Welcome to my monthly round up post. Here you will find all my writing from the previous month, plus a look at everything I watched.
This month I conducted a lot of interviews and I found each conversation immensely rewarding, so I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed having them. I also wrote in depth about the incomparable Hiroshi Shimizu retrospective that played NYC and reviewed two films that were not very good at all.
Tomorrow There Will Be Fine Weather: A Preview of NYC's Upcoming Hiroshi Shimizu Retrospective
Interview: Driven By Love and Necessity: An Interview With Lily Gladstone
Interview: Always a Rebel: Alessandro Nivola on The Big Cigar
Interview: Living Through Words: Ethan Hawke on His Career, Poetry, and Wildcat
May was somehow a whirlwind of a month. Thanks to the Chicago Critics Film Festival, the Shmizu retrospective from MoMI and Japan Society, a handful of Cannes Film Festival screeners, and my week of actually finally watching all the films on my AGFA Doris Wishman boxed sets, I watched a whopping 119 new-to-me films last month. As always, you can see everything I watched on Letterboxd, and below I’ve written about a few of my favorite discoveries.
My favorite film I saw for the first time at CCFF was Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing, which features a soul-stirring performance from star Colman Domingo as an incarcerated person whose life is changed through his work in a theatre program.
CCFF also featured a great collection of restored Dave Fleischer animated shorts. My favorite of these was The Mechanical Monsters (1941), a Superman cartoon that was clearly the major inspiration for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004). You love to see it.
I also really dug Don Hertzfeldt’s new bizarro, everything is terrible musical ME. Not for everyone, but certainly for me.
I can’t stop thinking about Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow and the way its use of time interrogates the trap that is nostalgia.
There were so many films in the Hiroshi Shimizu that I loved, but my three favorites were Forget Love for Now (1937), Children of the Beehive (1948), and Children of the Great Buddha (1952). You can read what I loved about these films here.
I can’t say that Jade Halley Bartlett’s Miller’s Girl is a good film per se, but I enjoyed the big swing it took into the more lascivious aspect of the Southern Gothic tradition and the film’s rich and sultry world building.
I had a blast with all the Doris Wishman films I watched, but the two I enjoyed the most were the nudie cutie noir Hideout in the Sun (1960) and the just utterly bonkers roughie Indecent Desires (1968). Nobody made bad taste look so damn stylish. I’m hoping to write longer on Wishman in the next week or so, so keep an eye out on that.
Of all the Cannes screeners I received hands down the best one was Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language. I loved it so much I went back and watched Rankin’s previous film The Twentieth Century (2019) and also several of his shorts, and damn it’s great to know someone is attempting to paint in the colors of Guy Maddin and actually succeeding.
I mostly want to recommend Roy Del Ruth’s The Mind Reader (1933) because it has one of the greatest posters of all time, but also it just has so many great performances led by the great Warren William, with truly standout supporting work from Allen Jenkins and Mayo Methot in one movie-stealing scene.
Robert and I finally tried Criterion24/7 and tuned in just as Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon (1995) came on and damn what a wonderful, gentle, and utterly heartbreaking film.
For Varda’s birthday earlier this week I finally watched Les Plages d'Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès) (2008), which I wrote about in yesterday’s Weekly Directed By Women Viewing Guide. She’s such a singular talent and I am grateful for her every day.
I also wrote at length about Tayarisha Poe’s The Young Wife, a film that I love more every time I think about it. It’s on VOD now and I hope that people will give it a watch. It’s one of the year’s most personal, idiosyncratic films and I wish it had gotten the theatrical release that it deserved.
P.S. - Don’t forget every week on Friday afternoons paid subscribers get my Directed By Women Viewing Guide, with picks for new releases and streaming hidden gems.
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I really want to see I Saw the TV Glow while its still in the theaters. I was going to see it today, but we are going to a showing of Drugstore Cowboy at the Alamo (one of my BF's favorite films).