82) Biller, Anna. "75 Classic Hollywood Funnywomen." Letterboxd (April 2020) ["Here is my list of 75 of the films with the best female characters in classic Hollywood comedies from the 1930s–1960s. There are many more fantastic comedies I could have included, (and I’m sure I will kick myself for the ones I forgot), but I tried to give a sampling of the work of the great comedy actresses here. I personally find it good for my mental health to see great actresses on the screen showing off their formidable talents in uplifting, well-written films. These characters are admirable, clever, resourceful, and human. And from Shirley Temple to Barbara Stanwyck to Margaret Rutherford, they are dressed, made-up, and coiffed by the greatest designers, lit by the greatest cinematographers, scripted by the best writers, directed by the greatest directors, and playing against the greatest leading men. These movies are a testament to the indomitable spirit of women everywhere, and they speak to us especially strongly today, when there is such a paucity of great female characters in movies. "]
81) Film is premiering on MUBI on May 1st with a discussion with the director afterward
80) Koski, Genevieve, et al. "Sorry to Bother You / Putney Swope (1969), Pt. 1" The Next Picture Show #138 (July 24, 2018) ["Rapper-director Boots Riley has said he hadn’t seen Robert Downey Sr.’s 1969 satirical comedy Putney Swope when he made the buzzy new Sorry to Bother Your, but the films share so much on both a surface level (white men providing the literal voices of black characters) and deeper thematic ones (concerns about capitalism, race, and what it might take to burn down an unjust system) that we had to put them in conversation with each other. In this half, we try to make sense of the fascinating mess that is Putney Swope, considering how it works as both satire and comedy, and whether Downey’s choice to overdub his black title character’s voice with his own is an asset or a liability."]
---. " Sorry To Bother You / Putney Swope (1969), Pt. 2" The Next Picture Show #139 (July 31, 2018) ["As with Robert Downey Sr.’s 1969 satirical oddity Putney Swope, there’s a lot going on in Boots Riley’s new Sorry to Bother You, which takes a similar anything-goes approach to the intersection of race and capitalism. In the second part of our “white voice” double feature, we dig into the anti-capitalist philosophy that unites Riley’s work and keeps Sorry to Bother You on the rails, then we look at how the two films compare in their views of race and capitalism, and their use of satire and surrealism."]
79)
Dakwar, Jamil, et al. "Advocate." Film at Lincoln Center Podcast (June 19, 2019) ["The Jewish Israeli lawyer Lea Tsemel and her Palestinian colleagues have been working for decades representing their clients in an increasingly conservative Israel. We meet Tsemel and the team as they prepare for their youngest defendant yet – Ahmad, a 13-year-old boy implicated in a knife attack on the streets of Jerusalem. Together, they must counter legal and public opposition and prepare Ahmad who, like other Palestinians charged with serious crimes, will face a difficult trial in a country in which the government, court system and the media are stacked against him. To many, Tsemel is a traitor who defends the indefensible. For others, she’s more than an attorney – she’s a true ally."]
78) Finnegan, Lorcan. "Housing Crisis." Letterboxd News (March 25, 2020)
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76) Hungtai, Alex Zhang and Makoto Yogi. "August at Akiko's." Film at Lincoln Center Podcast #231 (June 12, 2019)
75) Pinazza, Natália. "Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, 2019): A Socio-Political Background to Cinematic Catharsis." Mediático (March 30, 2020)
74) Fillion-Sauvé, Étienne. "The Platform (2019)." Film Matters (March 23, 2020)
73) Ehrlich, David, et al. "The 100 Best Movies of the Decade." IndieWire (July 22, 2019)
72) O'Malley, Sheila. "Unbelievable: An exemplary depiction of how to investigate sexual assault." Sight and Sound (February 5, 2020)
71) Koresky, Michael. "Queer Now and Then: 1981." Film Comment (March 11, 2020) [On Freak Orlando (Ulrike Ottinger, 1981)."]
Church of Film: Freak Orlando at Century Trailer from Church of Film on Vimeo.
70) If a Tree Falls: The Story of the Earth Liberation Front (USA/UK: Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman, 2011: 85 mins)
69) Dale, Austin. "Eliza Hittman on Never Rarely Sometimes Always." The Metrograph (March 11, 2020)
68)
T., Susanna. "No Future! No Future!: Fruit Chan Speaks About Made in Hong Kong." Metrograph (March 4, 2020)
67) Macauley, Scott. "Sonic Menace: Composer Mark Korven on Scoring Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse." Filmmaker (December 10, 2019)
66) Available on HULU:
65) Moulton, Jack. "Jungleland." Letterboxd News (September 26, 2019) ["'You’re in the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen, but it’s hell.' Colombian filmmaker Alejandro Landes takes us deep inside the extreme filming conditions of his acclaimed jungle thriller Monos, and the art of letting life come onto the page."]
64) The Stooges may have come from Detroit, but their music reverberated through the environment of the Southern California beaches of my youth. It whispered to me that all was not what it seemed to be and fueled a sense of being in a decaying amusement park (S. Ca, but the USA in general). The spectacle during that time was full of cracks and exposed, before it was once again locked-down during the Clintonite 90s and the rise of the corporations. My main desire was to run, swim, skateboard, bodysurf, ski and bike - constantly (and find interesting people that wanted the same). The burn of constant motion was a salve for my soul. This song, more than anything, is a distillation of what I was feeling at that time and in this video you can see the S. California beach skateboard rat culture of that time (from the documentary Dogtown and the Z-Boys). Skateboarding for miles at a time, taking the unusual routes, and seeking out abandoned places to express myself physically, alerted me to the 'derive' long before I read the Situationists. The opening guitar riff, Iggy's deep voice telling us he wanted to "feel our disease" and as he mentions the "it hits me like the ocean breeze" a background vocal yells out "hey" (so familiar, as I grew up floating up and down a miles long boardwalk - that "hey" would alert me to friendly people when I was going by). When I listen to this song I feel the rush of being bodily lifted/launched by a wave and for a moment learning to fly before plowing back into the water. In a way, the boardwalks of that period, were like Times Square in New York City of the same era, before it was locked down, sanitized, and robbed of its cultural force.
63) Anderson, Katherine J. "On the Absurdity of Ethical Capitalism." Public Books (May 3, 2019) ["Some critics have categorized Riley’s film as “over-the-top-madness,” deciding that it devolves into the “preposterous” despite its strong start. What it shows us, though, is fundamentally real. The problem, as ever, is whose life gets to count as real, and whose does not. In the same way the Western literary canon defined “realism” as a tidy linear narrative about everyday middle-class white life, and dismissed the stories that didn’t fit that narrative as something else—magical realism (postcolonial literature), Afrofuturism, multiethnic literature, and so on—some have characterized this film as absurd, in the sense of “ridiculously unreasonable” or “extremely silly.” What many others have rightly noted, however, is that Sorry to Bother You should be considered in the tradition of absurdist fiction, which depicts the world as having no rational or orderly relationship to human life, often through satire. That is, though Riley’s film relies on an absurdist aesthetic, its relationship to human life is entirely rational, because it narrates the precarious reality of certain lives as a logical and very real extension of Western capitalist history."]
62) Shambu, Girish. "Cold Water: Dancing on the Ruins." Current (September 11, 2018) ["Like the makers of these movies, Assayas has his own personal, signature style, one that owes much to the unencumbered shooting methods he was afforded on Cold Water; central to this style is the idea of movement. Critic Kent Jones has written that it is “hard to recall anyone in a state of repose” in Assayas’s work. The restless bodies in his films are captured by a visual style to match: a lyrical camera, often moving, that is preternaturally sensitive to tiny details of facial expression, nonverbal gesture, clothing, hair, and body movement. Meanwhile, this camera is forever reframing, recomposing the image from one moment to the next, almost miraculously uncovering elements of visual interest. In describing this effect, Jones memorably writes that Assayas “makes an event out of every shape and spatial configuration that crosses his camera’s field of vision.” The director’s style has an analogue in Situationist practice: that of the dérive, which is a drift, an exploratory movement through an urban environment in which the wanderer remains poetically aware of each moment, each small discovery."]
61) Tallerico, Brian. "The Plot Against America." Roger Ebert (March 13, 2020)
60) McMillan, Candice. "How Trump and #metoo Have Scared Us Into the New Decade." Chaz's Journal (March 10, 2020)
59) This film will be available on HULU on March 27:
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (France: Céline Sciamma, 2019)
Liu, Rebecca. "Céline Sciamma’s ‘Portrait de la jeune fille en feu’ (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) explores the boundlessness of poetic love – Cannes." Another Gaze (May 23, 2019)
58) Hudson, David. "The Virus and the Movies." The Daily (March 17, 2020)
57) Filmmaker Magazine has made their new Spring 2020 issue available for free
56) Morris, Wesley. "Rewatching Contagion During the Pandemic." On the Media (March 13, 2020)
55) Raup, Jordan. "Celebrate Women's History Month With Masterclasses From Female Filmmakers." Film at Lincoln Center (March 18, 2020) [Free: "In this moment of uncertainty, the unfailing wisdom of cinema’s rule-breaking, boundary-pushing, pioneering women is something we can always count on. Hear from such influential figures as Agnès Varda, Mati Diop, Claire Denis, Ava DuVernay, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Juliette Binoche, Laura Dern, Greta Gerwig, Isabelle Huppert, Lucrecia Martel, Céline Sciamma, Elaine May, Eliza Hittman, Kelly Reichardt, Alice Rohrwacher, Kate Winslet, and more as they share their storytelling tips and distinct approaches to filmmaking in discussions with our programmers and special guests."]
54) Just came across this interesting overview of Bong Joon-ho's (director of Parasite) filmmaking career
53) The best collection of online documentaries that you can watch for free https://thoughtmaybe.com/
52)
51) Miller, Jonathan. "24 Lies Per Second: an Auteurist Analysis of the Documentary Films of Errol Morris." Digital Window @ Vasseur (2011) ["My aim in these pages is to examine the work of Errol Morris, a film, television, and commercial director best known for his feature-length documentaries. For this analysis, I will use the framework of auteur theory, which premises that a director has a personal, creative vision evident across his or her body of work. Though auteur theory often pervades popular film criticism, it has never been a unified doctrine, as it lacks a single progenitor or foundational text. Critics have interpreted (and misinterpreted) the theory in many distinct ways, and it has been irregularly, often only implicitly, extended to the producers and directors of documentary films. Thus, I will begin by laying out my specific approach to the auteur theory, my assumptions in applying this theory to documentary film, and the ways in which I hope this analysis can illuminate Morris’s work."]
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46) Cheech and Chong's 'Up In Smoke' - have a happy spring break :)
45) Gamble, Ione. "The Craft (1996)." The Final Girls (October 31, 2019) ["The Final Girls are joined by Ione Gamble to discuss witchcraft, teen girl politics, and why Nancy Downs remains a bastion of weirdness for teenage girls everywhere."]
44) Girish, Devika, et al. "The Best Movies of 2019." The Film Comment Podcast (December 11, 2019)
43) Greene, Robert and Larry Fessenden. "Bisbee '17; Depraved." FilmWax Radio (July 11, 2019) [""Bisbee '17" is a nonfiction feature film set in Bisbee, Arizona, an eccentric old mining town just miles away from both Tombstone and the Mexican border. Radically combining collaborative documentary, western and musical elements, the film follows several members of the close knit community as they attempt to reckon with their town’s darkest hour. Then old friend of the podcast, Larry Fessenden, returns to discuss his latest film from Glass Eye Pix, "Depraved" which stars two actor friends of the podcast: David Call & Joshua Leonard. "Depraved" centers on Henry, a field surgeon suffering from PTSD after combat in the Middle East, who creates a man out of body parts in a makeshift lab in Gowanus, Brooklyn. The creature he creates must navigate a strange new world and the rivalry between Henry and his conniving collaborator Polidori."]
42) Koresky, Michael. "Queer Now and Then: O Fantasma (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2000)." Film Comment (February 26, 2020)
41) Archer, Ina Diane. "An Oversimplification of Her Beauty." Film Comment (March/April 2013)
40) Koresky, Michael, et al. "The Decade Project, Part 1." The Film Comment Podcast (December 4, 2019) ["By any measure, the 2010s have been a confusing and turbulent and also exciting time. That goes for both movies and the world at large, and that’s saying a lot after the 2000s. At Film Comment, part of our goal is to offer a critical chronicle of the movies as they’re happening, putting things in historical perspective, pointing out the bold and the beautiful in the art and craft of film, and hopefully offering an insight or two along the way. That’s often hardest to do with contemporary history, and so to grapple with the 2010s, we’re starting a series of Film Comment podcasts we’re calling The Decade Project. We’ll look at the movies from different angles and do our best to map out a vivid but often hard to characterize time. This week, we’ll talk about some of the major shifts and changes that happened over the last ten years, and some of the decade’s pivotal movies. It’s also an opportunity to talk about the big picture in movies, which probably means having a healthy skepticism about thinking in terms of decades altogether."]
39) Diop, Mati. "On Atlantics and Her Filmmaking Process." Film at Lincoln Center Podcast (November 27, 2019) ["This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re sharing an extensive conversation with Mati Diop. The French-Senegalese director earned the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival for her debut film Atlantics, which is now in theatrical release and arrives on Netflix this Friday. At the 57th New York Film Festival, Diop was on hand at a Directors Dialogue to discuss her first feature, which is a hypnotic yet grounded ghost and love story, with FLC Director of Programming Dennis Lim."]
38) McCann, Ruairi. "Solidarity Forever: Labour and Art as a Collective Endeavour in the Films of Julia Reichert and Patrick Wang." Photogénie (February 28, 2020)
37) I was very resistant to the concept of this film, but then I saw the trailer
36) An annual, massive, global undertaking - you want to explore the world of cinema (and global cultures) - here you go Senses of Cinema World Poll 2019
35) Hidalgo, Omar Zúñiga, Dominga Sotomayor and Rodrigo Teixeira. "Too Late to Die Young." Film at Lincoln Center Podcast (May 29, 2019)
34) "The 50 Most Overlooked Films of 2019." The Film Stage (December 20, 2019)
33) Scharf, Zack. "Bong Joon Ho’s Favorite Movies: 30 Films the Director Wants You to See." IndieWire (February 6, 2020)
32) Morgan Deatley wrote an interesting response to The Lodge (currently in theaters). If you watch it and write a response, talk to him about it.
31) "The Mushroom Hunters: Neil Gaiman’s Subversive Feminist Celebration of Science and the Human Hunger for Truth, in a Gorgeous Animated Short Film." Brain Pickings (November 25, 2019)
30) Recommended beautiful, ruminative SF film:
29) Since we watched The Gangs of New York (2003), lets make the films of the director Martin Scorsese and the phenomenal actor Daniel Day Lewis (played Bill the Butcher) available for extra credit responses.
28) Hellstrom, Monica and Simon Lereng Wilmont. "The Distant Barking of Dogs." Film School Radio (January 11, 2019) ["THE DISTANT BARKING OF DOGS is set in Eastern Ukraine on the frontline of the war. The film follows the life of 10-year-old Ukrainian boy Oleg throughout a year, witnessing the gradual erosion of his innocence beneath the pressures of war. Oleg lives with his beloved grandmother, Alexandra, in the small village of Hnutove. Having no other place to go, Oleg and Alexandra stay and watch as others leave the village. Life becomes increasingly difficult with each passing day, and the war offers no end in sight. In this now half-deserted village where Oleg and Alexandra are the only true constants in each other’s lives, the film shows just how fragile, but crucial, close relationships are for survival. Through Oleg’s perspective, the film examines what it means to grow up in a warzone. It portrays how a child’s universal struggle to discover what the world is about grows interlaced with all the dangers and challenges the war presents. THE DISTANT BARKING OF DOGS unveils the consequences of war bearing down on the children in Eastern Ukraine, and by natural extension, the scars and self- taught life lessons this generation will carry with them into the future. Director Simon Lereng Wilmont and Producer Monica Hellström stop by to talk about this harrowing, intimate and loving look at Oleg and Alexandra’s claustrophobic life on the frontlines of an undeclared war."]
27) Kessler, Martin, Lady P. and Kristen Sales. "Monty Python and the Holy Grail: An Unexpected Inquisition." Flixwise Favorites #30 (March 21, 2017)
26) Zamecka, Anna. "Communion." Film School Radio (January 4, 2019) ["Anna Zamecka’s intimate documentary Communion drops us into a truncated family living amid domestic instability and teenaged volatility, a sister and brother play out their lives on camera. At fourteen, Ola is already functioning as the woman of the house, cooking and cleaning for her lethargic father and helping her energetic autistic brother, Nikodem, prepare for his first Holy Communion. Throughout, she longs for her mother, Magda, whose absence is never explained, yet always deeply felt. As the date of Communion nears, it becomes an opportunity for the family to meet up and Ola is entirely responsible for planning the perfect family celebration. Communion is a portrait of young womanhood and crash course in growing up that teaches us that no failure is final, and that change is possible and needed, especially when love is in question. Anna Zamecka is a Polish film director, screenwriter and producer. She has studied cultural anthropology, journalism and photography in Warsaw and Copenhagen. Her 2016 debut feature film, Communion” received over 40 awards, including the European Film Award for Best European Documentary 2017 and the Critic’s Week Award at Locarno IFF, amongst others. Anna Zamecka joins us for a conversation about gaining the confidence of a struggling family and young woman trying to navigate a family life that threatens to overwhelm her."]
25) Any Maurice Pialat film is available for response:
24) John Carpenter's The Warriors can be an extra credit response:
Koski, Genevieve, et al. "Escapes from New York, Pt. 1 - The Warriors." The Next Picture Show #178 (May 28, 2019) ["The latest chapter in the JOHN WICK saga, the new PARABELLUM, follows its assassin hero on a long perilous journey through hostile territory, a setup that brought to mind Walter Hill’s controversial hit turned cult classic THE WARRIORS. In this half of our pairing of violent journeys through the night, we examine Hill’s film in the context of the director’s late-’70s/early-’80s hot streak, to discuss how its rain-slicked streets and stylized version of New York gang culture came to typify a certain strain of ’80s action filmmaking, and debate whether its portrayals of masculinity and romance work in the context of Hill’s bare-bones approach to storytelling."]
---. "Escapes from New York, Pt. 2 - John Wick 3: Parabellum." The Next Picture Show #179 (June 4, 2019) ["We return again to the deadly streets of the Big Apple at night to discuss Chad Stahelski’s latest entry in the JOHN WICK franchise, CHAPTER 3—PARABELLUM, and its place in the action pantheon alongside Walter Hill’s 1979 cult classic THE WARRIORS. After talking over our reactions to the latest JOHN WICK, and the series as a whole, we bring in THE WARRIORS to compare how these two films’ respective styles approach the streets of New York and action choreography, how they both embrace the trope of “honor among thieves,” and how their respective portrayals of masculinity play on the juxtaposition of vulnerability and indomitability."]
23)
22) Extra credit films in theaters the week of 2/21 - 2/27 that you can do extra credit responses on: Birds of Prey, Knives Out, Little Women, Ford v Ferrari, Fantastic Fungi, The Assistant, Waves, From Nowhere (One World Film Festival 2/22 Kentucky Theater), Soul Power (One World Film Festival 2/27 Kentucky Theater)
21) A list of documentaries you can do extra credit responses
20) This film is an option for an extra credit response: Eggers, Robert. "The Lighthouse." The Film Comment Podcast (October 23, 2019) ["The Lighthouse is the mind-bending new movie out from Robert Eggers, a director who’s making a career out of revisiting America’s primal past in vividly imagined period films. In 2015, Eggers won the Best Directing Award at Sundance for The Witch, a chilling piece of horror set in a colonial New England settlement. In The Lighthouse, Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson star as two lighthouse keepers, a grizzled old-timer and his new apprentice, in 19th century Maine. For our latest Film Comment Talk at Film at Lincoln Center, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold spoke with Eggers about the art, craft, and angst of making the movie, fleshing out the details of its setting, and what he’d do with an unlimited budget."]
19) Juhyundred. "Reading Colonialism in Parasite." Tropics of Meta (February 17, 2020)
18) Check out the Contemporary World Cinema Project
17) Pan's Labyrinth (Spain/Mexico: Guillermo Del Toro, 2006) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Archive)
16) Chabon, Michael. "The Film Worlds of Wes Anderson." The New York Review of Books (March 7, 2013)
15) I just heard on IMDB that Parasite with Bong Joon-ho and Adam McKay is being planned as a 6 hr limited HBO series
14) Available for an extra credit response Roma (Mexico/USA: Alfonso Cuarón, 2018) [You can stream it on Netflix]
13) Kempenaar, Adam, et al. "Top Films of 2019 (Pt. 1)." Filmspotting #758 (December 27, 2019)
---. "Top Films of 2019 (Pt. 2)." Filmspotting #759 (January 2, 2020) (Here are the hosts choices in list format)
12) upcoming film: Hudson, David. "Eliza Hittman's Never Rarely Sometimes Always." The Current (January 31, 2020)
11) Available for a response Hail Satan! (USA: Penny Lane, 2019)
10) Sight and Sound provides a handy archive of the best video essays of 2019 (a great way to study film & filmmaking)
9) The documentary 13th on Netflix is available for a response - here is a good source on it Wallis, Victor. "13th and the Culture of Surplus Punishment." Jump Cut #58 (Spring 2018)
8) Bluegrass Film Society Spring 2020 Schedule - attendance at a film counts as a response (no writing required - you are seeing the film outside of class)
7) Herzog, Werner. "On Gorbachev." On the Media (May 8, 2019) ["Renowned director and documentarian Werner Herzog's latest filmmaking endeavor examines the legacy of the eighth and final leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. For the film, Herzog sat down with the 88 year-old former General Secretary for a candid conversation about his complicated legacy. In the latest installment of Bob's Docs, Herzog joins Bob to discuss his filmmaking process and the history of the man he profiled."]
6) Extra credit response opportunity - opens at the Kentucky Theater 2/7:
5) Hynes, Eric, Nicolas Rapold and Daniel Witkin. "The Russians." The Film Comment Podcast (July 26, 2018) ["As long as we are being inundated with worrisome news about Russian cyberwarfare and other attacks, the time seems ripe for taking a look at the motherland’s cinema. The summer series “Putin’s Russia: A 21st-Century Mosaic” at the Museum of the Moving Image provided a perfect opportunity for surveying key films in the country’s recent history, including award-winning auteurs like Andrei Zvyagintsev and lesser-known directors. For this discussion I was joined by the co-programmers of the series: Eric Hynes, curator of film at Museum of Moving Image and FC columnist, and writer/filmmaker Daniel Witkin."]
4) Hudson, David. "Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always." The Current (Jan 31, 2020)
3) Lane, Penny. "Hail Satan?" Radio West (May 10, 2019) [MB - I was interested in seeing this documentary and after listening to this discussion with the director Penny Lane I'm thinking it could be a great opportunity in my Peace Studies' courses for discussing the problems with authoritarian impulses and rigid/controlling dogmas of traditional/mainstream religions (or any dominant/controlling ideology/worldview).]
2) Coming soon
1) Connor, Ashley, Eric Hynes and Nicolas Rapold. "Drone Cinema." Film Comment (July 11, 2018) ["“In just a few years’ time, they’ve become both requisite filmmaking tools and regrettable freighters of cliché. Drone shots are easily recognizable not because drone cameras have a single, easily definable use, but because nearly everyone’s using them the same way: god’s-eye view of a landscape, smooth gliding (heaven forbid there’s a jerk or rattle), low-grade wow factor, cut,” Eric Hynes writes in his essay about drones in the July/August issue of Film Comment. “Yet perhaps we shouldn’t blame the tool for how it’s being used, especially since we’re still in the early days, and since potential applications are still being explored within both documentary and fiction.” There’s great potential in drone photography, for sure, but how are filmmakers harnessing its power for good, and not just for awesome? In this week’s Film Comment Podcast, I discussed drones in cinema with Hynes, an FC columnist and Curator of Film at the Museum of the Moving Image, and a bona fide cinematographer, Ashley Connor (Madeline’s Madeline), and hashed out the good, the bad, and the ugly of this curious airborne invention."]
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