[Digital Video]. Nicole Brenez listed this among the best films she saw in 2023 so I was pretty ecstatic to finally catch up with it. On first impression, its primary significance appears in its historical value as one of the only documents of the Pier 34 artistic space but it warrants merit on several other levels as well. There’s a sparse narrative shell involving a female artist discovering a warehouse where she creates art, spies on several queer artists at…

Kinda whiffed the finale here imo. These films have always been predicated on the trade-off between their set pieces and the dialogue-laden set-up in between but the front-heavy ratio of exposition-to-action here really wrecks the overall pacing. McQuarrie’s first two installments (indebted to Bird’s franchise turning point as a sturdy template while dispersing call-backs to the earliest films) lean into the commercial affordances of the global spy-action star vehicle with a certain synthetic grace but these last two films accumulate…

In an interview with David Grillo, Solomon describes the difference between his and Brakhage’s films by noting that, “there’s no sense for me of a body actually behind the camera as oppose to lets say Brakhage, where you almost always feel the human physicality behind the camera in his photographed work.” This distinction seems clear in how both filmmakers approach illustrating life, aging, and death - Brakhage overwhelms the senses while Solomon focuses them and whereas Brakhage’s films are always…

In some respects, Snow is positing an antithesis to Brakhage’s filmmaking, at least as far as Brakhage’s expressionism (the camera as representative of Brakhage’s eye) is at the opposite side of the spectrum from Snow’s impressionistic vision. From my own personal experience, La région centrale has informed my awareness of the distinction between what the filmmaker sees, what the camera captures, and what the audience perceives in the frame.

If one supposes that part of our attraction to cinema, as…