The Dirties (Matthew Johnson, 2013)

The Dirties is one of my favorite films of the year, an exceptionally timed black comedy about a lonely, movie-obsessed boy getting lost in the project whose vicarious revenge against his bullies tips ever more precipitously into a literal quest for vengeance. Matt Johnson, director, co-writer and star, captures with uncomfortable accuracy the young man who can communicate only in obvious and obscure references, and who gets so fixated on the one thing that gives him solace that it becomes an escape from reality that threatens to horribly alter that reality. Yet it remains funny, Johnson's pubescent cherub face an open book as he naïvely carries on, deluded with flashes of self-awareness. And in the end, where his decisions start to become less about his rational, human choices than a slavish devotion to the narrative arc of his movie, that grim humor becomes fully tragic.

Read my full review at Spectrum Culture.

Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, 2013)

I've been dying to see this film for nearly a year and a half, and I'm thrilled to say that Leviathan more than lives up to its reputation as very possibly the greatest and most singular cinematic achievement of the decade so far. My review scrambles for a few literary and filmic touchstones just to process it, but this film feels so unlike anything I've seen, even other works by the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab. I cannot recommend it enough, and even though I lack a reference to the film's theatrical impact, I can safely say that Cinema Guild's Blu-Ray gets the job done.

Check out my review of the film and its home-video release at Slant.

Pauline Kael—5001 Nights at the Movies

There's been a resurgence in publication of Pauline Kael's work in the last few years after a 2011 mini-renaissance that saw some biographies and a new collection issued. It's long overdue, though part of the frustration of having to clamor together Kael's pieces around the Internet when most of her work was OOP is realizing how narrow your concept of her really was. Case in point, I was so used to digging out her more famous and easily available long-form pieces that I had no exposure to her capsule writing. This collection, then, was a bit of a surprise once I cracked it open, and honestly a bit of a disappointment. I'm enraptured when Kael gets going, even when I disagree, but this format doesn't allow her to build an argument, so that each dismissal has a nasty curtness to it. I admit a bias in that I think most capsules read this way (including mine), and that I can count on one hand the critics who seem to make an art of it (Agee and Fernando Croce) being the best. Still, it's good to have a fuller portrait of Kael's work, even if this aspect of it does not thrill me at all like her essays.

Read my full review at Spectrum Culture.

The Smashing Pumpkins—Siamese Dream

I was never into the Smashing Pumpkins growing up, but a recent relisten to their catalog has been revelatory. Of them, Siamese Dream is obviously the crowning achievement, a work that splits the difference between early-'90s alternative vagueness and experimentation and classic rock ambition and results in something patently calculated yet undeniably compelling. It's made to be listened to over and over, but at least Billy Corgan did us the solid of making it more than worth the time.

My retrospective review is up at Spectrum Culture.

I Declare War (Jason Lapeyre and Robert Wilson, 2013)

Meaningless display of young machismo that mistakes depiction of extremity as commentary. A waste of time. Read my full review at Spectrum Culture.

24 Hour Party People (Michael Winterbottom, 2002)

Post-punk is my favorite genre of music (one of these days, I must get back to my series of posts on The Fall, possibly my favorite band), and Michael Winterbottom's glibly self-referential, knowingly material work is not only the greatest possible snapshot of that freewheeling mini-era of music in the wake of punk's return to zero, but maybe the single best evocation of a musically defined time period put to film. Hilariously funny, the film's put-upon, sad-sack nature fits its subject well, not only quixotic Factory Records head Tony Wilson but the broader post-punk movement, which infiltrated pop charts with subversively catchy rhythms before becoming simply the new pop, period, intellectual exercises ultimately hoisted on their own petard. There's something grimly amusing about the film being at its brightest when misery purveyors Joy Division start to gain traction and at its lowest when ecstasy hits the clubs, but that's the contradictory, witty way of the film in a nutshell.

Read my full review at Spectrum Culture.

In Search of Blind Joe Death: The Saga of John Fahey (James Cullingham, 2013)

John Fahey is one of the best and most overlooked guitarists of the 20th century, and James Cullingham's mini-feature does about as good a job as one can do in bringing the recluse to life. Fahey left little in the way of anecdotal or personal value, which leaves little for the director to sink his teeth into. But then, Fahey left behind a considerable back catalogue of avant-garde but eminently listenable music, a nexus point of Eastern classical and Memphis blues that found constant variation in repetitious structures. Cullingham is at his best when he finds ways to visually ape those compositions, but in all this is one of those documentaries that succeeds artistically only in the sense it makes you want to see out the subject's work.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.