2021

WORDY PREAMBLE

I don't think I have the mental or physical energy to produce a year-end post like 2020's, in which I covered the handful of movies I watched in a theater before the shutdown, every movie I watched at home, the pandemic, the death of our cat Fern, the terrible, permanently life-changing news of my wife's metastatic breast cancer diagnosis, and the connections between all these things. If you missed it, it's the post before this one, helpfully entitled "2020."

If you only know me through this blog (is there anybody out there?), a dinosaur medium mostly replaced by the sad, boring hell of social media, here's a brief update. COVID's still here and not going anywhere, but you already knew that. Republicans are Nazis, Democrats are corporate losers, nothing will ever change unless and until capitalism is destroyed, but you already knew that. (C'mon, I had to put that sentiment in this post at least once.) The movie theaters in my city of Austin reopened in June and July, so I can write about the theatrical experience again (though current COVID numbers in Austin are so high that I am once again avoiding theaters). We still miss Fern but take great pleasure in the antics of our surviving cat Loretta. My wife is doing well. Her cancer is incurable, but it is treatable, and the first line of treatment has been successful. So far, there has been no progression, her tumors have shrunk considerably, and a few of her bone metastases have even disappeared. Still, it's been very, very hard. We live three or four months at a time, in between scans. 

Life at home has been easier in 2021, now that the devastating news is not so new. My marriage is the only thing I truly did right, the only thing that ever really worked out for me. I love our time together, and I want it to continue for as long as possible. I try to stay in the present and enjoy every minute I get with her. This doesn't always work because I'm neurotic as hell, but more often than not, I'm able to make it happen. If life at home has been easier, life in general has not. I knew my job was going to be difficult this year (I work for a state legislature, and they were in session in 2021), but I wasn't prepared for the most difficult year on the job I've ever had. It was an unending nightmare for almost 10 months (the five-month regular session plus three special sessions), we were ridiculously understaffed, and I was not in any kind of mentally healthy state to work as many hours as I was forced to work. My boss has been very understanding of my situation, but the people whose whims and political machinations determine our work schedule during sessions (legislators and, mostly indirectly but sometimes directly, the governor) do not even think of us as human beings. 

During the session, we had a freak winter storm that resulted in a spectacular statewide power grid failure. (My wife and I had no running water for three days; many friends and acquaintances were without power and water for almost a full week.) A harbinger of things to come as our institutions continue to fail us in this pyramid scheme pretending to be a country. The legislature also passed the most regressive stack of extreme far-right legislation I've ever seen in my many years on the job, and the governor vetoed my agency's entire budget (and the other legislative agencies' budgets) as punishment for the Democrats breaking quorum in their ultimately failed attempt to stop a voter suppression bill from passing. This egregious abuse of gubernatorial power was unsurprisingly upheld by the far-right justices of the state supreme court (many of whom were appointed by this same governor), and my job that once was secure will now be in jeopardy any time a governor is dissatisfied with the legislature and wants to inflict some punishment. (Fortunately, our pay was reinstated in the second special session just a few days before the defunding would have gone into effect, but I had a few months of horrendous stress about the future financial well-being of my household.) I'm desperate to quit my poisonous job that somehow gets shittier every year (I also feel like I'm an accessory to fascism even though my agency is nonpartisan and provides services to every legislator), but I'm finally making decent money for the first time in my life, I have great health insurance, I have a flexible schedule (when the legislature is not in session), I have tons of comp and vacation time, I can work from home (at least for now), and if I endure the misery and bullshit for another nine or ten years, I can retire. Most importantly, if my wife can't work in the future due to her illness, she can get on my insurance. Jesus, it almost sounds like a good job, doesn't it? To quote my buddy Frankenstein's monster, "Job bad. Perks and benefits good. Fire bad."

It's been a lonely year, and the never-ending pandemic just makes it worse. In some ways, it was good to have the rest of the world go on pause in 2020 as my wife and I were adjusting to our new cancer normal, but it's been pretty isolating this year (except for seeing a couple friends' bands and hanging out at my friend's bar when the local COVID numbers were low). I've had no mental or physical energy for any kind of creative outlet (other than writing a review of every movie I watched this year on Letterboxd; I guess that's a creative outlet of some kind; WARNING: it's a mixed bag of writing quality, from bad to worse to an occasional quality sentence), and it's starting to get to me. I really miss playing music, but I won't feel comfortable practicing with other people or playing or seeing live shows until this pandemic thing is done or at least under control. (Weirdly, I feel pretty comfortable in movie theaters but seeing live music crowds on my Instagram feed fills me with anxiety.) I also feel enormously alienated from other people and part of me is irrationally furious at any person with a healthy partner. My mind is not a good place to visit or live in at the moment. Guess how many friends and family members have checked in on me this year to see how I'm holding up or to ask how I'm doing? That's right, zero. (Though I do exchange quips and gags and Dusty Rhodes appreciation texts with some friends and relatives.) I was not expecting my boss and our cat's vet to do a better job checking in on the state of my mental health and my wife's physical health than friends and family, but the last couple years have given me a lot of things I never expected. Bad news turns into old news pretty quickly if no one dramatically declines or dies, and everyone else gets on with their lives, leaving you to carry your own heaviness. I'm carrying A LOT of heaviness, and I guess I'm going to have to keep carrying it. I don't reach out, either. I'm a loner and a curmudgeon and I hate social gatherings and sentimentality and obligation (I don't even like that my workplace acknowledges people's birthdays; leave me alone, damn it; why oh why can't I find a job at a haunted lighthouse; etc.), so I don't even know if I want people asking me how I'm doing and how I'm holding up. Sounds like a nightmare to have to answer that question every day. People have their own problems. I don't know. Nothing's good about the situation. I don't want people to reach out to me, but I'm sad when they don't. My brain is fucked. My wife writes these great Caring Bridge posts about her cancer experience, and her family never likes or comments on or says anything about them, either. Maybe people just can't handle talking about this stuff, but my wife and I have to talk about this stuff. As Jonathan Bon Jovi once said, "We've got each other, and that's a lot for love." He also said something about Tommy working on the docks, which doesn't apply here. 

Instead of friends and family or any healthy human relationships outside my marriage, I've got the movies, baby. Theaters are back. I strap on a mask and go to the movies, usually by myself. I like going to movies by myself, though I do sometimes miss my wife's company and look forward to the day when she feels safe enough to go with me. I've also pleasantly bumped into a few friends a few times. I'm vaxxed and boosted, and I like mostly unpopular films, so I feel pretty comfortable in the theater. For the rare crowd-pleaser, I've become adept at knowing which showtimes are the least popular, and which rows are the least crowded. (This paragraph was written before Austin's COVID numbers exploded, so I am once again staying home from theaters until we get back down to at least stage 3.)

Without any further ado, here is my hot (and occasionally room-temperature) take on the movies I watched on the big screen this year. New releases first, followed by revival screenings of older movies. Closing things out is a complete list of every movie I watched in 2021, in theaters and at home. Last year, I watched every Hellraiser sequel. I one-upped that ridiculousness this year by watching every Saw movie, though the worst movie I saw this year, by a few hundred country miles, was It Chapter Two. I said "without any further ado" and just kept typing. Classic.

NEW RELEASES

I finally joined Letterboxd this year, so I'll be cannibalizing my reviews there for parts of this post. Follow me here if you're on there, too.

Annette (Leos Carax)

The cojones on this guy Leos Carax over here. Carax makes his first English-language movie, starring popular movie stars Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, but instead of going for mainstream crossover success, he makes one of his harshest, most difficult, least friendly movies. And it's a musical. With all the songs written by Sparks. I don't even know if I like it, but I love it. The opening scene is such a joyful, thrilling, exciting, and propulsive visual and aural experience, with the best song in the whole movie, so I was lulled into thinking the bulk of the movie would carry on in that spirit. Instead, it beat me up. And I deserved it. It is a bit more of an endurance test than the other Carax movies I know and love (Mauvais sang, The Lovers on the Bridge, his third of Tokyo!, Holy Motors; I haven't seen Pola X or Boy Meets Girl yet), but it's nice to see a new release in the year of 2021 that is not cinematically timid.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Radu Jude)

Speaking of not timid, Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude uses a middle school teacher's leaked sex tape and the school council meeting with her students' parents that will decide if she keeps or loses her job as a jumping-off point for a wildly funny, uninhibited, and formally playful narrative comedy/essay film hybrid that gleefully exposes human hypocrisy, prejudice, prudishness, and tyranny on a personal, cultural, sexual, institutional, local, regional, and global level. Growing up under a repressive Communist dictatorship and living in a modern era that's seen the slow-motion car-crash rise of right-wing fascist authoritarianism, Jude is one of those rare filmmakers who can pummel the hypocrisies of the right and the left without grinding his point of view into a watered-down, centrist paste. If you're a bit of a prude yourself, the movie's unsimulated sex may scare you away, but you'll be missing one of the smartest, funniest movies of the year.

Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven)

Continuing to speak of a lack of timidity, my man Paul Verhoeven (the youngest 83-year-old in the game) is back with another one of his provocative, massively entertaining spectacles that's not so much about elevating trashiness to a higher form of art as it is an acknowledgment that trashiness is already elevated, is already art. The real depths are inside the surfaces. (Want to know what the United States really is? Watch Verhoeven's Robocop and Showgirls.) Like Bad Luck Banging, Benedetta shows that everyone's a hypocrite, everyone's a true believer. One of the best horny nun movies in years, but also so much more than a horny nun movie.

The Card Counter (Paul Schrader)

One of Schrader's many "god's lonely man" movies (American Gigolo, Mishima, Light Sleeper, Affliction, First Reformed, his screenplay for Scorsese's Taxi Driver), or, as I sometimes like to call them, "disturbed man writes in diary" movies (I've never called them this until now), The Card Counter is yet more proof that Schrader always finds fresh ways of telling this story. I love the atypical way he shoots the film's many casinos, the distorted camera angles of the Abu Ghraib flashback scenes, and the sometimes disruptive, sometimes soothing placement of the score. A strange and chilly little movie that takes an accurate emotional temperature of a stressed, sick country.

Days (Tsai Ming-liang)

Tsai Ming-liang is a master of the meditative, the still, and the gradual (though he's also skilled at vibrant musical numbers, freaky weirdness, physical comedy, and sex scenes), and he's one of those rare filmmakers whose characters are alienated but not cynical. He gets realllly sloooooow here, which is just what I needed on a night when my depression was giving me the business. I feel like the movie carried me back to health. Days is unsubtitled, with almost no dialogue, and consists of a series of long takes of two men, one young and one middle-aged (with a few landscape shots mixed in), as they go about their daily (and nightly) routines. The two men are alone, then come together, then go their separate ways again. We know that the older man has back problems and is economically comfortable. The younger man lives in a small, mostly unfurnished apartment and works at least two jobs. Both men are lonely. We don't know much else, and we don't need to. Though Tsai's scenes are lengthy in duration, no image or scene is repeated, and even when a location is visited a second time, the camera observes from a different spot. Each scene finds its own formal approach, including a handheld camera following a character down a busy street; mostly still tableaux where the only thing moving is water in a tub, a torn piece of window covering fluttering in the wind, or the shadow of a cat on the move; a fixed camera observing activity within the frame; a moving camera following the action; closeups; long shots; cameras placed above, below, or beside their subjects; and the flow of real-world traffic, pedestrians, and shoppers into the dream-space of the filmed narrative. As the final scene played out, I thought to myself, "This would be a beautiful final scene." Then the credits rolled. I love it when that happens.

Fire Music (Tom Surgal); Karen Dalton: In My Own Time (Richard Peete & Robert Yapkowitz); The Velvet Underground (Todd Haynes)

Three strong music documentaries that also have cinematic value, from weakest to strongest. Fire Music is a good but surface-level overview of the origins of free jazz in the 1950s and its major evolutions, musicians, and scenes through the end of the 1970s. Hobbled a bit by its short running time (the movie doesn't address free jazz's political connections to the civil rights movement, pretends everything stopped in the '80s, and includes only short clips of musical performances), Fire Music's most valuable achievement is in capturing dozens of interviews with free jazz pioneers who have since died and placing their work in both geographical and cultural context. 

Though Karen Dalton: In My Own Time is more conventional than Todd Haynes' Velvet Underground doc, this empathetic, complicated, and music-filled portrait of Dalton shares with Haynes' and Surgal's films an emphasis on the voices who were actually there instead of the usual time-wasting parade of celebrity fan testimonial. The notable exceptions here are superfans Nick Cave and novelist Rick Moody, who are used sparingly and effectively (with brief fan perspectives at the film's end from the bizarrely random peanut gallery of Vanessa Carlton and two guys from Deer Tick). It's a well-made, well-crafted movie that should compel both Dalton fans and newcomers, and Dalton's poems and diary entries and her daughter's perspective provide a welcome counterbalance to the fascinating but mostly male interview subjects. In the end, Dalton the person remains unknowable until you put on one of her records, but this is an admirable try. 

Finally, Todd Haynes' The Velvet Underground tells the story of the band, its individual members, the underground music, film, and art scenes swirling around and within them in the New York City of the mid-to-late '60s, and their temporarily symbiotic relationship with Andy Warhol. Unlike most recent music documentaries, The Velvet Underground doesn't treat the audience like it's selling us a time share (no celebrity testimonials unless they were directly involved in the story! no one says "you need to understand ___"! no cutesy animation! no opening scene of someone asking if the camera's rolling! yes, you as an audience member are treated as if you already know and appreciate the band and its music and are also interested in other forms of art, too!), and it understands that film is a visual and aural medium and finds an aesthetic form to complement its subjects. Most recent documentaries seem like they'd rather be a long-form article or a podcast. This is a damn movie. I knew Haynes wasn't going to phone it in, but it really turned out great.

The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson)

Isle of Dogs left me cold, but I am pleased to regret to inform my Wes Anderson-hating friends that I have once again greatly enjoyed another one of his meticulously symmetrical movies. I thought Anderson had gone as far in his signature style as was humanly possible with The Grand Budapest Hotel, but The French Dispatch pushes that style to a comically absurd breaking point. You could spend at least a year's worth of free time going frame-by-frame in an attempt to catch every minutely composed detail, but as carefully composed as his frames are, they never feel over-composed. Filmmakers with perfectionist approaches generally turn me off, but Anderson's comic blend of silliness and gallows' humor and his understated sense of melancholy and everyday tragedy inject pleasurably unsettling little disturbances inside his doll's-house visual constructions, and his movies generally improve on second viewings. I sometimes miss the early films' real-world intrusions (Bottle Rocket and Rushmore have an exciting tension that comes from his characters' quixotic attempts to turn the everyday world into a Wes Anderson movie), but I'm starting to understand that those intrusions are still there in weird, ghostly form. I love the issue-of-a-magazine structural conceit, and though the second of the three stories that make up the bulk of the movie didn't move me as much (I'm getting pretty tired of that Timothee Chalamet fella; cut me some slack, teens, I'm a Warren Oates and Ned Beatty guy), the rest of it landed pretty hard for me. This is a genuinely sexy movie, too, as odd as that sounds as a descriptor of a Wes Anderson movie.

Halloween Kills (David Gordon Green); The Many Saints of Newark (Alan Taylor)

People did not like these movies. I did. Michael Myers and Tony Soprano fans wanted some fan service. They didn't get it, or they got it in a way they didn't want. Both movies have some serious flaws, but I think they're doing a lot of interesting things within the confining worlds of, respectively, a slasher movie sequel to a sequel that was a reboot of a lucrative franchise and a gangster movie prequel to a popular TV series. Halloween Kills was a hilariously nihilistic orgy of carnage, brutality, and nastiness that dispensed with the overly deferential respectability of its otherwise decent 2018 predecessor, stuck its star in a hospital room for most of the running time, and filled the margins of the story with oddball characters who were fun to watch (a couple named Big John and Little John spend Halloween night getting high, eating artisanal honey, and watching Cassavetes' Minnie and Moskowitz, for example). 

I'm hopeful The Many Saints of Newark will one day receive some appreciation, in the way David Lynch's 1992 Twin Peaks prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me went from being despised and critically derided to defended and loved. Of course, Fire Walk with Me is one of the greatest damn movies in the history of the medium (I strongly believe this), and The Many Saints of Newark is just a good movie with some problems, so my comparison may fall apart a little under serious inspection. Newark has an unfortunate late-afternoon-on-an-overcast-day digitally color-graded look that is miles away from the vibrant color palette of The Sopranos, and it has so many characters that it doesn't get to go as deep with as many of them as you'd like. Nevertheless, I'm a fan of the loosely plotted, ensemble structure. We get a whole neighborhood ecosystem with an almost Robert Altman-style approach, which is so wonderfully odd for a gangster movie; we get some of the classic Sopranos humor and tone and subversion of expectations; we get Ray Liotta saying "I'm a jazz nut"; we get a performance from James Gandolfini's son Michael that brought a little tear to my eye (man, I miss James Gandolfini); we get Vera Farmiga doing a great Livia Soprano; and we get a final scene that's either a crazy lapse in judgment or a genius bit of cinematic shitposting (either way it's funny as hell). Come on, people. Get with it. The movies are back, baby.

Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson)

I love the electric feeling that anything could happen when watching a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. They're nonstop visual poetry. I love his characters, I love his images, I love how he uses music, I love the way his stories move. I will never understand people who prefer movies that don't wander or movies where the plot tells the characters what to do. This is an extremely pleasurable and sweetly funny film and probably the closest Anderson's come to a full-on hangout movie (if you know what I mean), but the marketing of it as a nostalgic '70s romp is pretty inaccurate. There's a lot of sadness, heaviness, insecurity, frustration, and anger floating above and below the surface, and though there are plenty of warmly nostalgic feelings for songs, places, waterbeds, pinball machines, and the energy and confidence of youth, this is not a rosy picture of the recent past. The '70s adult world is presented here as corrupt, predatory, deranged, sexist, racist, coked-up, alcoholic, cowardly, exploitative, dishonest, exhausted, selfish, and fucked-up, and the two main characters, Alana and Gary, have a mildly inappropriate, mostly platonic friendship because they are the only two people in each other's daily life (outside of their family members) who accept each other as they are, like each other as people, and aren't trying to use each other (at least most of the time). Alana, adrift and disappointed in the adult world (though still attempting to find her way past its closed doors and unspoken rules and painfully attempting to get her value and self-worth from men), reluctantly (and not so reluctantly) allows herself to be pulled back to her youth, while Gary mostly tries to skip past his (except for the pranks and gags and smart-ass remarks and impulsive whims). They meet somewhere in the middle, which is good and bad for both of them. Alana and Gary are two characters I don't think I've ever seen in a movie before, and Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman (in their first movie roles) are so good at inhabiting these characters that I never even thought about one of them being a rock star and the other one being the son of Philip Seymour Hoffman (man, I miss Philip Seymour Hoffman). They were just people. And they look like people. Both of them have a crooked tooth, Cooper Hoffman has a little acne. More real faces onscreen in 2022. Also worth pointing out, I saw this in 70mm, and even the brief technical glitch that delayed the screening for ten minutes was worth it. Most screenings I see now are digital, but I'm an analog bitch until death, so any time I get to see an actual film print in these end times of the soul, I feel like I have repaired a little piece of my broken heart. P.S. If you're going to be one of those obnoxious online scolds about the age gap in this movie, please watch it first. It's complicated shit, and the movie wouldn't make sense without it. P.P.S. Bradley Cooper was never an actor that excited me too much before this year. I didn't dislike him. I generally believed he did a good job at the ol' acting thing, but I didn't feel the electricity when he was onscreen. In the parlance of Marc Maron, he wasn't one of my guys. After the final scenes of Nightmare Alley and every charged second he's onscreen in Licorice Pizza, I'm changing my tune. This guy got to do some shit in 2021. Am I a Bradley-head now? I might be a Bradley-head now. Speaking of Nightmare Alley...

Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro)

Guillermo del Toro is too much of an optimist (and a fantasist) to be a good fit for film noir, but in his adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 novel (memorably made into a 1947 noir by Edmund Goulding), he does a good job of meeting it halfway. (It doesn't hurt that the traveling circus setting suits his sensibility.) The '47 film is better at depicting American grift, desperation, and failure, and its bleak immediacy has been replaced in del Toro's version with nostalgia, glamour, southern Gothic grotesqueries, and brief eruptions of graphic violence (the 1947 film wouldn't work in color; del Toro's remake wouldn't work in black and white). While the 1947 film's fatalistic worldview is undercut by a tacked-on semi-happy-ending character redemption, del Toro finds a rich seam of black humor in his ending by tying indomitable-spirit optimism and rock-bottom desolation into a knot. UPDATE: A black-and-white version will get a limited release in Los Angeles this month, and both del Toro and his cinematographer Dan Laustsen say they lit and conceived it with both color and B&W in mind. I still stand by my opinion above that the '47 film wouldn't work in color and this one wouldn't work in B&W, but I'm more than willing to look like an idiot if I'm wrong. 

The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion)

Nothing fantastical or impossible happens in any Jane Campion movie, but every one of them has an otherworldly quality, an uncanny oddness. She films a ranch and the surrounding mountains and countryside (New Zealand standing in for Montana) like they're the surface of the moon, and there is a possessed quality to Benedict Cumberbatch and Kodi Smit-McPhee's characters, who seem simultaneously ethereal, feral, and all too human (and in completely different ways from each other). I'm also just glad Jane Campion made a western. You don't get images of a bullied oddball teen mournfully but determinedly hula-hooping in the moonlight in a Kevin Costner western.

Titane (Julia Ducournau)

Three months later, and I still have no idea whether I like, dislike, or am completely indifferent toward this movie. I still think about it sometimes. That seems like an endorsement. Is it too silly? Not silly enough? Is the brutal and nauseating violence in the first half something to admire or be suspicious about? Is the second half manipulative sentimentality or a genuine emotional release? All the dancing scenes are great. The sex-with-car scene a visual thrill. Agathe Rouselle and Vincent Lindon in the leads? No complaints. Am I too old for this movie? Too much of a guy being a dude? You mystify me, Titane.

The Tragedy of Macbeth (Joel Coen)

This Shakespeare adaptation, Joel Coen's first movie without his brother Ethan since his 1980 NYU student film, is not a total triumph, but it's got a lot going for it. I sometimes felt like the big leads, Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, were working at cross-purposes. McDormand's Lady Macbeth gets the full-on, I'm-acting-here thespian treatment, while Washington gives his Macbeth a quieter and more naturalistic approach, but they both know how to give the camera their movie-star charisma, and certain moments really click. I may decide my criticisms are stupid on a second viewing. The supporting cast is phenomenally good. Coen avoids the play-to-screen bloat, but he sometimes moves at too fast a clip, and the big moments feel rushed. Coen's visual style resembles a blend of the Hollywood genres that were influenced by German expressionism ('30s, '40s, and '50s film noir and '30s Universal horror) and the darkest of Ingmar Bergman's '50s and '60s black and white films. It occasionally looks a little too bare, but for every shot that lacks punch, there are a dozen darkly expressive images that make up for it and then some. Most theater-to-film adaptations tend to look like either movies or filmed plays. Coen has created an object that looks like film and theater at the same time, something I've only seen elsewhere in Robert Altman's Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and, if we want to throw opera into the mix, Syberberg's Parsifal. I really threw the references around in this little review, didn't I?

RE-RELEASE, REVIVAL, AND REPERTORY SCREENINGS (aka OLD MOVIES ON THE BIG SCREEN)

I watched all these movies (and about half of the new releases above) at the Austin Film Society, an incredible nonprofit organization that, in the 21 years I've lived in Austin, has only screened one bad movie, Oliver Stone's Nixon. (I admit the guy's an artist with a singular vision, OK? I just think his vision sucks. I'm also not saying everything they've screened has been good. I'm just saying, they don't show corporate garbage or middlebrow awards show self-congratulatory white liberal fake art movies.) About seven or eight years ago, they opened their own theater, amazingly only a few minutes' drive from my home. I'm so used to everything I care about going away in these dark, corporate, surveillance-state, crypto-currencied, like-and-subscribe times that I still pinch myself that this place exists. Like I say every year, the new movies are one thing, but the entire history of the movies is another. The present moment of whatever moment has ever existed is never as interesting as every single thing that ever happened. That's not nostalgia, that's just math. 

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972); Cobra Verde (1987); Fitzcarraldo (1982); Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979); Woyzeck (1979) (Werner Herzog)

I'm not quite the Herzog freak I was in my twenties. He's more hit and miss than I was willing to admit back then, but his best stuff is pretty damn mind-blowing, and he's captured images that no else ever could. After years of watching these movies on VHS and DVD, I finally got to see all of Herzog's collaborations with Klaus Kinski on the big screen in 2021. No real revelatory changes of opinion (though Fitzcarraldo was a little worse than I remembered and Cobra Verde was a little better; both film's takes on colonialism are somewhat ambivalent and confused), but I urge anyone who hasn't seen Aguirre in a theater to leap at the next safely available chance. It's still one of the most witchily hypnotic things I've ever seen and one of Herzog's two greatest films (my other favorite is Stroszek). Nosferatu also holds up beautifully and is a respectful tribute to F. W. Murnau's 1922 version and classic Herzog (the faces of Kinski, Bruno Ganz, and Isabelle Adjani look incredible on the big screen), while the exceedingly odd Woyzeck is as close as Herzog ever got to making a Fassbinder movie (please see as many Rainer Werner Fassbinder movies as you can before you die or your life will be incomplete; I command it!). 

Arrebato (Iván Zulueta, 1979)

Filmmaking and drug-taking commingle and develop vampiric powers. Both hallucinatory and narcotic, Arrebato cares more about existing in its own dream-country than in making moral judgments. I saw this alone and tired from my work day and lack of sleep at a late-night screening. Perfect conditions for a movie that appears to exist in liminal space (even when there are people in the frame).

As Tears Go By (Wong Kar-wai, 1988)

Wong Kar-Wai really found himself in his second film as director, the fantastic Days of Being Wild, but his debut is a relatively conventional (for him) action/gangster film with an underdeveloped love story and several nods to Scorsese's Mean Streets. He directs the material with real style, romance, and urgency in vibrant locations with a charismatic cast, and we get several glimpses of the great artist to come, so I'm not too disappointed.

Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)

It's fitting that my choice for first movie in a theater since early March of 2020, a recent-ish old favorite by one of my favorite filmmakers, is all about movement. It's also one of the dreamiest and strangest movies about masculinity and routine, and one of those movies about men that probably could only have been made by a woman. The final scene, in which Denis Lavant's Galoup dances to "Rhythm of the Night," took on another layer of resonance in the purgatory of pandemic with its explosive release of repressed feeling inside an isolated, proscriptive life.

Chameleon Street (Wendell B. Harris, Jr., 1989)

Wendell B. Harris, Jr., is unfortunately on the long list of wonderfully unclassifiable filmmakers who didn't get to make many films. That a significant portion of these filmmakers with truncated careers are not white and/or not male is sadly not surprising. Harris only got one shot (so far), but he made it count. Chameleon Street has more layers than a bag of onions, is consistently funny, and skillfully and playfully experiments with form and narrative as it follows the lead of its con artist central character. Harris has a disarming and inviting style that makes the complex and uncomfortable subjects he broaches entertaining and subversively funny (the scene with the daughter and the knife, holy moly!!), and he weaves race, class, persona, and identity together with an artistically sure hand. The movie is about a black man trying to climb the social and financial ladder by running his own game inside white America's game, but it's also about how every one of us slides into a fresh persona depending on the situation at hand, making the movie even more resonant in the social media age. I'm still not entirely sure if Harris is slyly critiquing William Street's misogyny or endorsing it (maybe a little of both?), but I lean toward the former.

La Ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel, 2001)

From the first second, you can smell the sweat and feel the humidity. There is a near-constant soundtrack of ice clinking in glasses, wine being poured, phones ringing, dogs barking, televisions blaring, children and teenagers fighting and laughing and playing, thunder cracking, rain splashing, and hunting rifles shooting. Every image is endlessly fascinating and full of rot, dread, wildness, and funk. Martel captures the tumult, chaos, and slow House of Usher decay endemic to most large families in impressively controlled, visually elaborate scenes.

Death Laid an Egg (Giulio Questi, 1968)

A giallo-adjacent, mildly sci-fi, avant-garde anti-capitalist erotic crime thriller with two overlapping love triangles, genetically modified mutant chickens, experimental montage editing, a confusingly fractured narrative that actually comes together in the end, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Gina Lollobrigida, Ewa Aulin, betrayals within betrayals within double-crosses within misunderstandings within more double-crosses, fake murder fetishes, real murders, moneyed decadence, and raw egg-yolk gulping.

Le Franc (1994); The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (1999) (Djibril Diop Mambéty)

Two great 45-minute shorts by the Senegalese master Mambéty, especially The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun, his final film. (Don't worry, the Sun is a newspaper, not a corny metaphor.)  In the hands of most other filmmakers, it would have been sentimental uplift hokum, poverty tourism, or a hopeless downer, but he and his star Lissa Balera (sadly her only acting role; she's a natural movie star) create a complex and expressive short feature that retains its hard-won positivity without softening or hiding the world's cruelty, difficulty, and indifference. What else is there to do but keep going?

Friday Foster (Arthur Marks, 1975)

If Pam Grier's charisma, Yaphet Kotto's smile, and the onscreen charm of both could be converted into an energy source, we could divest from fossil fuels tonight. We should have had at least 12 more movies with Grier and Kotto teaming up. At least 12. 

Hester Street (Joan Micklin Silver, 1975)

A beautiful black-and-white '70s gem about Eastern European Jewish immigrants in New York in the late 1890s. Joan Micklin Silver, in her first feature, covers a lot of weighty subjects with a light touch, understated humor, and a graceful visual style. Initially in the unreliable shoes of Steven Keats' Jake, the film's perspective and the viewer's allegiance shifts to Carol Kane's Gitl from the moment she makes her first appearance.

Polyester (John Waters, 1981)

Waters' first mainstream-ish movie is maybe Edith Massey's finest moment (and probably Tab Hunter's). Though toned down five or six notches compared to its predecessors, it's hardly An Officer and a Gentleman (Divine's son is addicted to sniffing glue and has a fetish for stomping on women's feet; sample dialogue: "I never wanted to use macramé to kill" and "I'm gonna get an abortion and I can't wait"). I laugh a lot every time I revisit it. Maybe one day I'll actually get to see it (and smell it) in Odorama.

A Summer's Tale (1996); A Tale of Springtime (1990) (Eric Rohmer)

I finally caught up with the two of Rohmer's four seasons movies I hadn't seen. I loved both, but A Summer's Tale grabbed me the hardest. It's sensual, funny, seductively breezy until it isn't, and full of honest feeling and melancholic weight. How does Rohmer make filmmaking look so natural and effortless? Watching this in my forties was a bittersweet experience. The characters were just a few years older than I was in 1996, and I laughed and cringed at how similar I was to Gaspard at that age (though I never had three lovely women vying for my attention, and I'm also bad at math and not as into sea shanties). I also nearly collapsed after looking at IMDB and seeing that the twentysomething actors are in their early to mid-fifties now. I don't like the way time's been moving lately.

To Live and Die in L.A. (William Friedkin, 1985)

A fabulously coked-up bisexual '80s art-pulp noir with a somehow appropriate rubber-synth Caucasian-funk Wang Chung score and Robby Müller cinematography that practically pops off the screen. 2D 3D? Dispenses with every '80s action movie cliché within the first ten minutes (a detective says "I'm too old for this shit" two years before Lethal Weapon) and then morphs into a hilarious takedown of an arrogant, corrupt, moron detective who thinks he's a supreme alpha male badass as he relentlessly and repeatedly loses a series of dick-measuring contests to almost everyone he encounters. The stacked cast includes William Peterson, Willem Dafoe, Darlanne Fluegel, John Turturro, Dean Stockwell, John Pankow, Robert Downey Sr., Steve James, Valentin de Vargas, Gary Cole, and one of the ladies from Frasier. Great opening and closing credits, great car chase. Terminally cynical but relentlessly entertaining.

EVERY MOVIE I WATCHED OR REWATCHED IN 2021

1BR (David Marmor, 2019)

7 Men from Now (Budd Boetticher, 1956)

9 Lives of a Wet Pussycat (Abel Ferrara, 1976)

24 Hour Party People (Michael Winterbottom, 2002)

4:44 Last Day on Earth (Abel Ferrara, 2011)

About Endlessness (Roy Andersson, 2019)

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)

The Allins (Sami Saif, 2017)

The Amusement Park (George A. Romero, 2019/1973)

And Now the Screaming Starts (Roy Ward Baker, 1973)

Angel (Robert Vincent O’Neil, 1983)

Annabelle Comes Home (Gary Dauberman, 2019)

Annette (Leos Carax, 2021)

Antiviral (Brandon Cronenberg, 2012)

Aquarius (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2016)

Arrebato (Ivan Zulueta, 1979)

As Tears Go By (Wong Kar-Wai, 1988)

Asylum (Roy Ward Baker, 1972)

Audition (Takashi Miike, 1999)

Audrey Rose (Robert Wise, 1977)

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Radu Jude, 2021)

Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)

Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021)

Beyond the Door III (Jeff Kwitny, 1989)

The Big Gundown (Sergio Sollima, 1966)

The Big Shave (Martin Scorsese, 1967)

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Ang Lee, 2016)

Black Christmas (Sophia Takal, 2019)

The Black Room (Roy William Neill, 1935)

The Black Windmill (Don Siegel, 1974)

The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Piers Haggard, 1971)

Blood Rage (John Grissmer, 1987)

Blood Sabbath (Brianne Murphy, 1972)

Blue Is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013)

Body Double (Brian De Palma, 1984)

The Boogeywoman (Erica Scoggins, 2019)

Born to Win (Ivan Passer, 1971)

Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935)

Bride of Re-Animator (Brian Yuzna, 1990)

Buchanan Rides Alone (Budd Boetticher, 1958)

Buena Vista Social Club (Wim Wenders, 1999)

Burn, Witch, Burn (Sidney Hayers, 1962)

Burnt Offerings (Dan Curtis, 1976)

Busting (Peter Hyams, 1974)

Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker aka Night Warning (William Asher, 1981)

Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992)

Candyman (Nia DaCosta, 2021)

The Card Counter (Paul Schrader, 2021)

Carnage (Andy Milligan, 1984)

Carnival of Blood (Leonard Kirtman, 1970)

The Carpenter (David Wellington, 1988)

Castle Freak (Tate Steinsiek, 2020)

Cataclysm (Phillip Marshak, Tom McGowan & Gregg G. Tallas, 1980)

The Cat O’ Nine Tails (Dario Argento, 1971)

Cat People (Paul Schrader, 1982)

Celia (Ann Turner, 1989)

Cellar Dweller (John Carl Buechler, 1988)

Cemetery High (Gorman Bechard, 1988)

Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015)

The Challenge (John Frankenheimer, 1982)

Chameleon Street (Wendell B. Harris Jr., 1989)

The Child (Robert Voskanian, 1977)

Child of Darkness, Child of Light (Marina Sargenti, 1991)

Child of the Big City (Yevgeny Bauer, 1914)

Children of the Corn (Fritz Kiersch, 1984)

Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (Bob Clark, 1972)

Child’s Play (Tom Holland, 1988)

Child’s Play 2 (John Lafia, 1990)

Chopping Mall (Jim Wynorski, 1986)

Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016)

Christmas in July (Preston Sturges, 1940)

C.H.U.D. (Douglas Cheek, 1984)

La Cienaga (Lucrecia Martel, 2001)

The City of the Dead (John Llewellyn Moxey, 1960)

Class of 1984 (Mark L. Lester, 1982)

Class of Nuke ‘Em High (Richard W. Haines & Lloyd Kaufman, 1986)

Climate of the Hunter (Mickey Reece, 2019)

Cobra Verde (Werner Herzog, 1987)

Color Adjustment (Marlon Riggs, 1992)

Color Me Blood Red (Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1965)

Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (Robert Altman, 1982)

The Comedy (Rick Alverson, 2012)

Compañeros (Sergio Corbucci, 1970)

Condemned to Live (Frank R. Strayer, 1935)

Cotton Comes to Harlem (Ossie Davis, 1970)

Creswick (Natalie Erika James, 2017)

The Crime of Doctor Crespi (John H. Auer, 1935)

Crystal Force (Laura Keats, 1990)

Daisy Miller (Peter Bogdanovich, 1974)

Dance, Girl, Dance (Dorothy Arzner, 1940)

Dark August (Martin Goldman, 1976)

Dark City (William Dieterle, 1950)

Darkness by Day (Martin De Salvo, 2013)

The Day of the Beast (Alex de la Iglesia, 1995)

Days (Tsai Ming-liang, 2020)

Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993)

Dead & Buried (Gary Sherman, 1981)

Death Laid an Egg (Giulio Questi, 1968)

Death Ship (Alvin Rakoff, 1980)

Decision at Sundown (Budd Boetticher, 1957)

The Deeper You Dig (John Adams & Toby Poser, 2019)

Devil Times Five (Sean MacGregor & David Sheldon, 1974)

Diary of a Mad Housewife (Frank Perry, 1970)

Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

Don’t Panic (Ruben Galindo Jr., 1988)

Dos monjes (Juan Bustillo Oro, 1934)

Edge of the Axe (Jose Ramon Larraz, 1988)

Edvard Munch (Peter Watkins, 1974)

Elle (Paul Verhoeven, 2016)

Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (James Signorelli, 1988)

Embrace of the Vampire (Anne Goursaud, 1995)

L’enfant secret (Philippe Garrel, 1979)

Eureka (Ernie Gehr, 1974)

Evilspeak (Eric Weston, 1981)

Family (Veronica Kedar, 2017)

El fantasma del convento (Fernando de Fuentes, 1934)

Female Trouble (John Waters, 1974)

The Filth and the Fury (Julien Temple, 2000)

Fingers (Juan Ortiz, 2019)

Fire Music (Tom Surgal, 2018)

Fitzcarraldo (Werner Herzog, 1982)

Flames (Josephine Decker & Zefrey Throwell, 2017)

For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone, 1965)

Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky, 1948)

Le Franc (Djibril Diop Mambety, 1994)

Francisca (Manoel de Oliveira, 1981)

Frankenstein (Bernard Rose, 2015)

Freaky (Christopher Landon, 2020)

The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson, 2021)

Friday Foster (Arthur Marks, 1975)

Fried Barry (Ryan Kruger, 2020)

Funeral Parade of Roses (Toshio Matsumoto, 1969)

The Garment Jungle (Vincent Sherman & Robert Aldrich, 1957)

‘Gator Bait (Beverly & Ferd Sebastian, 1973)

The Ghost Walks (Frank R. Strayer, 1934)

Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett, 2000)

Girlfriends (Claudia Weill, 1978)

The Girl on a Motorcycle (Jack Cardiff, 1968)

The Gladiator (Abel Ferrara, 1986)

Godzilla: King of the Monsters (Michael Dougherty, 2019)

Godzilla vs. Kong (Adam Wingard, 2021)

The Great McGinty (Preston Sturges, 1940)

The Grudge (Nicolas Pesce, 2020)

Hagazussa (Lukas Feigelfeld, 2017)

Halloween Kills (David Gordon Green, 2021)

Heaven Knows What (Josh & Benny Safdie, 2014)

Hellboy (Neil Marshall, 2019)

Hellmaster (Douglas Schulze, 1992)

Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (Bruce Pittman, 1987)

Hester Street (Joan Micklin Silver, 1975)

The House by the Cemetery (Lucio Fulci, 1981)

The House of Mystery (William Nigh, 1934)

House on Haunted Hill (William Castle, 1959)

The House with a Clock in Its Walls (Eli Roth, 2018)

Humanoids from the Deep (Barbara Peeters, 1980)

I Am Divine (Jeffrey Schwarz, 2013)

I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (Sam Jones, 2002)

Ice Cream Man (Norman Apstein, 1995)

I’ll Sing for You (Jacques Sarasin, 2001)

The Immigrant (James Gray, 2013)

I’m No Angel (Wesley Ruggles, 1933)

Impetigore (Joko Anwar, 2019)

In Another Country (Hong Sangsoo, 2012)

L’inhumaine (Marcel L’Herbier, 1924)

In Search of Darkness: Part II (David A. Weiner, 2020)

In the Earth (Ben Wheatley, 2021)

In the Shadow of Women (Philippe Garrel, 2015)

The Invisible Man (Leigh Whannell, 2020)

Italianamerican (Martin Scorsese, 1974)

It Chapter Two (Andy Muschietti, 2019)

It’s Not Just You, Murray! (Martin Scorsese, 1964)

Jack Frost (Michael Cooney, 1997)

Jackie (Pablo Larrain, 2016)

Jakob’s Wife (Travis Stevens, 2021)

Jauja (Lisandro Alonso, 2014)

Jealousy (Philippe Garrel, 2013)

Jigsaw (Michael & Peter Spierig, 2017)

Journey to the Shore (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2015)

Julieta (Pedro Almodovar, 2016)

Karen Dalton: In My Own Time (Richard Peete & Robert Yapkowitz, 2020)

Kill, Baby… Kill! (Mario Bava, 1966)

Koko-di Koko-da (Johannes Nyholm, 2019)

Kuso (Flying Lotus, 2017)

Ladyworld (Amanda Kramer, 2018)

Last Man Standing (Walter Hill, 1996)

Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021)

Lisa and the Devil (Mario Bava, 1973)

The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (Djibril Diop Mambety, 1999)

Little Joe (Jessica Hausner, 2019)

The Little Shop of Horrors (Roger Corman, 1960)

Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau (David Gregory, 2014)

Lovin’ Molly (Sidney Lumet, 1974)

Love Is Strange (Ira Sachs, 2014)

Lover for a Day (Philippe Garrel, 2017)

The Love Witch (Anna Biller, 2016)

Macao (Josef Von Sternberg, 1952)

Machine Gun McCain (Giuliano Montaldo, 1969)

Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood (Christopher Speeth, 1973)

Mandy (Panos Cosmatos, 2018)

Maniac (Dwain Esper, 1934)

Maniac Cop (William Lustig, 1988)

Maniac Cop 2 (William Lustig, 1990)

Man on a Swing (Frank Perry, 1974)

The Many Saints of Newark (Alan Taylor, 2021)

Margaret (extended version) (Kenneth Lonergan, 2011)

Master of the House (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1925)

MC5: A True Testimonial (David C. Thomas, 2002)

Messiah of Evil (Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz, 1973)

Mia Madre (Nanni Moretti, 2015)

Mommy (Xavier Dolan, 2014)

Money Movers (Bruce Beresford, 1978)

Mother’s Day (Charles Kaufman, 1980)

Mulberry St. (Abel Ferrara, 2010)

Murder on the Orient Express (Sidney Lumet, 1974)

Napoli, Napoli, Napoli (Abel Ferrara, 2009)

The Neon Demon (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2016)

Next of Kin (Tony Williams, 1982)

The Night House (David Bruckner, 2020)

Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

Night Train Murders (Aldo Lado, 1975)

Nomadland (Chloe Zhao, 2020)

North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)

Nosferatu the Vampyre (Werner Herzog, 1979)

Nothing Bad Can Happen (Katrin Gebbe, 2013)

Office Killer (Cindy Sherman, 1997)

Old Boyfriends (Joan Tewkesbury, 1979)

Our Sunhi (Hong Sangsoo, 2013)

The Pale Door (Aaron B. Koontz, 2020)

The Panic in Needle Park (Jerry Schatzberg, 1971)

The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974)

Phantom Love (Nina Menkes, 2007)

Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967)

Polyester (John Waters, 1981)

Porno (Keola Racela, 2019)

Possessor (Brandon Cronenberg, 2020)

Possibly in Michigan (Cecelia Condit, 1983)

The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion, 2021)

The President’s Analyst (Theodore J. Flicker, 1967)

Psycho Goreman (Steven Kostanski, 2020)

The Queen of Spades (Thorold Dickinson, 1949)

A Quiet Place (John Krasinski, 2018)

A Quiet Place in the Country (Elio Petri, 1968)

Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932)

Riot in Cell Block 11 (Don Siegel, 1954)

Rise and Fall of a Small Film Company (Jean-Luc Godard, 1986)

Ritual (Joko Anwar, 2012)

Road Movie (Joseph Strick, 1973)

Saint Maud (Rose Glass, 2019)

Satan’s Slaves (Joko Anwar, 2017)

Sator (Jordan Graham, 2019)

Saw (James Wan, 2004)

Saw II (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2005)

Saw III (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2006)

Saw IV (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2007)

Saw V (David Hackl, 2008)

Saw VI (Kevin Greutert, 2009)

Saw: The Final Chapter (Kevin Greutert, 2010)

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (Andre Ovredal, 2019)

She Done Him Wrong (Lowell Sherman, 1933)

She Wolf (Tamae Garateguy, 2013)

The Sign of Leo (Eric Rohmer, 1962)

Slack Bay (Bruno Dumont, 2016)

Sledgehammer (David A. Prior, 1983)

Songs My Brothers Taught Me (Chloe Zhao, 2015)

Sound and Fury (Jean-Claude Brisseau, 1988)

Spellbinder (Janet Greek, 1988)

Split (M. Night Shyamalan, 2016)

Spookies (Eugenie Joseph, Thomas Doran & Brendan Faulkner, 1986)

The Spooky Bunch (Ann Hui, 1980)

Staying Vertical (Alain Guiraudie, 2016)

Stranded in Canton (William Eggleston, 1973-74/2005)

Stranger by the Lake (Alain Guiraudie, 2013)

The Student Nurses (Stephanie Rothman, 1970)

The Sugarland Express (Steven Spielberg, 1974)

A Summer’s Tale (Eric Rohmer, 1996)

Supernova (Walter Hill (as Thomas Lee) & Jack Sholder, 2000)

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (Joseph Sargent, 1974)

A Tale of Springtime (Eric Rohmer, 1990)

Tammy and the T-Rex (Stewart Raffill, 1994)

Terror Train (Roger Spottiswoode, 1980)

The Text of Light (Stan Brakhage, 1974)

Things (Andrew Jordan, 1989)

Thomasine & Bushrod (Gordon Parks Jr., 1974)

Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021)

To Live and Die in L.A. (William Friedkin, 1985)

Too Late for Tears (Byron Haskin, 1949)

A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhangke, 2013)

Towards Mathilde (Claire Denis, 2005)

Train to Busan (Yeon Sang-ho, 2016)

Travelling for a Living (Derrick Knight, 1966)

The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque (Eric Rohmer, 1993)

Tumbbad (Rahi Anil Barve, Anand Gandhi & Adesh Prasad, 2018)

Tunneling the English Channel (Georges Méliès, 1907)

Twixt (Francis Ford Coppola, 2011)

Unbreakable (M. Night Shyamalan, 2000)

Unfaithfully Yours (Preston Sturges, 1948)

Uptight (Jules Dassin, 1968)

U.S. Go Home (Claire Denis, 1994)

The Velvet Underground (Todd Haynes, 2021)

The Velvet Vampire (Stephanie Rothman, 1971)

Welcome Home, Soldier Boys (Richard Compton, 1971)

Werewolves Within (Josh Ruben, 2021)

Western (Bill Ross IV & Turner Ross, 2015)

We Summon the Darkness (Marc Meyers, 2019)

What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? (Martin Scorsese, 1963)

Where Danger Lives (John Farrow, 1950)

The White Dawn (Philip Kaufman, 1974)

William Eggleston in the Real World (Michael Almereyda, 2005)

The Wind Rises (Hayao Miyazaki, 2013)

The Witch: Part 1 – The Subversion (Park Hoon-jung, 2018)

Wolf Devil Woman (Ling Chang, 1982)

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (Kier-La Janisse, 2021)

Woyzeck (Werner Herzog, 1979)

The Wretched (Brett Pierce & Drew T. Pierce, 2019)

Zombi Child (Bertrand Bonello, 2019)