by ·Comments Off on Inventory: Cinema Scope

The ol’ movie blog is almost twenty years old, and for that entire time I’ve been reading Cinema Scope magazine. I subscribed after seeing Guy Maddin on the cover of issue 16 and stayed through Maddin’s cover of the final issue 97. It was a huge influence on what I chose to watch, and how I thought about film, and now that it’s gone, I won’t know how to tell which new movies to take seriously.

This past month I’ve caught up with a bunch of films that appeared on their front covers and/or year-end lists. To cap off those hastily-written entries, here’s an incomplete list of 300ish movies I watched and logged here – for better or worse – after reading about them in C. Scope’s pages. Sorted by the year they covered each movie, not when I watched it, which was often a very long time later.

–
2003-2005

Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay)
Cowards Bend the Knee (Guy Maddin)
Waiting For Happiness (Abderrahmane Sissako)
In My Skin (Marina de Van)
Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette)
Mondovino (Jonathan Nossiter)
Kings and Queen (Arnaud Desplechin)
L’Enfant (Dardennes)
Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (Peter Tscherkassky)
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu)
Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
8 Women (Francois Ozon)
Bright Future (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Childstar (Don McKellar)

2006

Homecoming (Joe Dante)
The Regular Lovers (Philippe Garrel)
La Commune (Peter Watkins)
Iraq in Fragments (James Longley)
Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt)
Marie-Antoinette (Sofia Coppola)
Gabrielle (Patrice Chéreau)
The Wind That Shakes the Barley (Ken Loach)
Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa)
Southland Tales (Richard Kelly)
Opera Jawa (Garin Nugroho)
Tales of the Rat Fink (Ron Mann)
Offside (Jafar Panahi)
Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

2007

The Last Winter (Larry Fessenden)
Deja Vu (Tony Scott)
Still Life (Jia Zhang-Ke)
Quei loro incontri (Straub/Huillet)
The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (Sophie Fiennes)
12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu)
Rehearsals for Retirement (Phil Solomon)
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu)
Go Go Tales (Abel Ferrara)
The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (Adam Curtis)
37/78 Tree Again (Kurt Kren)
Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (John Gianvito)
Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant)

2008

The Band’s Visit (Eran Kolirin)
In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerín)
La France (Serge Bozon)
Chop Shop (Ramin Bahrani)
Victory Over The Sun (Michael Robinson)
RR (James Benning)
Class Relations (Straub/Huillet)
Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas)
Baghead (Jay & Mark Duplass)
Mock Up on Mu (Craig Baldwin)
The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel)
Of Time and the City (Terence Davies)
Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh)
Pontypool (Bruce McDonald)
JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri)
Momma’s Man (Azazel Jacobs)

2009

Hunger (Steve McQueen)
Revanche (Götz Spielmann)
Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer)
Double Take (Johan Grimonprez)
Independencia (Raya Martin)
Bright Star (Jane Campion)
Let Each One Go Where He May (Ben Russell)
Sweetgrass (Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Ilisa Barbarsh)
Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine)
Tetro (Francis Ford Coppola)
Everyone Else (Maren Ade)

2010

Collapse (Chris Smith)
Film Socialism (Jean-Luc Godard)
Cold Weather (Aaron Katz)
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
Of Gods and Men (Xavier Beauvois)
The Oath (Laura Poitras)
Oki’s Movie (Hong Sang-soo)
I Wish I Knew (Jia Zhang-Ke)
The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski)
Alamar (Pedro González-Rubio)

2011

In the Shadows (Thomas Arslan)
Spring in a Small City (Fei Mu)
Mysteries of Lisbon (Raoul Ruiz)
Essential Killing (Jerzy Skolimowski)
The Four Times (Michelangelo Frammartino)
El Sicario Room 164 (Gianfranco Rosi)
Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari)
On Tour (Mathieu Amalric)
The White Meadows (Mohammad Rasoulof)
I Saw the Devil (Jee-woon Kim)
Road to Nowhere (Monte Hellman)
The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr)
Dreileben (Graf & Hochhausler & Petzold)
Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols)
House of Tolerance (Bertrand Bonello)
Monsieur Lazhar (Philippe Falardeau)
Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)
Attack the Block (Joe Cornish)
Symbol (Hitoshi Matsumoto)
Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin)
Target (Alexander Zeldovich)
Sleeping Sickness (Ulrich Köhler)

2012

Secret History of the Dividing Line (David Gatten)
Kill List (Ben Wheatley)
Two Years at Sea (Ben Rivers)
Crank (Neveldine & Taylor)
Tabu (Miguel Gomes)
Alps (Yorgos Lanthimos)
Neighbouring Sounds (Kleber Mendonca Filho)
Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg)
Holy Motors (Leos Carax)
Room 237 (Rodney Ascher)
The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev)
Museum Hours (Jem Cohen)
Greatest Hits (Nicolas Pereda)
Differently, Molussia (Nicolas Rey)
N:O:T:H:I:N:G and T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (Paul Sharits)
The End of Time (Peter Mettler)
Viola (Matias Piñeiro)

2013

Tectonics (Peter Bo Rappmund)
Girl from Nowhere (Jean-Claude Brisseau)
The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer)
Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley)
Vic+Flo Saw a Bear (Denis Côté)
Chumlum (Ron Rice)
Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski)
Norte, the End of History (Lav Diaz)
Stranger by the Lake (Alain Guiraudie)
The Past (Asghar Farhadi)
The Strange Little Cat (Ramon Zurcher)
Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-liang)
What Now? Remind Me (Joaquim Pinto)
Grosse Fatigue (Camille Henrot)
The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears (Cattet & Forzani)
A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (Ben Rivers & Ben Russell)

2014

Tom at the Farm (Xavier Dolan)
Why Don’t You Play in Hell? (Sion Sono)
Mouton (Gilles Deroo & Marianne Pistone)
New Fancy Foils (Jodie Mack)
Hard to be a God (Aleksei German)
Ida (Pawel Pawlikowski)
Jauja (Lisandro Alonso)
Force Majeure (Ruben Östlund)
The Wonders (Alice Rohrwacher)
Li’l Quinquin (Bruno Dumont)
Ape (Joel Potrykus)
Stop the Pounding Heart (Roberto Minervini)
Listen Up Philip (Alex Ross Perry)
20,000 Days on Earth (Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard)
La Sapienza (Eugène Green)
The Second Game (Corneliu Porumboiu)

2015

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (Roy Andersson)
The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland)
Orpheus (Outtakes) (Mary Helena Clark)
Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas)
Phoenix (Christian Petzold)
Blackhat (Michael Mann)
Wild Tales (Damián Szifrón)
Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)
Mia Madre (Nanni Moretti)
The Other Side (Roberto Minervini)
Arabian Nights (Miguel Gomes)
Miami Blues (George Armitage)
Ritual (Joseph Bernard)
Cosmos (Andrzej Zulawski)
The Club (Pablo Larrain)
Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sang-soo)
88:88 (Isiah Medina)
No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman)
Visit, or Memories and Confessions (Manoel de Oliveira)

2016

Office (Johnnie To)
The Visit (M. Night Shyamalan)
The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino)
Engram of Returning (Daïchi Saïto)
Love It, Leave It (Tom Palazzolo)
Christine (Antonio Campos)
Kate Plays Christine (Robert Greene)
Sixty Six (Lewis Klahr)
The Wailing (Na Hong-jin)
The Death of Louis XIV (Albert Serra)
Bleu Shut (Robert Nelson)
Things to Come (Mia Hansen-Løve)
Elle (Paul Verhoeven)
The Challenge (Yuri Ancarani)
The Human Surge (Eduardo Williams)
All the Cities of the North (Dane Komljen)
Berlin Horse (Malcolm Le Grice)
New York Portrait and Boston Fire (Peter Hutton)

2017

The Ornithologist (João Pedro Rodrigues)
As Without So Within (Manuela de Laborde)
Austerlitz (Sergei Loznitsa)
Kékszakállú (Gastón Solnicki)
The Lost City of Z (James Gray)
Resident Evil 4 to 6 (Paul W.S. Anderson)
Columbus (Kogonada)
I Am Not Madame Bovary (Feng Xiaogang)
Good Time (Ben & Joshua Safdie)
Western (Valeska Grisebach)
Let the Sunshine In (Claire Denis)
24 Frames (Abbas Kiarostami)
Ouroboros (Basma Alsharif)
Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? (Travis Wilkerson)
Zama (Lucrecia Martel)
Strangely Ordinary This Devotion (Dani & Sheilah ReStack)
Good Luck (Ben Russell)
Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (Frederick Wiseman)
First Reformed (Paul Schrader)

2018

Foxtrot (Samuel Maoz)
Dawson City: Frozen Time (Bill Morrison)
The Wandering Soap Opera (Raoul Ruiz & Valeria Sarmiento)
Cocote (Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias)
3/4 (Ilian Metev)
Dillinger Is Dead (Marco Ferreri)
Bodied (Joseph Kahn)
The Rider (Chloé Zhao)
Burning (Lee Chang-dong)
Climax (Gaspar Noé)
Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Bi Gan)
Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-Eda)
In My Room (Ulrich Köhler)
Asako I & II (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi)
Rose Gold (Sara Cwynar)
Blaze (Ethan Hawke)
Night Pulse (Damon Packard)
The Grand Bizarre (Jodie Mack)
La Flor (Mariano Llinás)
Fausto (Andrea Bussmann)
An Elephant Sitting Still (Hu Bo)
Happy as Lazzaro (Alice Rohrwacher)

2019

Belmonte (Federico Veiroj)
Rojo (Benjamín Naishtat)
A Land Imagined (Siew Hua Yeo)
Synonyms (Nadav Lapid)
The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Joe Talbot)
Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream (Frank Beauvais)
Fourteen (Dan Sallitt)
The Plagiarists (Peter Parlow)
I Was at Home, But… (Angela Schanelec)
MS Slavic 7 (Sofia Bohdanowicz)
Unfriended 2: Dark Web (Stephen Susco)
Indefinite Pitch (James Wilkins)
Portrait of Ga (Margaret Tait)
It has to be lived once and dreamed twice (Rainer Kohlberger)
Diamantino (Gabriel Abrantes & Daniel Schmidt)
Atlantics (Mati Diop)
It Must Be Heaven (Elia Suleiman)
The Traitor (Marco Bellocchio)
Bird Island (Sergio Da Costa & Maya Kosa)
Martin Eden (Pietro Marcello)
Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another (Jessica Sarah Rinland)
Oroslan (Matjaz Ivanisin)
Anne at 13,000 Ft. (Kazik Radwanski)

2020

Little Joe (Jessica Hausner)
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma)
The 20th Century (Matthew Rankin)
The Assistant (Kitty Green)
Days (Tsai Ming-liang)
The Truffle Hunters (Michael Dweck & Gregory Kershaw)
Cilaos & La Bouche (Camilo Restrepo)
This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese)
The Resurrected (Dan O’Bannon)
The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) (Edström Anders & CW Winter)
Dust Devil (Richard Stanley)
Possessor (Brandon Cronenberg)
Notturno (Gianfranco Rosi)

2021

La Nature (Artavazd Peleshian)
Rock Bottom Riser (Fern Silva)
Faya Dayi (Jessica Beshir)
Taming the Garden (Salomé Jashi)
Happy Valley and E-Ticket (Simon Liu)
The Beta Test (Jim Cummings & PJ McCabe)
Fabian: Going to the Dogs (Dominik Graf)
The Empty Man (David Prior)
Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (Kier-La Janisse)
What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (Aleksandre Koberidze)
Social Hygiene (Denis Côté)
El Planeta (Amalia Ulman)
The Scary of Sixty-First (Dasha Nekrasova)
Titane (Julia Ducournau)
Friends and Strangers (James Vaughan)

2022

Celia (Ann Turner)
El Gran Movimiento (Kiro Russo)
Earwig (Lucile Hadzihalilovic)
The Sacred Spirit (Chema García Ibarra)
Outside Noise (Ted Fendt)
A Man and a Camera (Guido Hendrikx)
Mutzenbacher (Ruth Beckermann)
Queens of the Qing Dynasty (Ashley McKenzie)
The Tale of King Crab (Matteo Zoppis & Alessio Rigo de Righi)
A New Old Play (Jiongjiong Qiu)
Enys Men (Mark Jenkin)
Ishtar (Elaine May)

2023-2024

Saint Omer (Alice Diop)
Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella)
Rewind & Play (Alain Gomis)
BlackBerry (Matt Johnson)
Fata Morgana (Werner Herzog)
Here (Bas Devos)
Everything Everywhere Again Alive (Keith Lock)
Strange Codes (Arthur Lipsett)
Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismäki)
Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet)
Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World (Radu Jude)
Bouquets (Rose Lowder)
Last Summer (Catherine Breillat)
Tourism and We Don’t Talk (Joshua Gen Solondz)
The Delinquents (Rodrigo Moreno)

by ·Comments Off on The Second Game (2014, Corneliu Porumboiu)

The one where the director watches a scoreless soccer game on TV with his dad, a soccer game his dad coached, and they discuss the game, players, era, and political context… difference in rules and tactics between then (1988) and now, the political implications of this army-vs-police game and the risks of being its referee. It’s movie-as-audio-commentary, and I was on board for the first half, until it runs out of interest and energy, just like most audio commenataries. Dad complains about the picture quality (“it’s from the stone age”) and he also takes a phone call which causes digital interference in the sound recording, so both layers have their tech problems.

Jordan Cronk in Cinema Scope: “It quickly becomes clear that the least interesting thing occurring on screen is the game. Rather, interpersonal rivalries, intimidation tactics, convenient editing, and extracurricular ploys provide the drama in a parallel conflict taking place just beneath the surface.”

Dad: “You couldn’t make a film out of this. Nobody would watch it, it’s all in the past. Football is like everything else, like cinema and art: they all have their moment, you consume it, and it’s over.”

Porumboiu, arguing that the game is like his films:

by ·Comments Off on Childstar (2004, Don McKellar)

The kid is from a forgotten Neverending Story reboot, and has worked consistently. Our director plays the star’s driver/handler, also trying to break into the industry with his experimental film called The Stupidity of God. Good cast, good fun.

Matrix Macaulay:

Mark Peranson in (of course) Cinema Scope:

It takes a while to sink in that the characters in Childstar evince an odd or off-putting psychology. They aren’t just in a movie; they behave as if they are in a movie. They interpret their surroundings in movie terms. They might come across as flat or underdeveloped, but that’s the danger of being driven by culture.

McKellar:

What’s interesting about the child-star phenomena is that it’s an exaggeration or acceleration of what a lot of people are feeling. Trapped in popular culture. Circumscribed by this all-encompassing machine that doesn’t allow them to find their own ability to express themselves.

by ·Comments Off on Alamar (2009, Pedro González-Rubio)

Kid is visiting Dad, who catches fish and lobsters along the coral reef.

I chilled out to the movie’s rhythms, and could’ve fallen asleep if not for this excellent egret.

The producer is a powerhouse, the director has some little-seen followup films, and you could (and probably should) watch three of ’em together in the same runtime as the Henry Fonda doc.

Adam Nayman writes that Gonzalez-Rubio “gets a film’s worth of astonishing footage, almost all of it shot by the filmmaker himself with a single HD camera,” and they discuss the “fiction inside the story” (the egret was an unstaged wild encounter). G-R: “I wouldn’t have been honest if I had shot this intimate story and then slept at night in another place, rather than in the palafitte on a hammock, waking up with the first rays of the sun.”

by ·Comments Off on 8 Women (2002, Francois Ozon)

Lovely and delightful, a bunch of the greatest actresses in a color-coordinated single-location murder-mystery musical. I take it Ozon isn’t always good, but I’m thankful to discover that he was ever this good. The ending is a bit cruel (you shouldn’t shoot yourself in front of your kids).

Won a cast award at Berlin (you bet it did). Victim’s wife Deneuve appears here after a couple Ruiz films and in between a couple Oliveiras. Her weirdo sister Isabelle Huppert was also following a great Ruiz, in between a couple Hanekes. Their mom Danielle Darrieux had been playing Catherine’s mom since The Young Girls of Rochefort. Chef Firmine Richard was in an early film from the director of Indigenes which nobody appears to have seen. Suspicious new maid (they’re all suspicious, but come on) Emmanuelle Béart was a decade past La Belle Noiseuse and about to star in Story of Marie and Julien. Victim’s flighty sister Fanny Ardant looks the same as she did in the 1980s Resnais films, played Maria Callas this same year. Older daughter Virginie Ledoyen had already been murdered by Huppert in The Ceremony and more recently played the hotgirl in The Beach. That leaves young Ludivine Sagnier, who would return in Ozon’s Swimming Pool, and get to sing again in Love Songs.

Huppert’s transformation:

by ·Comments Off on Zigeunerweisen (1980, Seijun Suzuki)

Dream-logic stuff happens, shot in a dreamy way by resurgent Suzuki (his big comeback, according to people who didn’t see A Tale of Sorrow). Story of the titular sound recording where the composer’s voice can be heard on the recording is true, the characters sharing this story are a German professor, a guy named Nakasago who is maybe his colleague or maybe a random maniac he met on a beach, and the girl (a geisha in mourning and her various doppelgangers). Between them, the three lead actors have been in all the weird Japanese movies: the prof in Funeral Parade of Roses, the girl in The Human Bullet, and Naka in Farewell to the Ark, Izo, and Nightmare Detective, not to mention the rest of Suzuki’s trilogy.

Sean Rogers in Cinema Scope:

A blood-red crab superimposed on a dead woman’s crotch, a bowl of pork fat grotesquely overfilled, a tongue erotically licking an eyeball in close-up, a man buried to the neck below riotously flourishing cherry blossoms — these visual flourishes originate entirely with the filmmaker, rather than the lean and fragmented short stories by the Taisho-era modernist Uchida Hyakken that serve as the film’s source material … Suzuki and screenwriter Tanaka Yozo, who scripted all the films of the trilogy, delight in setting up mysteries that are never resolved: Did Nakasago murder the woman on the beach? Did he seduce Aochi’s wife? Did Aochi himself sleep with Sono, or was she a ghost? And can Nakasago reclaim his daughter from O-Ine, even from beyond the grave?

by ·Comments Off on SPL: Kill Zone (2005, Wilson Yip)

I think the movie wants us to root for the cops who are trying to out-brutality each other, versus drug boss Sammo Hung who had the parents of a “cute” child murdered before they could testify against him. I chose to wish righteous death upon everyone onscreen, and nearly got my wish. Each cop has his little emotional family subplot before getting killed by a white-suited knife guy, except for retiring-due-to-brain-cancer Simon Yam who unfairly gets to live to see the sequel. Sammo also survives, but has been through a lot (accidentally murdering his family using Donnie Yen as a weapon), so he’s allowed to skip the sequel. The lighting was good, anyway.

Look what happens to bad cops:

My coworkers are always asking the autocomplete apps for professional advice and they no longer trust any knowledge that doesn’t come from bots, so I finally gave in, asking a bot how this movie ends, and it gave a completely wrong answer. Brandon’s Deeper Into Movies Blog: providing more accurate movie descriptions than the autocomplete bots for almost twenty years.

You have defeated Donnie Yen, but at what cost?

by ·Comments Off on Manslaughter (1922, Cecil De Mille)

I realized just before hitting play that I meant to grab Manhandled (1924), not Manslaughter (1922), for the series I’m watching. But I haven’t ever named or mentioned this series and I’m accountable to no one, and I’ve got Manslaughter on DVD with an Alloy Orchestra soundtrack, so we’re making a substitution. Ultimately the movie is a boring morality story, but I enjoyed playing the keyboard-and-percussion score nice and loud.

Early on the movie lets us know that the cute girl is gonna be punished by society for driving her car too fast (55mph!), with ominous capitalization in the intertitles. When Joy races a traffic cop she’d previously bribed I immediately recognized the music – this is the part I used in my trailer for Variete. She does a fun little stunt that kills the pursuing motorcycle cop.

Second-billed is the upright district attorney (who does some manhandling after all), and while Joy is in jail learning how to be a good generous person (?) the DA quits his job to become a drunk, until her jail-earned Goodness puts the DA back on the righteous track.

I’m always saying this:

I like that the lawyer’s name is Dan O’Bannon. DeMille must not have been impressed with Joy – she is 13th-billed in the following year’s Ten Commandments. Dead cop Jack Mower would play a cop in House of Wax decades later. Manhandled maid Lois Wilson starred in The Covered Wagon, and the maid’s sick kid Mickey Moore went on to assistant-direct Elvis movies.

I’m always saying this:

by ·Comments Off on Blow Out (1981, Brian De Palma)

Haven’t seen this in a while… probably De Palma’s best movie, but I’d probably say that about ten different De Palma movies if I’d rewatched them this week. Sound recordist Travolta works at a movie production house with a framed poster of Squirm, rescues Nancy Allen from a car crash, and gradually uncovers her role in the “accident.” Unfortunately for everyone, killer John Lithgow has gone rogue, starts a side project murdering girls who look like Nancy so her eventual death will be blamed on the serial killer instead of politics. Nancy’s accomplice, blackmail-photographer Dennis Franz, relaxes at home watching De Palma’s Murder a la Mod, while his shadowy co-conspirators erase Travolta’s entire tape library (filmed in an Akerman spin take).