Adelaide Film Festival 2022 #11 ("work-in-progress screening")

Let’s get it out right off the bat(mos): Tim Carlier’s debut feature is an incredible accomplishment; at once a scrappy “friends make a movie” movie and a work of fully-formed comic and cinematic sensibility, if not maybe actual genius. The premise is simple: actress leaves film set with a mic, sound recordist has to get it back. What follows is an odyssey through parks, city blocks, house parties, churches and liminal spaces, uncovering…

I had the very great pleasure of writing the CTEQ annotations for this, a a film from my favourite director, which can be read here at Senses of Cinema. I mainly focus on the film's context within King Hu's career and how it might represent a transitional period of martial arts cinema, but what I found the most fun (and difficult) to talk about is the relationship between the narrative structure and visual style, which only grows more rewarding with…

The World is Hell: Hopeless Cinema

[more to come...writing something large-ish but I'm feeling worse the longer I think about this and need to go to bed]

Update: More thoughts added

I have spent several hours now performing an exorcism on myself and I still only feel marginally better than I did when the lights came on and I emerged from the interminable hellscape that is this fucking movie. It is a million times more apocalyptically bleak than you could…