You know something’s amiss from the start. There’s something benign about the secondary school classroom setting, something pedestrian about the participants that makes your antenna immediately go up. The presence of the actor Alan Cumming is the second indication. Everyone … Continue reading MY OLD SCHOOL
Three Thousand Years of Longing is about stories. Myths and fairy tales, to be precise, but the movie is about how stories once were, and will always be, like breath to us. The narrator, Alithea (Tilda Swinton), tells us as much … Continue reading THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING
It opens like any other western: Sepia soaked still photographs of settlers in wagons traversing a wild frontier while title cards credit the actors, the filmmakers, and the dedication. Then the pictures begin to move. In the background, a lone rider … Continue reading BUCK AND THE PREACHER
A jitterbug contest. Hot rods drag race on a mountain road. A violent car crash. A woman wanders the Hollywood Hills with a head injury. A man recounts a dream of meeting a monster living behind a diner dumpster. A film … Continue reading MULHOLLAND DRIVE
A gay painter in Pittsburgh, Devan Shimoyama (above), talks about the travails of finding a barber capable of cutting his Black hair. “We don’t cut hair with texture,” a stylist tells him. This leads Shimoyama to begin frequenting Black barbershops, … Continue reading MANSCAPING
A lizard is photographed from 360 degrees. The lizard will soon become part of a computer archive that is recreating digital simulations of every animal on the planet, starting with the ones most likely to become extinct. For whom is … Continue reading OUR ARK
Trinity, New Mexico. The site where the American military tested the atomic bomb before dropping two on Japan. Today the site is an army base and tourist attraction. Despite some green glass where the blast fused sand and rocks and … Continue reading WHAT TRAVELERS ARE SAYING ABOUT JORNADA DEL MUERTO
I ask my grandmother whether she remembers her old house. She says: ‘It’s good that I never had a photograph of my childhood home. Because if I had a photo of it, I would have forgotten what it looked like. … Continue reading Mimesis Documentary Festival 2022
For Ben Manalowitz, America is just a theory. And he’s got plenty of them: Theories that favor time over space, myth over fact, conspiracy over simplicity. Some are good, really good, but a lot are over-cooked, over-thought, and over-analyzed after … Continue reading VENGEANCE
Michael J. Cinema 
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