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May (2002, Lucky McKee)
64/100Spent a lot of May feeling as if there were just too damn much going on with May. You've got the lazy eye that makes her a social outcast (swiftly corrected); you've got the creepy-ass doll whose voice seems to intermittently be in her head; you've got her general attraction to all things sick and twisted, such that she not only gets turned on by the student-film version of Trouble Every Day but wants to re-enact it with her boyfriend; you've got her fixation on the blind girl (honestly never did quite understand why that ...
Secret Mall Apartment (2024, Jeremy Workman)
60/100Irresistible for about 40 minutes, thanks to the human Borrowers’ treasure trove of self-shot video—this project was surprisingly well-documented for the pre-smartphone era, and often shot from a variety of well-chosen angles that cut together beautifully, as if they anticipated a documentary being made from their footage somewhere down the line. Moving/construction montages look more or less as they might in a fictionalized feature; were the resolution not so abysmally low, and the gang not unmistakably two decades younger than they ...
Köln 75 (2025, Ido Fluk)
64/100Improvisation rarely appeals to me, instrumental noodling still less, so I’ve never listened to Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert. Nor has Köln 75 exactly jump-started my interest—hardly surprising, since the movie basically ends when Jarrett sits down (and Nina Simone’s rendition of “To Love Somebody” plays over what little of the concert we do see). Instead, writer-director Ido Fluk fashions an entertaining, quick-witted, fast-paced character study of Vera Brandes, the German teenager who not only talked Cologne’s Opera H...
Little Trouble Girls (2025, Urška Djukić)
57/100Dirty pool to have my standard walk-out point (at ⅓ of total runtime) fall just as the choirgirls’ game of Truth or Dare is heating up. (Dared to kiss the prettiest girl in the convent—that’s where they’re rehearsing, for no terribly good reason other than amping up sacred v. profane—our bashful, anxious protagonist winds up planting one on a statue of the Virgin Mary.) Well before that point, it had become abundantly clear that Little Trouble Girls (yes, we hear the Sonic Youth song) wasn’t gonna deviate from a bog-standard...
The Hairdresser’s Husband (1990, Patrice Leconte)
33/100Second viewing, last seen during its 1992 U.S. theatrical release. Having loved Leconte’s previous film, Monsieur Hire, I was stoked for his follow-up; at year’s end, however, it made my list of ’92’s biggest disappointments, alongside the likes of Death Becomes Her and Toys. (Was a bigger fan of Zemeckis and Levinson back then than I am today.) And now I see very clearly what my objection was: There’s no movie here. Others disagree, obviously—The Hairdresser’s Husband appears in The Great Movies IV (I will tactfully pretend...
Caught Stealing (2025, Darren Aronofsky)
62/100Was After Hours mentioned in the press kit or something? I see virtually no resemblance outside of both being set in lower Manhattan (it’s not even the same neighborhood, East Village rather than SoHo; I lived on 11th St. between B and C almost exactly when this film takes place*, felt very nostalgic) and featuring Griffin Dunne as a guy named Paul. Oh, and I guess there’s a mohawk. Still, it’s got much more in common, structurally if not tonally, with something like North by Northwest: average dude (first time I’ve found Butler g...
Gemko Quibi: November 2025
As a reminder: These are brief (though they always wind up growing longer and longer) thoughts on films that I'm revisiting mostly just because it's been at least 20 years and I’m feeling nostalgic and/or want to have a rating for them. Mostly stuff that's about to be removed from a streaming service to which I subscribe, so far. See the original post for a fuller explanation. (I'm now throwing in repeat viewings of more recent films as well; those generally used to get no additional words unless my opinion significantly chang...
Hamnet (2025, Chloé Zhao)
40/100From apathy to enmity: a journey. Spent the movie’s first hour or so faintly bored, which seems almost inevitable—it’s essentially a biopic focused on the celebrated person’s wife and small children, about whom virtually nothing is known. Even the cause of Hamnet’s death is a mystery. (Hell, we don’t even know for sure what people called Mrs. Shakes, a detail of which I was previously unaware; spent the entire damn movie wondering why only “Agnes” had been renamed.) Doesn’t preclude richly imaginative fiction, of course,...
Jay Kelly (2025, Noah Baumbach)
49/100Crippled by rampant phoniness, plus some surprising ineptitude. I don’t blame Billy Crudup, who salvages that scene as best he can from beneath a singularly unflattering haircut, but the whole “Now I’ll drop the mask and reveal how much I despise and resent you” thing, following a prolonged period of feigned flattery/obsequiousness, never ever plays for me—it’s a cheap gotcha that instantly detaches the scenario from any emotional reality. And here it’s quickly followed by a Wild Strawberries*-style flashback memory that nee...
Fool for Love (1985, Robert Altman)
50/100One of the long-forgotten indie films I “reviewed” (in 100-word capsules) for Entertainment Weekly back in the late ’90s bore the cringeworthy title I Love You, Don’t Touch Me! And that’s more or less the dynamic here, exemplified by the way that May is introduced hiding from Eddie in the bathroom, terrified, but also primping herself for him in the mirror. She castigates him one moment and throws her arms around his legs like a frightened child seconds later; she instigates a tender kiss and follows up with a knee to the balls....
Bed and Sofa (1927, Abram Room)
73/100That '86 Soderbergh notebook entry became sex, lies and videotape...and also serves as a perfect logline for the remarkable, relatively little-known Soviet silent feature Bed and Sofa, which doesn't of course involve homemade pornos but is nonetheless arguably even more fucked up in certain respects. While director Abram Room doesn't have a surname that looks particularly Russian to Westerners (no -sky or -ovich), the film reveals itself as Russian (or at least Russian-influenced) almost immediately, introducing Nikolai (Nikol...
Dark Habits (1983, Pedro Almodovar)
54/100Avoided this for many years because it looked like non-stop Fallacy of the Profane Granny. Nuns snorting coke and shooting heroin! A convent decorated with Marilyn Monroe and Raquel Welch pin-ups! There's a tiger roaming around for some reason! And all of that's not not somewhat tiresome for me, truth be told. But I was surprised to discover that Dark Habits isn't especially comedic, that its sinning Sisters aren't really played for laughs. Julieta Serrano maintains the Mother Superior's dignity throughout, and her cha...
Shoeshine (1946, Vittorio De Sica)
66/100Let me note first my single favorite thing about this movie: Its original title, Sciuscià, turns out to be not the Italian word for "shoeshine" (as I'd always assumed), but rather a transliteration of how the Neapolitan accent pronounces that English word. It's as if a Japanese film were titled, say, Suturoberi Aisukurimo. (Matthew Butcher incoming with actual examples from Japan. Does Audition/Ōdishon qualify? Or is its true title in katakana?) Not far behind, however, are Shoeshine's two central performances, both ...
Sirāt (2025, Oliver Laxe)
59/100Raves: not even once. [I guess there's one minor SPOILER below.]Harrowing, to be sure, and it's arguably my own fault that the punishment our heroes(?) endure seemed wildly disproportionate. Or maybe Laxe's contextualization is overly subtle. In any case, it didn't register at the outset that some enormous world conflict's a-brewin', and later allusions to same I took as mere hyperbole, e.g. Bigui asking "So has World War III broken out? Is this what the end of the world feels like?" seemed to be nothing mo...
Going home to get my shine box.
Shoeshine got off to a quick lead in last week's request poll but was ultimately overtaken by Landscape Suicide. This week, it handily beat Branagh's Henry V and the new Running Man, pulling in 51% of the vote. This seems to me like one of the most notable classics I still haven't seen, though when I checked They Shoot Movies' list I was surprised to find that it dropped out of the top 1,000* several years ago. It's digitally rentable. Both of this month's random draws are ancient requests that spent the minimum four wee...
Oscar (1991, John Landis)
53/100Something I assumed about Oscar: Sylvester Stallone plays a character named Oscar. (Oscar doesn't show up until 40 seconds before The End.) Something else I assumed about Oscar: Stallone hangs Harold Lloyd–style from a clockface at some point. (He does not, nor does anyone else.) Something I did not assume about Oscar: It's adapted from a French farce first performed onstage in 1958 and previously filmed in 1967. True farce (as opposed to just the vaguely farcical) is a curious animal. On the one hand, it's arguably the hard...
Landscape Suicide (1986, James Benning)
63/100 Looking up where I could watch Landscape Suicide (Tubi, surprisingly, but see Anal-Retentive Title Corner below), I inadvertently glimpsed the first few lines of a description, which read: "Benning continues his examination of Americana in this film through the stories of two murderers. Ed Gein was a Wisco..." It cut off there, but Gein's name alone was enough to bring me up short, based on my previous Benning experience (One Way Boogie Woogie, 13 Lakes and Ten Skies). "He made a true-crime doc? About the most notorious 2...
The Ice Tower (2025, Lucile Hadžihalilović)
53/100Not the warped fairytale I'd assumed (based on every promotional still), for better and worse. Better in that Hadžihalilović's strengths are largely suggestive, intimating another, stranger world at the threshold of our own; when she went full-bore surreal with Earwig, the eerie magic dissipated. Ice Tower plays footsie with the phantasmagoric but is arguably her most conventional feature to date, its emblematic moment being Jeanne's initial awed view of the Snow Queen, seemingly walking towards her...until a offscreen voice...
Shivers (1975, David Cronenberg)
56/100Second viewing, last seen at Anthology Film Archives' complete Cronenberg retro in 2002...during the course of which I also first watched Rabid and found that to be Shivers' much more accomplished near-identical sibling. A recent revisit saw me slightly less impressed, but I still think it's the better film by some margin (specifically: an 11-point margin), for several reasons. First, it's got a riveting Marilyn Chambers in the central role; Shivers arguably qualifies as an ensemble piece, but if you had to pick one charac...
Reflection in a Dead Diamond (2025, Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani)
63/100Can't imagine ever being anything but excited to see Cattet & Forzani ask themselves questions like "How can we create something visually spectacular from four quick shots of a man walking down a hotel corridor, stopping at the door to his room, then glancing over at the room next to his?" (Their answer includes, for one of those four shots, cinema's most striking geometric hotel carpet since Kubrick's chosen pattern for the Overlook.) Sustaining that excitement for the duration of a feature-length narrative remains th...
The Childhood of a Leader (2015, Brady Corbet)
50/100Title's final word does a lot of load-bearing work here. To be fair, so does Tom Sweet's presence (more than his performance per se; he mostly just looks absolutely perfect, a real casting coup) as the pre-pubescent despot-to-be. And Leader's magnificently led by Scott Walker's almost unbearably intense, keening orchestral score, which I've owned for a decade despite not having watched the film until just now—if you wouldn't at least entertain the idea of our walking together down the aisle to this theme, alarmin...
Suicide is painless?
Hope so, since Landscape Suicide came from behind (or so various comments suggest; I wasn't paying attention myself) to eke out a victory over Shoeshine in this week's request poll, with Splitsville a distant third. While I try not to read about films in advance, my eye inadvertently caught just enough while I was looking up where this one can be found (on Tubi, improbably) to give me the impression that it might be something of a conventional documentary, rather than the structural/experimental Benning films I've seen to date (One ...
Enjo (1958, Kon Ichikawa)
57/100Second viewing, last seen 24 June 1995. (My screening log indicates that I rented it from Kim's Video between theatrical viewings that same day of Apollo 13 and Party Girl—the one starring Parker Posey, not the one directed by Nick Ray.) Watched it this time in honor of the late Tatsuya Nakadai, who steals the movie as a bitterly cynical fellow seminary student (I think? why he's around isn't super clear, at least to an American viewer more than half a century later) who at one point employs his twisted right leg as a seduct...
Good Fortune (2025, Aziz Ansari)
56/100Honestly, I didn't even need the high-concept premise. Would happily have watched an entire movie about Seth Rogen as a blowhard finance bro and Aziz Ansari as his put-upon personal assistant. Just watching them riff about anything is a good time. ROGEN: You got a hot date? What's the plan?ANSARI: Eh, somethin' low-key. Prob'ly go get tacos.ROGEN: Tacos?! What? Do you not like this girl?ANSARI: Yeah I like this girl, do you not like tacos?ROGEN: How did you guys meet each other?ANSARI: Mmm...we kinda met at a taco place. R...
Green Snake (1993, Tsui Hark)
62/100Anyone know Tsui's colored-gel budget for this sucker? Every dollar withheld from F/X work—released the same year that Jurassic Park made it clear that digital was the future, Green Snake features tsunamis that look charmingly as if some P.A. just tossed a large bucket of water perpendicular to the camera lens—evidently went into creating a singular gauzy pastel look that leaps out even to my defective eyes. (It's subtle color schemes that are liable to elude me; when filmmakers go big, as in Ju Dou or Umbrellas of Cherbourg, ...
Not enough of my yammerin'. Let's boogie!
As I noted in the most recent Quibi post, my October rewatches of Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (85/100) and In My Skin (74/100) were preparation for a podcast appearance on The Unwatchables on which both were discussed. That episode is now up. My guess is that many of you haven't seen either of these films, and I'd recommend both to anyone with a suitably strong stomach. (Sick features unsimulated acts of very cheerful masochism, most notably Flanagan hammering his dick to a board, while In My Skin gets just ...
Sentimental Value (2025, Joachim Trier)
42/100Dunno if I'd say there are actual spoilers below, but I do give away a pretty funny joke right off the bat. Like all of my friends who've seen Sentimental Value, I cracked up when Stellan Skarsgård's art-film director gifted his roughly 10-year-old grandson with DVDs of Irreversible and The Piano Teacher (though I'm old enough not to have caught without prompting from dialogue that giving a small child any DVD, however age-appropriate, is now likely to be pointless). Yet that's one of many reasons I didn't much li...
My Undesirable Friends: Part I • Last Air in Moscow (2024, Julia Loktev)
59/100Easily the most remarkable thing about Loktev's epic documentary project (Part II: Exile, due sometime next year, will apparently also run somewhere around five hours) is that she began shooting about four months before Putin invaded Ukraine, with no expectation that war was imminent. Her original idea was simply to profile some of the courageous young women working for independent Russian station TV Rain, all of whom had recently been designated as "foreign agents" (and required to display that information on literally everyt...
The Devil to Pay! (1930, Geo. Fitzmaurice)
76/100Second viewing, last seen at NYU (seems to have been a class on early sound in Hollywood; I wasn't actually taking it, just sitting in on screenings) in 1995. Were I to draft a list of the most purely likeable characters in cinema history, Willie Hale, as embodied-more-than-played by Ronald Colman, would be way up near the top, alongside Lloyd Dobler and Jane Craig; The Devil to Pay! mostly coasts on his laid-back charm, and I rarely wanted it to do anything more, frankly. First thing we see Willie do is interrupt an auction of his fu...
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (2025, Simon Curtis)
55/100Best of the three films, though that's not saying much. (I'd intended to catch up with Ostensible Finale on I see now it's Peacock, who knows when, but was in San Jose for a couple of days on personal business and noticed that Camera 3, my hometown arthouse theater, was screening it on Wednesday night. Their schedule's very erratic these days so whenever an opportunity arises to see anything I'm even remotely interested in, I tend to jump on it, out of nostalgia for the venue.) This almost feels like an episode of the ...
