually.” Looking for freedom – an escape from the Berlin underworld’s sadistic pimps, some breathing room outside the crippling institutions that have defined Bruno’s life, just a little bit of space to call your own – and Bruno’s first glimpse of the new world is…
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Nomadland 2020
A twilight-hued ode to one of the many communities left abandoned by the grotesque corporatization of American government; a society where communities to belong to and houses to live in are considered privileges rather than fundamental human rights, and the tragically unnecessary courage of those who have to create their own communities and find their own places to call home. “No, I’m not homeless,” Fern insists. “I’m just houseless. Not the same thing, right?” Whether working alongside the new class…
