Film strips

New URL: Film-Journey.org

Welcome to the newly hyphenated Film Journey domain—previously filmjourney.org now film-journey.org.

This blog began in 2003 and continued fairly regularly until 2008, when my daughter was born. I sporadically updated it after that, mainly with Robert Koehler’s excellent contributions. It essentially ceased in 2015 when I entered grad school. It’s now an archive of more than 500 articles on moviegoing in the aughts. Despite surviving the digital turn, post-9/11 austerity, the demise of the alternative weeklies, and The Great Recession, film criticism in 2015 seemed more like a hobby—or idealistic exercise in precarious labor—than a viable career. Today I …

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Connections and Globalisms: Days and Nights and the 2020 Palm Springs Film Festival

NOTE: This essay was written before the covid-19 pandemic, when film festivals around the world closed or cancelled, with no date in sight for relaunch. In a sense, this piece was written in another era, which just ended. But because of that, the strangeness of reading something written at one moment before that moment radically changed can have its own value.   

Everything in film culture—like every cultural project—will be permanently changed by this crisis and how governments and society will respond to it. We are in effect living in a global, collective mystery whose outcome is completely unknown. The

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What the Palm Springs Film Festival Tells Us About the State of Cinema

Like every other North American festival this time of year, the Palm Springs film festival, which closed this past Monday, is pulled into the apparently inescapable vortex of the Academy Awards. Despite all the sturm und drang of the Academy’s internal organizational drama, cost overruns on the new Academy museum at Wilshire and Fairfax and strain to diversify its (still) white-dominant membership, the Oscars rule, and not in a good way. The Oscars have utterly colonized English-language movies aspiring to that thing known as “art.”

This is a recent development that the so-called “art film” world hasn’t figured out or …

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The Best Films of 2017

An explanation about these two lists. You may notice that one overlaps the other. The world premieres list includes only movies that were first seen anywhere in the world in 2017, in festivals, commercial release or some other type of exhibition. The U.S./Los Angeles list is, as usual, a record of how the U.S. is a laggard in screening many significant world premieres. What this means is that, as usual, U.S. film festivals are much slower than festivals in other parts of the world to screen important, essential movies. So while these (overlapping ) lists may include a lot of …

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The Death of Cinefamily

News has finally arrived that the biggest Los Angeles repertory success story of the last ten years, Cinefamily, is permanently shutting its doors due to accusations of sexual impropriety and harassment among its employees. I write “success story” (even though the owners now say they have “crippling debt”) because Cinefamily, especially in its early years (say, 2007-2012), was regularly touted by local culture commentators as “some of the most vibrant and unusual repertory and independent-film programming in the country.” This included art house, music videos, cable video, repertory, and many other genres programmed on a nightly basis. And Cinefamily had …

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AFI Fest 2017: Loveless

Zvyagintsev’s films are often described as critiques of modern Russia, but I’m beginning to accept his constant denials of that interpretation, his assertions that he is apolitical and only interested in the human condition. Yes, his films are set in contemporary Russia and track the moral compromises and lack of justice in the lives of his characters, but surely Russia is not the only country in the world with such imbalances? It’s partly why Leviathan (2014) is my favorite of his films—simultaneously his most political (in its examination of small town corruption) and his most allegorical (alluding as he does …

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