Romanian filmmaking doesn’t make deep inroads into the United States. Cristian Mungiu’s deadly serious and award-winning 2007 drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is probably the most well-known of all the Romanian imports that have shown up in American arthouses over the past few decades. Radu
[NOTE: All archive reviews were published previously in print or on the internet for outlets that used to employ me. Every so often I'll be posting them here to give them another go.] HELLRAISER (2022) Pity the poor monsters of legendary horror movie franchises: Time and familiarity and
I still have an iPod. The last time it was updated was, I’m guessing, 2010 or so, not long before Apple purged my iTunes without any warning. One day I had 29,000+ songs in my files. The next day about 60% of that. Music I had purchased online,
La Pochette brand cigarette pouch, made from 100% leatherette and 14K Goldelle, tagline: “You kids KNOCK IT OFF!” This is an ad from Programme 4, a world outside of both time and place. The product, La Pochette, never existed. Also, in 1972, my mom owned one. She smoked Tareytons. She
I wrote a silly little book once – out of print, who cares – and in that silly little book I documented a moment when I was expected to review a film based on seeing it at its premiere. Sometimes they do this to you: no press screening, it's just
"Barrie Chase is here," I said to friend and neighbor Gary Cotti. The name didn't immediately click for him. So I whispered, "Mutual, I'm sure." "WHAT?! WHERE?!" He didn't yell, but his response was emphatic and warrants all-caps.
Two novels about unhappy priests by Georges Bernanos: The Diary of a Country Priest (1936), about a young priest in a rural French village whose physical frailty from encroaching stomach cancer parallels the diminished faith of his parishioners. He can't pray or sleep or eat, and despairs over
I have built a subjective scale of Christmas mania and appointed myself as arbiter of truth. A simple 1 to 10, where 1 is you tolerate the holiday, 5 is you like it like a normal person, 10 is you might have actually lost your mind for it. I have
I took that photo with my shitty iPhone 8. People laugh at me when I tell them that's still my level of phone but I don't care. It functions mostly. Anyway, the tomato. It's from my local farmer's market. Not THE farmer&
INHERENT VICE (2014) A title card in Inherent Vice references graffiti from a Paris wall in May of 1968, when French student and worker protests announced a social revolution there. That slogan — “Under the pavingstones, the beach!” — is about two forces pushing against one another, the cement on top eventually
7 Walks with Mark Brown is a documentary about French plants and the paleobotanist who loves them, and when I describe it that simply to friends, sometimes their eyes glaze over and they say something deadly like, “Oh… well, I guess that sounds nice.” 7 Walks is, of course, more
I woke up to a text from a friend letting me know that Radu Jude's latest film, Dracula, opens at the end of October. I admire Jude's films – his exuberantly long titles alone make me pretty happy: Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn; I Do Not