Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975, Chantal Akerman)
Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003, Thom Andersen)
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014, Wes Anderson)
Neon Genesis Evangelion: Take care of yourself. (1996, Anno Hideaki)
Syndromes and a Century (2006, Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
All My Life (1966, Bruce Baillie)
L’Argent (1983, Robert Bresson)
La Cérémonie (1995, Claude Chabrol)
Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996, Peter Chan)
Rose Hobart (1936, Joseph Cornell)
The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (2007, Adam Curtis)
L’Enfant (2005, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)
Stop Making Sense (1984, Jonathan Demme)
The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967, Jacques Demy)
Beau Travail (1999, Claire Denis)
Gertrud (1964, Carl Th. Dreyer)
India Song (1975, Marguerite Duras)
Pyaasa (1957, Guru Dutt)
The Mother and the Whore (1973, Jean Eustache)
The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
Spring in a Small Town (1948, Fei Mu)
Les Vampires (1915, Louis Feuillade)
Fort Apache (1948, John Ford)
(nostalgia) (1971, Hollis Frampton)
Napoléon (1927, Abel Gance)
Pierrot le Fou (1965, Jean-Luc Godard)
Asako I & II (2018, Hamaguchi Ryusuke)
Trust (1990, Hal Hartley)
Only Angels Have Wings (1939, Howard Hawks)
Carol (2015, Todd Haynes)
Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock)
Yourself and Yours (2016, Hong Sang-soo)
A City of Sadness (1989, Hou Hsiao-hsien)
A Touch of Zen (1971, King Hu)
Pedicab Driver (1989, Sammo Hung)
Platform (2000, Jia Zhangke)
Duck Amuck (1953, Chuck Jones)
The General (1926, Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman)
Like Someone in Love (2012, Abbas Kiarostami)
Eyes Wide Shut (1999, Stanley Kubrick)
Seven Samurai (1954, Kurosawa Akira)
Cure (1997, Kurosawa Kiyoshi)
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933, Fritz Lang)
Dirty Ho (1979, Lau Kar-leung)
The Night of the Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000, Ang Lee)
Do the Right Thing (1989, Spike Lee)
Naked (1993, Mike Leigh)
The Love Eterne (1963, Li Han-hsiang)
Before Sunset (2004, Richard Linklater)
Oxhide II (2009, Liu Jiayin)
La Flor (2018, Mariano Llinás)
Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895, Louis & Auguste Lumière)
Mulholland Dr. (2001, David Lynch)
The Tree of Life (2011, Terrence Malick)
Heat (1995, Michael Mann)
Sunless (1983, Chris Marker)
A New Leaf (1971, Elaine May)
Ruggles of Red Gap (1935, Leo McCarey)
Meet Me in St. Louis (1945, Vincente Minnelli)
Spirited Away (2001, Miyazaki Hayao)
Sansho the Bailiff (1954, Mizoguchi Kenji)
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927, F. W. Murnau)
Yearning (1964, Naruse Mikio)
Beijing Watermelon (1989, Obayashi Nobuhiko)
Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948, Max Ophuls)
Death by Hanging (1968, Oshima Nagisa)
Late Spring (1949, Ozu Yasujiro)
The Gospel According to Matthew (1964, Pier Paolo Pasolini)
Transit (2018, Christian Petzold)
The Battle of Algiers (1966, Gillo Pontecorvo)
Johnny Guitar (1954, Nicholas Ray)
Meek’s Cutoff (2010, Kelly Reichardt)
The Rules of the Game (1939, Jean Renoir)
Muriel, or the Time of Return (1963, Alain Resnais)
Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974, Jacques Rivette)
Perceval le Gallois (1978, Éric Rohmer)
Mysteries of Lisbon (2010, Raúl Ruiz)
Silence (2016, Martin Scorsese)
Blade Runner (1982, Ridley Scott)
Imitation of Life (1959, Douglas Sirk)
Wavelength (1967, Michael Snow)
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001, Steven Spielberg)
Manakamana (2013, Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez)
Shanghai Express (1932, Josef von Sternberg)
Moses and Aaron (1975, Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet)
PlayTime (1967, Jacques Tati)
Woman in the Dunes (1964, Teshigahara Hiroshi)
Two English Girls (1971, François Truffaut)
Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003, Tsai Ming-liang)
Peking Opera Blues (1986, Tsui Hark)
Sparrow (2008, Johnnie To)
Canyon Passage (1946, Jacques Tourneur)
Femmes Femmes (1974, Paul Vecchiali)
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Orson Welles)
Paris, Texas (1984, Wim Wenders)
In the Mood for Love (2000, Wong Kar-wai)
The Killer (1989, John Woo)
The Heiress (1949, William Wyler)
A One and a Two… (2000, Edward Yang)
Month: July 2023
Happer’s Comet
Full disclosure: I am good friends with the director.
Happer’s Comet, the new film by Tyler Taormina — one of the key members of the Omnes Films collective, which has emerged as one of the most promising lights in the American independent film scene — heralds a bold step forward. A slender, crepuscular experience, the 62-minute feature was filmed during the COIVD pandemic on the director’s native Long Island with both a skeleton crew (consisting just of himself and cinematographer Jesse Sperling) and an unpredictable, expansive cast of family and fellow denizens. Set seemingly over the course of a single night, the film eschews all audible dialogue, though this is still a film based very much on at least the suggestion of language — songs floating ethereally through the air, idle police radio chatter, televisions left on droning in the night — and plays like a feature-length exploration of a similar milieu as Taormina’s debut Ham on Rye. Where that film more explicitly cast its nighttime exploration as the curdling of teenage wonder and possibility, Happer’s Comet is more free-floating and reliant purely on Taormina’s considerable image-making skill: the majority of shots appear to be lit with a single off-screen source blasting through the darkness, and the recurring motif of roller-skating lends a potent anachronistic feeling. Though it concludes with the rising of the sun, Happer’s Comet proudly, deservedly wears its status as a film out of time.
Taipei Mansions 