Stuff I've Written in April

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Let's start from most recent first this time.

The Machine

New York's own Tribeca Film Festival came to an end on Sunday, and once again I was on the beat for Slant Magazine. I ended up writing four reviews:

Flex Is Kings (here)
Frankenstein's Army (here)
A Case of You (here)
The Machine (here)

As you can see, I was mostly underwhelmed by these four (The Machine was the best of the bunch, and even then I wouldn't make any grand claims for it as a great, visionary sci-fi achievement or anything); in fact, the only Tribeca Film Festival title that truly blew me away was Before Midnight, the latest in Richard Linklater's Before... series—and alas, I wasn't assigned to review that one (I did write this short Letterboxd entry, though). Actually, truth is, I didn't see a whole lot of films at Tribeca this year, so I'm sure I missed a lot of potentially good stuff (especially on the non-fiction front, as I kept hearing Tribeca had a lot of great documentaries to offer this year).

Otherwise, three more non-festival reviews: this of Terrence Malick's latest film, To the Wonder (I'm firmly in the "pro" camp); this of Shirley Clarke's recently restored 1967 documentary Portrait of Jason; and this of Unmade in China, a problematic but nevertheless compelling documentary about one filmmaker's increasingly nightmarish attempts to make a movie under the ultra-controlling grip of the Communist Chinese government.

Holy crap, did I write all that in April? I've sure kept myself busy this past month—and that also includes editing reviews for In Review Online and writing up shorter reviews at Letterboxd! And next month is looking to be about as productive...being that I'm going to the Cannes Film Festival for the first time!

A Self-Promotion Catch-Up of Epic Proportions

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—As many of you could tell, I indeed have been slacking mightily in keeping this blog active...but this week has been a bit of a lighter one than I expected—perhaps a welcome calm before the storm that is Tribeca Film Festival, which I'll be covering for Slant Magazine again this year—so now I have a bit of time to catch up on promoting things I've been writing in the past couple of months.

So let's go all the way back to January, when, over at In Review Online, I wrote this review of Hors Satan, the latest film from French filmmaker Bruno Dumont. Good movie—maybe not quite as good as I remembered it from Toronto International Film Festival back in 2011, but still a fascinating watch.

Then came three reviews for Slant Magazine. The "best" of the trio, relatively speaking, was The Sorcerer and the White Snake, a martial-arts spectacle that didn't entirely leave me unaffected—I admit, the romance aspects sort of got to me towards the end—but which can't help but pale by comparison to the splendors its director, Ching Siu-tung, once unleashed in films like A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) and Duel to the Death (1983). You call that CGI "state-of-the-art"???

But at least I found that more passably entertaining than either the egregiously hagiographic Mumia Abu-Jamal documentary Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey With Mumia Abu-Jamal (reviewed here) or, worst of all, the insufferable glorified globalization sitcom Shanghai Calling (here).

Later in February, I gave a second look to Gebo and the Shadow, the latest film from that seemingly ageless Portuguese auteur Manoel de Oliveira (he's 104!), and wrote this up over at The House Next Door as part of its coverage of Film Comment Selects, a local festival hosted by the renowned film magazine. If nothing else, the film offers a master class in making something truly cinematic out of the theatrical.

Fast-forward to March. I went to South by Southwest for the third year in a row! I ended up filing these five dispatches from Austin, Texas:

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone and V/H/S/2 (here)
Prince Avalanche and Drinking Buddies (here)
Museum Hours and Spring Breakers (here)
Downloaded, Touba and Before You Know It (here)
Cheap Thrills (one of the worst of the festival) and Short Term 12 (one of the best) (here)

And finally, I reviewed Bob Byington's ne plus ultra of deadpan comedy Somebody Up There Likes Me (no relation to the Robert Wise boxing picture with Paul Newman)—a review that apparently so annoyed a certain well-known film critic with my suggestion that Byington might actually be doing something somewhat Robert Bresson-like with his style that he made an offhand dismissive comment about it in this comment thread at the film site Letterboxd. I'll, um, take it as a compliment that I engendered some kind of reaction, however contemptuous. (As for whether I'm just full of shit, well, you should just watch the film for yourselves and decide.)

Speaking of Letterboxd: In between not blogging here and handling all the other crap in my life (occasional existential crises included), I've become rather addicted to the site's capabilities of allowing one to keep track and log reviews of films you watch. So if you all want to know what I've been watching since the beginning of this year, check out my profile and explore...because who knows if I'm ever going to revive that consumption-log thing I used to do?

Celebrities Are People Too, You Know!

NEW YORK—

Or, at least, that's one idea that celebrity photographer Kevin Mazur wants us to take away from his debut documentary feature $ellebrity, which I reviewed for Slant Magazine here. There's more to the film than that, but for me, that's the thread that comes through most strongly. My inner humanist finds a certain value in a film that expresses such a sentiment...but considering the way Mazur seems to pin as much blame on the general public for fostering paparazzi culture as he does on the vulture-like photographers themselves (but oh, not him, surely not him), I have a feeling that he wasn't exactly working from a humanist perspective himself. Still, the film has its, uh, useful qualities; it's, at the very least, a slightly more interesting film than I was expecting going in.

Catching Up on Promoting Myself

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Oh man, I've got a lot of catching up to do in regard to self-promotion on this blog!

For much of my November and December, I found myself consumed by balancing my Wall Street Journal day job with my In Review Online editor-in-chief duties, which in December including trying to organize an end-of-year cinema wrap-up. Now 2013 is finally here, all of that is done, and I can finally focus on other things. Behold the end result of all my duties here! (Thank you to all my writers at InRO for helping me pull this off!)

As a contributor to Slant Magazine, I also contributed to that site's end-of-year movies feature with a short blurb about my favorite film of 2012, Moonrise Kingdom. Click here to check out the whole shebang (Wes Anderson's film placed at No. 10). Oh, and speaking of Moonrise Kingdom, listen to me basically re-read my Slant blurb for Peter Labuza's Cinephiliacs podcast at some point during this most recent two-part end-of-year wrap-up episode.

Amidst all this, I still somehow managed to write some film reviews! Let's start with a couple of negligible items, both of them for Slant Magazine: that of Darragh Byrne's completely forgettable Irish drama starring Colm Meaney named Parked (review here) and Antonino D'Ambrosio's marginally more engaging documentary about the rise of punk entitled Let Fury Have the Hour (see here).

Over at Slant's sister blog The House Next Door, I penned this review of Brad Bernstein's Far Out Isn't Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story, which screened during the DOC NYC festival here in New York in early November. I didn't love the film, but I wouldn't necessarily discourage anyone from seeing it whenever it receives a proper theatrical release; its interview subject—a cartoonist who pushed the boundaries of taste with his illustrations in the '60s and eventually got ostracized for his fidelity to his vision—is, if nothing else, an endlessly fascinating personality to witness onscreen.

Speaking of documentaries, I made my first proper review at In Review Online that of The Central Park Five, Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon's often scalding chronicle of the institutional and personal injustices that befell five black New York City youths as they were sentenced for a horrific gang rape in 1989 in Central Park that they did not commit. It's an entirely honorable and sometimes incisive picture and definitely worth seeing, though I would hesitate to call it a great one (if only Spike Lee had handled this material instead of the ever-respectable Ken Burns...).

For my second review to date at InRO, however, I took on one of the biggest films of 2012: Kathryn Bigelow's much-lauded search-for-Bin Laden chronicle Zero Dark Thirty. Let's just say, I'm not entirely on board with the near-universal praise this film has been getting. You can read my ambivalent take on it here.

And I think that's it for catching up. Here's to more great films and film writing in the new year!

Lost in the Hurricane Sandy Shuffle

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Two film criticism-related things on the personal end got lost earlier this week amidst the Hurricane Sandy mess.

First: my review of Girl Walk // All Day, which begins a week-long run Sunday at the newly reopened reRun Gastropub Theater in Brooklyn. For those who don't live in New York or simply don't want to pay to see it, you can technically see the whole 77-minute film here. But Jacob Krupnick's film is great enough that it deserves to be seen on a big screen, if possible.

Second, a bit of personal news: I have agreed to take on editor-in-chief duties of the film- and music-review website In Review Online from its creator/now-former editor-in-chief (and current Brooklyn roommate) Sam C. Mac. I had made a resolution at the beginning of this year that I would somehow shake myself out of the routine I felt I'd been falling into professionally and personally speaking, so when Sam asked me if I would be willing to help keep his site alive as he focused his energies on other projects, I figured this was as good an opportunity as any to make good on that resolution. I've never been in charge of an entire website before—even at Rutgers, during that one year I was film editor for the weekly entertainment section of The Daily Targum, I didn't play the role of the, uh, "head honcho," so to speak. This, then, will be a fresh experience for me, made possibly more challenging by the fact that I'll still be juggling my day job at The Wall Street Journal while doing so. Nevertheless, on the much-bandied-about theory that one needs to push oneself out of one's comfort zone every once in a while if one has any shot of getting anywhere in life, I'm looking forward to taking on these challenges head-on and hopefully elevating Sam's already very fine site to even greater heights...

...or at least, I'm looking forward to it once I come back from my Amsterdam vacation, which is set to commence in a matter of hours! Amsterdam, you say? More on this later...

Two New Reviews, One Positive and One Negative

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Two new reviews of mine went up at Slant Magazine yesterday—not one, two!

First up: my not-especially-enthusiastic take on Delphine & Muriel Coulin's 17 Girls, which tells the based-on-a-true-story tale of 17 teenage girls who decide to get pregnant in a small, decaying town in France. Despite its "observational" bent, it rarely cuts very deep, and its attempts at "visual poetry" strike me as pretty hollow. Better is Robert H. Lieberman's documentary They Call it Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain, an exhaustive and eye-opening film which Lieberman shot clandestinely over three years while helping out young filmmakers in that notoriously closed-off southeast Asian nation. As far as assignments-I-took-just-because-my-editor-needed-someone-to-take-it go, this one was surprisingly not bad; you can read my review here. Both open here in New York this Friday.

Propaganda With Kid Gloves

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

Theodor Herzl and children, in 1900

My latest review for Slant Magazine is of It Is No Dream: The Life of Theodor Herzl, a biographical documentary about the founding father of Zionism. Having not heard much about Herzl going in, I found Richard Trank's film duly informative as a teaching tool; otherwise, I found it pretty much a snooze formally/aesthetically, and some of its gestures—a sentimental Lee Holdridge score, a lack of interest in addressing the more recent complexities of the Israeli-Palestine conflict—betray a pro-Israel bias that undercuts its pose of academic detachment. Really, you could just read the Wikipedia page about Herzl and pick up most of what Trank and co-writer Rabbi Marvin Hier show us in their film—and I bet you'd probably get a less blinkered view of things.

If you're still interested in the film, it begins a theatrical run at the Quad Cinema in New York Friday and some other theater in Los Angeles starting the Friday after.

A Triumph of the Human Spirit in the Best Sense

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

My latest review for Slant Magazine is of an excellent South Korean documentary called Planet of Snail. It's a love story, more or less, between a blind and deaf poet and her devoted wife—and, like some of the other documentaries I've especially liked this year (Crazy Horse, Gerhard Richter Painting, Tchoupitoulas), this one takes some admirable formal risks in the way it explores its subject. It also helps that it's often sweet and touching. It opens at Film Forum in New York tomorrow. For all of you New Yorkers, I'd implore you to check it out; for the rest of you...well, keep an eye out for it, is all I can tell you.

My Very, Um, Visible Review of Invisible

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

My latest review for Slant Magazine is of an Israel film called Invisible, which is currently playing in a week-long theatrical run at the Museum of Modern Art here in New York. For me, this was one of those cases where a film improved for me in hindsight as I was writing up a review for it compared to the mixed reaction I had right after I finished watching it. If any of you in New York do get around to seeing this, I'd certainly love to discuss the implications of its final scene—especially its final cut to black—which was the main source of my initial doubts.

Two Serviceable Documentaries on Great Subjects

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

When I reviewed the documentary Gerhard Richter Painting for Slant Magazine back in March, I gave it a 2½-star review, admiring the integrity of its almost wholly observational approach while wondering if the fairly limited insights offered into the German artist's life and creative processes justified that rigor. And yet, when I watched two recent artist-centered documentaries, Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present and Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, I couldn't get Corinna Belz's film out of my mind. Certainly, neither of those two films have anything like the formal and conceptual daring of Gerhard Richter Painting (and in the case of the Abramović film, director Matthew Akers throws in a lot of annoying visual tricks early on to give things a spuriously "cinematic" flavor), preferring to spoon-feed interpretations of their respective subjects' life and art instead of allowing us to draw our own conclusions. Both films are fine on their own terms (the Abramović documentary, for instance, made me deeply regret missing out entirely on her much-discussed Artist is Present  performance at the Museum of Modern Art two years ago; the film makes it seem like it might have been a near-transformative experience), and I'm sure viewers not too familiar with the work of either artist would find them duly enlightening. Nevertheless, I can't honestly say I feel a whole lot of passion for them; both strike me as merely serviceable films on great subjects.

Anyway, I expounded at length on Akers's Abramović film at Slant Magazine here and on Alison Klayman's Ai Weiwei documentary at The House Next Door here. As for Gerhard Richter Painting...well, the more I think about it, the more I feel that, at the very least, the film may have deserved at least half a star more from me.

Members of the Wedding

NEW YORK—

My latest review for Slant Magazine is that of a Woody Allen-ish ensemble film entitled Richard's Wedding, the debut feature of writer/director/star Onur Tukel (who I know only from his performance as one of three brothers in an oddball indie called Septien, made by Hammer to Nail creator/film critic Michael Tully and given a limited release by Sundance Selects last year). This one's playing at one independent theater in New York—Brooklyn's reRun Gastropub Theater (which, by the way, is a pretty cool theater that, if nothing else, serves amazing popcorn)—starting this Friday, so for now only adventurous New Yorkers will have a chance to see it. Long story—or review—short: I think I tried my best to take the film on its own deliberately abrasive terms, but I found the experience of watching these mostly unpleasant characters ultimately unrewarding. But Tukel accomplishes what he sets out to do, more or less. Take that for what it's worth.

[EDIT (Wednesday, May 30, 2012, 11:57 A.M.): Last night, Michael Tully himself informed me that Richard's Wedding is not Tukel's first feature—he has a few other previous features to his credit. It's just the first in which he takes on a starring role in addition to taking on roles behind the camera. The review has been amended accordingly, and I regret the error.]

Two Recent Reviews, or Yet Another Blog Post of Shameless Self-Promotion

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Two more links to recent film reviews—both at Slant Magazine—to share with you all:

Technically, my Under African Skies review is basically the review I filed after I saw Joe Berlinger's documentary about Paul Simon's groundbreaking 1986 album Graceland at South by Southwest back in March; it just now has a star rating attached to it. Either way, the film is still worth checking out, whether you're a fan of the album or not.

My review of Grant Gee's Patience (After Sebald), however, is brand new. Here is another documentary that explores an existing work of art, in this case The Rings of Saturn, a truly unclassifiable work of literature from iconoclastic German-born writer W. G. Sebald. This one, however, is, formally speaking, a far different kind of documentary than the more aesthetically conventional Under African Skies. I think it's a marvelous film, fully worthy of a brilliant book. I can't say how it will play to newbies; I would hope that those who go into this unfamiliar with Sebald or The Rings of Saturn will be at least somewhat intrigued by Gee's film to go seek out the book as well as the rest of the late writer's work.

A Few More Dispatches from the Tribeca Film Festival

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—The Tribeca Film Festival ended Sunday night, so as far as I know, you won't be able to see any of the films I saw and/or reviewed since my last Tribeca round-up. Still, that doesn't mean you can't read my pieces and keep the ones I reviewed positively in mind for the future...right?

Death of a Superhero

I ended up seeing "only" four more films since that last Tribeca post, two of which I officially reviewed: Ian Fitzgibbon's surprisingly decent Death of a Superhero at Slant Magazine and Alex Karpovsky's insinuating psychological thriller Rubberneck at The House Next Door.

Neither of the two other films left me in the mood to wildly sing its praises. At least Magnus Martens's Swedish crime comedy Jackpot is good for a few genuine bad-taste laughs to go along with its utterly predictable nihilism, especially in an extended setpiece that follows the central criminal band's increasingly hapless and hilarious attempts to dispose of a corpse. Jackpot could best be described as the Coen Brothers' Fargo redone as out-and-out cartoonish farce; if that kind of thing sounds appealing to you, this one delivers the bloody goods.

The Fourth Dimension is a tougher nut to crack. An anthology film featuring contributions from Harmony Korine, Alexei Fedorchenko and Jan Kwiecinski, it opens with title cards explaining the concept of the "fourth dimension" (including, helpfully, a quote from Back to the Future), and then setting out a bunch of rules imposed by producer Eddy Moretti on the three filmmakers—many of which are openly silly (examples: "The hero must have a missing tooth," "The director must direct one scene from the film with a blindfold on over his or her eyes" and so on), none of which have anything to do with any "fourth dimension." What binds these three disparate short films together, then? Perhaps just the idea of characters achieving some higher plane of existence, whatever that means to them personally.

In any case, Korine's "The Lotus Community Workshop" is memorable chiefly for featuring Val Kilmer playing himself as a self-help guru/charlatan who spends the rest of his time basically getting stoned and hanging out with his girlfriend (Rachel Korine). None of this adds up to much more than a prank, but Kilmer is a hoot to watch, especially when you get to the end and hear his auto-tuned "Fourth Dimension" song at the end.

Fedorchenko's "Chronoeye" is the closest this omnibus comes to directly engaging with the fourth dimension, featuring as it does a scientist named Grigory (Igor Sergeev) who has created a device to try to visit moments in the past and future—except that, whenever he is able to visit the past and the future, the camera always seems to be pointed at the most undesirable angles. In his obsession with exploring the past, Grigory seems ignorant of what's around him in the present, including the sexy female neighbor (Darya Ekamasova) who seems to have a thing for him. This is, for my money, the most interesting of the three segments, and sure, I'd consider it my favorite.

Other critics, for some reason, seem to be picking Kwiecinski's segment, entitled "Fawns," as their pick for best in show in this anthology. Personally, I found this parable of hipsters learning to care for someone other than themselves during an impending apocalypse to be an interminable bore—occasionally striking visually but a complete void as far as human interest goes.

One out of three in the case of The Fourth Dimension = not enough to give me a reason to recommend it even for its intriguing concept and occasional choice bits. So it goes with yet another one of these portmanteau films.

And on that (slightly sour) note, thus ends my Tribeca Film Festival experience this year. Obviously, if I wasn't also juggling a day job in addition to checking out films screening at the festival this year, I might have seen more of what I really wanted to see (the one film I regret not being able to schedule: Ira Sachs's new film Keep the Lights On, which played to generally appreciative audience at the Sundance Film Festival a few months ago). But hey, since I'm not doing this film-criticism thing full time, I'll gladly take what I can get!

A Few Dispatches from Tribeca Film Festival

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

Yossi

So far at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, I've seen five films. The closest that has come to blowing me away is Yossi, the latest film from Israeli director Eytan Fox; I explained what I liked about it in this House Next Door review. Unfortunately, there are no more screenings of the film scheduled at the festival, so you fine people will have to wait for either a future theatrical release or a subsequent home-video appearance to see it. But it's definitely worth your time.

Your Sister's Sister, the latest film from Humpday writer-director Lynn Shelton, is also worth your time—at least, up until its third act, which becomes a bit too plot-heavy and melodramatic for my taste. But all three of its lead actors are terrific, and there are other admirable aspects to it, as I tried to explain over at Slant Magazine here.

Less worthy of your attention is Postcards from the Zoo, a terminally boring hunk of whimsy from an Indonesian filmmaker who goes by the name of Edwin. One-and-a-half stars to go along with this Slant Magazine review? I think that's the lowest star rating I've given at that site!

Two films I've seen at Tribeca which I didn't review, but which are of varying degrees of interest: Sleepless Night and Cut. The former is a French action thriller that, like the recent Indonesian film The Raid: Redemption, has generated a lot of positive buzz since its world premiere at Toronto last year. Gareth Evans's film offers up an abstract ballet of violence and choreography; Frédéric Jardin's film, however, features actual human interest underpinning its fiendish plot complications and twisty morals. Both are enjoyable in their own ways (and I wrote so about The Raid when I saw it at South by Southwest last month), but given the choice between the two, I would opt for Jardin's film without question.

As for Cut, Iranian filmmaker Amir Naderi's brutal Japanese-language poison-pen letter to cinephilia—well, the film leaves me with deeply mixed feelings, but as frustrating and sometimes grueling as the experience of watching it was, it still sticks in the memory, for better and for worse. As a bitterly ironic riposte to recent nostalgic old-movie valentines like Hugo and The Artist, it has a certain crude, pummeling effectiveness. As Roger Ebert said about The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, I can't quite recommend it, but I wouldn't discourage you from seeing it.

More to come at Tribeca...

A Laundry List of Links

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—This post will basically be a collection of links to my recent published work outside of this blog—and these days, the great majority of the writing I'm doing is admittedly outside of this blog. Of course, those of you who follow me on Facebook and Twitter will have, I hope, encountered these pieces already; nevertheless, in the interest of self-promotion, I like to collect all those links here at My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second because hey, they are part of my life, after all!

Where to begin, then? Well...how about South by Southwest?

Tchoupitoulas (2012)

Yeah, I went to Austin, Texas, for SXSW again this year...and truth be told, because I had already done this last year, I admit that I was perhaps inevitably less than overwhelmed by the experience this time around. Plus, I found the selection of films I saw, at least, to be wildly mixed in quality: very little that I'd consider actively terrible, but also very little that left me feeling flush with an exhilarating sense of discovery. Two films came closest to inducing such euphoria in me: Tchoupitoulas, the latest documentary from the Ross Brothers, the sibling duo behind the terrific 45365 (a Roger Ebert favorite; he programmed it at Ebertfest last year); and Keyhole, the latest Guy Maddin dreamscape/love letter to classic Hollywood cinema. Oh, and I should probably give a special mention to 21 Jump Street, which received a raucously enthusiastic reception at its world premiere at SXSW and which comes closer than any recent Hollywood comedy I've seen to approximating the anarchic spirit of Airplane! (1980). It's pretty consistently hilarious, even if it's never quite as smart as it thinks it is. (But hey, at least it never turns irritatingly snarky like Drew Goddard/Joss Whedon's overpraised horror-deconstruction romp The Cabin in the Woods, which was SXSW's opening-night film.)

Anyway, here are links to the five House Next Door posts I filed while I attended SXSW:
No. 1: Girl Model, Tchoupitoulas and Killer Joe
No. 2: Keyhole and The Raid: Redemption
No. 3: Compliance
No. 4: Girls and Sleepwalk With Me
No. 5: Under African Skies and Last Call at the Oasis

While I was in Austin, my review of Gerhard Richter Painting—an intriguing and sometimes beautiful documentary about the German painter—was posted at Slant Magazine.

An Oversimplification of Her Beauty (2012)

When I returned from SXSW, I was immediately thrown into another film festival: New Directors/New Films, a collaboration between Museum of Modern Art and Film Society of Lincoln Center in its 41st year this year. Of the 29 feature films that screened during ND/NF this year, I reviewed three of them for Slant Magazine:

Goodbye, the latest film from imprisoned Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof (here)
Generation P, Victor Ginzburg's ambitious Russian epic about advertising in post-Soviet society (here)
Twilight Portrait, Angelina Nikonova's sometimes inscrutable female-centered character study (here)

None of those three films, for all their virtues, approached the highs of An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, the debut feature of New York-based filmmaker Terence Nance and a heady mix of self-analysis, postmodern self-reflexivity and cinematic experimentation that was, head above shoulders, unlike anything I saw not only at ND/NF, but at the movies all year long. I do hope it eventually gets picked up for theatrical distribution. (Alas, I ended up being unable to see Oslo, August 31st—Joachim Trier's much-lauded follow-up to Reprise—at ND/NF, so who knows if that film might have bested Nance's as the highlight of the festival?)

And I think that brings me up to date as far as links go. For now, I'm taking it easy on the writing and mentally preparing for the upcoming maelstrom that will be the Tribeca Film Festival.

A Linkthrough Catch-up, Or Stuff I've Published Recently

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—At the beginning of the year, I made a resolution to, if nothing else, try to be more productive on the writing front. I don't know what happened last year or why, but I went through long stretches where I felt barely a desire to write any serious film criticism at all beyond those brief sketches of reviews I'd set out in my artistic consumption logs. 2012, however, feels like the year in which I need to make some kind of major change in my life; I'm still not really sure what that change would entail, but perhaps I could at least push that change along by making more of an effort to be productive as a critic/writer.

Thus, I've been a bit busier both at and outside of my day job...so busy, it seems, that I haven't even had time to put up links here at this blog to the stuff I've published recently!

So here, in list form, are some links for you all to peruse, if, for some reason, you haven't been following me on Facebook and/or Twitter:

The Snowtown Murders (2011, Justin Kurzel)—reviewed here [P.S. This film was originally called Snowtown, and some of you may have already heard about this film by that name. That title, in my opinion, should have remained.]
On the Ice (2011, Andrew Okpeaha MacLean)—reviewed here; I also did this interview of the director
Transfer (2010, Damir Lukacevic) and All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (2011, Adam Curtis)—both reviewed here
We Have a Pope (2011, Nanni Moretti)—reviewed here

As I get more stuff published going forward, I will try to be more prompt with the linkthroughs. Considering that I will be heading off to Austin, Texas, once again for South by Southwest in a few days, I suspect the linkthroughs are about to get even more plentiful!