6u532b

Even as more and more popular entertainment gets homogenized into brand-recognizable slop auteurism still finds a way to survive even under the nebulous framework of TV fandoms. And whichever way you cut it TV is still viewed more so as “content” then cinema especially by the vocal social media audience that consumes it, which makes it all the more funny when a TV auteur puts out such a clunker that it retroactively makes you question whether any of their stuff was good in the first place. Joss Whedon has been lost to the sands of time, the inconsistent quality of Damon Lindelof has made his all new shows only for the most devoted (or stubborn) and Doctor Who fans are currently in a collective meltdown trying to figure out if Russell T Davies has entered cognitive decline or if the thing they’ve based a large portion of their lives around was ever actually worth its salt. Watching Mountainhead made me question whether Succession, what I would consider one of the great TV shows of the past decade, was actually good or if I had Stockholm syndrome from devoting hours of my life to watching actors give crass, funny but more so mean one liners in grey rooms with slow handheld zooms and dramatic brass music. Everything I find boring and belabored about Mountainhead is somehow everything I found great about Succession, though perhaps ironic denouements work better when you have the promise of another episode on the horizon. Anyway I actually forgot I watched this like 2 hours after it was done so doesn’t really matter, I’ll watch whatever slop Jesse Armstrong puts out.

I can’t believe the CIA paid off all my friends in my living room to think Ishtar wasn’t funny

Interview: Drunken Noodles Cinematographer Barton Cortright on the struggles and joys of micro-budget filmmaking.

Premiering in the ACID sidebar of this year’s Cannes was Lucio Castro’s Drunken Noodles, a luscious, micro-scale and micro-budget exploration of queer intimacy. Over the course of its 82 minutes Castro’s film tumbles backwards in reverse chronological order through a hazy world of hand stitched erotic tapestries, anonymous hook-ups and bucolic landscapes as his lead Laith Khalifeh searches for connection, weaving between the city and the tranquil escape of upstate New York.

Following his film After This Death (2025), which recently premiered at the 75th Berlin Film Festival, Castro re-teamed with cinematographer Barton Cortright, who also serves as a producer on the film, to craft Drunken Noodles on a much smaller scale. If you’ve been paying attention to the current wave of independent films emerging from New York you may have recognized Cortright’s name in the credits as he’s slowly become synonymous with the sorts of inventive, personal and transgressive films sprouting from the indie scene which have become essential counterprogramming to the work currently produced in the US.

With a wide list of credits ranging from Ricky D’Ambrose’s The Cathedral (2021), Graham Swon’s An Evening Song (for three voices) (2023), Eugene Kotlyarenko’s The Code (2024) and Peter Vack’s www.RachelOrmont.com (2024), Cortright has demonstrated a great dexterity moving between projects both maximalist and lowkey. Cortright returned to Cannes this year with Drunken Noodles following the selection of Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has ed (2023), which he also shot, in the 2023 edition of Director’s Fortnight. Over the course of this interview we discussed his working relationship with Castro, the current state of indie cinema and the challenges of micro budget filmmaking.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Matthew Chan: You seem to be more hands-on with this film as opposed to other things you’ve worked on as a producer in addition to being the DP. So I’m curious as to how you got involved in this project?

Barton Cortright: I did a movie with Lucio called After This Death (2025), like two years ago in the fall. I had seen his first movie, End of the Century (2019) going into shooting that film and really liked his sensibility. I really liked that he really liked movies and had an interesting and diverse and wide gamut of movies that he liked and referenced and we just got along well and I think I really understood the visual language that he was after and he responded really well to all of my ideas and so we made that movie.

And then that movie was in post for a long time and Lucio had had some other projects in development and I think he was a little frustrated. He just wanted to make something. So, you know, he was texting or emailing me and he was like:

Hey, I just want to make this movie with absolutely no resources and we’ll shoot it really quickly, we’ll use my apartment in New York and we’ll use a friend’s house upstate and we’ll do it in like a month.

And I was like, okay, great. And I was like, where’s the script?

And he was like, oh, I haven’t written it yet.

And I was like, okay.

He had hit me up like two months before we were going to shoot, but like a few weeks later he sent me the script. and I really liked it. Lucio’s work is largely nonlinear, his first movie is nonlinear, After This Death the script was nonlinear but in the edit became linear and this movie is nonlinear, which I really like. I really liked the themes in the movie and the characters and you know I was excited for how Lucio wanted to shoot it, so we did it really quickly with a limited crew.

The film was shot on digital but has a rather filmic look and I wanted to know how you set about achieving that?

I really like vintage lenses, I kind of struggle with movies that are shot, you know, hyper sharp or with really new lenses. Sometimes it kind of takes me out of it because they have more of a commercial look to them.

I used Zeiss Super Speeds, which are lenses that I use on a lot of movies. On Lucio’s previous movie, we used Ari Signature Primes, which are like a newer set of lenses but have a little bit more character, but anyway, after After This Death he was interested in a more filmic look a little bit more rough around the edges. So we used the Super Speeds, we used some light filtration, we used Black Satin filters, and then our great colorist Joseph Mastantuono at Nice Dissolve he did a little bit of halation stuff and highlights to kind of give it that film bloom and I think he added a little bit of grain not that much honestly to not emulate film but give it a less digital look. 

The film is broken up into four different segments between the apartment, the exteriors of the city and the house in the country. I was curious as to how you and Lucio planned on visually distinguishing each segment because there’s a lot more natural light once you move out of the city.

I did probably less lighting in this feature than maybe any feature I’ve shot, maybe second to The Code, because it had such limited resources. I mean we shot this movie in seven days, it never felt rushed to us because we had like great shorthand but we weren’t doing a ton of lighting.

We shot in this area of Williamsburg really close to the water that’s weirdly like a ghost town and kind of just embraced that element and then the apartment that we shot in was Lucio’s and at night it has all these great, weird lights on buildings that kind of wash into the apartment and we really liked that. I think it works too stylistically because, you know, in New York he’s kind of, I don’t want to say he’s at a low point, but he’s like alone, so upstate is more romantic. It was nice to have that be a little bit more warm and naturalistic.

The biggest shift visually is probably the, I kind of don’t even know what to call it, the dance sequence in the woods with the fawn. It was kind of funny because Lucio’s main reference was Kenneth Anger’s Rabbit’s Moon (1972), a film I love too, which is outside but it’s in a studio and it’s kind of very lit, but I tried to keep a basic approach and just have a heightened night style.

Full Interview on the USC Cannes Classics Blog

The rice cooker is engineered to produce the same perfect outcome each time. It’s hard to imagine wanting anything else, and yet….

I don’t think it’s really possible to engage in bad faith with a film this intentionally unpleasant and abrasive but I think a lot of people are misreading this as both a sceney-insider work and a shallow attempt to visualize the late 2010s internet via theatrics when what Vack seems to really be interested in is how the data structure and rewards system of the internet can completely warp the self psychologically. If you think the film is an attempt to smuggle in words like “wojack” and “based” into a motion picture that’s probably more on you for recognizing it because these are clearly deployed as empty, endless signifiers, with the film portraying reality as interpreted through the internet, as a constant deluge of noise where everything needs to be understood, everyone needs to be labelled. What really sold me on this all was Betsey’s performance, which unifies every segment into a cogent emotional reality, and what helps is that she isn't overacting or committing to a bit but locating a naive fragility at every point reminiscent of Haley Joel Osment in A.I. (which is what this film most reminded me of truthfully in addition to Shozin Fukui’s 964 Pinocchio), as she is truly left in the lurch amongst all the slop. Vack isn’t quite saying anything new about our current digital reality and the parasocial relationships that breed within them but I can appreciate how he couches it in psychodrama, the added layer being the involvement of his actual parents in addition to directing his sister. And the relationship between Rachel and Mommy, apart from being genuinely moving, reminded me of Jean Louis Baudry's pronouncement that in the cinema "The arrangement of the different elements: projector, darkened hall, screen-in addition from reproducing in a striking way the mise-en scene of Plato's cave (prototypical set for all transcendence and the topological model of idealism) reconstructs the situation necessary to the release of the "mirror stage" discovered by Lacan”, likening the experience of being in a dark room to regressing to a pre-natal stage in the womb, with the warm bodiless embrace of social media likewise being seen as a way to return to Mommy. I do take a pause to anyone that finds the performances in the film ethically dubious because I don’t see much different between what Vack attempts and what Yorgos Lanthimos does in Poor Things, which is perhaps an even more condescending work because it tries to wave off its pornographic indulgence under the guise of morality, stopping the film to look the audience directly in the eye and give them a college level feminism course. Though the same can be said about this film and Lacan and I do think the actual porn in this picture is a step too far into provocation. But this film does attempt something interesting with the “born sexy yesterday” trope (especially in comparison to Poor Things) as it understands that sexual discovery for someone raised sheltered can be a rancid process of self loathing and shame, with the internet uniquely positioned to heighten the process as an avenue for both narcissism and exploitation, one feeding into the other until they become completely indistinguishable. This cycle of desperation, validation and humiliation is constant in the life of lolcows everywhere from Chris Chan to Daniel Larson and it’s the very same for Rachel.

The monkey of this all makes this pretty perverse conceptually, as evinced by the box office there isn’t quite a demand for Robbie Williams, who despite all his hit records has been memory holed like Garth Brooks as an artifact of another time, so the actual appeal of the film seems to be the sick thrill you get out of seeing a monkey do heroin, attempt suicide, watch his girlfriend get an abortion, kill his child self etc with the cushy familiarity of the biopic giving the audience a seemingly moral out to justify their enjoyment of it all. The monkey also lets Gracey play more so in virtual than physical space with every set being rendered as a free floating, shifting green screen soundstage which actually gives the impression that we’re experiencing Williams’ life from the inside out. You don’t see this much panache and personal investment in virtual production outside of Cameron and Spielberg, which surely occurred due to a lack of studio oversight with the film being generously bankrolled by the Australian government and Chinese money (something Paul WS Anderson seems to have also taken a shine to) I don’t think this bucks biopic convention as much as it’s newly minted cult audience thinks it does, and the technical wizardry does recall a certain strain of West End or modern video game developer cringe, but the final pronouncement that Williams is less so a sort of savant and more so a shameless entertainer is about as honest as a big biopic can get. Though I do find the anonymity of the lead performance, which is a composite between Williams, an actual actor in mo cap suit and VFX monkey artists, pretty refreshing in an age where biopics seem to hinge on terrible, showy performances by A listers plotting on awards campaigns. In many ways this is more All That Jazz than A Complete Unknown and I’d gladly watch 10 more of these than another A Complete Unknown.

I was discussing with a friend recently about how click farming new age pornstars like Bonnie Blue have completely taken out any erotic connotation from sexual intercourse because to them sex is rendered as sport, consumed by technicalities and statistics. There’s obviously very little stimulating the onlooker other than obscene curiosity and you do wonder what the participants even get out of it, the only clear answer being that participating in a Bonnie Blue record breaking live stream is akin to going to the concert of your favorite artist, to say you were there, and more importantly to bond with your boys over the perverse shared experience you went through (as is the case with many of the college students involved in the stunts) That is to say that male sexual conquests many of times have nothing to do with the act itself and instead serve as pure fodder for homosocial bonding. And as this picture lovingly illustrates it seems to have always been like this. The very illegal online live stream they hook up with the foreign exchange student, which is maybe the first time an online live stream has been a crucial plot point in a mainstream film, illustrates this in very clear, salacious & De Palma-esque manner. For many it’s not just for them but for others to watch.

Saw this programmed as part of a series on Rivette and the influence is pretty clear cut as a film focused on two women engaged in constant, conscious performance (partially the Jean Cocteau special). ittedly the Bresson-isms are in short supply with the lack of close ups and an abundance of overt melodramatic gestures though the ending, where all complications evaporate as if touched by God show Bresson had it down from the start. But there is something fascinating about the film’s relationship with predestination. All the characters talk about fate as if it’s something they’re both conscious of and are consciously manipulating, I suppose he realized it goes down smoother once everyone surrenders.

Saturated treat for the senses

Watched on Friday May 30, 2025.

Watched on Friday May 30, 2025.

The first time I saw this was at premiere in the Lumiere, which featured a captive audience that laughed throughout, and after the film I remarked to people that it was like a Howard Hawks movie about prison torture, which may sound condescending but it felt like an apt comparison for a film that so confidently expands Panahi’s aesthetic and narrative palette. After making a string of films about himself and starring himself this film marks his first ensemble piece since Offside, and as far as I can recall his first ensemble of adult actors, all of whom are gathered together in a definitively Hawksian manner, being swept away by one objectively absurd mishap and being made to undergo a string of strange foibles, though of course instead of a leopard on the loose it’s the bound and drugged amputee in the back of the van who tortured them in prison.

As one of the few surviving filmmakers of the post-Kiarostami school Panahi’s films have always been preoccupied with deconstructing notions of cinematic reality, a tendency that has remained consistent all the way to his prior feature No Bears, which features sublime layers of artifice between scenes from an in film production, remote FaceTime directing and virtual video villages. Yet woven into his exploration of the technological evolution of film production was the unavoidable context for why he was even forced into such a position in the first place because of his filmmaking ban. Accordingly It Was Just An Accident is entirely informed by his recent imprisonment by the Iranian government which seems to override any other preoccupation the film may have. As many have noted, in the opening scene once Eghbal steps out of the car the camera actually swivels and disrupts the static frame, a move practically unheard of in a Panahi film, which signals that what the film is actually interested in which isn’t cinematic reality but individual ones, as we are firmly placed in Eghbal’s perspective, and how they can be shaped by the deprivation of the senses. The central question the film posits is of how you can reconstruct and a moment experienced without sight, and how it’s possible for such experiences to leave traumas without direct witness. The off screen squeaking of Eghbal’s leg is what triggers the hunt and all other attempts of verification similarly hinge on the senses, of the smell of sweat that clings on the leg or tenor of his voice. The implication then becomes that the robbing of sight is akin to the robbing of a seemingly objective experience of reality, an indignity woven into their torture which prevents clear testimony from being recounted. This is a phenomenon we witness first hand in Eghbal’s prolonged, static interrogation scene as his visual experience is robbed from him, only going off their voices and the their physical blows, he is forced to contend with a hostility delivered unfiltered. What makes the film so effective is that it never is a call for pity as much as it is an individual, and by extension collective, attempt to parse through trauma. In this sense Panahi’s film holds a genuine sense of dignity as it works to restore the image, foregrounding sight in a society that wants to deprive it.

Pretty one note for the number of mothers in it

Godard seems to only speak in riddles and grind set quotes in this picture which will surely find a second life clipped apart on YouTube shorts- though I strain to see why I even needed to watch this given that I’ve already seen Breathless. But I bet this really hits if you’re stupid.

This review may contain spoilers.

Despite this ending with the fatalism of Pickpocket, of gravity finally drawing JB into the inevitable with one final punchline, this genuinely felt unpredictable to me. I was on the edge of my seat not knowing what was going to happen on a scene to scene basis and what delightful scenes throughout! No matter how much you try to claw your way towards regaining some modicum of personal autonomy the state is always there around the corner to put you in your place whether be it Vietnam protestors, bank robbers or college burnouts.

This starts out with the logos of a bunch of Israel national film funds which really does nothing to prepare you for the film which unambiguously portrays Israel as the most evil country in the world, which induces schizophrenia from its many moral contradictions for any rube willing to live there. The implication then perhaps is that this is a form of capitalist realism with the state allowing one of its most internationally renowned artists the cushion of culture to allow the populace to air out any grievance in a manner that doesn’t actually challenge power- though this doesn’t detract from how fascinating it is to watch such an acid tongued film produced from within the empire. For the most part when thinking of genocidal regimes Western art has deferred to the two ideas: of the banality of evil and of the complicit nature of the populace. What Lapid suggests is that the evils of Israel aren’t just banal but brain numbingly stupid, with the populace not just complicit but actively involved in the of genocide, being viewed as a mildly unpleasant stop gap for a future they see as inevitable. The first hour (which is perhaps my favorite chunk out of any film I’ve seen in Cannes) plunges you directly into the heart of the empire, with a maximalist approach that very astutely captures our condition of modern schizophrenia, so many funny formal gambits: strobe lights, shaky blurred handheld, and direct, rubbery ruptures in reality, pay off dividends because they reveal the actual reality of what Israel and the rest of the western world has decided is worth sacrificing thousands for: a world of Eurovision, cross fit and high rise condominiums. Everything feels insane and artificial because everyone involved has to keep up an impossible illusion. In many regards the film that this initially most reminded me of was Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant as Lapid drags us through the depths of depravity, in a manner that doesn’t quite read as didactic, with each new detail making everything seem worse and worse. The other 2 segments of the film do tend to feel more rote as the crisis of conscience finally rears its head in the picture though with every insane turn (which reveal themselves to directly be plucked from reality) the morality tale comes into focus and this reveals itself to not just be a film about selling your soul to the devil but of how far you’re willing to go to keep it in his hands, to humiliate yourself and secure your place in a pathetic, joyless future built on violence.

I can’t tell if this is a singular work of genius or scattershot and completely incoherent, given that is is essentially made up of loose, disconnected ideas that don’t quite cohere, and which attempt to get away with a lack of said coherence under the insinuation of dream logic, with the film in some regards quite literally just being 6 unrelated shorts Bi Gan wanted to make. But there are such big swings and unexpected choices here that make it hard to ignore in an arthouse landscape that can feel so predictable and incessantly formulaic. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film so confidently set up its thesis, directly communicating it to the audience via intertitle, not actually follow through on its ideas at all and then wrap things up pretending it addressed everything it wanted to address. Still the first segment alone should warrant Bi Gan a Palme, as a labyrinth through early cinema history, both cloyingly referential and formally innovative, at the very least there’s a thrill in seeing sets and camera techniques from the era captured by new high definition digital cameras and it has the sense of play and discovery a la Feuillade, in spades. I was floating in my seat when the punchline was a recreation of the Lumiere hose gag. The conceptual starting point of a world where the invention of cinema has precluded any need to dream and has offered a permanence akin to immortality is so strong and so out there that it becomes disappointing when the work doesn’t become the journey through film history it seems to intend to be and instead a bunch of shorts organized around the 5 senses, which while occasionally good don’t ever scratch the formal or conceptual itch of the first segment. The last segment of the film set in Y2K is truly wonderful, but the long take feels like a shallower version of what Bi Gan has attempted before and that made me question the intention of the work as a whole. If Bi Gan’s prior films were so invested in formal innovation and digital experimentation, specifically the idea of medium specificity- attempting things the film format never could, why is his take on cinema history so staid, why doesn’t he find pockets to innovate and evolve, to launch the medium into the future from the perspective of the past? The film closest to this in concept is Leos Carax Holy Motors which foregrounds itself to be both about artifice and performance, specifically how performance can sculpt filmic reality via Denis Lavant and what tends to make that film work is that it isn’t a celebration of the magic of the movies but more so of the collaborative process that fuels it. Bi Gan attempts something similar with Jackson Yee but all of the performances feel so nondescript and the film as a whole so enraptured by illusion that it becomes hard to perceive any strong conceptual backbone. Still the fact that this film can inspire such a strong desire to force it to make sense in one’s head, as if finding a throughline will immediately transform it into a masterpiece in memory suggests it’s doing something right. One more positive thing I’ll say is that despite the ending not really delivering anything profound, I’ve never seen another work that manages to look like Twin Peaks The Return.

I for one the separation of church and state (Cannes and Sundance)

For everyone that watched Clouds of Sils Maria ten years ago and has wondered why they haven’t made more Clouds of Sils Maria-type films. Boy do I have a movie for you.

Watched on Tuesday May 20, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday May 20, 2025.

Never a good look to finger wag when a beloved filmmaker you’re lukewarm on puts out a dud but this was a genuine fiasco. The problem with Ducornau’s prior films was their lack of specificity, in how they feel like a grab bag of signifiers with no basis in any discourse arranged in a way to appear provocative, with aesthetic privileged over actual observation. This film seemingly has the opposite problem where it’s literal to a fault, being a straightforward AIDS drama where the disease is rendered in an, ittedly impressive, impressionistic manner, but cannot be construed as a metaphor in any possible way, it's just AIDS. And yet without the crutch of genre provocations Ducornau’s house of cards seem to fall because she doesn’t seem to be good at anything else, this being a terribly written film that never justifies its existence. It has nothing insightful to say about AIDS other than the quasi-horror lens it presents it in, which can occasionally feel inappropriate in its own right and none of the relationships feel plausible or properly sketched out. The most this film can muster are vague comparisons between the struggles of teenage girlhood and the AIDS crisis which just saying out loud feels insane. The imagery to boot, i.e. the blood rushing out into the water, feels like something out of a debut feature as do most attempts at melodrama, and I think people are being rightfully uncharitable to the film because all these missteps feel particularly egregious for someone who’s already won the Palme.

Watched on Monday May 19, 2025.

Howard Hawks said “A good movie is three good scenes and no bad scenes.” And there didn’t seem to be any bad ones in this picture

Kind of impressed by how miserable this is for a new American indie. Convincingly Dardennes-esque (positive)

I should’ve known that a big budget Lav Diaz film bankrolled by European money would have the veneer of a Miguel Gomes or Lisandro Alonso rather than the more modest sheen of his other films, and this comes with a conspicuous lack of dialogue with the final stretch practically having none at all (the overwhelming fatalism reminded me of Bresson’s Lancelot Du Lac) Compared to the rest of his oeuvre this is likely his least outwardly didactic, featuring little to no scenes of people engaged in lengthy conversation where they seem to be directly speaking to the camera, with the level of narrative and interpersonal detail supplanted by the actual period details of the work. Still there is something exhilarating about seeing Lav go directly to the source of his fixation on the intersection between religion, power and corruption, with Christianity being wielded as the primary justification for brutality in his films, and in the context of the colonial project said brutality has never looked as unambiguous as their slaughter. The scene where they outright state how immoral and incompatible their actions are with their religious beliefs and a later one where a man finds space to die essentially capture Diaz’s entire project in miniature.

The cure to depression is having a white woman live in your house. I swear some people just need to have their Miranda July DVDs confiscated.

I can’t really get behind the shagginess of Kleber’s films, because between every wonderful moment there’s many more of dead air, though I guess that’s just how he likes to work (Bacurau pulls this off cause it’s like 2 films in 1). And just when I thought it was gonna pick up it ended, though maybe it’s not the worst thing in the world for a 158 minute film to leave you wanting more

Sort of genius to very explicitly hang the entire film on post natal depression because it provides a plausible load bearing beam for Ramsey to indulge in all sorts of impulses and constantly pitch everything at a level of histrionic emotion usually reserved for hacks but which reads as completely commensurate to the films subject matter and its dedication to an unsubtle, distorted subjectivity. What feels so refreshing is that Lawrence has done this style of performance so many times prior in pretty bad films like Aronofsky’s Mother, which miss the mark because they attempt to position Lawrence as bearing the brunt of the universe which Ramsey eschews by sticking to such a narrow lane. Which makes it so that something you’ve seen so many times before can actually feel revelatory under the watchful eye of a tactful filmmaker. Ramsey also recognizes Lawrence and Pattinson’s wonderful qualities as physical performers and allows so much of the emotion to hinge on the rubberiness of their bodies in gestures both obvious (there’s an incredible moment where Pattinson flops over like a ragdoll out of the car seat) and subtle. There’s so little detail about either of them yet because of the shared familiarity between their bodies moments of conflict actually read as as painful and individually earth shattering as they should. And what is so lovely is how Ramsey frames Lawrence’s descent as both environmentally influenced and partially involuntary. There’s never any neat explanation to a shift in one’s brain chemistry and I was moved by how the one person Lawrence can actually communicate with without any caveats is Nick Nolte’s dementia ridden father, the condition of the brain can warp reality in such a cruel manner. And said subjectivity allows the film to be completely elliptical, forming a personal sandbox of sorts for Ramsey to deliver all kinds of perfect, sensuous imagery. The image of the knife gently cutting through the reeds would be affecting in any medium.

This collapses under its own ambitions and becomes far too convoluted to keep track of, but for a moment it’s incredibly romantic for a film where a guy gets sucked off by a vacuum.

I liked the first 5 minutes and the Yellow Magic Orchestra needle drop. Other than that, nothing new here!

Petzold playing the hits in a minor key

As I suspected all the Covid and doomscrolling stuff is just set dressing for Ari to play with genre conventions, which makes the first hour the weakest section as he seems to believe he has a duty as a contemporary filmmaker to take on the burden of actually depicting the modern world, which most people have run away from. Unfortunately the approach Ari takes is particularly hacky, slavishly recreating the divisive political climate of the pandemic (i.e. they all open their phones to look at George Floyd’s murder), yet failing to actually weave in the specific qualities of modernity, of algorithmically generated individual realities and post truth in any meaningful way- that is to say the film functions just fine without consideration of any of these things. In that sense this seems like the type of work primed to be picked apart by academics in cinema studies departments, who want to write about the media landscape of the pandemic and need a film that tackles it as an excuse. That being said once the film leaves reality it picks up and becomes as unpredictable, funny and exciting as you’d want a modern western to be. The twists remind me of Kleber’s Bacurau, which plays a little bit better because of how aggressive and goofy the tonal shift is, and I was oddly reminded of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s work which moves further and further from reality as the film goes on (see also Cloud, which has a similar final stretch and is a much shrewder diagnosis of “our times”) When the layers peel back and you see Ari’s prognosis of everything to be the same vague point about emasculation as Beau is Afraid you kind of just have to roll with it. And I wish this started from the same point of unreality as that film and like Sean Price Williams’ The Sweet East, which while also a way more dynamic and through rundown of the current moment™️, seems to be the best approximation of what Ari is shooting for, which would’ve saved everything from feeling so belabored. Funny movie anyways.

Pretty noncommittal initially but it gets to where it needs to by the end (specifically the very funny reframing of the film as a boilerplate coming of age indie)

Everyone keeps remaking The White Balloon and I’ve enjoyed all the different iterations for the most part because it offers a very functional template between giving very young actors room to explore and express themselves and provides the film a quest like-structure akin to a video game (Riddle of Fire on paper basically has the same premise) and I appreciate how Hadi doesn’t pull that many punches even if this has a vested interest in being cute.

We tend to confuse ambiguity with ambition and minimalism for artfulness these days and level as many comparisons to Stalker or Antonioni as you want but try and tell me if this has as many, if any, interesting characters, memorable pieces of dialogue, religious or philosophical quandaries as those films. But somehow it seems deep house music is enough to save this from feeling completely undercooked for most people. The vibe film is not a real thing and if it is it shouldn’t be a mark of quality if the film is all vague feelings without substance. It’s like the picture of Will Smith in I, Robot: do we have compelling themes or conceptual ideas? Nope, aura and hype moments.

Starts off with a terrible Hou Hsiao Hsien riff before threatening to do Hamaguchi-lite with a time skip and late title drop, before settling on being its very own tedious Neo-Ozu film. As if all the cliches of the modern Japanese arthouse have been reheated and served to a non discerning festival going audience. I’m starting to believe the restrained emotions characteristic of these films is less so a reflection of polite Japanese society, with said politeness making this entire thing dramatically inert, and more so a way to avoid confronting the complexity of human interaction in a conscious effort to privilege aesthetics over melodrama (Ozu’s films are so melodramatic!). That is to say you’ll probably have a way more spiritually enriching experience walking around in a Muji store for an hour. Every Director’s Fortnight screening starts with Harmony Korine’s signature lingering on the screen and all I can do is think of this video: Give me something

A shot in the arm. A respite from the incessant tedium of the modern festival movie. More to come.

You’ve seen BPM, now get ready for BPD

Watched on Wednesday May 14, 2025.

Definitely loses something once Kris Kristofferson shows up with the rest of the film feeling more so episodic, losing the urgency that propelled the early segments (easy to see how they made this into a TV show). But still what reads today as so refreshing about this picture is how unrepentantly miserable it is and how unpretentious it goes about portraying it. In an age where the tropes of the melodrama have been co-opted by the arthouse, drained of life, and served to the audience as if to make them complicit in the misery Scorsese plays a much more even hand where dignity remains in tact in the face of struggle. Alice and her kid are made to suffer but the kid is still allowed to be annoying and pockets of joy are still allowed to emerge. And for studio standards this feels relatively unvarnished as a happy medium between the melodramas of old and the independent films of the era scraping the edges of discomfort (Wanda, A Woman Under the Influence). The fact Kristofferson is allowed to do all those awful things and leave the picture relatively unscathed speaks volumes. Loved when Ellen Burstyn tells the 27 year old Harvey Keitel that she “doesn’t date teenagers”

All of these mid-2010s arthouse “humanist” dramedies have corporate mandated ironic needle drops and dance scenes. But I suppose I’ll hold my tongue when all the movies have 2Hollis in them in 15 years. That is to say this one’s a little too cute!

2045 Singapore E Sports Olympics

linktr.ee/thecodetour

Watched on Friday May 9, 2025.

As with Herzog’s best film this elegantly splits the difference between observational, documentary-inflicted realism, with the camera lingering on rote action and struggle far past anyone normally would (which is why the images tend to become interesting and memorable), and a casual mysticism, with shimmering mirages and prophetic visions injected into the work, which eventually possesses a fatalism that brings narrative shape to historical fact. This approach very clearly squares with Herzog’s own self described creative process that appears more instinctual than anything. Sometimes there’s neither rationality nor fantasy but a tree frog.

Watched on Wednesday May 7, 2025.

One of my favorite scenes here is when we watch the recording session, which initially seems to be played off as a lark with the artist performing without the backing track before the camera lingers on far longer than it would typically cut and we’re forced to see the entire action performed again but with the song in full, which shows an actual tangible, meaningful end product for a process we initially view as both unnecessarily laborious and frivolous. For various reasons Russell and Travers can’t show everything but what makes the film work is how much attention they pay to things they can.

Best part was when Wyatt Russell as the loser JD Vance Captain America experiences his most traumatic memory: reading a mean Substack article about himself on his phone while ignoring his biracial child

In many ways this works as a very effective rebuttal, or perhaps more accurately reframing of the sun dappled vacation films of Rohmer, essentially being a flip of Claire’s Knee from Claire’s perspective (curiously this was the same period Rohmer was attempting the same with Pauline at the Beach) Though this goes far further in muddying the power dynamics. You still have the same youthful insecurities that guide the social interactions where unsteady emotions are bounced around like a game of pinball though they’re undercut by very real instances of sexual violence which infuses the film with an unpredictability because of the dangers that lurk beneath every purportedly charming interaction. The extended conversation between Lili and Jean-Pierre Leaud reminds me so much of Vincent Gallo’s scenes in Claire Denis’ US Go Home, because despite the power each man holds in the interaction there is a strange, non-threatening tenderness that’s hard to fully accept. It also gives way to one of the most telling moments of the film, when Leaud reads out Lili’s clearly shabby poetry and says it’s good but not good enough. There’s always a chasm when you’re young between what you want and what you can actually grasp and trying to cross that is where most of the problems begin.

1. Die My Love
2. It Was Just an Accident
3. Yes
4. Room Temperature
5. Left-Handed Girl
6. The Mastermind
7. Magic Farm
8. Sinners
9. The Phoenician Scheme
10. Magellan

...plus 39 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Wendy and Lucy
2. Certain Women
3. First Cow
4. The Mastermind
5. Showing Up
6. Meek's Cutoff
7. Old Joy
8. Night Moves

1. Pickpocket
2. A Man Escaped
3. The Trial of Joan of Arc
4. Diary of a Country Priest
5. Four Nights of a Dreamer
6. L'Argent
7. The Devil, Probably
8. Mouchette
9. Lancelot of the Lake
10. Au Hasard Balthazar

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. No Bears
2. It Was Just an Accident
3. Taxi
4. The Mirror
5. The White Balloon
6. This Is Not a Film
7. Life

1. The Royal Tenenbaums
2. Fantastic Mr. Fox
3. Rushmore
4. The French Dispatch
5. The Grand Budapest Hotel
6. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
7. Asteroid City
8. Moonrise Kingdom
9. The Phoenician Scheme
10. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Phoenix
2. Afire
3. Undine
4. Yella
5. Transit
6. Mirrors No. 3

1. Die My Love
2. It Was Just an Accident
3. Yes
4. Left-Handed Girl
5. The Mastermind
6. Magellan
7. The Phoenician Scheme
8. Resurrection
9. Sound of Falling
10. The Secret Agent

...plus 18 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Anora
2. The Florida Project
3. Red Rocket
4. Tangerine
5. Take Out

1. Spring Breakers
2. Gummo
3. Julien Donkey-Boy
4. AGGRO DR1FT
5. Trash Humpers
6. Mister Lonely
7. The Beach Bum
8. Baby Invasion

1. Death by Hanging
2. Cruel Story of Youth
3. In the Realm of the Senses
4. Sing a Song of Sex
5. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
6. Night and Fog in Japan
7. Empire of ion
8. Max My Love

1. Showgirls
2. Turkish Delight
3. Basic Instinct
4. RoboCop
5. Starship Troopers
6. Benedetta

twitter.com/centeredfutura/status/1227519266724777989?s=21
Now with nifty flowchart

1. Parasite
2. Memories of Murder
3. Mother
4. Okja
5. The Host
6. Barking Dogs Never Bite
7. Snowpiercer
8. Mickey 17

1. The Beast
2. The Code
3. I Saw the TV Glow
4. The Shrouds
5. Anora
6. Megalopolis
7. Challengers
8. Universal Language
9. This Closeness
10. Scénarios

...plus 105 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Microhabitat
• House of Hummingbird
• Angels Wear White
• 20 Fingers
• This Closeness
• Bhaji on the Beach
• By the Time It Gets Dark
• Fresh Kill
• Sweet Bean
• Fire

...plus 22 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Unbelievable Truth
2. Surviving Desire
3. Trust
4. Flirt
5. Amateur

1. Flowers of Shanghai
2. Goodbye South, Goodbye
3. Three Times
4. The Time to Live and the Time to Die
5. Millennium Mambo
6. A City of Sadness
7. The Puppetmaster
8. Daughter of the Nile
9. A Summer at Grandpa's
10. Dust in the Wind

1. The Marriage of Maria Braun
2. Fox and His Friends
3. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
4. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
5. World on a Wire
6. Querelle

• The Mother and the Whore
• Brief Encounter
• Listen Up Philip
• Moving
• Go, Go Second Time Virgin
• Carol
• Peep "TV" Show
• Maps to the Stars
• Three Times
• I'm Still Here

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Call Me by Your Name
2. Challengers
3. Suspiria
4. We Are Who We Are
5. I Am Love
6. A Bigger Splash
7. Queer
8. Bones and All

1. Crimes of the Future
2. Pacifiction
3. Everything Everywhere All at Once
4. TÁR
5. The Novelist's Film
6. Aftersun
7. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
8. Decision to Leave
9. EO
10. No Bears

...plus 61 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Addiction
2. Ms .45
3. Zeros and Ones
4. Mary
5. New Rose Hotel
6. Dangerous Game
7. King of New York
8. Bad Lieutenant
9. 4:44 Last Day on Earth
10. Welcome to New York

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Late Spring
2. An Autumn Afternoon
3. Early Summer
4. Good Morning
5. Late Autumn
6. Floating Weeds
7. Tokyo Story
8. Tokyo Twilight
9. Early Spring
10. Equinox Flower

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Contempt
2. In Praise of Love
3. Breathless
4. Goodbye to Language
5. Alphaville
6. Hail, Sarajevo
7. In the Darkness of Time
8. King Lear
9. Tout Va Bien
10. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Pulse
2. Cure
3. Tokyo Sonata
4. Chime
5. Serpent's Path
6. Cloud
7. Bright Future

1. Funny Ha Ha
2. the Girls
3. Results
4. Mutual Appreciation
5. Computer Chess

1. Glass
2. Old
3. Trap
4. Split
5. Unbreakable
6. Knock at the Cabin
7. The Village
8. The Sixth Sense
9. The Last Airbender

1. Goodbye, Dragon Inn
2. Vive L'Amour
3. Stray Dogs
4. The Wayward Cloud
5. Days
6. What Time Is It There?
7. The River
8. Rebels of the Neon God
9. The Hole
10. I Don't Want to Sleep Alone

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Code
2. Spree
3. 0s & 1s
4. A Wonderful Cloud
5. Wobble Palace
6. We Are

1. Beau Travail
2. U.S. Go Home
3. Trouble Every Day
4. Bastards
5. Nenette and Boni
6. 35 Shots of Rum
7. Stars at Noon
8. High Life
9. White Material
10. Let the Sunshine In

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Discarnates
2. House
3. His Motorbike, Her Island
4. Sada
5. Beijing Watermelon
6. Emotion
7. Bound for the Fields, the Mountains, and the Seacoast

1. The Handmaiden
2. Decision to Leave
3. Oldboy
4. Thirst
5. t Security Area
6. Lady Vengeance
7. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
8. I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK

1. Like Someone in Love
2. Taste of Cherry
3. Close-Up
4. Certified Copy
5. The Wind Will Carry Us
6. Life, and Nothing More…
7. Ten
8. Shirin
9. Where Is the Friend's House?
10. Through the Olive Trees

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. May December
2. Priscilla
3. Afire
4. Piaffe
5. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
6. Music
7. Killers of the Flower Moon
8. How to Blow Up a Pipeline
9. Showing Up
10. Evil Does Not Exist

...plus 53 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Social Network
2. Gone Girl
3. Zodiac
4. The Killer
5. Se7en

1. Holy Motors
2. The Lovers on the Bridge
3. Annette
4. Boy Meets Girl
5. It's Not Me
6. Mauvais Sang
7. Pola X

1. The Beast
2. Nocturama
3. Coma
4. House of Tolerance
5. Zombi Child

1. Malcolm X
2. Do the Right Thing
3. He Got Game
4. 25th Hour
5. David Byrne's American Utopia
6. Bamboozled
7. Da 5 Bloods
8. She Hate Me
9. BlacKkKlansman
10. School Daze

1. Mangrove
2. Red, White and Blue
3. Lovers Rock
4. Education
5. 12 Years a Slave
6. Occupied City
7. Widows
8. Alex Wheatle
9. Hunger
10. Shame

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Shrouds
2. Anora
3. Megalopolis
4. Universal Language
5. Scénarios
6. Caught by the Tides
7. All We Imagine as Light
8. Grand Tour
9. It's Not Me
10. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Crimes of the Future
2. M. Butterfly
3. Crash
4. eXistenZ
5. Videodrome
6. The Shrouds
7. Maps to the Stars
8. The Fly
9. Cosmopolis
10. Dead Ringers

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Still Life
2. Platform
3. The World
4. Caught by the Tides
5. Pickpocket
6. Unknown Pleasures
7. Mountains May Depart

dead eyed dolls, clout chasers & unspeakable evil

• The Canyons
• Southland Tales
• Maps to the Stars
• Showgirls
• Entourage
• The Beast
• The Bling Ring
• Inland Empire
• Cosmopolis
• The Mask

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Listen Up Philip
2. Her Smell
3. The Color Wheel
4. Queen of Earth
5. Golden Exits

1. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
2. The Meetings of Anna
3. Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels
4. Toute une Nuit
5. Je Tu Il Elle
6. Golden Eighties
7. The Captive
8. News from Home
9. Hotel Monterey

1. Personal Shopper
2. Irma Vep
3. Clean
4. Demonlover
5. Clouds of Sils Maria
6. Boarding Gate
7. Non-Fiction

1. Tale of Cinema
2. Yourself and Yours
3. The Day He Arrives
4. In Front of Your Face
5. The Novelist's Film
6. Claire's Camera
7. Ha Ha Ha
8. The Woman Who Ran
9. Oki's Movie
10. Right Now, Wrong Then

...plus 12 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Mirror
• Memoria
• Untitled (For Marilyn)
• Mundane History
• Sans Soleil
• The Time to Live and the Time to Die
• U.S. Go Home
• The Long Day Closes
• Mysterious Object at Noon
• News from Home

...plus 38 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Drive My Car
2. Memoria
3. Can't Get You Out of My Head
4. We're All Going to the World's Fair
5. The French Dispatch
6. Licorice Pizza
7. Annette
8. In Front of Your Face
9. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
10. The Card Counter

...plus 59 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Speed Racer
2. The Matrix Resurrections
3. The Matrix
4. Bound
5. The Matrix Reloaded
6. Cloud Atlas
7. The Matrix Revolutions

1. A Summer's Tale
2. The Aviator's Wife
3. Love in the Afternoon
4. My Night at Maud's
5. Full Moon in Paris
6. Pauline at the Beach
7. Claire's Knee
8. A Tale of Autumn
9. The Green Ray
10. Boyfriends and Girlfriends

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.