What the hell does this have
to do with a French movie about white women, you may be asking? Well, to get
there, I have to share this New York Times quote from actor/comedian Andy
Samberg. (Not a sentence I anticipated typing.) He articulated something I felt
but hadn’t been able to put into words about watching this movie (and in a
related way about listening to the records mentioned above), so I’ll leave him
to it: “… I feel like it’s a good movie for men to understand energetically how
when they show up it can really change things. It’s not a spoiler to say this.
You get lulled into this amazing space of there being no men for a long time in
the movie, then a random guy does show up. He’s a nothing character; he’s there
to do an errand. He’s not being a jerk or being weird. But him just sitting
there eating some slop, you’re like: ‘Ugh, what’s this guy doing here? Get him
out of here. He’s ruining the vibe.’”
Recorder: The Marion Stokes
Project (Matt Wolf) It’s fitting that the last
film I watched in a movie theater before movie theaters largely shut down is
about, at least in part, global events and private obsessions converging on a
television screen. Marion Stokes, a Philadelphia librarian, civil rights
activist, and public access television producer, inspired by the extensive TV
coverage of the Iran hostage crisis and the debut of CNN, presciently realized in
1979 and 1980 that the then-in-its-infancy 24-hour news cycle would document, shape,
influence, distort, and manipulate human behavior, technology, culture, public
policy, and world events and how important it was to preserve its history in
real time and in as much detail as possible. She recorded, on Betamax and VHS
tapes on multiple televisions in her apartment, nearly every moment of every
24-hour cable news channel and nearly every local and national network news
program from 1979 until her death in 2012. (She also acquired Macintosh
computers, newspapers, magazines, books, toys, and dollhouses with similar
zeal, though the film focuses mostly on the recordings of TV.) Her second husband, the black sheep son of a
wealthy family who got to know Stokes when she appeared as a frequent guest on
his public access talk show, became just as obsessed with her videotape
project, and the couple distanced themselves from their own families and much
of the outside world to direct the overwhelming majority of their time and
attention to the recordings. (Stokes’ son reconnected with his mother in the
last years of her life and has devoted much effort to getting the collection
digitized and available to researchers and the public.) Wolf, who made an empathetic documentary about
the musician Arthur Russell in 2008, has delivered another complex human
portrait in Recorder.
Non-2020 Movies Seen on the Big Screen in 2020
(January-March)
Diary of a Chambermaid (Luis
Buñuel, 1964) I consider this minor Buñuel
(what a snotty way for me to start this sentence, eh?), but his minor work is
still pretty major. Frankly, I feel like I watched this movie 20 years ago, not
12 months ago (in 2020, recalling the year’s beginning at its end is like
looking at a photograph of a dead relative you never met), but images of Jeanne
Moreau, and Buñuel’s healthy disdain for fascists, remain in the memory like
fragments of a dream.
Bay of Angels (Jacques Demy,
1963) People have been saying
cinema is dead since the early ‘30s, and the latest round of premature mourning
kicked in because next year’s green-screen spandex franchise movies will hit
streaming platforms before or at the same time as their theatrical releases. So
what? Cinema was still alive in early 2020 when I saw a projection of Jeanne
Moreau in 1963, smoking cigarettes, wearing and taking off great clothes, and
compulsively gambling her money and life away in the casinos of Nice to Michel
Legrand’s score, Jean Rabier’s black and white cinematography, and Jacques
Demy’s inspired direction. Glamour and resigned disappointment should get
together more often.
Cry-Baby (John Waters, 1990)
Waters’ last really good
movie before the culture caught up with him remains a nonstop party. In Cry-Baby and its predecessors, Hairspray and Polyester, Waters softened his rough edges enough to bring in some
of the mainstream audience without diluting any of the John Waters essence.
Now, the whole country is a John Waters movie without any of the style,
intelligence, humor, or fun. (Not sure whether we are the dog shit being eaten
or the ones eating it. Need to take this paragraph to the metaphor repairman.) Also
nice to see Johnny Depp back when he wasn’t a wife-beating alcoholic dressed
like Steven Tyler’s mic stand strapped to 14 jackets. It’s not like I’m doing
so great these days, though.
Smithereens (Susan Seidelman,
1982)
I love this movie.
Seidelman’s first is still her best, and such a great snapshot of Manhattan
before Giuliani ruined it. I’d love to do an early ‘80s New York City triple
feature of Smithereens, Wild Style, and Basket Case. Let’s add Gloria
and Variety, make it a quintuple
feature. I find Susan Berman so charming and compelling and frustrating and
charismatic and vulnerable in this movie, and I wish she’d been the lead in 30
other movies. Smithereens is such a
beautiful example of what can happen with determination, no money, a great eye,
and a real point of view. I love the way Seidelman has her story follow, not
lead, her characters.
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall
His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)
I spent a decade trying and
failing on multiple occasions to see this movie on a big screen. I missed the
first run at a now-closed arthouse theater when I was out of town. A
short-lived University of Texas film club screened it on campus on a night when
I had band practice. The Austin Film Society showed it four other times before
this year’s screening, and I missed each one (food poisoning, attending a
wedding, a late night at work, out of town again). I find it morbidly hilarious
that I finally managed to see it just a few weeks before a pandemic shut down
every theater in the country. Maybe it came to me when I needed it. Elements of
it portended the coming weeks of my life (illness, mortality, stillness,
change, memory, past lives, new forms, ghosts). I like a phrase that the critic
Sukhdev Sandhu used to describe Uncle
Boonmee: “It’s barely a film; more a floating world.” Now that I think
about it, every Weerasethakul film I’ve seen is a floating world, but this may
be the floatiest. I loved moving through it, around it, in it.
The Gold Diggers (Sally
Potter, 1983) Despite its heavy use of symbolism
(not usually my thing), I found all kinds of pleasures in Potter’s first
feature; the Icelandic landscapes, a great score by the much-missed Lindsay
Cooper (who played with Henry Cow, Comus, Art Bears, Mike Oldfield, David
Thomas, and the list goes on), the performances of Julie Christie and Colette
Lafont, Babette Mangolte’s black and white cinematography, the way it embraces and skewers pretentiousness (it’s both a
Very Serious Movie and a playful, funny one), the dance scene, the scene where
the narrative pauses (or keeps going) to watch drummer Marilyn Mazur play a
lengthy percussion solo, and a welcome and unfortunately evergreen observation
of the connection between capitalism and misogyny in who gets paid for their
labor and who doesn’t.
Intermission/Purgatory
()
Late in the night/early in
the morning in the first week of March, two days after seeing the last movie I
will see in a theater until who knows when (Recorder,
see above), my wife, Kristy, got out of bed and asked me to take her to the
emergency room because she felt like she was possibly having a heart attack.
She was also feeling severe abdominal pain and lightheadedness. (On a handful
of occasions in the past two or three years, she had experienced a sudden bout
of severe abdominal pain and lightheadedness late at night that went away just
as mysteriously as it arrived. Her doctors were unsure of the cause, especially
since it was so infrequent. She was given vague instructions to keep an eye on
it. The pain on this particular night was similar but much more intense and
lingering with new pain in the upper chest.) I remember being roughly halfway
through the movie I was watching at the time (Susan Seidelman’s Cookie, a mildly forgettable, mildly
enjoyable film that will remain imprinted on me forever), and I can still
physically feel the worry and apprehension filling my body like I was standing
under some kind of panic-dispensing tap. We got in my car, and I drove like a
bat out of hell to a nearby emergency room. We checked in with the not-rude but
also not-friendly front desk staff, an ER nurse took her away, and I sat in the
small, empty, overly bright waiting room in the weird clothes I’d haphazardly
thrown on (sweatpants, button-up dress shirt, slip-on shoes) for two or three
hours while a wall-mounted television set tuned to one of the sports channels
blared commentary and prognostication about professional golf and college
baseball and college basketball, and I tried not to have a panic attack.
The verdict was inconclusive
and slightly dismissive (the ER doctor thought it was just gas and seemed to
assume Kristy was overreacting to her symptoms, which is ridiculous if you know
her), though a heart attack was fortunately ruled out. Testing didn’t reveal
much, and we turned down more elaborate scans and x-rays because we had no idea
how much of the ER costs insurance would cover (health care should be free for
every human on the planet, for-profit health care is a moral monstrosity), it
was close to daybreak, Kristy was starting to feel better, and she had an
appointment already scheduled with her gynecologist in a week or two for
routine exams and a look at a weirdly shaped lump that had appeared in her left
breast in February, a lump that Kristy and I naively expected to be a benign,
fluid-filled cyst. Meanwhile, the news of the Covid-19 virus was a constant hum
in the background and getting louder every day.
That second or third week of
March, the city of Austin canceled SXSW. My band of a dozen years, The Early
Stages, had decided earlier in the year to break up, and our celebratory final
three shows, one of which was part of a SXSW free day party, were also canceled.
Three shows I had tickets for or plans to attend (The Necks, Damo Suzuki, and
Wire) were canceled. Businesses shut down, sometimes temporarily, sometimes
permanently. On the Thursday of that week, I received an alarming text from my
wife while I was at work. Her gynecologist had seen a few unusual things and
wanted her to see both a breast specialist/surgeon and an ovarian surgeon. The
possibilities of ovarian cancer, breast cancer, fibroids, benign cysts, and
endometriosis, or some combination of all these things, were floated. I felt
like the floor was shaking. Minutes later, my bosses emailed everyone and told
them to go home. My workplace was shutting down for a few weeks except for
upper management and the few people who already had work-from-home capability
while they kept an eye on the coronavirus and came up with a comprehensive
work-from-home plan. A few days later, my wife’s workplace did the same thing. We
are extremely fortunate to be able to work from home.
The next four weeks became an
endless, lonely, soul-crushing, terrifying, emotionally shattering parade of
tests, scans, x-rays, CT scans, lab work, mammograms, ultrasounds, biopsies,
bone scans, multiple doctor appointments with multiple doctors, telehealth
appointments, agonizing hours waiting for test results, a major surgery, and an
intense period of recovery for my wife, and an intensely overwhelming,
mindboggling, and sorrowful experience for me as a caregiver, supporter, and
husband. The hell of waiting for test result and scan result phone calls is one
of the most agonizing hells, especially since many of these calls delivered bad
news or led to even more tests and scans. The stress and terror were close to
unbearable, and I developed an odd little trick to keep myself from spinning
out. A few weeks before everything went to hell, Kristy and I were enjoying a
trip down a YouTube rabbit hole that culminated in the music video for the 1981
Cher/Meat Loaf duet “Dead Ringer for Love.” Let me tell you, that song and
video deliver the over-the-top, high-drama goods that the phrase “1981
Cher/Meat Loaf duet” would lead any sane human to expect and demand. We then
went down a Cher Wikipedia rabbit hole, which led to us learning more about
Cher’s mother than we ever thought possible on an average Saturday night. Long
story short, Cher’s full name if you include her maiden name and ex-husbands’
last names is Cherilyn Sarkisian La Piere Bono Allman. I made a joke about what
a good mantra that would be, if you were the New Age type. Just a few weeks
later, while waiting interminably for doctors’ offices and laboratories and
insurance companies and surgeons’ offices and hospitals to call us back and
waiting for Kristy to get off the phone with them and let me know what was
happening, I would spend what probably added up to three or four hours total
walking back and forth in our house, muttering “Cherilyn Sarkisian La Piere
Bono Allman” to myself, over and over and over and over, to keep myself from
spectacularly melting down. I started doing it as a gallows humor inside joke
with myself, but it really ended up working as a sort of calming mantra. Thanks,
Cher and Cher’s mom. I’ll thank Meat Loaf, too, even though he’s a Republican.
We finally learned what was
happening, in three big waves of news. Bad news (treatable breast cancer) was
followed by good news (no ovarian cancer!!!; instead, she had severe
endometriosis and a large fibroid that needed to be removed but the complicated
surgery, which included a hysterectomy, was successful, though I was only allowed
in the hospital on the day of the surgery and couldn’t visit her in her room
for the week after due to constantly changing pandemic restrictions) and was
finally followed by devastating news (incurable, metastatic breast cancer that
had spread to the bones). If you have been through this, you know. If you
haven’t, you don’t. Nothing anyone can say really helps. Not even Cherilyn
Sarkisian La Piere Bono Allman.
The remainder of our year not
involving medical appointments has been spent in self-imposed isolation to
avoid exposure to the virus, with the occasional masked conversation with
friends who have come by to drop off food or gift packages or enjoy a distanced
beer. We have both adjusted to working from home, and in a weird way, adjusted
to her terminal diagnosis. In some ways, Covid-19 made the first year of living
with cancer more bearable. We didn’t have to put on happy faces at work when we
weren’t feeling it (though I still feel like I’m hanging by a mental thread and
am constantly having to fake many human-man-living-in-normal-circumstances
responses at my job, particularly with a recently promoted supervisor whose
management style is the bureaucratic equivalent of a bird lightly but
continuously pecking your shoulder with its beak; at least this fakery is
happening from inside my house), Kristy was able to remain in the comfort of
her own home while getting used to her medication and its side effects and the
hot flashes from surgery-induced early menopause, we didn’t have to feel like
we were missing out on friends’ parties and rock shows and social events and
gatherings while dealing with the mental and physical drain of recent events,
and we could spend so much more time with each other and with our cats (this
gets sad, too; stick around for more bad vibes).
I love, admire, and respect
Kristy so much, and I’m continually blown away (yet also not surprised) by how
she has responded to her diagnosis. I think it’s important to butt into my own
paragraph here and say that a metastatic, incurable, stage 4 cancer diagnosis
is not an immediate, or even necessarily a distant, death sentence. People have
survived 10, 15, 20, 25, and in some cases, even 30 or 40 years after getting
this devastating news while holding on to their quality of life. Meanwhile,
treatments are advancing and improving, and new treatments look promising. The
chances for a longer life with this diagnosis are increasing each year. Things
may not shake out for us so positively, and we are mentally preparing ourselves
for that possibility (as much as one can), but right now, the course of
treatment my wife is on is working extremely well. Despite the occasional aches
and pains and discomfort of her side effects and the loss in energy that comes
with all of it, she mostly feels good, her tumors are shrinking, and the spread
has stopped. We live our lives, we have fun, we do things we enjoy, we
sometimes feel depressed and miserable and anxious, I sometimes (OK, often)
feel angry at the universe, we cope with the ways the diagnosis has changed our
lives, we make lots of jokes, we try to live in the present, we do all these
things. In keeping with the subject of this blog, we watch A LOT of movies (and
I watch even more than that late at night after my wife goes to bed). (Movies
have been such a comfort to me in ways that even I, an obsessive movie freak,
never imagined, though in the first month of all this devastating news all I
could make myself do was watch TV shows, take care of household chores, and
stare blankly at the wall. Gradually, my desire to listen to and play music,
read books, and watch movies came back to me in April.) To get back to the
first sentence of this paragraph, Kristy has brought all of herself and her
personality into living with this diagnosis (not to imply we don’t have bad days;
we have many bad days, but many good ones, too): reading books and articles
about breast cancer and metastatic cancer, attending online conferences,
joining a support group of women her age going through the same thing, writing
about her experience with honesty, warmth, and humor, advocating for herself
and sharing information with others online, promoting research organizations, being
straightforward and open about what it’s like to live with chronic illness. She
has eloquently and beautifully chronicled her own experiences on
CaringBridge and in a Medium article. Her essay about what she
and I call “cancer wives,” a movie and TV cliché that has obviously jumped out
at us even more than usual lately, should be of special interest to my fellow
movie people.
I don’t even know how to tell
you what my life is like now. I feel like a human-sized exposed nerve, and I
suppose I will keep feeling that way until my experiment in living concludes.
Everything is raw and sensitive and right there on the surface. I don’t know
what will happen, but you don’t know, either. Life gives us a handful of
line-of-demarcation moments that change our lives permanently, immediately.
Going to school for the first time, moving out of our childhood homes and going
to work or to college or to the military or to a life of crime or to a
lucrative career as the star of YouTube Pokemon card unboxing videos, I assume
having a child (I’m happy to be childless, one of the only decisions in life besides
marrying my wife that I don’t regret), experiencing a major trauma, you know
where I’m going with this so Mad Libs a few of your own. I can’t believe my
wife and I got two of the fuckin’ things (cancer and a pandemic) on the same
day. Un-fucking-believable. (Also a little weird that of the two
line-of-demarcation moments, one is intensely personal while the other affects
every single human on the planet, even the assholes who think wearing a mask is
tyranny.) “2020, am I right?” people say. Cram it with walnuts, people. Cancer
doesn’t magically disappear in 2021.
Remember a few paragraphs ago
when I told you to stick around for more bad vibes? Here they are. About
late-summer/early-fall, one of our two beloved cats, a tortoiseshell named
Fern, started losing a little weight. This wasn’t too alarming since she was
still eating and running around the house like a maniac and acting like her
amusingly moody self. As the fall wore on, her weight started dropping more
dramatically, her appetite disappeared, her breathing became labored, and she
sometimes had trouble getting her back legs to move properly. After some tests
and blood samples didn’t reveal anything, an ultrasound found a large and most
likely cancerous mass in her liver. She went downhill fast after that, and
though her appetite returned in part (lots of very tiny meals throughout the
day and night) and a prescribed steroid gave her a pretty good week before
things went south again, we knew we had to make the decision you never want to
make, and we said goodbye to her in mid-November. My wife had the weird,
occasionally unsettling experience of seeing our cat go through a series of
tests and a cancer diagnosis, which dragged back memories of her March and
April full of tests and diagnoses. On Fern’s last day, she snuggled in next to
us on the couch as her painkillers kicked in, we petted her and said our
goodbyes, the fatal shot was administered, and she died. Our surviving cat,
Loretta, has comically and mysteriously picked up several of Fern’s personality
traits in addition to keeping her own. It’s a wild thing to see. Everything
ends, but nothing is ever completely gone.
What a tough, sad, alienating
year to kick off many tough years to come. I hope some of those years will be
less sad and less alienating. I’m staring down a mentally impossible year at
work (though my job has been understanding of my situation, I’m about to enter
a fairly intense stretch of time there, and my stress levels are already
sky-high for reasons having nothing to do with work), so 2021 is not going to
be any kind of reprieve. At least we got rid of that shit-pig Donald Trump
(maybe), but his voters and the utterly broken and dying
country that no one in charge wants to fix because the system is working for
them as intended remain.
You can see how I’m not mourning
the loss of the movie theater experience as much as I otherwise would have been
if Covid-19 was my only problem. In order to keep some semblance of sanity and the
desire to give at least one more day a chance, I have been throwing myself into
my major passions/obsessions/whatever corny term you want to call it with an
overzealous fervor bordering on madness. I listen to at least one album every
day (usually several on Sundays) and I watch 7-10 movies a week. I listened to
a lot of music and watched a lot of movies before the pandemic, but now I have
absolutely nothing else to do except go to my job, and this is not the place to
talk about my job. It funds my life. It is not my life. Thanks to the pandemic,
it is in my house, which I have mixed feelings about, but despite its closer
proximity to my life, I try to make my job stay more than 500 mental feet away
from my life at all times. Long story mildly shorter, movies and music and
books are keeping me alive.
()
2020 on the Small Screen
(2020/2019 movies I watched in 2020 that probably
would have screened theatrically in Austin if the pandemic didn’t happen)(OK, a
few of these 2019 movies did play
theatrically in Austin, but I did not see them then)
I feel less urgency to keep
up with new releases since most theaters are closed. If I’m not going to see it
on the big screen, the movie can wait several weeks or months or years until
the streaming price drops and I can rent instead of buy. (Buying a digital
stream instead of renting it seems ridiculous to me anyway, since a corporation
can decide at any time that you no longer own it or they no longer want to pay
to license it or the service streaming it to you no longer exists. As Homer
Simpson once said, “You can’t, like, own a potato, man.”)
The choices available to
stream from the almost century and a half of film preceding the current year
are always going to be more interesting than whatever the hell’s going on in,
say, August. What I’m saying is, my home experience of an art form exists
simultaneously in every year that that particular medium has existed, so it can
be 2020, 1914, 1964, 1996, or 1978 on any given night in my living room.
Consequently, this is a particularly weird personal overview of 2020 cinema
that is very different from what my end-of-year post would have looked like if
the theaters were still open. All that said, I watched a lot of newish movies
this year. Here they are, hit-and-run style. I even accidentally ended up with
a top 10 (i.e., The Best).
The Best
Bacurau (Juliano Dornelles
& Kleber Mendonca Filho)
Two Brazilian filmmakers of
different ages and experience levels team up and create a thrilling,
righteously angry, genre-hopping working-class revenge tale that blends
arthouse drama, horror, comedy, tragedy, western, sci-fi, action, and thriller
elements and delivers a cathartically brutal stomping to white supremacists,
colonizers, middle-of-the-road cinema, and the bootlicking water-carriers of authoritarian
governments, corporations, and developers.
Color Out of Space (Richard
Stanley)
Director Stanley returns to
feature filmmaking after an almost 30-year absence (there were a handful of
short films and a few documentaries in that gap) with a heavy, trippy H.P.
Lovecraft adaptation that is not afraid to harsh your mellow. Nicolas Cage
turns in a relatively subtle performance but still gets to do a handful of
patented Cage freakouts. (The “hey, man, Cage goes freaking nuts in this one”
thing has become tired, but you and I know we’d be a little disappointed if
Cage didn’t go at least a little nuts at least once.) I also commend Stanley
for realistically depicting a character living with cancer (played by Joely
Richardson) in emotionally real, non-Hollywood ways without making the cancer a
tragically melodramatic plot device or a piece of phony sentimental uplift.
It’s just something that exists and is lived with on a day-to-day basis. Tommy
Chong’s in this weird, wild thing, too. A truly gorgeous psychedelic downer
that both increased my anxiety and delighted my eyeballs.
Family Romance, LLC (Werner
Herzog)
All of Herzog’s films blend
fiction, documentary, and an entertaining line of Barnumesque charming huckster
bullshit, but I think it’s reasonable to separate them into two general categories:
movies that are primarily documentaries in form and purpose and movies that are
primarily fictional narratives in form and purpose. This latter category has
been pretty underwhelming and inferior to his documentaries in recent years,
especially the last two, Salt and Fire (a
strange and gripping political thriller in the first half that stops dead in
the second half for the characters to wander aimlessly around a salt flat and
spout dialogue that sounds like someone parodying a Herzog movie) and Queen of the Desert (in his weirdest
move yet, Herzog makes a boringly conventional mainstream drama). Happily, Family Romance, LLC, with Herzog as his
own cameraman, is his strongest narrative feature since the hysterically funny Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.
It’s a muted, melancholy, quiet movie about loneliness and how we communicate
as humans in the 21st century. Herzog shows that honest emotions and
yearning are welded tight to lies and fantasies in the ways we communicate and
present ourselves on social media and how this bleeds into the physical world,
and he makes this point while maintaining empathy and respect for his
characters even at their most ridiculous.
First Cow (Kelly Reichardt)
Probably my favorite new
movie this year. I am consumed with envy for you lucky chumps in New York and
Los Angeles who got to see this on the big screen in the week or two before
theaters shut down. I hope I get the chance one day. Reichardt’s second western
(after Meek’s Cutoff) (and by
western, I mean a story taking place in the early 19th century
American west, not a black hat/white hat horse opera, though I like those kinds
of westerns, too) and her second film about male friendship (after Old Joy, whose characters were
once-close friends who had grown distant; this one is, at least in part, about
two men becoming friends, business partners, and early victims of rapacious Big
Capitalism), First Cow is beautiful
to look at, with some of my favorite uses of the color green, and delicately
and finely assembled in its period details, shot compositions, performances
(especially its leads, John Magaro and Orion Lee), structure, music (by William
Tyler), stillness, language, and pace, but it’s not overly fussy or controlled,
and Reichardt leaves plenty of space for a viewer’s eyes and imagination to
wander the Oregon landscapes and the characters’ faces. Reichardt (and her
frequent collaborator Jonathan Raymond, who cowrote the screenplay with her
loosely based on his novel The Half-Life),
begins and ends her narratives in different places than audiences have been
trained and bullied to expect, one of the reasons that so much of her work
remains a recurring presence in my daydreams.
Hubie Halloween (Steven
Brill)
Is mine the only 2020 best-of
list to include Hubie Halloween and Vitalina Varela? Do you dare enter the
twisted mind of Josh Krauter? This movie is so stupid. I love it. I’ve been
waiting for an Adam Sandler movie as continuously and chaotically dumb as Billy Madison, and this one comes close.
I couldn’t stop laughing. June Squibb’s shirts. Ray Liotta. The black cat
double take. Shaq. The nun. Steve Buscemi playing a werewolf. Sandler’s
terrible, terrible character voice. The fall colors and Halloween in Capraville
(or maybe Zemeckisville) set design and visual palette. I felt so bad so often
this year (and I’m really good at feeling bad, but this year was off the
charts). I felt good when I watched this movie. Is this how adult babies
feel when they watch those superhero movies? Maybe I should stop being condescending about that. (But I won’t.) (Also, I watched all nine Hellraiser
sequels this year, so the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon, I learned
it by watching you, Dad, and so on.)
Knives and Skin (Jennifer
Reeder)
This one really took me by
surprise. The fact that I erased four different paragraphs in frustration trying
to describe my admiration for it is a good sign that it’s operating in its own
time zone. To put it as simply as possible, it’s mostly about teenage girls
finding their own power and worth. It’s also deeply weird, vibrantly colorful,
funny, a little pretentious (in a good way), creepy, unpredictable, melancholy,
uplifting. None of these adjectives are quite cutting it. It’s stranger than
that. It’s also, in its own odd way, a musical. And all the things in it that
should be annoying hipster affectations mysteriously aren’t.
She Dies Tomorrow (Amy
Seimetz)
I’m so glad Amy Seimetz
directed another movie. She’s an actor, producer, writer, editor,
cinematographer, costume designer, and television director, so it’s not like
she hasn’t been busy, but I’ve been chomping at the bit for another movie from
her as writer/director since seeing her 2012 feature Sun Don’t Shine three or four years ago. So many people online and
in reviews have called She Dies Tomorrow a
perfect pandemic movie or an accidental psychic predictor of life during
Covid-19 (well, not in those exact words), and I can buy that to a certain
extent. It’s not what I saw in the movie, though. Instead, She Dies Tomorrow played to me as an unsettling and oddly beautiful
visual representation of the ways nameless, unfixed, allusive anxiety and dread
and paranoia and defeatism and ominous foreboding move from person to person on
social media (especially Twitter) and how that hovering amalgamation of sharp
but ungraspable feeling changes our brains. Also, Jane Adams is always great,
and Kate Lyn Sheil has one of the most fascinating faces in movies.
Shirley (Josephine Decker)
This might be my least
favorite Josephine Decker movie, and it still made my best list, which shows
how good I think she is. I also know my opinion could change drastically on a
rewatch, pro or con, because Shirley
is a hard movie to pin down. Unlike my other Decker favorites (Madeline’s Madeline, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, and Butter on the Latch), Shirley, a historical fiction (heavier on
the fiction than the history) in which Shirley Jackson and her husband are
characters in an invented scenario, is
an extremely busy, almost oppressive, movie that doesn’t leave a lot of open
space. The narrative initially appears to be more conventional than Decker’s
other work, but appearances are deceiving, and the movie becomes much freer and
wilder as it proceeds. Decker has such an odd but instinctively perfect feel
for sound, images of the natural world, and formal and structural
experimentation within a narrative, and her work resists neat categorization. I
wasn’t as exhilarated as when I finished Madeline’s
Madeline, but there’s something witchy and exciting about Shirley that has stayed with me. I feel
like everything I’ve said here is vague, but it’s the kind of movie that left
me with more feelings than details.
Ferrara is a filmmaker who
just clicks for me (maybe it’s the Catholicism/hedonism blend), and even his
most ridiculous movies pulse with energy and feeling. He’s a wildman who just
keeps making good, bad, and great (never mediocre) stuff (often all at once)
against daunting odds (addiction, distribution problems, self-inflicted drama,
sobriety, a country and marketplace that don’t want anything personal and challenging,
his own advancing years). Here, longtime collaborator Willem Dafoe plays a
fictional version of Ferrara named Tommaso, who, like Ferrara, is clean and
sober after decades of heavy drug use, a filmmaker, a New Yorker living in
Italy only partly by choice, a guilty Catholic, a new husband and father with a
much-younger wife and a toddler daughter, and a chaos magnet. Ferrara doesn’t
make himself a hero or a villain, just a wildly flawed and immature human being
trying to live a less chaotic life and sometimes causing even more chaos in the
trying. He throws everything he’s got at Tommaso,
and it’s a film that is sometimes silly, sometimes wonderful, sometimes
exasperating, sometimes moving, sometimes pretentious, sometimes a hilarious
skewering of pretension, always burning with life, always following its own
rhythm. The scenes showing Tommaso’s recovery meetings are some of the most
formally exciting film moments of my year.
Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa)
Costa is another difficult
filmmaker to write about because he makes films that are as hard to define and
describe as they are easy to admire. In his narrative features, he tends to use
nonprofessional actors from some of the (economically and politically speaking
only) poorest, most marginalized areas of Lisbon (including many immigrants
from Cape Verde), often playing versions of themselves within stories based on
their own lived experiences, though these stories look and move like no other
films. Every frame of a Costa film could be a painting and is often nearly as
still, but never to fussily stilted effect. No vulgar, oppressive, empty beauty
in a Costa film. The beauty (and the ugliness, too) comes from faces, bodies,
light, shadow, color, the occasional movement, and the way Costa places these
elements in the frame. Vitalina Varela, playing herself, is a character you
don’t see in movies, and your eyes are constantly drawn to her face and the way
it holds her experiences and secrets, her terrible losses and her endurance.
This may be my favorite Costa movie and, along with First Cow, my favorite movie from this strange and miserable year.
The Worthwhile
Blood & Flesh: The Reel
Life and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson (David Gregory)
A formally conventional but
endlessly fascinating talking heads and movie clips documentary about the life,
career, and bizarre 1995 murder of B-movie/exploitation/drive-in filmmaker
Adamson. I will never lose interest in stories about the off-Hollywood
filmmakers making low-budget movies for the drive-in and grindhouse markets in
the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, and my favorite part of Gregory’s doc is the
time it spends with the eccentric, hilarious B-movie old-timers who were peers
and collaborators of Adamson’s, most of them retired and living in the
California desert.
Blood Quantum (Jeff Barnaby)
An enjoyable Canadian zombie
movie with a Mi’kmaq First Nations filmmaker and mostly First Nations cast and
crew, Blood Quantum works better in
the first half before the clichés of the genre sometimes drag things down in
the second half. I liked the premise of a zombie virus that First Nations
people were immune to and moments and images throughout, and I look forward to
what Barnaby does next.
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
(Jason Woliner)
I laughed a lot, I cringed a
lot, Maria Bakalova and Sacha Baron Cohen make a great comedy team (in which
both of them play the straight man and
the comedian simultaneously and continuously). Might do an even better job than
the first one at showing how deeply fucking weird the people of the United
States are. In a sane country, this film would have made Giuliani flee to
Siberia or at least the nearest wooded area.
Crawl (Alexandre Aja)
An exciting horror-thriller
about a young woman and her father trying to escape from several large
alligators in the middle of a Florida hurricane. The camera actually shows you
what you want to be looking at during the action sequences, the characters are
interesting instead of flat, and the suspense is relentless (multiple
alligators and a damn hurricane).
Quentin Tarantino said Crawl was one
of his favorite films of last year, which is probably due to its quality and
also probably because Kaya Scodelario is either barefoot or in flip-flops
through the whole movie. Dude loves feet.
Depraved (Larry Fessenden)
Fessenden is one of my
favorite contemporary indie horror directors, and he also turns up as an actor
and/or producer in a lot of other quality independent projects, both horror and
non-horror. His modern update of the Frankenstein story is smart, strange, a
little heavy-handed, a little ridiculous, and wild. I’m still waiting for
another Fessenden movie to knock me over as much as my two favorites, Habit and Wendigo, but this is a worthy and inventive effort.
Dogs Don’t Wear Pants (J.-P.
Valkeapaa)
A heartwarming, unsentimental
love story about extreme S&M, processing tragedy, and being a comically
negligent single father because you’re out every night at a dungeon. “Aw,
that’s sweet,” you’ll find yourself thinking. “He’s letting her yank his tooth
out.”
Haunt (Scott Beck & Brian
Woods)
A solid, creepy, fun,
suspenseful horror movie. Whaat? In this day and age? I like how the filmmakers
never explain who the villains are, how they got that way, or why they are
doing what they’re doing. Less explanations, please, filmmakers of the present.
The audience doesn’t need to know everything and shouldn’t know everything.
Fuck your backstory.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things
(Charlie Kaufman)
I was completely absorbed by
this movie while watching it, but I get a lingering unpleasant feeling when I
try to recall it. That may be an endorsement. I don’t know. I really don’t know
what the hell to think. I think it may be a warning to those of us who spend so
much of our lifetimes consumed by books and movies and TV shows and music and
plays and books about books and movies and TV shows and music and plays. Or it
could just be a misanthropic self-flagellation. Or a clever but bitter attack
on critics. Or a lonely, dying old man’s memories of his own life and the art
and entertainment he consumed getting all mixed together. Or just a really,
really bad meet-the-parents experience for a young woman who’s thinking about
breaking up with her boyfriend and hasn’t told him yet. Or a ride inside the
thoughts of someone considering (or committing) suicide. Or a screenwriter
trying to adapt a novel and having a nervous breakdown. Or all these things.
Kaufman is an ingenious writer, but he forgets to (or chooses not to) let any
light in when he directs his own scripts and adaptations. I’m not sure if this
is a strength or a weakness. I’ll never be sure.
The Lighthouse (Robert
Eggers)
This movie falls flat on its
ass as often as it succeeds, but Eggers really goes for it, and so do Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson. Failing in
interesting ways is a kind of success. Pretentious in a good way, which is a
mini-theme this year. I have been trapped in office jobs most of my adult life.
I think I was meant to work in a lighthouse. Probably not this lighthouse, but an isolated job on the water that will likely
induce madness seems right for me.
The Lodge (Severin Fiala
& Veronika Franz)
Way too grim and with a few
ridiculous twists I couldn’t buy into, but this is still creepy as hell, and I
can’t stress enough how much I appreciate mainstream and
just-left-of-mainstream filmmakers who actually care about what their movies
look like.
Nomad: In the Footsteps of
Bruce Chatwin (Werner Herzog)
Herzog’s affectionate tribute
to close friend, author, and fellow world traveler and walking enthusiast Bruce
Chatwin, who died of AIDS in 1989, is at its best when capturing strange and
beautiful landscapes in unique corners of Wales, England, Chile, Argentina, and
Australia. (Though I would have loved to see what the ecstatically wild Herzog
of the 1970s would have done with the same landscapes.) This is not the film
for you if you want some of Chatwin’s ideas, assertions, and privileges
challenged, and if you’re an archivist like my wife, you will be mildly
dismayed at some improper document handling, but I was happy to spend time
vicariously wandering the earth with Herzog and the memory of Chatwin as my
guides.
The Prodigy (Nicholas
McCarthy)
Another ultra-grim downer of
a horror movie, and some of the characters are flat as can be, but I kinda
liked this one, though admittedly I’m a sucker for evil, killer children.
Satanic Panic (Chelsea
Stardust)
A really fun horror comedy
about upper-class suburban Dallas Satanists and the working-class pizza
delivery woman in the right place at the wrong time that gets the horror/comedy
balance just right. Also, kudos (see Color
out of Space, above) for having a character who is dealing with cancer and
not turning it into something stupid or insulting.
The Siren (Perry Blackshear)
Blackshear is a newish
filmmaker whose two features, They Look Like
People and this one, share the same natural and understated young actors
and an odd tone that is not quite horror and not quite humanist drama. I like
the way he uses silence, stillness, facial expressions, minimal dialogue, sound
design, and images to tell his stories instead of the constant jibber-jabber
and flat visuals of most current American film and television about people, and
I like how he slowly builds unease and dread while avoiding total bleakness.
Friendship, kindness, and love are valued and rewarded in Blackshear’s films,
and pain and trauma are taken seriously. He also has a decent sense of humor. I
have some nitpicky criticisms, too, but I hope and suspect he’s building up to
a truly great movie.
Young Ahmed (Luc &
Jean-Pierre Dardenne)
The Dardennes faced some
backlash for this movie, mostly by people who hadn’t seen it, because the main
character is a Muslim teenage boy in Belgium who gets radicalized by his
ultra-fundamentalist imam and plots to kill one of his teachers. The general
tenor of the criticism was that a couple old white European guys shouldn’t be
making a movie about an aspiring Islamic terrorist, particularly at a time when
there is so much anti-Muslim sentiment in the Western world. I’m sympathetic to
that criticism, but the Dardennes have been making unsentimental, radically
empathetic movies about hard-earned forgiveness for decades. They’re not
bad-faith filmmakers, and they don’t chase trends or controversy. The movie
itself shows many different practicing Muslims in a positive or neutral light,
including the teacher who is the target of Ahmed’s planned attack, and Ahmed
himself is treated with empathy. The story is, in essence, about any lost boy
finding an identity in any extremist belief system. Backlash aside, this is
fairly minor Dardennes. I don’t think they’re capable of making a bad movie,
but this is a more surface-level exploration than they usually accomplish, and
I got the sense they knew less about their protagonist here than in most of
their other work. This is worth seeing if you’re a Dardennes fan, but it’s a
little thin compared to La Promesse
or Rosetta or The Son or The Kid with a
Bike.
The Rest
3 from Hell (Rob Zombie)
I occasionally give a Rob
Zombie movie a whirl to see if I will ever like what he’s doing. It hasn’t
happened yet.
Bill and Ted Face the Music
(Dean Parisot)
I wanted to like this more.
Its heart is in the right place, but the execution is awkward and low energy
and the ugly digital visual palette reminded me of a Best Buy ad or a
Scientology propaganda video. I did enjoy the killer robot named Dennis Caleb
McCoy, though.
Child’s Play (Lars Klevberg)
Has a few inspired moments,
but mostly suffers from the same corporate flatness as the other contemporary
reboots/reimaginings/remakes of lucrative intellectual property.
The Curse of La Llorona
(Michael Chaves)
I continue to be underwhelmed
by most of the big-budget Hollywood horror of the last couple decades, and this
didn’t change my mind. I don’t even expect to be overwhelmed. I just wanna be
whelmed (my third-favorite Ramones song). Come on, Hollywood big shots. Whelm
me.
Daniel Isn’t Real (Adam Egypt
Mortimer)
Well, now we have an indie
horror film with an unusual, offbeat approach, and I didn’t like this one, either.
The cinematography was too dim, and, I’ll be honest, I was put off by the lead
actor’s stupid haircut. It was hard to focus on the movie because I hated his
hair so much. This is a superficial reason to dislike a movie, but I’m a very
grumpy man.
Girl on the Third Floor
(Travis Stevens)
A valiant attempt to try
something new with the haunted house movie, with an unreliable central
character and a pretty good first third. I didn’t care for the execution once
the plot kicked in, and professional wrestler CM Punk is pretty awkward in the
lead role when he has to emote. I hope he keeps at it, though. He’s got a good
screen presence. I did enjoy the score and was pleasantly surprised to see it
had been composed by Steve Albini (Big Black, Shellac), Tim Midyett (Silkworm,
Bottomless Pit, Mint Mile), and Alison Chesley (Verbow, Helen Money).
Gretel & Hansel (Osgood
Perkins)
An exquisitely gorgeous yet
curiously empty and unsatisfying experience.
The Hunt (Craig Zobel)
It pains me to disagree with
John Waters, who put this movie on his 10 best list in Artforum, but sometimes
you have to say “fuck you, old man” to one of the greatest Americans. This is a
bad movie. A contemporary take on The
Most Dangerous Game, Zobel’s update shares the modern disease of not
letting the audience think for itself for five seconds, and it mistakes its cringey
dialogue that explicitly spells out the subtext in case the half-asleep guy in
the back row didn’t get it (which just makes it text) for the height of
sophisticated cleverness. Some of the violence was pretty cathartically gnarly,
but Zobel’s mealy-mouthed political both-sides-ism got on my nerves. Much more
interesting than the movie was the run of historically bad luck that canceled
its planned theatrical release on three separate occasions. The studio got cold
feet and delayed the initial release after a mass shooting, a new release date
was set and then delayed yet again after Fox News and the right-wing perpetual
outrage machine picked The Hunt as
their cultural own-the-libs-by-whining-loudly target of the week (even though
the film is way more sympathetic to Trump voters than almost any recent
Hollywood release that claims to be about These Times We’re Living In) and the
cowardly studio caved to pressure from the White House, and the coronavirus
delivered strike three to opening weekend number three.
Pet Sematary (Kevin Kolsch
& Dennis Widmyer)
See Child’s Play above.
Rabid (Jen & Sylvia
Soska)
Another remake, this time of
Cronenberg’s 1977 classic. This is a personal, heart-in-the-right-place,
independent remodel and is more creative than the Hollywood studios’ IP
franchise extenders, but it’s still kinda lousy. Cronenberg’s original was a
great horror movie, a great movie about loneliness (particularly loneliness in
the big city), and a great movie about pandemics. The Soskas’ take is campier,
louder, duller, overloaded with cultural references, and ugly as shit. It’s
also one of those movies (see The Hunt,
above) where the dialogue turns the subtext into plain text. I mean, the head
of the medical institute is named William freakin’ Burroughs in this movie.
Come on now.
Rebecca (Ben Wheatley)
Me during the first half of Rebecca: Why was Film Twitter so mean to
this movie?
Me during the second half of Rebecca: Ohhhhhhhh, that’s why. This
thing went off the rails on a crazy train.
Scare Package (Courtney
Andujar, Hillary Andujar, Anthony Cousins, Emily Hagins, Aaron B. Koontz, Chris
McInroy, Noah Segan & Baron Vaughn)
A so-so horror/comedy
anthology that has a couple of quality segments and an enjoyable connecting
thread filmed at the late, lamented Vulcan Video in my city of Austin, TX.
Scream, Queen! My Nightmare
on Elm Street (Roman Chimienti & Tyler Jensen)
A mediocre documentary that
should have been more interesting about actor Mark Patton, a closeted gay man
in the ‘80s whose once-successful career evaporated after his leading role in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 due to a
combination of homophobia, bad luck, the death of his ex-partner from AIDS, and
his own HIV-positive status. The film has a surprisingly flat visual style and loses
momentum in the second half, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was
more to the story of Patton’s exit from acting than he or the filmmakers were
willing or able to explore.
New restorations of older movies
Cane River (Horace Jenkins,
1982)
The only feature film
directed by PBS producer Horace Jenkins, Cane
River was restored in 2019 and finally released for the first time outside
of festival and bootleg screenings in 2020. It’s a beautiful piece of regional
independent filmmaking during a particularly exciting time for regional indies
(even if so many of them didn’t get the credit or the audiences they deserved),
a warm and funny romance with some political bite (the new couple are from
different class backgrounds and religious denominations, and there is tension
between their respective light-skinned Creole and darker-skinned families due
to colorism issues and the families’ complicated and intertwined histories),
and a specific slice of black American life in rural Louisiana and New Orleans
in the early ‘80s that you never see in Hollywood movies. I loved it.
Cane River
ran into some major bad luck that kept it out of distribution for almost 40
years. Richard Pryor, in New Orleans filming a movie, attended Cane River’s local premiere and fell in
love with it. He asked the financiers if he could help distribute it, but they
unbelievably turned him down, fearing that he would get all the credit and
press. Shortly afterward, Horace Jenkins died suddenly and unexpectedly from a
heart attack, aged only 41. Left with no director to promote the film and with
no famous stars in the cast, the financiers decided to cut their losses and
forget about distributing Cane River.
That was pretty much that until the negative was restored in 2013 and the
film’s champions, including Jenkins’ son, finally got it distributed and
released.
Sicilia! (Jean-Marie Straub
& Daniele Huillet, 1999) Writing about Straub and
Huillet is possibly even more difficult than writing about Pedro Costa, for
some of the same reasons. (Costa even made a documentary about Straub and
Huillet, filmed during the editing of Sicilia!)
Sicilia! is one of their more
accessible films, though an oblique relationship with storytelling remains, and
one of their most beautiful. A 66-minute black-and-white mini-epic/operatic
miniature consisting of stylized shots of conversations, objects, landscapes,
and food, the film follows a man who has returned to 1930s Italy after years in
New York. He talks to an orange picker after getting off the boat, secret
police and a fellow passenger on a train, his mother at her home, and a street
vendor. That’s it, but that’s not all. The movie feels like a musical with the
songs removed but the feelings created by those songs mysteriously intact, and
the speech patterns and cadences of the dialogue have their own musical effect.
Every movie I watched at home this year
I have a notebook where I
write down every movie I see in a theater. Since that notebook didn’t get much
use this year, I started doing the same for every movie I watched at home.
Presented all at once, it makes me look mildly insane. And maybe I am. I’ve
often felt like I’ve been living the world’s longest, slowest midlife crisis
(it began when I was 9 or 10 and will probably continue until my final breath),
and 2020 for me was a year-long, slow-motion nervous breakdown within that
ongoing midlife crisis.
I consider the following list
an autobiography of my intensely traumatic year in movie title form. I watched
some of these movies for the first time in 2020, others for the second, third,
or even tenth time. Fifteen or twenty of these movies are terrible. A few are
historically fascinating but ethically dubious. The worst movie I watched all
year, by far, was the ninth Hellraiser
movie, Hellraiser: Revelations.
I occasionally take pictures
of some of my favorite shots from these movies as they appear on my television,
and I post them on Instagram @joshkrauter. This may defeat the purpose of trying to show
what I value about movies because it turns a moving medium into a still one.
But that’s interesting to me, too. (My other pandemic hobby is posting a
picture of every album I listen to on Instagram. I’m betting a third of my
followers have me on mute as a result. Someday I’ll get out on the streets
again and take pictures of people and streets and live music. Maybe I’ll even
play live music again. Or maybe we’re just going to have one pandemic after
another forever and ever. Amen.) Enough jibber-jabber. Let’s bring this
looooooong post to a close with a looooooong list. Peace out, dweebs.
Movies watched/rewatched at home this year
3 from Hell (Rob Zombie, 2019)
1990: The Bronx Warriors (Enzo G. Castellari, 1982)
1991: The Year Punk Broke (Dave Markey, 1992)
All the Colors of the Dark (Sergio Martino, 1972)
American Harmony (Aengus James, 2009)
Among the Living (Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury,
2014)
Amsterdamned (Dick Maas, 1988)
Annabelle (John R. Leonetti, 2014)
Annabelle: Creation (David F. Sandberg, 2017)
Another 48 Hrs. (Walter Hill, 1990)
Antonyms of Beauty (Khalik Allah, 2013)
Art School Confidential (Terry Zwigoff, 2006)
Atlantiques (Mati Diop, 2009)
Audition (Takashi Miike, 1999)
Auto Focus (Paul Schrader, 2002)
Bacurau (Juliano Dornelles & Kleber Mendonca Filho,
2019)
Bad Moon (Eric Red, 1996)
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2018)
Barton Fink (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1991)
Beast (Michael Pearce, 2017)
Before I Forget (Jacques Nolot, 2007)
Bell, Book and Candle (Richard Quine, 1958)
Beyond the Darkness (Joe D’Amato, 1979)
The Bigamist (Ida Lupino, 1953)
The Big Combo (Joseph H. Lewis, 1955)
Big in Vietnam (Mati Diop, 2012)
The Big Lebowski (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1998)
Bill and Ted Face the Music (Dean Parisot, 2020)
Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004)
Black Belly of the Tarantula (Paolo Cavara, 1971)
The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934)
Black Christmas (Glen Morgan, 2006)
Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life & Ghastly Death of Al
Adamson (David Gregory, 2019)
Bloodbeat (Fabrice-Ange Zaphiratos, 1983)
Blood on the Moon (Robert Wise, 1948)
Blood Quantum (Jeff Barnaby, 2019)
Blood Simple (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1984)
Bloodsucking Freaks (Joel M. Reed, 1976)
Blue My Mind (Lisa Bruhlmann, 2017)
Body Bags (John Carpenter & Tobe Hooper, 1993)
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (Jason Woliner, 2020)
Brain Damage (Frank Henenlotter, 1988)
The Brothers Rico (Phil Karlson, 1957)
Bullitt (Peter Yates, 1968)
Burial Ground (Andrea Bianchi, 1981)
Buried Alive (Gerard Kikoine, 1989)
Burn after Reading (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2008)
A Burning Hot Summer (Philippe Garrel, 2011)
Bury Me an Angel (Barbara Peeters, 1971)
But I’m a Cheerleader (Jamie Babbit, 1999)
Cain’s Cut-Throats (Kent Osborne, 1970)
Caligula (Tinto Brass, 1979)
Caligula – The Untold Story (Joe D’Amato, 1982)
Cameron’s Closet (Armand Mastroianni, 1988)
Cane River (Horace Jenkins, 1982)
Cannibal Apocalypse (Antonio Margheriti, 1980)
Cannibal Girls (Ivan Reitman, 1973)
Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980)
Cannibal Hookers (Donald Farmer, 1987)
Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976)
The Cars that Ate Paris (Peter Weir, 1974)
Cassandra (Colin Eggleston, 1987)
Cathy’s Curse (Eddy Matalon, 1977)
Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman (Chantal Akerman, 1997)
Charley Varrick (Don Siegel, 1973)
Child’s Play (Lars Klevberg, 2019)
Chopping Mall (Jim Wynorski, 1986)
Christmas Evil (Lewis Jackson, 1980)
Class of 1984 (Mark L. Lester, 1982)
Climax (Gaspar Noe, 2018)
Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008)
Cold Hell (Stefan Ruzowitsky, 2017)
Color Out of Space (Richard Stanley, 2020)
Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa, 2006)
The Conjuring (James Wan, 2013)
The Conjuring 2 (James Wan, 2016)
Cookie (Susan Seidelman, 1989)
Crawl (Alexandre Aja, 2019)
The Crimson Kimono (Samuel Fuller, 1959)
The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (Kathleen Collins, 1980)
The Curse of La Llorona (Michael Chaves, 2019)
Daddy Longlegs (Josh & Benny Safdie, 2009)
Daniel Isn’t Real (Adam Egypt Mortimer, 2019)
Day of the Outlaw (Andre de Toth, 1959)
Deadbeat at Dawn (Jim Van Bebber, 1988)
Deadhead Miles (Vernon Zimmerman, 1972)
Dead Heat (Mark Goldblatt, 1988)
Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007)
Deep Red (Dario Argento, 1975)
Depraved (Larry Fessenden, 2019)
Dial Code: Santa Claus aka Deadly Games (Rene Manzor, 1989)
Dillinger (John Milius, 1973)
Dogs Don’t Wear Pants (J.-P. Valkeapaa, 2019)
Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009)
Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)
Double Lover (Francois Ozon, 2017)
Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (Manoel de Oliveira,
2009)
Elles (Malgorzata Szumowska, 2011)
Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (James Signorelli, 1988)
Essential Killing (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2010)
The Exorcist III (William Peter Blatty, 1990)
Extremity (Anthony DiBlasi, 2018)
Fade to Black (Vernon Zimmerman, 1980)
Family Romance, LLC (Werner Herzog, 2019)
Fargo (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1996)
Faust (Alexsandr Sokurov, 2011)
Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (Shun’ya Ito, 1972)
Female Prisoner Scorpion: #701’s Grudge Song (Yasuharu
Hasebe, 1973)
Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable (Shun’ya Ito, 1973)
Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (Shun’ya Ito, 1972)
Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010)
The Final Insult (Charles Burnett, 1997)
First Cow (Kelly Reichardt, 2020)
Un Flic (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1972)
Foxy Brown (Jack Hill, 1974)
Gas Food Lodging (Allison Anders, 1992)
Geronimo: An American Legend (Walter Hill, 1993)
Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001)
The Ghoul (T. Hayes Hunter, 1933)
Girl on the Third Floor (Travis Stevens, 2019)
Go Go Tales (Abel Ferrara, 2007)
Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (Alex
Gibney, 2015)
Graduate First (Maurice Pialat, 1978)
Great Expectations (Alfonso Cuaron, 1998)
Gretel & Hansel (Osgood Perkins, 2020)
Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950)
Hack-O-Lantern (Jag Mundhra, 1988)
Hail, Caesar! (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2016)
Hairspray (John Waters, 1988)
Hatchet (Adam Green, 2006)
Hatchet II (Adam Green, 2010)
Hatchet III (BJ McDonnell, 2013)
Haunt (Scott Beck & Brian Woods, 2019)
Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1989)
Hellbound: Hellraiser II (Tony Randel, 1988)
Hell Comes to Frogtown (Donald G. Jackson & R.J. Kizer,
1988)
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (Anthony Hickox, 1992)
Hellraiser: Bloodline (Kevin Yagher (as Alan Smithee), 1996)
Hellraiser: Deader (Rick Bota, 2005)
Hellraiser: Hellseeker (Rick Bota, 2002)
Hellraiser: Hellworld (Rick Bota, 2005)
Hellraiser: Inferno (Scott Derrickson, 2000)
Hellraiser: Judgment (Gary J. Tunnicliffe, 2018)
Hellraiser: Revelations (Victor Garcia, 2011)
High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood, 1973)
Hogzilla (Diane Jacques, 2014)
House of Pleasures (Bertrand Bonello, 2011)
Hubie Halloween (Steven Brill, 2020)
The Hudsucker Proxy (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1994)
Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008)
The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983)
The Hunt (Craig Zobel, 2020)
I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, 2020)
Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2013)
Intolerable Cruelty (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2003)
Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion (Elio Petri,
1970)
It (Andy Muschietti, 2017)
Jesus’ Son (Alison Maclean, 1999)
Johnny Handsome (Walter Hill, 1989)
Keep the Lights On (Ira Sachs, 2012)
The Killers (Andrei Tarkovsky, Marika Beiku & Aleksandr
Gordon, 1956)
The Killers (Don Siegel, 1964)
King Kong (Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack,
1933)
Knives and Skin (Jennifer Reeder, 2019)
Lady Chatterley (Pascale Ferran, 2006)
Lady in the Water (M. Night Shyamalan, 2006)
The Ladykillers (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2004)
The Last American Hero (Lamont Johnson, 1973)
The Laughing Policeman (Stuart Rosenberg, 1973)
Lenny Cooke (Josh & Benny Safdie, 2013)
Let’s Get Lost (Bruce Weber, 1988)
Liberian Boy (Mati Diop, 2015)
The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019)
The Lineup (Don Siegel, 1958)
A Little Princess (Alfonso Cuaron, 1995)
La Llorona (Ramon Peon, 1933)
The Lodge (Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz, 2019)
Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins, 1982)
Madonna: Truth or Dare (Alek Keshishian, 1991)
Magnum Force (Ted Post, 1973)
Maniac (William Lustig, 1980)
The Man Who Wasn’t There (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2001)
Mayhem (Joe Lynch, 2017)
Merrily We Go to Hell (Dorothy Arzner, 1932)
Miller’s Crossing (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1990)
Mother (Mikio Naruse, 1952)
The Mouth Agape (Maurice Pialat, 1974)
Murders in the Zoo (A. Edward Sutherland, 1933)
Mystery of the Wax Museum (Michael Curtiz, 1933)
The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann, 1953)
Nick’s Film – Lightning over Water (Wim Wenders &
Nicholas Ray, 1980)
Nightfall (Jacques Tourneur, 1956)
Night of Terror (Ben Stoloff, 1933)
No Country for Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007)
Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin (Werner Herzog,
2019)
The Nun (Corin Hardy, 2018)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2000)
O Lucky Man! (Lindsay Anderson, 1973)
One Cut of the Dead (Shin’ichiro Ueda, 2017)
On War (Bertrand Bonello, 2008)
Ornette: Made in America (Shirley Clarke, 1985)
Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovich, 1973)
Papillon (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1973)
Payday (Daryl Duke, 1973)
Le petit lieutenant (Xavier Beauvois, 2005)
Pet Sematary (Kevin Kolsch & Dennis Widmyer, 2019)
Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak, 1944)
The Pleasure of Being Robbed (Josh Safdie, 2008)
Police (Maurice Pialat, 1985)
Pretty in Pink (Howard Deutch, 1986)
Private Fears in Public Places (Alain Resnais, 2006)
The Prodigy (Nicholas McCarthy, 2019)
The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931)
Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich (Sonny Laguna & Tommy
Wiklund, 2018)
Rabid (Jen & Sylvia Soska, 2019)
Raising Arizona (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1987)
Real Life (Albert Brooks, 1979)
Rebecca (Ben Wheatley, 2020)
Redacted (Brian De Palma, 2007)
Red Heat (Walter Hill, 1988)
Regular Lovers (Philippe Garrel, 2005)
Ride the Pink Horse (Robert Montgomery, 1947)
The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (Eric Rohmer, 2007)
‘Round Midnight (Bertrand Tavernier, 1986)
Satanic Panic (Chelsea Stardust, 2019)
Scare Package (Courtney Andujar, Hillary Andujar, Anthony
Cousins, Emily Hagins, Aaron B. Koontz, Chris McInroy, Noah Segan & Baron
Vaughn, 2019)
Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street (Roman Chimienti
& Tyler Jensen, 2019)
A Serious Man (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2009)
Serpico (Sidney Lumet, 1973)
The Seven-Ups (Philip D’Antoni, 1973)
She-Devil (Susan Seidelman, 1989)
She Dies Tomorrow (Amy Seimetz, 2020)
Shirley (Josephine Decker, 2020)
Sicilia! (Jean-Marie Straub & Daniele Huillet, 1999)
The Silent Partner (Daryl Duke, 1978)
The Siren (Perry Blackshear, 2019)
The Slumber Party Massacre (Amy Holden Jones, 1982)
Slumber Party Massacre II (Deborah Brock, 1987)
The Sniper (Edward Dmytryk, 1952)
Snow Canon (Mati Diop, 2011)
Solo con tu pareja (Alfonso Cuaron, 1991)
Something Wild (Jack Garfein, 1961)
Sorry, Wrong Number (Anatole Litvak, 1948)
The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira, 2010)
The Sun (Alexsandr Sokurov, 2005)
Sun Don’t Shine (Amy Seimetz, 2012)
Super 8 (J.J. Abrams, 2011)
Supernatural (Victor Halperin, 1933)
Suspiria (Luca Guadagnino, 2018)
Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)
Tale of Cinema (Hong Sangsoo, 2005)
A Tale of Two Sisters (Jee-woon Kim, 2003)
Tchoupitoulas (Bill Ross IV & Turner Ross, 2012)
Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Shin’ya Tsukamoto, 1989)
Them! (Gordon Douglas, 1954)
They Look Like People (Perry Blackshear, 2015)
Thieves Like Us (Robert Altman, 1974)
A Thousand Suns (Mati Diop, 2013)
Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (Wang Bing, 2002)
To Die Like a Man (Joao Pedro Rodrigues, 2009)
Tommaso (Abel Ferrara, 2019)
Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich, 2010)
Troma’s War (Michael Herz & Lloyd Kaufman, 1988)
True Grit (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2010)
Two Lovers (James Gray, 2008)
The Ultimate Warrior (Robert Clouse, 1975)
Urban Rashomon (Khalik Allah, 2013)
The Vampire Bat (Frank R. Strayer, 1933)
Victor Crowley (Adam Green, 2017)
Vincere (Marco Bellocchio, 2009)
Violence in a Women’s Prison (Bruno Mattei, 1982)
Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa, 2019)
Walk on the Wild Side (Edward Dmytryk, 1962)
Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008)
The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-liang, 2005)
We Have a Pope (Nanni Moretti, 2011)
We Own the Night (James Gray, 2007)
White Lightning (Joseph Sargent, 1973)
Wild Bill (Walter Hill, 1995)
The Witch Who Came from the Sea (Matt Cimber, 1976)
The Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang, 1944)
Working Girls (Dorothy Arzner, 1931)
Young Ahmed (Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne, 2019)
