New York Film Festival 2025 Predictions (Round 3)

August 3, 2025Ryan Swen Musings Tags: nyff predictions Leave a comment

Main Slate
*After the Hunt (Luca Guadagnino)
*Father Mother Sister Brother (Jim Jarmusch)
*Is This Thing On? (Bradley Cooper)
Blue Moon (Richard Linklater)
The Blue Trail (Gabriel Mascaro)
Dracula (Radu Jude)
Drunken Noodles (Lucio Castro)
Duse (Pietro Marcello)
Enzo (Robin Campillo)
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein)
It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)
Jay Kelly (Noah Baumbach)
Kontinental ’25 (Radu Jude)
Landmarks (Lucrecia Martel)
The Love That Remains (Hlynur Pálmason)
Magellan (Lav Diaz)
The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt)
Mirrors No. 3 (Christian Petzold)
No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook)
The Perfect Neighbor (Geeta Gandbhir)
A Poet (Simón Mesa Soto)
Resurrection (Bi Gan)
Romería (Carla Simón)
Rose of Nevada (Mark Jenkin)
The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)
Sirât (Óliver Laxe)
Sound of Falling (Mascha Schilinski)
Two Prosecutors (Sergei Loznitsa)
What Does That Nature Say to You (Hong Sang-soo)
Yes! (Nadav Lapid)
Young Mothers (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)

Currents
*Dry Leaf (Alexandre Koberidze)
After Dreaming (Christine Haroutounian)
The Currents (Milagros Mumenthaler)
Hair, Paper, Water (Nicolas Graux & Trương Minh Quý)
The Lake (Fabrice Aragno)
Mare’s Nest (Ben Rivers)
Phantoms of July (Julian Radlmaier)
Remake (Ross McElwee)
The Seasons (Maureen Fazendeiro)
Tales of the Wounded Land (Abbas Fahdel)
With Hasan in Gaza (Kamal Aljafari)

Spotlight
*Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie)
Back Home (Tsai Ming-liang)
Below the Clouds (Gianfranco Rosi)
Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos)
Hamnet (Chloé Zhao)
Late Fame (Kent Jones)
Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater)
One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)
The Smashing Machine (Benny Safdie)
The Souffler (Gastón Solnicki)

New York Film Festival 2025 Predictions (Round 2)

Virtual Lock
Dracula (Radu Jude)
It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)
Kontinental ’25 (Radu Jude)
The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt)
Resurrection (Bi Gan)
The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)
Sirât (Óliver Laxe)
What Does That Nature Say to You (Hong Sang-soo)

Strong Chance
Blue Moon (Richard Linklater)
The Blue Trail (Gabriel Mascaro)
Duse (Pietro Marcello)
Father Mother Sister Brother (Jim Jarmusch)
Jay Kelly (Noah Baumbach) [centerpiece]
Mirrors No. 3 (Christian Petzold)
Nuestra Tierra (Lucrecia Martel)
One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Romería (Carla Simón)
Sound of Falling (Mascha Schilinski)
Two Prosecutors (Sergei Loznitsa)
Yes! (Nadav Lapid)

Moderate Possibility
Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos)
Drunken Noodles (Lucio Castro)
Enzo (Robin Campillo)
Franz (Agnieszka Holland)
Girl (Shu Qi)
Heads or Tails? (Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis)
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein)
Living the Land (Huo Meng)
Love on Trial (Fukada Koji)
The Love That Remains (Hlynur Pálmason)
Magellan (Lav Diaz)
Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie) [opening night]
No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook)
Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater)
The Perfect Neighbor (Geeta Gandbhir)
A Poet (Simón Mesa Soto)
Renoir (Hayakawa Chie)
Rose of Nevada (Mark Jenkin)
The Smashing Machine (Benny Safdie)
The Voice of Hind Rajab (Kaouther Ben Hania)
The Wizard of the Kremlin (Olivier Assayas)
Young Mothers (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)

Currents
The Currents (Milagros Mumenthaler)
Dry Leaf (Alexandre Koberidze) [gala]
Hair, Paper, Water (Nicolas Graux & Trương Minh Quý)
The Lake (Fabrice Aragno)
Mare’s Nest (Ben Rivers)
Phantoms of July (Julian Radlmaier)
The Seasons (Maureen Fazendeiro)
Tales of the Wounded Land (Abbas Fahdel)
With Hasan in Gaza (Kamal Aljafari)

Spotlight
Back Home (Tsai Ming-liang)
Below the Clouds (Gianfranco Rosi)
Hamnet (Chloé Zhao) [gala]
Late Fame (Kent Jones)
Remake (Ross McElwee)
The Souffler (Gastón Solnicki)

New

Dracula (Radu Jude)
Jude fiction film.

Duse (Pietro Marcello)
Lim is a great admirer of Marcello’s, and Scarlet made it in despite a relatively muted reception.

Father Mother Sister Brother (Jim Jarmusch)
Jarmusch’s NYFF attendance can be a bit inconsistent, but this hopefully seems like a return to form.

Jay Kelly (Noah Baumbach)
Baumbach’s become a NYFF regular, especially in gala slots (including the divisive White Noise), so predicting this for Centerpiece or Closing Night seems like a safe bet.

Nuestra Tierra (Lucrecia Martel)
Have no idea what to expect from a Martel documentary, but the general adoration of her work makes it likely that this will be in either Main Slate or Spotlight.

Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos)
The inclusion of Poor Things as a non-gala selection in Main Slate meant that the committee’s love for Lanthimos was greater than I anticipated; I’m still not entirely convinced that his inclusions aren’t a case-by-case basis but it’s in the cards.

Franz (Agnieszka Holland)
Green Border was a semi-surprising Main Slate pick, and I don’t know how to factor in the TIFF world premiere.

Girl (Shu Qi)
The Venice competition berth for one of cinema’s greatest actor’s directorial debut seems like a vote of confidence.

Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie)/The Smashing Machine (Benny Safdie)
Still not entirely sure how NYFF feels about the Safdies—Uncut Gems was notably a late addition to Spotlight, after the likes of Joker—but wouldn’t be shocked if Josh got the first Opening Night world premiere in a while, and Benny was also in the mix.

No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook)
Feel like Decision to Leave might not have made it into NYFF last time in a stronger premiere year/without the Cannes Best Director award, but he’s always a candidate.

A Poet (Simón Mesa Soto)
Included mostly because of the 1-2 Special acquisition, which signals at least a certain degree of confidence in the film’s merits.

Rose of Nevada (Mark Jenkin)
Enys Men was a slightly surprising choice, and this seems like a relatively more conventional film.

The Voice of Hind Rajab (Kaouther Ben Hania)
Four Daughters wasn’t picked and I truthfully have no idea how this especially sensitive and timely event will be tackled, but I wouldn’t be shocked if this was selected.

The Wizard of the Kremlin (Olivier Assayas)
Suspended Time didn’t make it but I retain some hope for Assayas.

Dry Leaf (Alexandre Koberidze)
This will almost certainly be in the NYFF selection, but an over-three-hour film shot entirely on a Sony Ericsson seems more in the vein of past Currents gala film The Human Surge 3.

Hamnet (Chloé Zhao)
Assuming one of the other films I’ve anticipated for Main Slate doesn’t take the Spotlight gala spot, I think this would make sense, especially considering the very low profile it’s had thus far relative to the prominence of Nomadland‘s 2020 run.

Lost in the World [MISERICORDIA and GRAND TOUR]

June 10, 2025June 10, 2025Ryan Swen Reviews Tags: new release Leave a comment

Courtesy of Sideshow/Janus Films.

Courtesy of MUBI.

Misericordia/Miséricorde

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Alain Guiraudie

Grand Tour

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Miguel Gomes

I sometimes worry that my habit of writing about two new releases together—stolen, like the credits/ratings block immediately above, from Jonathan Rosenbaum—can feel like a crutch. True, it can sometimes provide a productive, logical point of comparison, and just as often it can come as something of a challenge. But in this instance, it’s meant, at least at the outset, as a means of saving time, of allowing me to write at length about two of my favorite films of the decade thus far without needing to shortchange one or the other by “consigning” it to a capsule review, or taking even longer than I already have in my delayed writing and publication of what you’re reading now. Of course, this very act of combination could be seen as an implicit denigration, meaning that the films either aren’t worth my time and effort to tackle individually or that they can’t stand up by themselves. That (I hope) incorrect assumption is something I’m willing to risk, for the sake of various other competing obligations (for this website and in the actually “important” things in the “real world”).

That being said, the more I think about these two films, the more parallels present themselves. In an earlier, embryonic version of this piece concerned solely with the first film, I noted that from my vantage point, the early to mid-2010s seemed like an unusual time period, full of filmmakers who established themselves with what appeared to be a breakthrough hit; some of them have gone on to become part of what might be considered the film festival mainstay, while others have receded in visibility within the American cinephile consciousness for one reason or another. Alain Guiraudie seems to me the clearest and most understandable example, given the particular confluence of thriller mechanics, frank gay sexuality, and rigorous form offered by 2013’s Stranger by the Lake. However, Miguel Gomes isn’t far behind, even though 2012’s Tabu ultimately had a marginally smaller footprint when it was released. Both continue to operate as statements, even milestones, pure expressions of fated desire as filtered through Guiraudie’s stunningly casual treatment of cruising within precise, locked-down frames and Gomes’s two-part, black-and-white meditation on colonialism present and past, eventually slipping into his own unique take on silent cinema.

Guiraudie and Gomes have each released two feature film projects within a year of each other since then, neither to close the same fanfare. The former’s case is perhaps more banal: Staying Vertical, despite a surprise Cannes competition berth, was too willfully weird to attract a wide audience, and Nobody’s Hero, despite its considerable strengths, was doomed by a reluctant festival rollout and risky treatment of its terrorism backdrop. Gomes, for his part, went both bigger and smaller: the ambitious three-part epic Arabian Nights, all components of which premiered at the same time, was destined to confuse listmakers and cinephiles alike, while the lowkey lockdown film The Tsugua Diaries (co-directed with his artistic and life partner Maureen Fazendeiro) was a minor work by its very nature.

At last year’s Cannes, Guiraudie and Gomes took unexpected paths towards some semblance of critical acclaim. The French director’s Misericordia bowed in the non-competitive Cannes Premiere section, a post-COVID addition widely perceived as a backhanded compliment and tertiary tier of programming amid the main selection, generating nearly as many comments expressing disbelief that it was not in Competition as Víctor Erice’s Close Your Eyes and Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka from the previous year put together. For his part, the Portuguese director did appear in Cannes Competition for the first time with Grand Tour, winning an unexpected yet very well-deserved Best Director prize from the jury. In the usual fashion, they both received US theatrical releases earlier this year, coming out in back-to-back weeks in March.

Much of the (separate) discussion around these two films has hinged around a crucial concept: a filmmaker knowingly revisiting the style of his past works, whether to recapture something of a past glory or not. Both Misericordia and Grand Tour seem to call back specifically to Stranger by the Lake and Tabu, respectively, and it’s certainly no accident that these somewhat more palatable modes have been received as something of a return to form. Guiraudie’s film does indeed return to the openly queer murder mystery framework, while Gomes issued another bifurcated black-and-white tale of thwarted colonialist romance conveyed through archaic cinematic methods. But to reduce these two films, and their elaborations upon past successes, is to risk taking two master filmmakers for granted, even considering their recent reemergence into the wider cinephile consciousness.

As might be inferred by my shorter enumeration, Misericordia shares less in common with Guiraudie’s past work than Grand Tour does with Gomes’s. Like those films, however, it begins fully in media res, a long winding opening shot from the perspective of a car that eventually enters Saint-Martial, a remote village in the French countryside. The driver is Jérèmie (Félix Kysyl), a young man returning to his hometown on the occasion of his baker mentor’s funeral. Though he initially plans to leave that same night, the baker’s wife Martine (Catherine Frot) urges him to stay, and so begins an indefinite period of time spent in the company of the local villagers, including Martine’s son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), former acquaintance Walter (David Ayala), and the local priest (Jacques Develay).

Though the aforementioned violence does occur remarkably early and acts as the nominal plot engine for Misericordia‘s second two-thirds, Guiraudie establishes early on that there is much more on his mind than another tale of a h(a)unted man. The most immediate impression is of a specific, unusual sense of routine within an environ that is—to Jérèmie at least—both old and new. He is frequently seen walking in the yellowing forests from the relatively few locations that constitute the bulk of the film’s centers of activity, a purely beautiful backdrop of foliage and mountains (captured by Guiraudie’s frequent collaborator Claire Mathon) that often dwarfs Jérèmie and those he interacts with. Across innumerable glasses of pastis, several physical and/or verbal fights of varying levels of intensity, and various criss-crossing attractions (mostly between men), the interplay between the expansive outdoors and cramped interiors comes to form an odd mirror for the situation that Jérèmie has found himself in.

As his moral struggle increases in prominence, so too does the priest’s role, in a manner not dissimilar from the lonely straight man played by Patrick d’Assumçao in Stranger by the Lake. Aside from some chance interactions, the intertwining of Jérèmie and the priest truly begins with one of the most remarkable scenes to ever take place in a confessional, an veiled outpouring of dedication and doubt that bursts open Guiruadie’s carefully couched conversations. Though the film’s title—Latin for mercy—is never uttered onscreen, this scene and another between the two men on a cliff overlooking the village communicate in unexpectedly forthright terms all that goes into such a concept, which involves forgiveness of both the other and the self. With these elements coming to form the more thematic framework, Misericordia is able to also incorporate characters and narratives closer to farce, including a pair of dogged yet polite police officers whose presence only further muddies the waters of Guiraudie’s characteristically slippery relationship between reality and dreams. The final note is one of total ambiguity, an unexpected note given to an unexpected person that refuses any hint of finality, one final gambit in a continual highwire act between hilarity, suspense, and heartrending emotion.

If Misericordia only gets more fascinating as it unfolds, Grand Tour is a marvel from its production concept alone. It is composed of what might be considered two separate tendencies: the narrative, which follows the story of a British civil servant (Edward, played by Gonçalo Waddington) who flees across Asia in the year 1918, pursued by his betrothed Molly (Crista Alfaite), which is told from first his perspective, then hers on obvious soundstages in Portugal shot in black-and-white by Rui Poças; and the non-narrative, which incorporates black-and-white and color footage shot in modern times with no attempts to hide the century-long gap between the diegesis of the story and the new aspects of the present; much of it was shot by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, but the sections in China were shot (due to lockdown protocol) by Gui Liang, with Gomes directing remotely from across the country.

Over all of this, there is narration given by unnamed voices who speak in the language of the country Edward, then Molly is in at the time, and it is this wild collision of voices and past and present that gives Grand Tour so much of its spark. It is crucial that Gomes does not attempt to disguise what many have already characterized as an excessively Orientalist lens. There is never any point at which the film is unaware of the distance that exists between it and everything it is depicting: the gap in time between it and the Western characters, and the gap in perspective between it and the locales it is existing within. Like Molly’s continual pursuit of Edward, there is the constant sense of searching, during which Gomes’s unique methodology allows him to open up the film to the possibility of experiencing all that the world has to offer.

That being said, Grand Tour wouldn’t be as successful if Gomes lacked an investment in the central dynamic. Part of this is courtesy of the sneakily coherent structure of his screenplay (co-written with Fazendeiro, Telmo Churro, and Mariana Ricardo), which progresses rapidly through Edward’s hapless travails and then diverges from them during Molly’s retracing of his steps, throwing in additional characters which complicate and delay her quest in unexpected, often amusing ways. It also becomes clear that the ardor and care with which Gomes captures both halves of the twinned journeys form a metonym for the passion that Molly has for Edward despite his parting; Alfaite’s performance, full of exuberance and bemused determination, seems to represent Gomes’s perspective better than the shambling Waddington. By the end, which feels like a grand Classical Hollywood exit, the sights and sounds that the viewer experiences alongside these two people are overpowering, a reminder of all that remains to be seen.

New York Film Festival 2025 Predictions (Round 1)

May 24, 2025May 13, 2026Ryan Swen Musings Tags: nyff predictions 1 Comment

Virtual Lock
It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)
Kontinental ’25 (Radu Jude)
The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt)
Resurrection (Bi Gan)
The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)
Sirât (Óliver Laxe)
What Does That Nature Say to You (Hong Sang-soo)

Strong Chance
Blue Moon (Richard Linklater)
The Blue Trail (Gabriel Mascaro)
Mirrors No. 3 (Christian Petzold)
One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Romería (Carla Simón)
Sound of Falling (Mascha Schilinski)
Two Prosecutors (Sergei Loznitsa)
Yes! (Nadav Lapid)

Moderate Possibility
Drunken Noodles (Lucio Castro)
Enzo (Robin Campillo)
Heads or Tails? (Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis)
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein)
Living the Land (Huo Meng)
Love on Trial (Fukada Koji)
The Love That Remains (Hlynur Pálmason)
Magellan (Lav Diaz)
Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater)
The Perfect Neighbor (Geeta Gandbhir)
Renoir (Hayakawa Chie)
Young Mothers (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)

Virtual Lock

It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)
Panahi.

Kontinental ’25 (Radu Jude)
Jude fiction film.

The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt)
Reichardt.

Resurrection (Bi Gan)
Bi.

The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
Mendonça Filho.

Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)
Trier.

Sirât (Óliver Laxe)
Laxe.

What Does That Nature Say to You (Hong Sang-soo)
Hong.

Strong Chance

Blue Moon (Richard Linklater)
I feel like one of the Linklater festival competition films will make it into Main Slate and the other could make it to MS, Spotlight, or miss entirely; though this one is much less buzzy and more modest, the reviews were more uniformly positive.

The Blue Trail (Gabriel Mascaro)
Lim loved Neon Bull + Berlin Grand Jury Prize.

Mirrors No. 3 (Christian Petzold)
Maybe should be a Virtual Lock and I’m sure Lim still wishes he could have programmed Afire, but the avowed modesty of this has me just a little less sure.

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)
The film opens on the same day as NYFF Opening Night and it’s admittedly been a long time since the festival premiered a film on the same day it opened; a special preview Spotlight selection à la Megalopolis last year is more likely if anything happens, but Lim’s greater love of Anderson just might win out.

Romería (Carla Simón)
Considering the variable inclusions of the Golden Bear in NYFF (even during the Chatrian tenure), there might be more enthusiasm for Simón than I realized, and Cannes received this warmly.

Sound of Falling (Mascha Schilinski)
A little hesitant on where to put this; it’s certainly a significant breakthrough film but I could see its unsparing approach rubbing the committee the wrong way; Jury Prize and a strong Justin Chang advocacy makes it much more likely than not though.

Two Prosecutors (Sergei Loznitsa)
Lim certainly likes Loznitsa and this is a well-received return to narrative for him; My Joy is his only Main Slate selection though.

Yes! (Nadav Lapid)
Lapid; unless hesitancy over political considerations takes precedence.

Moderate Possibility

Drunken Noodles (Lucio Castro)
End of the Century was beloved and this seemed to be the highlight of the ACID program, though it would be the first Main Slate entry from there in at minimum a very long time, if not ever.

Enzo (Robin Campillo)
Relatively well-received, a nice tribute to Cantet, and Red Island was an outlier on all counts; 120 BPM might have been a specific alignment of circumstances though.

Heads or Tails? (Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis)
The Tale of King Crab was in Currents and this seems to be bigger in scale.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein)
Still not sure if A24 plans to distribute this before the fall, but this was among the most well-received films of the early year and a long-awaited second film.

Living the Land (Huo Meng)
Berlin Best Director winner, though I don’t know much else about it.

Love on Trial (Fukada Koji)
Despite Venice competition title Love Life missing, I still think it’s possible that he could return to NYFF.

The Love That Remains (Hlynur Pálmason)
Strong reviews, general bafflement over its absence from Cannes Competition, and seems to be a shift away from the more ostentatious tone of Godland.

Magellan (Lav Diaz)
Norte, the End of History was his only NYFF entry and this happens to be his first(?) color film since then; the Albert Serra connection and relative cohesion of this might be an appealing occasion for a return.

Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater)
This is the less likely of the two Linklaters but it still has a considerable number of defenders (including Justin Chang) and I think it’ll find a place somewhere.

The Perfect Neighbor (Geeta Gandbhir)
The most beloved of the early-year documentaries, aesthetically inventive, and it hasn’t received a New York premiere yet; David Osit’s Predators is a remote possibility as well.

Renoir (Hayakawa Chie)
Was received modestly but strangely feels a little more probable in its references to Japanese cinema/Somai Shinji than something like Hafsia Herzi’s The Little Sister, Cannes Best Actress award notwithstanding.

Young Mothers (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)
Seems to have been more warmly received than most other recent Dardennes films, though even the Best Screenplay prize is no guarantee.

Henry Fonda for President

May 14, 2025May 14, 2025Ryan Swen Reviews Tags: new release capsule Leave a comment

From its title on down, Henry Fonda for President both follows along and defies the idiosyncratic, sweeping aims it has set for itself. The filmmaking debut of longtime film critic and Austrian Film Museum director Alexander Horwath takes its name from the plot of an episode of the obscure sitcom Maude, and while it’s never meant as a completely sincere political statement, it sums up the aspirational tone of both the actor’s most beloved work and the impossibility of concrete hope. By beginning where Horwath does—circa 1980, where the director’s first exposure to Fonda’s work came on a trip to Paris—and entwining it with the ascent of Ronald Reagan to the White House, Fonda’s belated Oscars, and the audio of a revealing interview with Playboy magazine’s Lawrence Grobel, he immediately conjures up the feeling of a paradise lost, a nation set inexorably on an ever-darker path juxtaposed against a last bastion of hope almost faded away.

I was even more primed for Henry Fonda for President than normal, as I was enlisted by Jordan Cronk to transcribe his interview with Horwath for Film Comment. The conversation was much longer than space allowed for, but one tidbit that did make it in was the unavoidable comparison to and inspiration of Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself; indeed, the legendary filmmaker came to the Los Angeles premiere of Horwath’s film. Certainly, there are many similarities to be found: an openly analytical, sociopolitical approach to cinephilia and the essay film, the three-hour runtime, the mix of film clips, footage shot on location at the sites of the former, and voiceover. That last point marks a fascinating point of divergence: Andersen’s is far more openly opinionated, witty, sarcastic, and somehow sincere in all the ways that make Los Angeles Plays Itself among the greatest of films, yet it was given by Encke King. Horwath speaks more neutrally but uses his own voice, and interweaves his own German words with Fonda’s recorded interview that asserts a certain objectivity, even as he makes all the logical assertions expected of an incisive scholar.

Henry Fonda for President is, of course, much closer to a biography of the legendary actor than it is a recounting of American history from the mid-1600s to 1981, but the latter is made possible by the sheer number of noteworthy films the former made that were strewn across time and brought to the forefront by Horwath’s generally chronological progression. Along the way, he makes some astonishing detours, including some brilliant digressions into Taxi Driver and Easy Rider, and while this does not quite possess the dynamism of Los Angeles Plays Itself, the steady, ruminative tone that Horwath establishes privileges the text and the man above all else. It is entirely to his credit that Horwath does not appear to ascribe to the clichéd notion of Fonda as simply an American paragon; his onscreen and personal lives are too multifaceted and anguished to support that kind of reading. Equally importantly, he still fully commits to the image of Fonda being proffered in a given text, incorporating the canonical films while also spending a surprising amount of time on lesser-known works, even giving over some of the most emotional cruxes to films like The Best Man and My Name Is Nobody. It is the kind of film that allows for, if not openly invites, room for extratextual associations: a brief interpolation of footage of elderly Fonda and John Ford revisiting the site of the final shot of Young Mr. Lincoln irresistibly brought to mind David Lynch’s portrayal of the latter in The Fabelmans, and I immediately became emotional in an entirely unexpected way.

Horwath’s own journey through America (mostly filmed at the tail end of the pandemic in 2021) doesn’t aim for the vibrancy of Deborah Stratman’s 16mm images in Los Angeles Plays Itself, but the separate immediacy of his HD digital video makes for a compelling contrast between the often variable sources of these entirely celluloid productions. The gulf in time is even greater, and even though Henry Fonda for President thankfully draws as few parallels to our current, analogous political situation as possible—some choice shots of a Trump impersonator dancing in Times Square, as part of a sequence that weaves together Fonda’s early Broadway success and Hamilton—the impression is of these places that, in some way or another, have largely fallen into a recursive image of themselves, a relatively young history nevertheless committed to a not unreasonable sense of self-preservation. Of course, the same is true of Fonda, and of Hollywood, and this brilliant film sees all of that with an inviting, ever-surprising eye.

2025 First Watches

January 1, 2025April 1, 2026Ryan Swen Lists Tags: first watch, log

Old
New

Renewed Appreciation: Devil in a Blue Dress, Reservoir Dogs, Ugetsu Monogatari, Pickpocket, L for Leisure, Hermia & Helena, Viola, What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?, The Other Side, Pulp Fiction, Taste of Cherry, The Thin Blue Line, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Kill Bill, Journey to the West, Boogie Nights, Minority Report, A Man Escaped, Isabella, Frances Ha, The Terminator, Memoria, Stranger Eyes, Goodbye CP, The Master, Melancholia, The Incredibles, Slow Action, Punishment Park, RoboCop, Inglourious Basterds, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Shorts: Ten Mornings Ten Evenings and One Horizon, sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars, Scénarios, Shibuya – Tokyo, Tokyo – Ebisu, Being John Smith, 45 7 Broadway, Market Street, Walking on Water, Venice Pier, A Portrait of Ga, UFOs, Diamond Sutra, 16-18-4, No Form, Sketch Film #1, The Night, Samadhi, Apollo, Incident, Sleepwalk, Lumphini 2552, Amusement Ride, When the Sun Is Eaten (Chi’bal K’iin), Light, Noise, Smoke and Light, Noise, Smoke, I Forgot!, The Tony Longo Trilogy, Exposé du film annonce du film “Scénario,” Sketch Film #2, Trafic, Manhattan One Two Three Four, In the Mood for Love 2001, Single Belief, New York Eye and Ear Control, Phenomena, Side Phase Drift, Olympiad, Sketch Film #4, That I’m Falling?, Momentum, D. M. T., Sketch Film #5, Into the Mass, Sketch Film #3, Sycorax, Clear Blue Sky, Hotel Chevalier, I Wasn’t There, False Expectations, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, The Whirled, Magnetic Point, Grandma’s Scissors, Urth, Luminous Veil, Equinox, Madam Butterfly, Polly Two, It follows It passes on, Senseless, Hua yang de nian hua, Hand Held Day, Lapis, Fur Film vol.2: mirror mirror, birthday song (single channel), À propos de Nice, The Chicken, — ——-, Matrix III, A Short History, Preface to the Little Dialogue, transcript, off (I don’t know when to stop), Taris, Melting, Poemfield 7, Byjina Flores, Castello Cavalcanti, Binary Bit Patterns

Ordet (1955, Carl Th. Dreyer) [June]
To Have and Have Not (1944, Howard Hawks) [March]
Day of Wrath (1943, Carl Th. Dreyer) [June]
Sirāt (2025, Óliver Laxe) [September]
Fat Girl (2001, Catherine Breillat) [April]
Misericordia (2024, Alain Guiraudie) [February]
The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987, Hara Kazuo) [April]
One Battle After Another (2025, Paul Thomas Anderson) [September]
Stranger Than Paradise (1984, Jim Jarmusch) [May]
Resurrection (2025, Bi Gan) [October]
The Thing From Another World (1951, Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks) [December]
Anatomy of a Murder (1959, Otto Preminger) [March]
Henry Fonda for President (2024, Alexander Horwath) [April]
Love Affair(s) (2020, Emmanuel Mouret) [June]
Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (1974, Hara Kazuo) [April]
Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977, Jon Jost) [June]
No Bears (2022, Jafar Panahi) [June]
Water and Power (1989, Pat O’Neill) [June]
Modern Romance (1981, Albert Brooks) [July]
Afternoons of Solitude (2024, Albert Serra) [June]
Blue Moon (2025, Richard Linklater) [August]
Se7en (1995, David Fincher) [June]
The Plains (2022, David Easteal) [June]
Tempting Heart (1999, Sylvia Chang) [October]
Blue Collar (1978, Paul Schrader) [April]
The Abyss (1989, James Cameron) [July]
Kontinental ’25 (2025, Radu Jude) [October]
A Silent Voice (2016, Yamada Naoko) [January]
Unrest (2022, Cyril Schäublin) [June]
Neighboring Sounds (2012, Kleber Mendonça Filho) [August]
The Currents (2025, Milagros Mumenthaler) [October]
What Does That Nature Say to You (2025, Hong Sang-soo) [October]
It Was Just an Accident (2025, Jafar Panahi) [September]
Minamata Mandala (2020, Hara Kazuo) [April]
The Black Cat (1934, Edgar G. Ulmer) [August]
Marty Supreme (2025, Josh Safdie) [November]
7 Walks With Mark Brown (2024, Pierre Creton & Vincent Barré) [September]
Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990, Joe Dante) [December]
Escape From New York (1981, John Carpenter) [December]
My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow (2024, Julia Loktev) [October]
Saturday Night Fever (1977, John Badham) [May]
The Sugarland Express (1974, Steven Spielberg) [April]
Pump Up the Volume (1990, Allan Moyle) [March]
Tongues Untied (1989, Marlon Riggs) [May]
A Lake (2008, Philippe Grandrieux) [June]
The Secret Agent (2025, Kleber Mendonça Filho) [September]
Sand (2018, Tsai Ming-liang) [August]
Father Mother Sister Brother (2025, Jim Jarmusch) [October]
Lost in America (1985, Albert Brooks) [July]
Below the Clouds (2025, Gianfranco Rosi) [September]
Parking (2008, Chung Mong-hong) [May]
Point Break (1991, Kathryn Bigelow) [July]
The Mastermind (2025, Kelly Reichardt) [September]
The Phoenician Scheme (2025, Wes Anderson) [May]
Bitter Money (2016, Wang Bing) [October]
DIRECT ACTION (2024, Guillaume Cailleau & Ben Russell) [May]
Nouvelle Vague (2025, Richard Linklater) [November]
Love Hotel (1985, Somai Shinji) [April]
Easy Living (1937, Mitchell Leisen) [February]
Nadja (1994, Michael Almereyda) [April]
Night of the Demon (1957, Jacques Tourneur) [October]
Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another (2019, Jessica Sarah Rinland) [July]
Broken Rage (2024, Kitano Takeshi) [February]
Miroirs No. 3 (2025, Christian Petzold) [September]
Pin de fartie (2025, Alejo Moguillansky) [October]
Abiding Nowhere (2024, Tsai Ming-liang) [August]
Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued (2025, Julian Castronovo) [April]
Dracula (2025, Radu Jude) [September]
Nightshift (1981, Robina Rose) [April]
Hail the Conquering Hero (1944, Preston Sturges) [May]
The Missing (2003, Lee Kang-sheng) [September]
The Eternal Daughter (2022, Joanna Hogg) [June]
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025, Mary Bronstein) [September]
Despite the Night (2015, Philippe Grandrieux) [June]
One False Move (1992, Carl Franklin) [May]
Predators (2025, David Osit) [April]
Egg and Stone (2012, Huang Ji) [August]
Magellan (2025, Lav Diaz) [September]
Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning (2025, Christopher McQuarrie) [May]
An Evening Song (for three voices) (2023, Graham Swon) [May]
Invention (2024, Courtney Stephens) [April]
Yes (2025, Nadav Lapid) [October]
Familiar Touch (2024, Sarah Friedland) [June]
A Prince (2023, Pierre Creton) [September]
Sinners (2025, Ryan Coogler) [April]
Happyend (2024, Sora Neo) [April]
Suburban Fury (2024, Robinson Devor) [October]
Ed Wood (1994, Tim Burton) [October]
Fire of Wind (2024, Marta Mateus) [April]
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997, Errol Morris) [April]
The Damned (2024, Roberto Minervini) [June]
Peter Hujar’s Day (2025, Ira Sachs) [September]
Videoheaven (2025, Alex Ross Perry) [August]
Christmas, Again (2014, Charles Poekel) [December]
The Fence (2025, Claire Denis) [November]
The Breaking Point (1950, Michael Curtiz) [June]
It Happened One Night (1934, Frank Capra) [May]
Last Days (2005, Gus Van Sant) [June]
Coming to Terms (2013, Jon Jost) [April]
A Land Imagined (2018, Yeo Siew Hua) [September]
Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1975, Thom Andersen) [September]
Help Me Eros (2007, Lee Kang-sheng) [September]
Monkey Business (1931, Norman Z. McLeod) [August]
Rich and Famous (1981, George Cukor) [May]
The Smashing Machine (2025, Benny Safdie) [September]
Late Fame (2025, Kent Jones) [September]
Is This Thing On? (2025, Bradley Cooper) [October]
No Sleep Till (2024, Alexandra Simpson) [April]
I Only Rest in the Storm (2025, Pedro Pinho) [September]
Jay Kelly (2025, Noah Baumbach) [October]
Short Stay (2016, Ted Fendt) [January]
The Heroic Trio (1993, Johnnie To) [May]
Sound of Falling (2025, Mascha Schilinski) [November]
The Passage (2011, Roberto Minervini) [June]
Escape From L.A. (1996, John Carpenter) [December]
Go, Toto! (2017, Pierre Creton) [September]
The Love That Remains (2025, Hlynur Pálmason) [November]
Duel (1971, Steven Spielberg) [April]
John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (2025, Michael Almereyda & Courtney Stephens) [April]
A New Life (2002, Philippe Grandrieux) [June]
Brand New Landscape (2025, Danzuka Yuiga) [November]
No Other Choice (2025, Park Chan-wook) [September]
L.A. Confidential (1997, Curtis Hanson) [August]
My Stinking Kid (2004, Lee Kang-sheng & Tsai Ming-liang) [September]
Rose of Nevada (2025, Mark Jenkin) [September]
Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025, James Cameron) [December]
Black Bag (2025, Steven Soderbergh) [March]
Cent mille milliards (2024, Virgil Vernier) [April]
Bogancloch (2024, Ben Rivers) [September]
Collective Monologue (2024, Jessica Sarah Rinland) [July]
Measures for a Funeral (2024, Sofia Bohdanowicz) [June]
American Gigolo (1980, Paul Schrader) [April]
Blue Strait (2015, Jon Jost) [April]
After the Hunt (2025, Luca Guadagnino) [September]
Your Touch Makes Others Invisible (2025, Rajee Samarasinghe) [December]
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich) [July]
Mr. 3000 (2004, Charles Stone III) [May]
We Are the Fruits of the Forest (2025, Panh Rithy) [October]
The Foolish Bird (2017, Huang Ji & Otsuka Ryuji) [August]
Kokuho (2025, Lee Sang-il) [September]
Amiko (2017, Yamanaka Yoko) [May]
Last Life in the Universe (2003, Pen-ek Ratanaruang) [July]
Blue Sun Palace (2024, Constance Tsang) [May]
After the Rain (2021, Fan Jian) [March]
In the Lost Lands (2025, Paul W. S. Anderson) [March]
Times Square (1980, Allan Moyle) [March]
Sombre (1998, Philippe Grandrieux) [June]
Permanent Green Light (2018, Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley) [April]
April (2024, Dea Kulumbegashvili) [April]
Left-Handed Girl (2025, Tsou Shih-ching) [October]
The Little Sister (2025, Hafsia Herzi) [November]
Den of Thieves: Pantera (2025, Christian Gudegast) [January]
Wild Foxes (2025, Valéry Carnoy) [November]
Pillion (2025, Harry Lighton) [November]
Escape From the 21st Century (2024, Li Yang) [June]
Breathless (2024, James Benning) [February]
They All Lie (2009, Matías Piñeiro) [March]
Sleep #2 (2024, Radu Jude) [April]
Eight Postcards From Utopia (2024, Radu Jude & Christian Ferencz-Flatz) [April]
The Iron Giant (1999, Brad Bird) [March]
DeadEndz (2023, Jon Jost) [June]
Mickey 17 (2025, Bong Joon-ho) [March]
Romería (2025, Carla Simón) [September]
Wake Up Dead Man (2025, Rian Johnson) [December]
The Things You Kill (2025, Alireza Khatami) [November]
Dead Man’s Wire (2025, Gus Van Sant) [October]
A Private Life (2025, Rebecca Zlotowski) [October]
Highest 2 Lowest (2025, Spike Lee) [August]
Magic Farm (2025, Amalia Ulman) [April]
Her Will Be Done (2025, Julia Kowalski) [November]
Dracula (1931, Tod Browning) [October]
12 Angry Men (1957, Sidney Lumet) [April]
The World to Come (2020, Mona Fastvold) [June]
Bugonia (2025, Yorgos Lanthimos) [October]
Norma Rae (1979, Martin Ritt) [August]
Gaucho Gaucho (2024, Michael Dweck & Gregory Kershaw) [February]
Urchin (2025, Harris Dickinson) [October]
Hummingbirds (2023, Silvia Del Carmen Castaños & Estefanía “Beba” Contreras) [February]
Room Temperature (2025, Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley) [April]
Daughter’s Daughter (2024, Huang Xi) [October]
The Testament of Ann Lee (2025, Mona Fastvold) [November]
The Girls We Want (2025, Prïncia Car) [November]
A Brief History of Time (1991, Errol Morris) [April]
Zodiac Killer Project (2025, Charlie Shackleton) [April]
Sentimental Value (2025, Joachim Trier) [September]
Sorry, Baby (2025, Eva Victor) [March]
Anemone (2025, Ronan Day-Lewis) [October]
Hamnet (2025, Chloé Zhao) [October]
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (2025, Scott Cooper) [October]
F1 (2025, Joseph Kosinski) [November]
Ballerina (2025, Len Wiseman) [June]
Key Largo (1948, John Huston) [March]
Materialists (2025, Celine Song) [June]
The Wild Robot (2024, Chris Sanders) [March]
Vox Lux (2018, Brady Corbet) [June]
Eddington (2025, Ari Aster) [July]
Frankenstein (2025, Guillermo del Toro) [October]
Double Happiness (2025, Joseph Hsu) [October]
The History of Sound (2025, Oliver Hermanus) [August]
Beau Is Afraid (2023, Ari Aster) [May]
The Apprentice (2024, Ali Abbasi) [March]
KPop Demon Hunters (2025, Maggie Kang & Chris Appelhans) [December]
The Actor (2025, Duke Johnson) [February]
Mongrel (2024, Chiang Wei-liang & Yin You-qiao) [April]
Train Dreams (2025, Clint Bentley) [November]
Preparation for the Next Life (2025, Liu Bing) [August]
Patrice: The Movie (2024, Ted Passon) [February]
A House of Dynamite (2025, Kathryn Bigelow) [September]
Ballad of a Small Player (2025, Edward Berger) [October]
Die My Love (2025, Lynne Ramsay) [October]
Saturday Night (2024, Jason Reitman) [January]
Honey Don’t! (2025, Ethan Coen) [August]
The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025, Kaouther Ben Hania) [October]

Old

Ordet (1955, Carl Th. Dreyer)
To Have and Have Not (1944, Howard Hawks)
Day of Wrath (1943, Carl Th. Dreyer)
Fat Girl (2001, Catherine Breillat)
The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987, Hara Kazuo)
Stranger Than Paradise (1984, Jim Jarmusch)
The Thing From Another World (1951, Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks)
Anatomy of a Murder (1959, Otto Preminger)
Love Affair(s) (2020, Emmanuel Mouret)
Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (1974, Hara Kazuo)
Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977, Jon Jost)
No Bears (2022, Jafar Panahi)
Water and Power (1989, Pat O’Neill)
Modern Romance (1981, Albert Brooks)
Se7en (1995, David Fincher)
The Plains (2022, David Easteal)
Tempting Heart (1999, Sylvia Chang)
Blue Collar (1978, Paul Schrader)
The Abyss (1989, James Cameron)
A Silent Voice (2016, Yamada Naoko)
Unrest (2022, Cyril Schäublin)
Neighboring Sounds (2012, Kleber Mendonça Filho)
Minamata Mandala (2020, Hara Kazuo)
The Black Cat (1934, Edgar G. Ulmer)
Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990, Joe Dante)
Escape From New York (1981, John Carpenter)
Saturday Night Fever (1977, John Badham)
The Sugarland Express (1974, Steven Spielberg)
Pump Up the Volume (1990, Allan Moyle)
Tongues Untied (1989, Marlon Riggs)
A Lake (2008, Philippe Grandrieux)
Sand (2018, Tsai Ming-liang)
Lost in America (1985, Albert Brooks)
Parking (2008, Chung Mong-hong)
Point Break (1991, Kathryn Bigelow)
Bitter Money (2016, Wang Bing)
Love Hotel (1985, Somai Shinji)
Easy Living (1937, Mitchell Leisen)
Nadja (1994, Michael Almereyda)
Night of the Demon (1957, Jacques Tourneur)
Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another (2019, Jessica Sarah Rinland)
Nightshift (1981, Robina Rose)
Hail the Conquering Hero (1944, Preston Sturges)
The Missing (2003, Lee Kang-sheng)
The Eternal Daughter (2022, Joanna Hogg)
Despite the Night (2015, Philippe Grandrieux)
One False Move (1992, Carl Franklin)
Egg and Stone (2012, Huang Ji)
Ed Wood (1994, Tim Burton)
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997, Errol Morris)
Christmas, Again (2014, Charles Poekel)
The Breaking Point (1950, Michael Curtiz)
It Happened One Night (1934, Frank Capra)
Last Days (2005, Gus Van Sant)
Coming to Terms (2013, Jon Jost)
A Land Imagined (2018, Yeo Siew Hua)
Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1975, Thom Andersen)
Help Me Eros (2007, Lee Kang-sheng)
Monkey Business (1931, Norman Z. McLeod)
Rich and Famous (1981, George Cukor)
Short Stay (2016, Ted Fendt)
The Heroic Trio (1993, Johnnie To)
The Passage (2011, Roberto Minervini)
Escape From L.A. (1996, John Carpenter)
Go, Toto! (2017, Pierre Creton)
Duel (1971, Steven Spielberg)
A New Life (2002, Philippe Grandrieux)
L.A. Confidential (1997, Curtis Hanson)
My Stinking Kid (2004, Lee Kang-sheng & Tsai Ming-liang)
American Gigolo (1980, Paul Schrader)
Blue Strait (2015, Jon Jost)
Mr. 3000 (2004, Charles Stone III)
The Foolish Bird (2017, Huang Ji & Otsuka Ryuji)
Amiko (2017, Yamanaka Yoko)
Last Life in the Universe (2003, Pen-ek Ratanaruang)
After the Rain (2021, Fan Jian)
Times Square (1980, Allan Moyle)
Sombre (1998, Philippe Grandrieux)
Permanent Green Light (2018, Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley)
They All Lie (2009, Matías Piñeiro)
The Iron Giant (1999, Brad Bird)
Dracula (1931, Tod Browning)
12 Angry Men (1957, Sidney Lumet)
The World to Come (2020, Mona Fastvold)
Norma Rae (1979, Martin Ritt)
A Brief History of Time (1991, Errol Morris)
Key Largo (1948, John Huston)
Vox Lux (2018, Brady Corbet)

New

Sirāt (Óliver Laxe)
Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie)
One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Resurrection (Bi Gan)
Henry Fonda for President (Alexander Horwath)
Afternoons of Solitude (Albert Serra)
Blue Moon (Richard Linklater)
Kontinental ’25 (Radu Jude)
The Currents (Milagros Mumenthaler)
What Does That Nature Say to You (Hong Sang-soo)
It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)
Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie)
7 Walks With Mark Brown (Pierre Creton & Vincent Barré)
My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow (Julia Loktev)
The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
Father Mother Sister Brother (Jim Jarmusch)
Below the Clouds (Gianfranco Rosi)
The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt)
The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson)
DIRECT ACTION (Guillaume Cailleau & Ben Russell)
Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater)
Broken Rage (Kitano Takeshi)
Miroirs No. 3 (Christian Petzold)
Pin de fartie (Alejo Moguillansky)
Abiding Nowhere (Tsai Ming-liang)
Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued (Julian Castronovo)
Dracula (Radu Jude)
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein)
Predators (David Osit)
Magellan (Lav Diaz)
Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning (Christopher McQuarrie)
An Evening Song (for three voices) (Graham Swon)
Invention (Courtney Stephens)
Yes (Nadav Lapid)
Familiar Touch (Sarah Friedland)
A Prince (Pierre Creton)
Sinners (Ryan Coogler)
Happyend (Sora Neo)
Suburban Fury (Robinson Devor)
Fire of Wind (Marta Mateus)
The Damned (Roberto Minervini)
Peter Hujar’s Day (Ira Sachs)
Videoheaven (Alex Ross Perry)
The Fence (Claire Denis)
The Smashing Machine (Benny Safdie)
Late Fame (Kent Jones)
Is This Thing On? (Bradley Cooper)
No Sleep Till (Alexandra Simpson)
I Only Rest in the Storm (Pedro Pinho)
Jay Kelly (Noah Baumbach)
Sound of Falling (Mascha Schilinski)
The Love That Remains (Hlynur Pálmason)
John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (Michael Almereyda & Courtney Stephens)
Brand New Landscape (Danzuka Yuiga)
No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook)
Rose of Nevada (Mark Jenkin)
Avatar: Fire and Ash (James Cameron)
Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh)
Cent mille milliards (Virgil Vernier)
Bogancloch (Ben Rivers)
Collective Monologue (Jessica Sarah Rinland)
Measures for a Funeral (Sofia Bohdanowicz)
After the Hunt (Luca Guadagnino)
Your Touch Makes Others Invisible (Rajee Samarasinghe)
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich)
We Are the Fruits of the Forest (Panh Rithy)
Kokuho (Lee Sang-il)
Blue Sun Palace (Constance Tsang)
In the Lost Lands (Paul W. S. Anderson)
April (Dea Kulumbegashvili)
Left-Handed Girl (Tsou Shih-ching)
The Little Sister (Hafsia Herzi)
Den of Thieves: Pantera (Christian Gudegast)
Wild Foxes (Valéry Carnoy)
Pillion (Harry Lighton)
Escape From the 21st Century (Li Yang)
Breathless (James Benning)
Sleep #2 (Radu Jude)
Eight Postcards From Utopia (Radu Jude & Christian Ferencz-Flatz)
DeadEndz (Jon Jost)
Mickey 17 (Bong Joon-ho)
Romería (Carla Simón)
Wake Up Dead Man (Rian Johnson)
The Things You Kill (Alireza Khatami)
Dead Man’s Wire (Gus Van Sant)
A Private Life (Rebecca Zlotowski)
Highest 2 Lowest (Spike Lee)
Magic Farm (Amalia Ulman)
Her Will Be Done (Julia Kowalski)
Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos)
Gaucho Gaucho (Michael Dweck & Gregory Kershaw)
Urchin (Harris Dickinson)
Hummingbirds (Silvia Del Carmen Castaños & Estefanía “Beba” Contreras)
Room Temperature (Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley)
Daughter’s Daughter (Huang Xi)
The Testament of Ann Lee (Mona Fastvold)
The Girls We Want (Prïncia Car)
Zodiac Killer Project (Charlie Shackleton)
Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)
Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor)
Anemone (Ronan Day-Lewis)
Hamnet (Chloé Zhao)
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (Scott Cooper)
F1 (Joseph Kosinski)
Ballerina (Len Wiseman)
Materialists (Celine Song)
The Wild Robot (Chris Sanders)
Eddington (Ari Aster)
Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro)
Double Happiness (Joseph Hsu)
The History of Sound (Oliver Hermanus)
Beau Is Afraid (Ari Aster)
The Apprentice (Ali Abbasi)
KPop Demon Hunters (Maggie Kang & Chris Appelhans)
The Actor (Duke Johnson)
Mongrel (Chiang Wei-liang & Yin You-qiao)
Train Dreams (Clint Bentley)
Preparation for the Next Life (Liu Bing)
Patrice: The Movie (Ted Passon)
A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow)
Ballad of a Small Player (Edward Berger)
Die My Love (Lynne Ramsay)
Saturday Night (Jason Reitman)
Honey Don’t! (Ethan Coen)
The Voice of Hind Rajab (Kaouther Ben Hania)

2025 Omnibus Log

January 1, 2025August 1, 2026Ryan Swen Lists Tags: log, omnibus

s001. Sycorax (2021, Lois Patiño & Matías Piñeiro) Television, Blu-ray 07 Jan – 8
s002. À propos de Nice (1930, Jean Vigo & Boris Kaufman) Television, Blu-ray 13 Jan – 7
s003. Taris (1931, Jean Vigo) Television, Blu-ray 13 Jan – 7
s004. A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (2009, Apichatpong Weerasethakul) Television, Blu-ray 13 Jan – 7
s005. The Second (2024, Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou) Laptop, YouTube 14 Jan – 4
s006. +Fantasy Sentences (2017, Dane Komljen) Laptop, File 14 Jan – 8 [up from 6]
001. Short Stay (2016, Ted Fendt) Monitor, File 14 Jan – 7
t001. +Pilot (1990, Twin Peaks) Monitor, File 16 Jan
002. Saturday Night (2024, Jason Reitman) Television, File (Father) 18 Jan – 4
s007. Incident (2023, Bill Morrison) Monitor, File 19 Jan – 8
s008. Being John Smith (2024, John Smith) Monitor, File 19 Jan – 8
003. A Silent Voice (2016, Yamada Naoko) Monitor, File 21 Jan – 8
004. Den of Thieves: Pantera (2025, Christian Gudegast) Television, File (Father) 29 Jan – 7
s009. That I’m Falling? (2013, Eduardo Williams) Television, File 06 Feb – 8
s010. I Forgot! (2014, Eduardo Williams) Television, File 07 Feb – 8
005. +Breathless (1960, Jean-Luc Godard) Television, Blu-ray 07 Feb – 10
s011. A Portrait of Ga (1952, Margaret Tait) Monitor, File 08 Feb – 8
s012. Bottle Rocket (1993, Wes Anderson) Monitor, File 11 Feb – 6
s013. Hotel Chevalier (2007, Wes Anderson) Monitor, File 11 Feb – 8
s014. Castello Cavalcanti (2013, Wes Anderson) Monitor, YouTube 11 Feb – 7
006. +A Real Pain (2024, Jesse Eisenberg) Television, File (Father) 11 Feb – 7
007. Breathless (2024, James Benning†) Monitor, File 16 Feb – 7
008. Hummingbirds (2023, Silvia Del Carmen Castaños^ & Estefanía “Beba” Contreras^) Monitor, Screener 17 Feb – 6
009. Broken Rage (2024, Kitano Takeshi) Television, File (Father) 18 Feb – 8
010. Patrice: The Movie (2024, Ted Passon^) Television, Hulu 22 Feb – 5
011. Gaucho Gaucho (2024, Michael Dweck^ & Gregory Kershaw^) Television, File 22 Feb – 6 [delay]
012. Misericordia (2024, Alain Guiraudie†) Sepulveda Screening Room, DCP (Friends) 26 Feb – 9
013. The Actor (2025, Duke Johnson) Sepulveda Screening Room, DCP (Friend) 27 Feb – 5
s015. +Nine Behind (2016, Sophy Romvari) Television, Criterion Channel 28 Feb – 6 [down from 7]
s016. It’s Him (2017, Sophy Romvari) Television, Criterion Channel 28 Feb – 6
s017. +Pumpkin Movie (2017, Sophy Romvari) Television, Criterion Channel 28 Feb – 6 [down from 7]
s018. Grandma’s House (2018, Sophy Romvari) Television, Criterion Channel 28 Feb – 6
s019. Norman Norman (2018, Sophy Romvari) Television, Criterion Channel 28 Feb – 6
s020. In Dog Years (2019, Sophy Romvari) Television, Criterion Channel 28 Feb – 6
s021. Remembrance of József Romvári (2020, Sophy Romvari) Television, Criterion Channel 28 Feb – 6
s022. It’s Pink, But Is It Mink? (1975, Robert McKimson) New Beverly, 35mm 28 Feb – 6
014. Easy Living (1937, Mitchell Leisen^) New Beverly, 35mm 28 Feb – 8
s023. +Still Processing (2020, Sophy Romvari) Television, Criterion Channel 28 Feb – 6
015. The Apprentice (2024, Ali Abbasi^) Television, File 01 Mar – 5 [delay]
s024. Teeny Weeny Meany (1966, Sid Marcus) New Beverly, 35mm 01 Mar – 6
016. +Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, Steven Spielberg) New Beverly, 35mm 01 Mar – 10 [up from 9]
017. To Have and Have Not (1944, Howard Hawks) New Beverly, 35mm 01 Mar – 10
018. Key Largo (1948, John Huston) New Beverly, 35mm 01 Mar – 6
019. The Wild Robot (2024, Chris Sanders) Television, File 01 Mar – 6
020. Pump Up the Volume (1990, Allan Moyle^) AC Aero Theatre, 35mm (Director Q&A) 07 Mar – 8 [late]
021. Times Square (1980, Allan Moyle) AC Aero Theatre, DCP (Director Q&A) 07 Mar – 7
022. Mickey 17 (2025, Bong Joon-ho) AMC The Grove, DCP 08 Mar – 7
023. In the Lost Lands (2025, Paul W. S. Anderson) AMC The Grove, DCP 08 Mar – 7 [late]
024. +Isabella (2020, Matías Piñeiro) AC Aero Theatre, DCP (Friends, Director Q&A) 14 Mar – 8 [slight; up from 7]
025. +Viola (2012, Matías Piñeiro) AC Aero Theatre, DCP (Friends, Director Q&A) 14 Mar – 8 [late; up from 7]
026. +Hermia & Helena (2016, Matías Piñeiro) AC Los Feliz 3, DCP (Friend, Moderator) 15 Mar – 9 [up from 8]
027. They All Lie (2009, Matías Piñeiro) AC Los Feliz 3, DCP (Friends, Director Introduction) 15 Mar – 7 [slight]
s025. Preface to the Little Dialogue (2025, Matías Piñeiro) AC Egyptian Theatre, DCP (Friend, Director Q&A) 15 Mar – 7
028. +You Burn Me (2024, Matías Piñeiro) AC Egyptian Theatre, DCP (Friend, Director Q&A) 15 Mar – 7 [fragments]
029. After the Rain (2021, Fan Jian^) Culver Theater/Alula, LED (Director Q&A) 16 Mar – 7
030. Black Bag (2025, Steven Soderbergh) Culver Theater, LED 16 Mar – 7
s026. A Short History (2017, Erica Sheu) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, 16mm Dual Projection (Volunteer, Friends, Director Q&A) 18 Mar – 7
s027. the way home (2018, Erica Sheu) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, File (Volunteer, Friends, Director Q&A) 18 Mar – 6
s028. transcript (2019, Erica Sheu) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, File (Volunteer, Friends, Director Q&A) 18 Mar – 7
s029. pài-lak ē-poo (2020, Erica Sheu) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, 16mm (Volunteer, Friends, Director Q&A) 18 Mar – 6
s030. birthday song (single channel) (2021, Erica Sheu) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, 16mm (Volunteer, Friends, Director Q&A) 18 Mar – 7
s031. off (I don’t know when to stop) (2021, Erica Sheu) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, File (Volunteer, Friends, Director Q&A) 18 Mar – 7
s032. Grandma’s Scissors (2021, Erica Sheu) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, File (Volunteer, Friends, Director Q&A) 18 Mar – 7
s033. Fur Film vol.2: mirror mirror (2022, ЯeaRflex) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, File (Volunteer, Friends, Director Q&A) 18 Mar – 7
s034. It follows It passes on (2022, Erica Sheu) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, File (Volunteer, Friends, Director Q&A) 18 Mar – 7
s035. False Expectations (2023, Erica Sheu) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, 16mm Triple Projection (Live Score, Volunteer, Friends, Director Q&A) 18 Mar – 8
031. Anatomy of a Murder (1959, Otto Preminger) Vista Theater, 35mm 21 Mar – 9
032. +A Man Escaped (1956, Robert Bresson) New Beverly, 35mm 23 Mar – 10
033. +Pickpocket (1959, Robert Bresson) New Beverly, 35mm (Friend) 23 Mar – 9 [up from 8]
034. The Iron Giant (1999, Brad Bird) Egyptian Theatre, DCP (Friends, Director Q&A) 26 Mar – 7
035. +The Incredibles (2004, Brad Bird) Egyptian Theatre, DCP (Director Q&A) 26 Mar – 8
036. Sorry, Baby (2025, Eva Victor^†) CAA Ray Kurtzman Theater, DCP (Director Q&A) 28 Mar – 6
037. +Ugetsu Monogatari (1953, Mizoguchi Kenji) AC Los Feliz 3, 35mm 30 Mar – 10 [late; up from 8]
s036. Woolen Under Where (1963, Phil Monroe & Richard Thompson) New Beverly, 35mm 01 Apr – 6
038. Blue Collar (1978, Paul Schrader) New Beverly, 35mm 01 Apr – 9
039. American Gigolo (1980, Paul Schrader) New Beverly, 35mm 01 Apr – 7
040. Magic Farm (2025, Amalia Ulman) Vidiots, DCP (Friends, Director/Cast Q&A) [LAFM] 03 Apr – 6
041. Invention (2024, Courtney Stephens) 2220 Arts + Archives, DCP (Friend, Director/Actor Q&A) [LAFM] 04 Apr – 8 [slight]
042. Cent mille milliards (2024, Virgil Vernier) 2220 Arts + Archives, DCP (Director/Producer Q&A) [LAFM] 04 Apr – 7 [slight]
043. Nightshift (1981, Robina Rose^) 2220 Arts + Archives, DCP (Friend, Cooper Introduction) [LAFM] 05 Apr – 8 [intermittent]
044. Permanent Green Light (2018, Dennis Cooper^ & Zac Farley^) Television, File 05 Apr – 7 [delay]
045. Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued (2025, Julian Catronovo^) 2220 Arts + Archives, DCP (Friends, Director Q&A) [LAFM] 05 Apr – 8
046. Room Temperature (2025, Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley) 2220 Arts + Archives, DCP (Directors/Cast Q&A) [LAFM] 05 Apr – 6 [slight]
047. Zodiac Killer Project (2025, Charlie Shackleton^) 2220 Arts + Archives, DCP (Friend, Director Q&A) [LAFM] 06 Apr – 6 [slight]
048. No Sleep Till (2024, Alexandra Simpson^) 2220 Arts + Archives, DCP (Friend, Director/Crew Q&A) [LAFM] 06 Apr – 7 [slight]
049. Happyend (2024, Sora Neo) Vidiots, DCP (Friend, Director/Producers Q&A) [LAFM] 06 Apr – 8
050. Mongrel (2024, Chiang Wei-liang^ & Yin You-qiao^†) Television, Screener 09 Apr – 5
051. 12 Angry Men (1957, Sidney Lumet) Television, File 09 Apr – 6 [delay]
052. Henry Fonda for President (2024, Alexander Horwath^) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, File (Volunteer, Director/Crew Q&A) 09 Apr – 9 [slight]
053. Eight Postcards From Utopia (2024, Radu Jude & Christian Ferencz-Flatz^) AC Los Feliz 3, DCP 10 Apr – 7 [late; slight]
054. Sleep #2 (2024, Radu Jude) AC Los Feliz 3, DCP 10 Apr – 7 [slight]
055. Fire of Wind (2024, Marta Mateus^) AC Los Feliz 3, DCP 11 Apr – 8 [late; intermittent]
056. Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997, Errol Morris) AC Los Feliz 3, 35mm (Director Q&A) 12 Apr – 8 [intermittent]
057. The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987, Hara Kazuo) AC Egyptian, DCP (Hader Introduction, Director Q&A) 12 Apr – 9
058. +The Thin Blue Line (1988, Errol Morris) AC Egyptian, 35mm (Director Q&A) 12 Apr – 8 [intermittent]
059. A Brief History of Time (1991, Errol Morris) AC Egyptian, 35mm (Director Q&A) 12 Apr – 6
060. Minamata Mandala (2020, Hara Kazuo) Television, File 13 Apr – 8 [delay]
061. +Goodbye CP (1972, Hara Kazuo) AC Los Feliz 3, DCP (Friend, Director Q&A) 14 Apr – 8 [late; intermittent]
062. Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (1974, Hara Kazuo) AC Los Feliz 3, DCP (Friend, Director Q&A) 15 Apr – 9 [slight]
063. Predators (2025, David Osit^) AC Los Feliz 3, DCP (Director Q&A) 16 Apr – 8
064. April (2024, Dea Kulumbegashvili†) Laemmle Glendale, DCP (Friend) 17 Apr – 7 [slight]
065. John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (2025, Michael Almereyda & Courtney Stephens) AC Los Feliz 3, DCP (Directors Q&A) 17 Apr – 7 [slight]
066. Nadja (1994, Michael Almereyda) AC Los Feliz 3, 35mm (Friends, Director/Cinematographer Q&A) 20 Apr – 8
067. Duel (1971, Steven Spielberg) New Beverly, 35mm 21 Apr – 7 [slight]
068. The Sugarland Express (1974, Steven Spielberg) New Beverly, 35mm 21 Apr – 8
069. +Devil in a Blue Dress (1995, Carl Franklin) Egyptian Theatre, DCP (Director Q&A) 22 Apr – 8 [up from 6]
070. Love Hotel (1985, Somai Shinji) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, File (Volunteer, Friends) 23 Apr – 8
071. +In the Mood for Love (2000, Wong Kar-wai) Academy Museum, 35mm (Yang Introduction) 24 Apr – 10
072. Sinners (2025, Ryan Coogler) Regal Irvine Spectrum, IMAX 70mm 26 Apr – 8
073. Coming to Terms (2013, Jon Jost^) Television, Screener 30 Apr – 8
074. Blue Strait (2015, Jon Jost) Television, Screener 30 Apr – 7
075. Fat Girl (2001, Catherine Breillat) New Beverly, 35mm 30 Apr – 9 [slight]
076. +36 Fillette (1988, Catherine Breillat) New Beverly, 35mm 30 Apr – 8
077. DIRECT ACTION (2024, Guillaume Cailleau^ & Ben Russell^) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, File (Volunteer, Friend) 03 May – 8 [intermittent]
078. +Dog Day Afternoon (1975, Sidney Lumet) Egyptian Theatre, 35mm (Strauss Introduction) 05 May – 7 [up from 6]
079. +Dersu Uzala (1975, Kurosawa Akira) Egyptian Theatre, 35mm (Speaker) 07 May – 9 [up from 8]
080. Amiko (2017, Yamanaka Yoko) Television, File 10 May – 7
081. Beau Is Afraid (2023, Ari Aster) Television, File 16 May – 5
082. Parking (2008, Chung Mong-hong^) AC Los Feliz 3, 35mm (Director Q&A) 16 May – 8
083. Stranger Than Paradise (1984, Jim Jarmusch) AC Los Feliz 3, 35mm 18 May – 9 [late]
084. +Minority Report (2002, Steven Spielberg) AC Egyptian Theatre, 35mm (Friends) 18 May – 8 [slight; up from 7]
085. +RoboCop (1987, Paul Verhoeven) New Beverly, 35mm (Screenwriter Q&A) 21 May – 9
086. +The Terminator (1984, James Cameron) New Beverly, 35mm 21 May – 9 [up from 8]
087. Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning (2025, Christopher McQuarrie) AMC The Grove, DCP 22 May – 8 [late]
088. +Invention (2024, Courtney Stephens) Now Instant, DCP (Friend, Director/Actor Q&A) 23 May – 8
s037. Surf-Bored Cat (1967, Abe Levitow) New Beverly, 35mm 24 May – 6
089. +Jaws (1975, Steven Spielberg) New Beverly, 35mm 24 May – 9
090. It Happened One Night (1934, Frank Capra) Vista Theater, 35mm 25 May – 8
091. Hail the Conquering Hero (1944, Preston Sturges) AC Los Feliz 3, 35mm (Friend) 25 May – 8
092. Blue Sun Palace (2024, Constance Tsang^) AC Los Feliz 3, DCP (Friend, Producers Introduction) 25 May – 7
093. +The Master (2012, Paul Thomas Anderson) Academy Museum, 70mm 25 May – 9 [late; up from 8]
s038. Apollo (2003, Nishikawa Tomonari) Television, Vimeo 26 May – 8
s039. Sketch Film #1 (2005, Nishikawa Tomonari) Television, Vimeo 26 May – 8
s040. Sketch Film #2 (2005, Nishikawa Tomonari) Television, Vimeo 26 May – 8
s041. Market Street (2005, Nishikawa Tomonari) Television, Vimeo 26 May – 8
s042. Sketch Film #3 (2006, Nishikawa Tomonari) Television, Vimeo 26 May – 8
s043. Clear Blue Sky (2006, Nishikawa Tomonari) Television, Vimeo 26 May – 8
s044. Sketch Film #4 (2007, Nishikawa Tomonari) Television, Vimeo 26 May – 8
s045. Sketch Film #5 (2007, Nishikawa Tomonari) Television, Vimeo 26 May – 8
s046. Into the Mass (2007, Nishikawa Tomonari) Television, Vimeo 26 May – 8
s047. 16-18-4 (2008, Nishikawa Tomonari) Television, Vimeo 26 May – 8
s048. Lumphini 2552 (2009, Nishikawa Tomonari) Television, Vimeo 26 May – 8
s049. Tokyo – Ebisu (2010, Nishikawa Tomonari) Television, Vimeo 26 May – 9
s050. Shibuya – Tokyo (2010, Nishikawa Tomonari) Television, Vimeo 26 May – 9
s051. 45 7 Broadway (2013, Nishikawa Tomonari) Television, Vimeo 26 May – 8
s052. sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars (2014, Nishikawa Tomonari) Television, Vimeo 26 May – 9
s053. Manhattan One Two Three Four (2014, Nishikawa Tomonari) Television, Vimeo 26 May – 8
s054. Luminous Veil (2016, Nishikawa Tomonari) Television, Vimeo 26 May – 7
s055. Ten Mornings Ten Evenings and One Horizon (2016, Nishikawa Tomonari) Television, Vimeo 26 May – 9
s056. Amusement Ride (2019, Nishikawa Tomonari) Television, Vimeo 26 May – 8
s057. Trafic (2021, Nishikawa Tomonari) Television, Vimeo 26 May – 8
s058. Magnetic Point (2023, Nishikawa Tomonari) Television, Vimeo 26 May – 7
s059. Light, Noise, Smoke and Light, Noise, Smoke (2023, Nishikawa Tomonari) Television, Vimeo 26 May – 8
094. Rich and Famous (1981, George Cukor) AC Los Feliz 3, 35mm (Longworth Introduction) 27 May – 8
095. One False Move (1992, Carl Franklin) New Beverly, 35mm (Friends) 27 May – 8
096. The Heroic Trio (1993, Johnnie To) Television, Blu-ray 28 May – 7
097. Tongues Untied (1989, Marlon Riggs^) Television, Blu-ray 28 May – 8
098. Mr. 3000 (2004, Charles Stone III^) Television, File 29 May – 7 [delay]
099. The Phoenician Scheme (2025, Wes Anderson) AMC The Grove, DCP 29 May – 8
100. An Evening Song (for three voices) (2023, Graham Swon) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, File (Volunteer, Friends, Director Q&A) 29 May – 8 [intermittent]
101. +Rope (1948, Alfred Hitchcock) Academy Museum, 35mm Nitrate (Koresky/Aster Q&A) 30 May – 8
s060. Fractured Friendship (1965, Sid Marcus) New Beverly, 35mm 31 May – 6
102. +Frances Ha (2012, Noah Baumbach) New Beverly, 35mm 31 May – 9
103. Saturday Night Fever (1977, John Badham^) AC Los Feliz 3, 35mm 31 May – 8 [late]
104. The Breaking Point (1950, Michael Curtiz) AC Los Feliz 3, 35mm (Connor Introduction) 01 Jun – 8
105. Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977, Jon Jost) AC Los Feliz 3, DCP (Director Q&A) 01 Jun – 9 [late; slight]
106. DeadEndz (2023, Jon Jost) AC Los Feliz 3, DCP (Director Q&A) 01 Jun – 7 [late]
107. Despite the Night (2015, Philippe Grandrieux^) AC Los Feliz 3, DCP (Director Zoom Q&A) 01 Jun – 8 [slight]
108. Sombre (1998, Philippe Grandrieux) AC Aero Theatre, 35mm (Director Zoom Q&A) 02 Jun – 7 [late; technical]
109. A New Life (2002, Philippe Grandrieux) AC Aero Theatre, 35mm (Friend, Director Zoom Q&A) 02 Jun – 7 [slight]
110. A Lake (2008, Philippe Grandrieux) AC Los Feliz 3, 35mm (Director Zoom Q&A) 03 Jun – 8 [late; intermittent]
111. +Melancholia (2011, Lars von Trier) AC Egyptian Theatre, 35mm (Actor Q&A) 04 Jun – 8
112. The World to Come (2020, Mona Fastvold^) AC Los Feliz 3, 35mm (Director/Actor Q&A) 05 Jun – 6
113. Vox Lux (2018, Brady Corbet) AC Los Feliz 3, 35mm (Friend, Director/Screenwriter/Cinematographer Introduction) 05 Jun – 5
114. +Taste of Cherry (1997, Abbas Kiarostami) AC Los Feliz 3, 35mm (Speaker, Friends) 06 Jun – 10 [late; up from 9]
115. Last Days (2005, Gus Van Sant) AC Los Feliz 3, 35mm (Director Q&A) 06 Jun – 8 [late; intermittent]
116. Ordet (1955, Carl Th. Dreyer) Television, File 07 Jun – [delay]
117. Day of Wrath (1943, Carl. Th. Dreyer) AC Egyptian Theatre, 35mm Nitrate (Friends, Stoiber Introduction) 07 Jun – 10
118. +Clueless (1995, Amy Heckerling) Academy Museum, 35mm (Director/Cast/Crew Q&A) 07 Jun – 9
119. +Limbo (2021, Soi Cheang) AC Los Feliz 3, DCP (Speaker, Friends) 08 Jun – 9
120. Escape From the 21st Century (2024, Li Yang^) AMC Atlantic Times Square, DCP (Friends) 09 Jun – 7 [late]
121. The Damned (2024, Roberto Minervini) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, File (Volunteer, Director/Cinematographer/Actor Q&A) 13 Jun – 8 [slight]
122. The Passage (2011, Roberto Minervini) Brain Dead Studios/Acropolis Cinema, DCP (Volunteer, Friends, Director Q&A) 14 Jun – 7 [slight]
123. +The Other Side (2015, Roberto Minervini) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, File (Volunteer, Friend, Director Q&A) 15 Jun – 8 [slight]
124. Water and Power (1989, Pat O’Neill^) Philosophical Research Society/Los Angeles Filmforum, 16mm 15 Jun – 9 [intermittent; technical]
s061. Venice Pier (1976, Gary Beydler) Philosophical Research Society/Los Angeles Filmforum, 16mm 15 Jun – 8
s062. +Pasadena Freeway Stills (1974, Gary Beydler) Monitor, File 16 Jun – 8 [up from 7]
125. Ballerina (2025, Len Wiseman) AMC The Grove, DCP 17 Jun – 6
126. Materialists (2025, Celine Song) AMC The Grove, DCP 17 Jun – 6
127. Se7en (1995, David Fincher) Vista Theater, 35mm 22 Jun – 9 [late]
128. +What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? (2018, Roberto Minervini) Brain Dead Studios/Acropolis Cinema, DCP (Volunteer, Friends) 23 Jun – 8 [slight]
s063. Hand Held Day (1975, Gary Beydler) Television, File 25 Jun – 7
s064. Scénarios (2024, Jean-Luc Godard) Television, File 25 Jun – 9
s065. Exposé du film annonce du film “Scénario” (2024, Jean-Luc Godard) Television, File 25 Jun – 8
129. Love Affair(s) (2020, Emmanuel Mouret) Television, File 25 Jun – 9 [delay]
130. The Plains (2022, David Easteal^) Television, File 25 Jun – 9 [delay]
131. No Bears (2022, Jafar Panahi) Television, File 25 Jun – 9 [delay]
132. Unrest (2022, Cyril Schäublin^) Television, File 25 Jun – 8 [delay]
133. The Eternal Daughter (2022, Joanna Hogg) Television, File 25 Jun – 8 [delay]
s066. Experiments in Motion Graphics (1968, John Whitney Sr.) 2220 Arts + Archives/Lightstruck, 16mm 26 Jun – 6
s067. Poemfield 7 (1968, Stan VanDerBeek & Ken Knowlton) 2220 Arts + Archives/Lightstruck, 16mm 26 Jun – 7
s068. Olympiad (1971, Lillian Schwartz & Ken Knowlton) 2220 Arts + Archives/Lightstruck, 16mm 26 Jun – 8
s069. UFOs (1971, Lillian Schwartz & Ken Knowlton) 2220 Arts + Archives/Lightstruck, 16mm 26 Jun – 8
s070. Byjina Flores (1966, John Whitney Jr.) 2220 Arts + Archives/Lightstruck, 16mm 26 Jun – 7
s071. Binary Bit Patterns (1969, Michael Whitney) 2220 Arts + Archives/Lightstruck, 16mm 26 Jun – 7
s072. Matrix III (1972, John Whitney Sr.) 2220 Arts + Archives/Lightstruck, 16mm 26 Jun – 7
s073. Lapis (1966, James Whitney) 2220 Arts + Archives/Lightstruck, 16mm 26 Jun – 7
s074. Phenomena (1965, Jordan Belson) 2220 Arts + Archives/Lightstruck, 16mm 26 Jun – 8
s075. Samadhi (1967, Jordan Belson) 2220 Arts + Archives/Lightstruck, 16mm 26 Jun – 8
s076. Momentum (1969, Jordan Belson) 2220 Arts + Archives/Lightstruck, 16mm 26 Jun – 8
s077. Side Phase Drift (1969, John Whitney Jr.) 2220 Arts + Archives/Lightstruck, 16mm Triple Projection 26 Jun – 8
134. Familiar Touch (2024, Sarah Friedland^) Laemmle Royal, DCP (Director/Actor Q&A) 28 Jun – 8
135. Measures for a Funeral (2024, Sofia Bohdanowicz) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, File (Volunteer, Friend, Director Q&A) 29 Jun – 7 [slight]
136. Afternoons of Solitude (2024, Albert Serra) AC Los Feliz 3, DCP (Friend) 30 Jun – 9 [slight]
137. +Reservoir Dogs (1992, Quentin Tarantino) Vista Theater, 35mm 08 Jul – 8 [up from 6]
138. +Pulp Fiction (1994, Quentin Tarantino) Vista Theater, 35mm 08 Jul – 9 [up from 8]
139. Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another (2019, Jessica Sarah Rinland^) Television, File 08 Jul – 8 [delay]
140. Collective Monologue (2024, Jessica Sarah Rinland) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, File (Volunteer, Friend, Director Q&A) 08 Jul – 7 [intermittent]
141. The Abyss (1989, James Cameron) Academy Museum, 70mm (Producer, Crew Introduction) 09 Jul – 9
142. +Inglourious Basterds (2009, Quentin Tarantino) New Beverly, 35mm 11 Jul – 9 [up from 8]
143. +Moonrise Kingdom (2012, Wes Anderson) New Beverly, 35mm 12 Jul – 9
144. +Drive (2011, Nicolas Winding Refn) Academy Museum, 35mm (Composer Introduction) 12 Jul – 6
145. +Les Vampires (1915, Louis Feuillade) Academy Museum, DCP (Friend) 13 Jul – 10 [slight]
s078. In the Mood for Love 2001 (2001, Wong Kar-wai) Laemmle Glendale, DCP 17 Jul – 8
146. Point Break (1991, Kathryn Bigelow) New Beverly, 35mm 17 Jul – 8
147. +Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989, Steven Spielberg) New Beverly, 35mm 19 Jul – 8 [up from 7]
148. Last Life in the Universe (2003, Pen-ek Ratanaruang^) AC Los Feliz 3, 35mm 19 Jul – 7
149. +PlayTime (1967, Jacques Tati) AC Egyptian Theatre, 70mm 20 Jul – 10 [late]
150. +Boogie Nights (1997, Paul Thomas Anderson) AC Egyptian Theatre, 70mm 20 Jul – 8
151. Eddington (2025, Ari Aster) AMC The Grove, DCP 22 Jul – 5 [late]
152. Lost in America (1985, Albert Brooks^) New Beverly, 35mm 22 Jul – 8
153. Modern Romance (1981, Albert Brooks) New Beverly, 35mm 22 Jul – 9
154. The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich^) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, File (Volunteer, Friend) 23 Jul – 7 [slight]
155. +Kill Bill (2004, Quentin Tarantino) Vista Theater, 35mm (Friend) 24 Jul – 9 [up from 8]
156. +The Little Mermaid (1989, John Musker & Ron Clements) Egyptian Theatre, DCP (Directors Q&A) 24 Jul – 6
s079. +Spectrum Reverse Spectrum (2014, Margaret Honda) AC Aero Theatre, 70mm (Director Q&A) 26 Jul – 8
s080. Equinox (2019, Margaret Honda) AC Aero Theatre, 70mm (Director Q&A) 26 Jul – 7
t002. A Fair Murderer (2006, Furuhata Ninzaburo) Monitor, File 27 Jul
157. +The Clock (1945, Vincente Minnelli) Television, File 01 Aug – 10
158. Neighboring Sounds (2012, Kleber Mendonça Filho) Television, Blu-ray 01 Aug – 8 [delay]
p001. Wild Man Blues (1997, Barbara Kopple) Television, File (Friend) 01 Aug
159. Abiding Nowhere (2024, Tsai Ming-liang) Television, File 06 Aug – 8
s081. No Form (2012, Tsai Ming-liang) AC Los Feliz 3, DCP 06 Aug – 8
s082. Hua yang de nian hua (2000, Wong Kar-wai) Television, Blu-ray 08 Aug – 7
160. Egg and Stone (2012, Huang Ji) Television, File 08 Aug – 8
161. Videoheaven (2025, Alex Ross Perry) AC Los Feliz 3, DCP (Friend) 08 Aug – 8
s083. Single Belief (2016, Lee Kang-sheng) Television, File 09 Aug – 8
162. The Foolish Bird (2017, Huang Ji & Otsuka Ryuji) Television, File 09 Aug – 7
163. +Stonewalling (2022, Huang Ji & Otsuka Ryuji) Television, File 09 Aug – 8
s084. +No Form (2012, Tsai Ming-liang) AC Aero Theatre, DCP (Friends, Director/Actor Q&A) 10 Aug – 8
s085. +Walker (2012, Tsai Ming-liang) AC Aero Theatre, DCP (Friends, Director/Actor Q&A) 10 Aug – 8
s086. Walking on Water (2013, Tsai Ming-liang) AC Aero Theatre, DCP (Friends, Director/Actor Q&A) 10 Aug – 8
164. +Journey to the West (2014, Tsai Ming-liang) AC Aero Theatre, DCP (Friends, Director/Actor Q&A) 10 Aug – 9 [slight; up from 8]
s087. +No No Sleep (2015, Tsai Ming-liang) AC Aero Theatre, DCP (Friends, Director/Actor Q&A) 10 Aug – 9
165. Sand (2018, Tsai Ming-liang) AC Aero Theatre, DCP (Friend, Director/Actor Q&A) 10 Aug – 8 [slight]
s088. Sleepwalk (2012, Tsai Ming-liang) AC Aero Theatre, DCP (Friend, Director/Actor Q&A) 10 Aug – 8
s089. Diamond Sutra (2012, Tsai Ming-liang) AC Aero Theatre, DCP (Friend, Director/Actor Q&A) 10 Aug – 8
166. +Where (2022, Tsai Ming-liang) AC Aero Theatre, DCP (Friend, Director/Actor Q&A) 10 Aug – 8 [slight]
167. +Abiding Nowhere (2024, Tsai Ming-liang) AC Aero Theatre, DCP (Friend, Director/Actor Q&A) 10 Aug – 8 [slight]
168. Norma Rae (1979, Martin Ritt^) Egyptian Theatre, DCP (Friends, Actor Q&A) 13 Aug – 6
169. Highest 2 Lowest (2025, Spike Lee) Regal L.A. Live, DCP 19 Aug – 6
170. L.A. Confidential (1997, Curtis Hanson^) Academy Museum, 35mm 20 Aug – 7 [late]
171. +L for Leisure (2014, Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn) Coaxial Arts/Shadow Kitchen, File (Director Q&A) 21 Aug – 9 [up from 8]
172. The History of Sound (2025, Oliver Hermanus^†) Wilshire Screening Room, DCP 22 Aug – 5 [late]
173. Monkey Business (1931, Norman Z. McLeod^) UCLA Billy Wilder Theater, DCP (Historian Introduction) 22 Aug – 8
174. The Black Cat (1934, Edgar G. Ulmer) UCLA Billy Wilder Theater, 35mm 22 Aug – 8
175. Preparation for the Next Life (2025, Liu Bing†) Culver Theater, LED (Director/Actor Q&A) 25 Aug – 5
176. Honey Don’t! (2025, Ethan Coen) AMC The Grove, DCP 27 Aug – 4 [late]
177. Blue Moon (2025, Richard Linklater†) Crescent Theater, DCP (Friends) 27 Aug – 9
178. A Land Imagined (2018, Yeo Siew Hua) Television, File 02 Sep – 8
179. +Stranger Eyes (2024, Yeo Siew Hua) Television, File 02 Sep – 8 [up from 7]
180. The Missing (2003, Lee Kang-sheng^) Television, File 03 Sep – 8
181. My Stinking Kid (2004, Lee Kang-sheng & Tsai Ming-liang) Television, File 03 Sep – 7
182. Help Me Eros (2007, Lee Kang-sheng) Television, File 03 Sep – 8
183. It Was Just an Accident (2025, Jafar Panahi) Crescent Theater, DCP (Director Q&A) 04 Sep – 8 [late]
184. After the Hunt (2025, Luca Guadagnino†) Culver Theater, DCP (Friend) 10 Sep – 7
185. +Pierrot le Fou (1965, Jean-Luc Godard) New Beverly, 35mm 10 Sep – 10 [slight]
s090. The Chicken (2020, Sora Neo) Television, Blu-ray 11 Sep – 7
s091. Melting (1965, Thom Andersen) Television, File 11 Sep – 7
s092. — ——- (1967, Thom Andersen & Malcolm Brodwick) Television, File 11 Sep – 7
186. The Smashing Machine (2025, Benny Safdie) DGA Theater, DCP (Director/Cast/Subject Q&A) 11 Sep – 8
187. A Prince (2023, Pierre Creton^) Television, File 13 Sep – 8
188. Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1975, Thom Andersen) Television, File 13 Sep – 8
189. 7 Walks With Mark Brown (2024, Pierre Creton & Vincent Barré^) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, File (Volunteer, Friends) 13 Sep – 8
190. Go, Toto! (2017, Pierre Creton) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, File (Volunteer, Friends) 13 Sep – 7
191. +Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003, Thom Andersen) Television, Blu-ray 13 Sep – 10
p002. Red Hollywood (1996, Thom Andersen & Noël Burch) Television, File 14 Sep
192. One Battle After Another (2025, Paul Thomas Anderson†) Warner Bros. Steven J. Ross Theater, VistaVision 35mm (Friends) 15 Sep – 9
s093. The Tony Longo Trilogy (2014, Thom Andersen) Television, Blu-ray 15 Sep – 8
193. Miroirs No. 3 (2025, Christian Petzold†) FLC Walter Reade Theater, DCP (Friends) [NYFF] 17 Sep – 8
194. The Mastermind (2025, Kelly Reichardt†) FLC Walter Reade Theater, DCP (Friends) [NYFF] 17 Sep – 8
195. Late Fame (2025, Kent Jones†) FLC Walter Reade Theater, DCP (Friends) [NYFF] 17 Sep – 7
196. No Other Choice (2025, Park Chan-wook†) FLC Walter Reade Theater, DCP (Friends) [NYFF] 17 Sep – 7
197. I Only Rest in the Storm (2025, Pedro Pinho^†) FLC Walter Reade Theater, DCP (Friend) [NYFF] 18 Sep – 7
198. Peter Hujar’s Day (2025, Ira Sachs†) FLC Walter Reade Theater, DCP (Friends) [NYFF] 18 Sep – 8
199. The Secret Agent (2025, Kleber Mendonça Filho†) FLC Walter Reade Theater, DCP (Friend) [NYFF] 18 Sep – 8
200. Sirāt (2025, Óliver Laxe†) FLC Walter Reade Theater, DCP (Friends) [NYFF] 18 Sep – 9
201. Magellan (2025, Lav Diaz†) FLC Walter Reade Theater, DCP (Friends) [NYFF] 19 Sep – 8
202. Below the Clouds (2025, Gianfranco Rosi†) FLC Walter Reade Theater, DCP (Friends) [NYFF] 19 Sep – 8
203. Rose of Nevada (2025, Mark Jenkin†) FLC Walter Reade Theater, DCP (Friends) [NYFF] 19 Sep – 7
204. Romería (2025, Carla Simón^†) FLC Walter Reade Theater, DCP (Friends) [NYFF] 19 Sep – 6
205. Kokuho (2025, Lee Sang-il^†) Television, Screener 21 Sep – 7
s094. The Whirled (1961, Ken Jacobs) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, 16mm (Volunteer, Friends, Hoberman Q&A) 25 Sep – 7
s095. Senseless (1962, Ron Rice) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, 16mm (Volunteer, Friends, Hoberman Q&A) 25 Sep – 7
s096. New York Eye and Ear Control (1964, Michael Snow) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, 16mm (Volunteer, Friends, Hoberman Q&A) 25 Sep – 8
s097. D. M. T. (1966, Jud Yalkut) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, 16mm (Volunteer, Friends, Hoberman Q&A) 25 Sep – 8
206. Sentimental Value (2025, Joachim Trier†) Rodeo Screening Room, DCP (Friend) 26 Sep – 6
207. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025, Mary Bronstein^) AC Aero Theatre, DCP (Friend, Director/Cast Q&A) [Beyond Fest] 26 Sep – 8
208. Dracula (2025, Radu Jude) AC Aero Theatre, DCP (Friends) [Beyond Fest] 27 Sep – 8
209. +Slow Action (2010, Ben Rivers) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, File (Volunteer, Friends, Director Q&A) 28 Sep – 8 [up from 7]
s098. Urth (2016, Ben Rivers) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, File (Volunteer, Friends, Director Q&A) 28 Sep – 7
s099. +Look Then Below (2019, Ben Rivers) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, File (Volunteer, Friends, Director Q&A) 28 Sep – 7
210. A House of Dynamite (2025, Kathryn Bigelow†) Dolby Burbank, DCP (Friend) 29 Sep – 4
211. Bogancloch (2024, Ben Rivers) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, File (Volunteer, Friends, Director Q&A) 30 Sep – 7
212. Ed Wood (1994, Tim Burton) Academy Museum, 35mm 01 Oct – 8
213. Resurrection (2025, Bi Gan) AC Aero Theatre, DCP (Friends, Director Q&A) [Beyond Fest] 02 Oct – 9
214. Dracula (1931, Tod Browning^) New Beverly, 35mm 03 Oct – 6
215. +Sirāt (2025, Óliver Laxe) AC Aero Theatre, DCP (Friend, Director/Actor Q&A) [Beyond Fest] 03 Oct – 9
216. Hamnet (2025, Chloé Zhao†) Harmony Gold Preview House, DCP (Friends, Director/Actor Q&A) 05 Oct – 6
217. Die My Love (2025, Lynne Ramsay†) Wilshire Screening Room, DCP 06 Oct – 4 [late]
218. Anemone (2025, Ronan Day-Lewis^) DGA Theater, DCP (Friend, Director/Actor/Producer Q&A) 06 Oct – 6 [slight]
219. +One Battle After Another (2025, Paul Thomas Anderson) AMC Universal CityWalk, IMAX 70mm 07 Oct – 9 [late]
220. Left-Handed Girl (2025, Tsou Shih-ching^†) Netflix Icon Home Theater, DCP (Friend) 08 Oct – 7
221. Suburban Fury (2024, Robinson Devor^†) Television, Screener 09 Oct – 8
222. My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow (2024, Julia Loktev) Television, Screener 09 Oct – 8 [delay]
223. Bugonia (2025, Yorgos Lanthimos†) Rodeo Screening Room, DCP 10 Oct – 6 [late]
224. Is This Thing On? (2025, Bradley Cooper†) DGA Theater, DCP 10 Oct – 7
225. Urchin (2025, Harris Dickinson^) Television, Screener 11 Oct – 6
226. Ballad of a Small Player (2025, Edward Berger†) Egyptian Theatre, DCP (Director/Producer/Cast Introduction) 14 Oct – 4
227. Frankenstein (2025, Guillermo del Toro†) Netflix Epic Roma Theater, DCP (Friends) 15 Oct – 5
228. A Private Life (2025, Rebecca Zlotowski^†) Crescent Theater, DCP (Friend) 16 Oct – 6
229. +A City of Sadness (1989, Hou Hsiao-hsien) Culver Theater, LED (Moderator) [Alula Film Festival] 16 Oct – 10 [slight]
230. Bitter Money (2016, Wang Bing) Television, File 19 Oct – 8
231. Jay Kelly (2025, Noah Baumbach†) Netflix Epic Roma Theater, DCP (Friends) 20 Oct – 7 [late]
s100. Polly Two (2018, Kevin Jerome Everson) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, File (Volunteer, Friend, Director/Composer Q&A) 20 Oct – 7
s101. When the Sun Is Eaten (Chi’bal K’iin) (2025, Kevin Jerome Everson) 2220 Arts + Archives/Acropolis Cinema, File (Volunteer, Friend, Director/Composer Q&A) 20 Oct – 8
232. Daughter’s Daughter (2024, Huang Xi^†) Television, Screener 22 Oct – 6
233. Tempting Heart (1999, Sylvia Chang^) Television, File 23 Oct – 9
234. Pin de fartie (2025, Alejo Moguillansky^) TCL Chinese 6, DCP (Friends, Director Introduction) [AFI Fest] 23 Oct – 8
235. Yes (2025, Nadav Lapid) TCL Chinese 6, DCP (Director/Actor Q&A) [AFI Fest] 23 Oct – 8
236. The Currents (2025, Milagros Mumenthaler^) TCL Chinese 6, DCP (Friends) [AFI Fest] 23 Oct – 8
237. Father Mother Sister Brother (2025, Jim Jarmusch) TCL Chinese 6, DCP [AFI Fest] 24 Oct – 8
238. Dead Man’s Wire (2025, Gus Van Sant) TCL Chinese Theatre, DCP (Director Q&A) [AFI Fest] 25 Oct – 6 [late]
239. The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025, Kaouther Ben Hania^) TCL Chinese 6, DCP (Friend, Producer Introduction) [AFI Fest] 25 Oct – 3
240. Kontinental ’25 (2025, Radu Jude) TCL Chinese 6, DCP [AFI Fest] 25 Oct – 8 [slight]
241. What Does That Nature Say to You (2025, Hong Sang-soo) TCL Chinese 6, DCP (Friends) [AFI Fest] 26 Oct – 8 [slight]
242. Night of the Demon (1957, Jacques Tourneur) New Beverly, 35mm (Friend) 27 Oct – 8
243. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (2025, Scott Cooper) AMC Universal CityWalk, DCP 28 Oct – 6
244. We Are the Fruits of the Forest (2025, Panh Rithy†) Television, Screener 28 Oct – 7
245. Double Happiness (2025, Joseph Hsu^†) Monitor, Screener 31 Oct – 5
246. The Little Sister (2025, Hafsia Herzi^) DGA Theater, DCP (Actor Q&A) [TAFFF] 01 Nov – 7
247. The Fence (2025, Claire Denis) DGA Theater, DCP (Friends) [TAFFF] 03 Nov – 8
248. The Testament of Ann Lee (2025, Mona Fastvold) AC Aero Theatre, 70mm 03 Nov – 6
249. Train Dreams (2025, Clint Bentley^†) Ross House, DCP (Waititi Introduction, Director/Cast/Crew Q&A) 05 Nov – 5
250. Her Will Be Done (2025, Julia Kowalski^) DGA Theater, DCP (Volunteer, Friends) [Directors’ Fortnight Extended] 08 Nov – 6
251. Brand New Landscape (2025, Danzuka Yuiga^) DGA Theater, DCP (Volunteer, Friend, Director Q&A) [Directors’ Fortnight Extended] 08 Nov – 7 [slight]
252. The Girls We Want (2025, Prïncia Car^) DGA Theater, DCP (Volunteer, Friends) [Directors’ Fortnight Extended] 09 Nov – 6
253. Wild Foxes (2025, Valéry Carnoy^) DGA Theater, DCP (Volunteer, Friend) [Directors’ Fortnight Extended] 09 Nov – 7
254. Nouvelle Vague (2025, Richard Linklater) Vista Theater, 35mm 10 Nov – 8 [late]
255. Sound of Falling (2025, Mascha Schilinski^†) Soho House West Hollywood, DCP (Director/Cinematographer Q&A) 11 Nov – 7 [late]
256. Marty Supreme (2025, Josh Safdie†) DGA Theater, DCP (Friend, Director/Cast Q&A) 13 Nov – 8
257. +Breathless (1960, Jean-Luc Godard) Vista Theater, 35mm 14 Nov – 10
258. Pillion (2025, Harry Lighton^†) CAA Ray Kurtzman Theater, DCP (Director/Cast Q&A) 16 Nov – 7
259. The Things You Kill (2025, Alireza Khatami^) Lumiere Music Hall, DCP (Friend, Director Q&A) 21 Nov – 6 [slight]
260. The Love That Remains (2025, Hlynur Pálmason^†) Four Seasons, DCP (Friends, Director Virtual Introduction) 22 Nov – 7
s102. Madam Butterfly (2009, Tsai Ming-liang) Television, Blu-ray 24 Nov – 7
s103. The Night (2021, Tsai Ming-liang) Television, File 24 Nov – 8
t003. 7:00 A.M. (2025, The Pitt) Television, File (Family) 25 Nov
261. F1 (2025, Joseph Kosinski) Television, File (Family) 25 Nov – 6
t004. Where the Sun Rises (2025, Physical: Asia) Television, Netflix (Family) 26 Nov
t005. On the Brink (2025, Physical: Asia) Television, Netflix (Family) 26 Nov
t006. Shipwreck (2025, Physical: Asia) Television, Netflix (Sister) 26 Nov
262. Your Touch Makes Others Invisible (2025, Rajee Samarasinghe^†) Monitor, Screener 01 Dec – 7 [delay]
263. Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025, James Cameron†) Disney Studios Main Theater, 3D DCP (Friend) 01 Dec – 7
264. Escape From New York (1981, John Carpenter) Television, File 04 Dec – 8
265. Escape From L.A. (1996, John Carpenter) Egyptian Theatre, 35mm (Friends, Director Q&A) 04 Dec – 7
s104. I Wasn’t There (2014, Sky Hirschkron) Television, Vimeo (Friends) 05 Dec – 8
266. Wake Up Dead Man (2025, Rian Johnson) Landmark Sunset, DCP 05 Dec – 6
267. BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (2025, Kahlil Joseph) Television, Screener 06 Dec – 7 [delay]
268. Arco (2025, Ugo Bienvenu^) Television, Screener 06 Dec – 6
269. Scarlet (2025, Hosoda Mamoru†) Television, Screener 06 Dec – 7 [delay]
270. Hedda (2025, Nia DaCosta^) Television, File 07 Dec – 6 [delay]
271. Little Amélie or the Character of Rain (2025, Maïlys Vallade^ & Han Liane-cho^) Television, Screener 07 Dec – 7 [delay]
272. KPop Demon Hunters (2025, Maggie Kang^ & Chris Appelhans^) Television, File 07 Dec – 5 [delay]
273. +Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point (2024, Tyler Taormina) New Beverly, 35mm (Director Q&A) 09 Dec – 8
274. Christmas, Again (2014, Charles Poekel^) New Beverly, 35mm (Friends, Director Introduction) 09 Dec – 8
275. The Thing From Another World (1951, Christian Nyby^ and Howard Hawks) Aero Theatre, 35mm (Scholar Introduction) 18 Dec – 9
276. Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990, Joe Dante) New Beverly, 35mm 18 Dec – 8
277. +Punishment Park (1971, Peter Watkins) UCLA Billy Wilder Theater, 35mm (Friends, Cartoonist Introduction) 19 Dec – 9
278. +Memoria (2021, Apichatpong Weerasethakul) Lumiere Music Hall, DCP (Friend) 31 Dec – 10 [late, slight; up from 9]

2025 Viewing Log

January 1, 2025July 23, 2026Ryan Swen Lists Tags: log, viewing

January
Sycorax (2021, Lois Patiño & Matías Piñeiro)
À propos de Nice (1930, Jean Vigo & Boris Kaufman)
Taris (1931, Jean Vigo)
A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (2009, Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
The Second (2024, Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou)
+Fantasy Sentences (2017, Dane Komljen)
Short Stay (2016, Ted Fendt) – 7
Saturday Night (2024, Jason Reitman) – 4
Incident (2023, Bill Morrison)
Being John Smith (2024, John Smith)
A Silent Voice (2016, Yamada Naoko) – 8
Den of Thieves: Pantera (2025, Christian Gudegast) – 7

February
That I’m Falling? (2013, Eduardo Williams)
I Forgot! (2014, Eduardo Williams)
+Breathless (1960, Jean-Luc Godard) – 10
A Portrait of Ga (1952, Margaret Tait)
Bottle Rocket (1993, Wes Anderson)
Hotel Chevalier (2007, Wes Anderson)
Castello Cavalcanti (2013, Wes Anderson)
+A Real Pain (2024, Jesse Eisenberg) – 7
Breathless (2024, James Benning) – 7
Hummingbirds (2023, Silvia Del Carmen Castaños & Estefanía “Beba” Contreras) – 6
Broken Rage (2024, Kitano Takeshi) – 8
Patrice: The Movie (2024, Ted Passon) – 5
Gaucho Gaucho (2024, Michael Dweck & Gregory Kershaw) – 6
Misericordia (2024, Alain Guiraudie) DP – 9
The Actor (2025, Duke Johnson) DP – 5
+Nine Behind (2016, Sophy Romvari)
It’s Him (2017, Sophy Romvari)
+Pumpkin Movie (2017, Sophy Romvari)
Grandma’s House (2018, Sophy Romvari)
Norman Norman (2018, Sophy Romvari)
In Dog Years (2019, Sophy Romvari)
Remembrance of József Romvári (2020, Sophy Romvari)
It’s Pink, But Is It Mink? (1975, Robert McKimson) 35mm
Easy Living (1937, Mitchell Leisen) 35mm – 8
+Still Processing (2020, Sophy Romvari)

March
The Apprentice (2024, Ali Abbasi) – 5
+Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, Steven Spielberg) 35mm – 10 [up from 9]
Teeny Weeny Meany (1966, Sid Marcus) 35mm
To Have and Have Not (1944, Howard Hawks) 35mm – 10
Key Largo (1948, John Huston) 35mm – 6
The Wild Robot (2024, Chris Sanders) – 6
Pump Up the Volume (1990, Allan Moyle) 35mm – 8
Times Square (1980, Allan Moyle) DP – 7
Mickey 17 (2025, Bong Joon-ho) DP – 7
In the Lost Lands (2025, Paul W. S. Anderson) DP – 7
+Isabella (2020, Matías Piñeiro) DP – 8 [up from 7]
+Viola (2012, Matías Piñeiro) DP – 8 [up from 7]
+Hermia & Helena (2016, Matías Piñeiro) DP – 9 [up from 8]
They All Lie (2009, Matías Piñeiro) DP – 7
Preface to the Little Dialogue (2025, Matías Piñeiro) DP
+You Burn Me (2024, Matías Piñeiro) DP – 7
After the Rain (2021, Fan Jian) LED – 7
Black Bag (2025, Steven Soderbergh) LED – 7
A Short History (2017, Erica Sheu) 16mm
the way home (2018, Erica Sheu) DP
transcript (2019, Erica Sheu) DP
pài-lak ē-poo (2020, Erica Sheu) 16mm
birthday song (single channel) (2021, Erica Sheu) 16mm
off (I don’t know when to stop) (2021, Erica Sheu) DP
Grandma’s Scissors (2021, Erica Sheu) DP
Fur Film vol.2: mirror mirror (2022, ЯeaRflex) DP
It follows It passes on (2022, Erica Sheu) DP
False Expectations (2023, Erica Sheu) 16mm
Anatomy of a Murder (1959, Otto Preminger) 35mm – 9
+A Man Escaped (1956, Robert Bresson) 35mm – 10
+Pickpocket (1959, Robert Bresson) 35mm – 9 [up from 8]
The Iron Giant (1999, Brad Bird) DP – 7
+The Incredibles (2004, Brad Bird) DP – 8
Sorry, Baby (2025, Eva Victor) DP – 6
+Ugetsu Monogatari (1953, Mizoguchi Kenji) 35mm – 10 [up from 8]

April
Woolen Under Where (1963, Phil Monroe & Richard Thompson) 35mm
Blue Collar (1978, Paul Schrader) 35mm – 9
American Gigolo (1980, Paul Schrader) 35mm – 7
Magic Farm (2025, Amalia Ulman) LAFM, DP – 6
Invention (2024, Courtney Stephens) LAFM, DP – 8
Cent mille milliards (2024, Virgil Vernier) LAFM, DP – 7
Nightshift (1981, Robina Rose) LAFM, DP – 8
Permanent Green Light (2018, Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley) – 7
Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued (2025, Julian Castronovo) LAFM, DP – 8
Room Temperature (2025, Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley) LAFM, DP – 6
Zodiac Killer Project (2025, Charlie Shackleton) LAFM, DP – 6
No Sleep Till (2024, Alexandra Simpson) LAFM, DP – 7
Happyend (2024, Sora Neo) LAFM, DP – 8
Mongrel (2024, Chiang Wei-liang & Yin You-qiao) – 5
12 Angry Men (1957, Sidney Lumet) – 6
Henry Fonda for President (2024, Alexander Horwath) DP – 9
Eight Postcards From Utopia (2024, Radu Jude & Christian Ferencz-Flatz) DP – 7
Sleep #2 (2024, Radu Jude) DP – 7
Fire of Wind (2024, Marta Mateus) DP – 8
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997, Errol Morris) 35mm – 8
The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987, Hara Kazuo) DP – 9
+The Thin Blue Line (1988, Errol Morris) 35mm – 8
A Brief History of Time (1991, Errol Morris) 35mm – 6
Minamata Mandala (2020, Hara Kazuo) – 8
+Goodbye CP (1972, Hara Kazuo) DP – 8
Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (1974, Hara Kazuo) DP – 9
Predators (2025, David Osit) DP – 8
April (2024, Dea Kulumbegashvili) DP – 7
John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (2025, Michael Almereyda & Courtney Stephens) DP – 7
Nadja (1994, Michael Almereyda) 35mm – 8
Duel (1971, Steven Spielberg) 35mm – 7
The Sugarland Express (1974, Steven Spielberg) 35mm – 8
+Devil in a Blue Dress (1995, Carl Franklin) DP – 8
Love Hotel (1985, Somai Shinji) DP – 8
+In the Mood for Love (2000, Wong Kar-wai) 35mm – 10
Sinners (2025, Ryan Coogler) 70mm – 8
Coming to Terms (2013, Jon Jost) – 8
Blue Strait (2015, Jon Jost) – 7
Fat Girl (2001, Catherine Breillat) 35mm – 9
+36 Fillette (1988, Catherine Breillat) 35mm – 8

May
DIRECT ACTION (2024, Guillaume Cailleau & Ben Russell) DP – 8
+Dog Day Afternoon (1975, Sidney Lumet) 35mm – 7 [up from 6]
+Dersu Uzala (1975, Kurosawa Akira) 35mm – 9 [up from 8]
Amiko (2017, Yamanaka Yoko) – 7
Beau Is Afraid (2023, Ari Aster) – 5
Parking (2008, Chung Mong-hong) 35mm – 8
Stranger Than Paradise (1984, Jim Jarmusch) 35mm – 9
+Minority Report (2002, Steven Spielberg) 35mm – 8 [up from 7]
+RoboCop (1987, Paul Verhoeven) 35mm – 9
+The Terminator (1984, James Cameron) 35mm – 9 [up from 8]
Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning (2025, Christopher McQuarrie) DP – 8
+Invention (2024, Courtney Stephens) DP – 8
Surf-Bored Cat (1967, Abe Levitow) 35mm
+Jaws (1975, Steven Spielberg) 35mm – 9
It Happened One Night (1934, Frank Capra) 35mm – 8
Hail the Conquering Hero (1944, Preston Sturges) 35mm – 8
Blue Sun Palace (2024, Constance Tsang) DP – 7
+The Master (2012, Paul Thomas Anderson) 70mm – 9 [up from 8]
Apollo (2003, Nishikawa Tomonari)
Sketch Film #1 (2005, Nishikawa Tomonari)
Sketch Film #2 (2005, Nishikawa Tomonari)
Market Street (2005, Nishikawa Tomonari)
Sketch Film #3 (2006, Nishikawa Tomonari)
Clear Blue Sky (2006, Nishikawa Tomonari)
Sketch Film #4 (2007, Nishikawa Tomonari)
Sketch Film #5 (2007, Nishikawa Tomonari)
Into the Mass (2007, Nishikawa Tomonari)
16-18-4 (2008, Nishikawa Tomonari)
Lumphini 2552 (2009, Nishikawa Tomonari)
Tokyo – Ebisu (2010, Nishikawa Tomonari)
Shibuya – Tokyo (2010, Nishikawa Tomonari)
45 7 Broadway (2013, Nishikawa Tomonari)
sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars (2014, Nishikawa Tomonari)
Manhattan One Two Three Four (2014, Nishikawa Tomonari)
Luminous Veil (2016, Nishikawa Tomonari)
Ten Mornings Ten Evenings and One Horizon (2016, Nishikawa Tomonari)
Amusement Ride (2019, Nishikawa Tomonari)
Trafic (2021, Nishikawa Tomonari)
Magnetic Point (2023, Nishikawa Tomonari)
Light, Noise, Smoke and Light, Noise, Smoke (2023, Nishikawa Tomonari)
Rich and Famous (1981, George Cukor) 35mm – 8
One False Move (1992, Carl Franklin) 35mm – 8
The Heroic Trio (1993, Johnnie To) – 7
Tongues Untied (1989, Marlon Riggs) – 8
Mr. 3000 (2004, Charles Stone III) – 7
The Phoenician Scheme (2025, Wes Anderson) DP – 8
An Evening Song (for three voices) (2023, Graham Swon) DP – 8
+Rope (1948, Alfred Hitchcock) 35mm – 8
Fractured Friendship (1965, Sid Marcus) 35mm
+Frances Ha (2012, Noah Baumbach) 35mm – 9
Saturday Night Fever (1977, John Badham) 35mm – 8

June
The Breaking Point (1950, Michael Curtiz) 35mm – 8
Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977, Jon Jost) DP – 9
DeadEndz (2023, Jon Jost) DP – 7
Despite the Night (2015, Philippe Grandrieux) DP – 8
Sombre (1998, Philippe Grandrieux) 35mm – 7
A New Life (2002, Philippe Grandrieux) 35mm – 7
A Lake (2008, Philippe Grandrieux) 35mm – 8
+Melancholia (2011, Lars von Trier) 35mm – 8
The World to Come (2020, Mona Fastvold) 35mm – 6
Vox Lux (2018, Brady Corbet) 35mm – 5
+Taste of Cherry (1997, Abbas Kiarostami) 35mm – 10 [up from 9]
Last Days (2005, Gus Van Sant) 35mm – 8
Ordet (1955, Carl Th. Dreyer) – 10
Day of Wrath (1943, Carl Th. Dreyer) 35mm – 10
+Clueless (1995, Amy Heckerling) 35mm – 9
+Limbo (2021, Soi Cheang) DP – 9
Escape From the 21st Century (2024, Li Yang) DP – 7
The Damned (2024, Roberto Minervini) DP – 8
The Passage (2011, Roberto Minervini) DP – 7
+The Other Side (2015, Roberto Minervini) DP – 8
Water and Power (1989, Pat O’Neill) 16mm – 9
Venice Pier (1976, Gary Beydler) 16mm
+Pasadena Freeway Stills (1974, Gary Beydler)
Ballerina (2025, Len Wiseman) DP – 6
Materialists (2025, Celine Song) DP – 6
Se7en (1995, David Fincher) DP – 9
+What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? (2018, Roberto Minervini) DP – 8
Hand Held Day (1975, Gary Beydler)
Scénarios (2024, Jean-Luc Godard)
Exposé du film annonce du film “Scénario” (2024, Jean-Luc Godard)
Love Affair(s) (2020, Emmanuel Mouret) – 9
The Plains (2022, David Easteal) – 9
No Bears (2022, Jafar Panahi) – 9
Unrest (2022, Cyril Schäublin) – 8
The Eternal Daughter (2022, Joanna Hogg) – 8
Experiments in Motion Graphics (1968, John Whitney Sr.) 16mm
Poemfield 7 (1968, Stan VanDerBeek & Ken Knowlton) 16mm
Olympiad (1971, Lillian Schwartz & Ken Knowlton) 16mm
UFOs (1971, Lillian Schwartz & Ken Knowlton) 16mm
Byjina Flores (1966, John Whitney Jr.) 16mm
Binary Bit Patterns (1969, Michael Whitney) 16mm
Matrix III (1972, John Whitney Sr.) 16mm
Lapis (1966, James Whitney) 16mm
Phenomena (1965, Jordan Belson) 16mm
Samadhi (1967, Jordan Belson) 16mm
Momentum (1969, Jordan Belson) 16mm
Side Phase Drift (1969, John Whitney Jr.) 16mm
Familiar Touch (2024, Sarah Friedland) DP – 8
Measures for a Funeral (2024, Sofia Bohdanowicz) DP – 7
Afternoons of Solitude (2024, Albert Serra) DP – 9

July
+Reservoir Dogs (1992, Quentin Tarantino) 35mm – 8 [up from 6]
+Pulp Fiction (1994, Quentin Tarantino) 35mm – 9 [up from 8]
Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another (2019, Jessica Sarah Rinland) – 8
Collective Monologue (2024, Jessica Sarah Rinland) 35mm – 7
The Abyss (1989, James Cameron) 70mm – 9
+Inglourious Basterds (2009, Quentin Tarantino) 35mm – 9 [up from 8]
+Moonrise Kingdom (2012, Wes Anderson) 35mm – 9
+Drive (2011, Nicolas Winding Refn) 35mm – 6
+Les Vampires (1915, Louis Feuillade) DP – 10
In the Mood for Love 2001 (2001, Wong Kar-wai) DP
Point Break (1991, Kathryn Bigelow) 35mm – 8
+Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989, Steven Spielberg) 35mm – 8 [up from 7]
Last Life in the Universe (2003, Pen-ek Ratanaruang) 35mm – 7
+PlayTime (1967, Jacques Tati) 70mm – 10
+Boogie Nights (1997, Paul Thomas Anderson) 70mm – 8
Eddington (2025, Ari Aster) DP – 5
Lost in America (1985, Albert Brooks) 35mm – 8
Modern Romance (1981, Albert Brooks) 35mm – 9
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich) DP – 7
+Kill Bill (2004, Quentin Tarantino) 35mm – 9 [up from 8]
+The Little Mermaid (1989, John Musker & Ron Clements) DP – 6
+Spectrum Reverse Spectrum (2014, Margaret Honda) 70mm
Equinox (2019, Margaret Honda) 70mm

August
+The Clock (1945, Vincente Minnelli) – 10
Neighboring Sounds (2012, Kleber Mendonça Filho) – 8
Abiding Nowhere (2024, Tsai Ming-liang) – 8
No Form (2012, Tsai Ming-liang) DP
Hua yang de nian hua (2000, Wong Kar-wai)
Egg and Stone (2012, Huang Ji) – 8
Videoheaven (2025, Alex Ross Perry) DP – 8
Single Belief (2016, Lee Kang-sheng)
The Foolish Bird (2017, Huang Ji & Otsuka Ryuji) – 7
+Stonewalling (2022, Huang Ji & Otsuka Ryuji) – 8
+No Form (2012, Tsai Ming-liang) DP
+Walker (2012, Tsai Ming-liang) DP
Walking on Water (2013, Tsai Ming-liang) DP
+Journey to the West (2014, Tsai Ming-liang) DP – 9 [up from 8]
+No No Sleep (2015, Tsai Ming-liang) DP
Sand (2018, Tsai Ming-liang) DP – 8
Sleepwalk (2012, Tsai Ming-liang) DP
Diamond Sutra (2012, Tsai Ming-liang) DP
+Where (2022, Tsai Ming-liang) DP – 8
+Abiding Nowhere (2024, Tsai Ming-liang) DP – 8
Norma Rae (1979, Martin Ritt) DP – 6
Highest 2 Lowest (2025, Spike Lee) DP – 6
L.A. Confidential (1997, Curtis Hanson) 35mm – 7
+L for Leisure (2014, Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn) DP – 9 [up from 8]
The History of Sound (2025, Oliver Hermanus) DP – 5
Monkey Business (1931, Norman Z. McLeod) DP – 8
The Black Cat (1934, Edgar G. Ulmer) 35mm – 8
Preparation for the Next Life (2025, Liu Bing) LED – 5
Honey Don’t! (2025, Ethan Coen) DP – 4
Blue Moon (2025, Richard Linklater) DP – 9

September
A Land Imagined (2018, Yeo Siew Hua) – 8
+Stranger Eyes (2024, Yeo Siew Hua) – 8 [up from 7]
The Missing (2003, Lee Kang-sheng) – 8
My Stinking Kid (2004, Lee Kang-sheng & Tsai Ming-liang) – 7
Help Me Eros (2007, Lee Kang-sheng) – 8
It Was Just an Accident (2025, Jafar Panahi) DP – 8
After the Hunt (2025, Luca Guadagnino) DP – 7
+Pierrot le Fou (1965, Jean-Luc Godard) 35mm – 10
The Chicken (2020, Sora Neo)
Melting (1965, Thom Andersen)
— ——- (1967, Thom Andersen & Malcolm Brodwick)
The Smashing Machine (2025, Benny Safdie) DP – 8
A Prince (2023, Pierre Creton) – 8
Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1975, Thom Andersen) – 8
7 Walks With Mark Brown (2024, Pierre Creton & Vincent Barré) DP – 8
Go, Toto! (2017, Pierre Creton) DP – 7
+Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003, Thom Andersen) – 10
One Battle After Another (2025, Paul Thomas Anderson) 35mm – 9
The Tony Longo Trilogy (2014, Thom Andersen)
Miroirs No. 3 (2025, Christian Petzold) NYFF, DP – 8
The Mastermind (2025, Kelly Reichardt) NYFF, DP – 8
Late Fame (2025, Kent Jones) NYFF, DP – 7
No Other Choice (2025, Park Chan-wook) NYFF, DP – 7
I Only Rest in the Storm (2025, Pedro Pinho) NYFF, DP – 7
Peter Hujar’s Day (2025, Ira Sachs) NYFF, DP – 8
The Secret Agent (2025, Kleber Mendonça Filho) NYFF, DP – 8
Sirāt (2025, Óliver Laxe) NYFF, DP – 9
Magellan (2025, Lav Diaz) NYFF, DP – 8
Below the Clouds (2025, Gianfranco Rosi) NYFF, DP – 8
Rose of Nevada (2025, Mark Jenkin) NYFF, DP – 7
Romería (2025, Carla Simón) NYFF, DP – 6
Kokuho (2025, Lee Sang-il) – 7
The Whirled (1961, Ken Jacobs) 16mm
Senseless (1962, Ron Rice) 16mm
New York Eye and Ear Control (1964, Michael Snow) 16mm
D. M. T. (1966, Jud Yalkut) 16mm
Sentimental Value (2025, Joachim Trier) DP – 6
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025, Mary Bronstein) Beyond Fest, DP – 8
Dracula (2025, Radu Jude) Beyond Fest, DP – 8
+Slow Action (2010, Ben Rivers) DP – 8 [up from 7]
Urth (2016, Ben Rivers) DP
+Look Then Below (2019, Ben Rivers) DP
A House of Dynamite (2025, Kathryn Bigelow) DP – 4
Bogancloch (2024, Ben Rivers) DP – 7

October
Ed Wood (1994, Tim Burton) 35mm – 8
Resurrection (2025, Bi Gan) Beyond Fest, DP – 9
Dracula (1931, Tod Browning) 35mm – 6
+Sirāt (2025, Óliver Laxe) Beyond Fest, DP – 9
Hamnet (2025, Chloé Zhao) DP – 6
Die My Love (2025, Lynne Ramsay) DP – 4
Anemone (2025, Ronan Day-Lewis) DP – 6
+One Battle After Another (2025, Paul Thomas Anderson) DP – 9
Left-Handed Girl (2025, Tsou Shih-ching) DP – 7
Suburban Fury (2024, Robinson Devor) – 8
My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow (2024, Julia Loktev) – 8
Bugonia (2025, Yorgos Lanthimos) DP – 6
Is This Thing On? (2025, Bradley Cooper) DP – 7
Urchin (2025, Harris Dickinson) – 6
Ballad of a Small Player (2025, Edward Berger) DP – 4
Frankenstein (2025, Guillermo del Toro) DP – 5
A Private Life (2025, Rebecca Zlotowski) DP – 6
+A City of Sadness (1989, Hou Hsiao-hsien) LED – 10
Bitter Money (2016, Wang Bing) – 8
Jay Kelly (2025, Noah Baumbach) – 7
Polly Two (2018, Kevin Jerome Everson) DP
When the Sun Is Eaten (Chi’bal K’iin) (2025, Kevin Jerome Everson) DP
Daughter’s Daughter (2024, Huang Xi) – 6
Tempting Heart (1999, Sylvia Chang) – 9
Pin de fartie (2025, Alejo Moguillansky) AFI Fest, DP – 8
Yes (2025, Nadav Lapid) AFI Fest, DP – 8
The Currents (2025, Milagros Mumenthaler) AFI Fest, DP – 8
Father Mother Sister Brother (2025, Jim Jarmusch) AFI Fest, DP – 8
Dead Man’s Wire (2025, Gus Van Sant) AFI Fest, DP – 6
The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025, Kaouther Ben Hania) AFI Fest, DP – 3
Kontinental ’25 (2025, Radu Jude) AFI Fest, DP – 8
What Does That Nature Say to You (2025, Hong Sang-soo) AFI Fest, DP – 8
Night of the Demon (1957, Jacques Tourneur) 35mm – 8
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (2025, Scott Cooper) DP – 6
We Are the Fruits of the Forest (2025, Panh Rithy) – 7
Double Happiness (2025, Joseph Hsu) – 5

November
The Little Sister (2025, Hafsia Herzi) TAFFF, DP – 7
The Fence (2025, Claire Denis) TAFFF, DP – 8
The Testament of Ann Lee (2025, Mona Fastvold) 70mm – 6
Train Dreams (2025, Clint Bentley) DP – 5
Her Will Be Done (2025, Julia Kowalski) Fortnight Extended, DP – 6
Brand New Landscape (2025, Danzuka Yuiga) Fortnight Extended, DP – 7
The Girls We Want (2025, Prïncia Car) Fortnight Extended, DP – 6
Wild Foxes (2025, Valéry Carnoy) Fortnight Extended, DP – 7
Nouvelle Vague (2025, Richard Linklater) 35mm – 8
Sound of Falling (2025, Mascha Schilinski) DP – 7
Marty Supreme (2025, Josh Safdie) DP – 8
+Breathless (1960, Jean-Luc Godard) 35mm – 10
Pillion (2025, Harry Lighton) DP – 7
The Things You Kill (2025, Alireza Khatami) DP – 6
The Love That Remains (2025, Hlynur Pálmason) DP – 7
Madam Butterfly (2009, Tsai Ming-liang)
The Night (2021, Tsai Ming-liang)
F1 (2025, Joseph Kosinski) – 6

December
Your Touch Makes Others Invisible (2025, Rajee Samarasinghe) – 7
Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025, James Cameron) 3D – 7
Escape From New York (1981, John Carpenter) – 8
Escape From L.A. (1996, John Carpenter) 35mm – 7
I Wasn’t There (2014, Sky Hirschkron)
Wake Up Dead Man (2025, Rian Johnson) DP – 6
BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (2025, Kahlil Joseph) – 7
Arco (2025, Ugo Bienvenu) – 6
Scarlet (2025, Hosoda Mamoru) – 7
Hedda (2025, Nia DaCosta) – 6
Little Amélie or the Character of Rain (2025, Maïlys Vallade & Han Liane-cho) – 7
KPop Demon Hunters (2025, Maggie Kang & Chris Appelhans) – 5
+Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point (2024, Tyler Taormina) 35mm – 8
Christmas, Again (2014, Charles Poekel) 35mm – 8
The Thing From Another World (1951, Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks) 35mm – 9
Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990, Joe Dante) 35mm – 8
+Punishment Park (1971, Peter Watkins) 35mm – 9
+Memoria (2021, Apichatpong Weerasethakul) DP – 10 [up from 9]

Ghosts of Pictures [Top 10 of 2024]

December 31, 2024January 6, 2025Ryan Swen Lists Tags: wrap-up Leave a comment

As usual, I perhaps spoke a bit prematurely about a great deal in my wrap-up last year. For the first time I can remember, I switched to a different #1 within the following year; while I still adore Walk Up and look forward to revisiting it soon, it’s probably not a greater, more mysterious achievement than Pacifiction. More importantly however, I genuinely believe that as strong as 2023 was as a release year, 2024 was even better, albeit in a harder to define way. Though many do consider this a banner year for film—plenty don’t, which could be influenced by what appears to be an unusually weak premiere year—it’s refreshingly difficult to find a uniform consensus on what exactly constitutes the year’s highlights. The less charitable will argue that there’s still much more agreement than there should be, and indeed at least one of my top three can be found in nearly any respectable list, but the picture is far more murky than the past few years. For a variety of reasons, I watched a far larger number of films than I have in a long time, including many of the most obvious contenders for critics’ lists or awards consideration, which nevertheless had a largely negligible effect on my top 10. Correspondingly, there are many causes célèbres which, whether I liked them or not, didn’t really come close to even being an honorable mention: some in no particular order, Red Rooms, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Good One, I Saw the TV Glow, Hundreds of Beavers, Challengers, The People’s Joker, The Substance, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Juror #2, No Other Land, Trap, Janet Planet, and many more.

To invert the title of one of the many great films this year, many of the best films of 2024 felt like ghosts of pictures, will-o’-the-wisps whose impact was enormous even as their precise import was elusive. Of course, that describes many of the films that I naturally gravitate towards, but it felt especially notable that so many of them embraced a certain irresoluteness that aimed towards a minor key. For all their ambiguity, films like Anatomy of a Fall, Afire, and even Showing Up felt more forceful in their aims, clear highlights in their filmmakers’s oeuvres that even these following films don’t. This might just be my inherent defensiveness, even given the relative lack of consensus this year, but it was a trend that felt welcome. (This is definitely a less polemical/voluble introduction/list than last year, but that’s not meant to reflect my lack of enthusiasm for these films or this year at large, far from it.)

As always, this list is merely meant to capture my feelings about the films I was able to see at this moment in time, strictly limited to the films that were theatrically released in New York City this year.

1. The Beast. The boldest, most heart-wrenching film of the year, and the fact that it coincided with the distended development of my Nocturama Reverse Shot piece felt like divine providence. I’ve probably spoken too much about how much its tonal variance across the three parts perfectly maps onto the spirit (certainly not the letter) of its putative source, but suffice it to say that Bertrand Bonello and his brilliantly volatile lead actors burrowed into the heart of a doomed romanticism, feeling more deeply and dangerously than anyone else this year.

2. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World. This, unlike a film just a few spots down this list, is the film that best sums up what it means to be alive this decade, probably for the worse. But Radu Jude’s dazzling admixture of sources, his daring willingness to not only make crass light of the workaholic hellscape we live in but to pay genuine, unflinching tribute to those it has spit out, is its own sort of tonic.

3. Evil Does Not Exist. The rare film where virtually every aspect seems to get more mysterious: its place in Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s body of work; its shifting stance on humanity and nature, town and country; its own relationship with Gift, which I had the good fortune of seeing twice this year as well. It was probably destined to be received a little more coolly than Drive My Car (little notice from critics’ groups, not making the Film Comment top 5) and I’m still not exactly sure how much I adore it. But its unerring focus, its ability to metamorphose and unsettle, is still one of the great achievements in filmmaking this year, and that’s more than enough.

4. Music. Somehow the earliest film I saw on this list (thanks to the Taipei Film Festival), but it’s still the one that confounds me the most, particularly in the way it handles its narrative. While it was perhaps too much to expect that Angela Schanelec’s recognition would continue to build upon the mild breakthrough of I Was at Home, But…, her decision to make things ever more abstruse simultaneously further developed her sense for ineffable emotions, yoked to a startling engagement with myth that enhances it as much as the plaintiveness of the songs at its core.

5. The Human Surge 3. Ironically, I actually don’t think this surpassed its predecessor in one crucial respect: while The Human Surge remains the key document of life in the 2010s, I sense a certain remove, caused both by the 360-degree camera and the deliberate murkiness of its narratives. But in every other respect, Eduardo Williams doubles down on what made that such a fascinating, generative work. It definitely doesn’t hurt to see Taiwan in the mix, and its use here, first only glimpsed briefly and then serving as the focus in what does rank for me as the greatest sequence of this decade, feels like a perfect encapsulation of the playful, unpredictable spirit.

6. A tie between Wang Bing’s Youth (Homecoming) and Youth (Hard Times). As obvious as this tie is, it’s a bit of a necessary cop-out for reasons I’ll get into below. I’ve written about the third prong of Wang Bing’s monumental trilogy multiple times already as the culmination and the greatest entry, but it’s true that the two are perhaps more interchangeable for me than that would suggest. Watching them on back-to-back days, they each possessed their own strengths: Hard Times was the most purely engaging, the most concentrated from scene-to-scene, and the interview with the worker towards the end might be the pinnacle of the project. But Homecoming, while it maybe grabbed me slightly less while I was watching it, seems to stand for something greater for itself: not only Youth as a whole, but also the experiences of these people which, by dint of its expansion in setting and personal relationships, this seems to fully capture the best. Obviously, they’re both among the essential films of the year.

7. In Our Day. One of those perfect “minor major” Hong Sang-soo’s which invariably makes it onto my lists, which doesn’t make them any less exciting or surprising to experience. Here, the interwoven narratives and the connections that they allow for is, in its own way, as exciting as Walk Up‘s, and the joy present in the simple scenes of communal eating and drinking games goes a great deal towards illuminating the strengths of his recent work.

8. Last Summer. Still haven’t seen nearly as many of Catherine Breillat’s films as I should have, but it was nevertheless gratifying to watch something so delectably in tune with its protagonist, turning every decision into something equally monstrous and sensible, even justified in the moral schema of the film. The fact that the film ends where it does, not exactly condemning its characters to their lies but also suggesting the extents to which they can bury each other, is a total wonder.

9. I’ts Not Me. Technically, Leos Carax’s immense 40-minute work shouldn’t be on this list, for the simple fact of its unusual simultaneous theatrical and streaming release. For that reason, it only played a single day in general release in New York City, and won’t feature on my top 10 release year lists by the strictest standards. But I couldn’t imagine a list of this sort without it, and because pairing it and the following entry would make less sense than placing the Youths together, it gets its own richly deserving spot here. I could say a great deal about its mischievous yet loving relationship to late Godard, the astonishing insight it provides into taboo and thorny subject matter, the beauty of its aphorisms on looking and storytelling. But what sticks with me most is the wondrous, unfairly maligned post-credits scene, an amalgam of Carax’s past work that finds the perfect balance between embodiment and artifice, the beauty of motion and the awareness of what must go into its creation.

10. A Traveler’s Needs. This Hong gets into this list on a technicality, which isn’t to downplay its brilliance whatsoever. Just as much as the other Hong on this list, this feels so much bigger than the single day that it seems to span, a series of intimate interactions that refuses to let on more about its central figure than absolutely necessary. The emotional range that Huppert’s “French lessons” engender, and how she in turn interprets them, is still one of the most mysterious things in his recent body of work, and a fascinating turn in their ongoing collaboration.

Even when expanding to eleven, that still leaves out the beautiful reflection on character and place in Zhang Lu’s The Shadowless Tower, the elegiac meta-cinematic texts of Víctor Erice’s Close Your Eyes, Lisandro Alonso’s confounding and mystical Eureka, the city/forest rhapsody of Bas Devos’s Here, and Sean Baker’s wildly heartbreaking Anora. Some other amazing, appropriately elusive works that won’t even finish off my green color-coded films: RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys (genuinely radical image-making tied to its characters), Phạm Thiên Ân’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (the most purely beautiful film of the year), Bonello’s Coma (as strange a pandemic film as any), Jonás Trueba’s You Have to Come and See It (so wise and playful in its portrait of relationships), Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths (a tragicomedic force of nature), Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (one of the most delightful and deserving consensus picks in recent memory), Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door (quietly the cinephile film of the year), Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (more complex and pleasurable than even its proponents typically recognize), Mati Diop’s Dahomey (perfectly balanced and mutable), Soi Cheang’s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (completely rousing and textured), Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (hilariously piercing in its insights on modern arrangements), Richard Linklater’s Hit Man (best Vertigo riff of the year), Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man (such a treat to see an American independent film with this much complexity and scale), Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Pictures of Ghosts (captures a city and its cinemas with welcome deftness), and Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples (so many of the funniest and best modulated performances of the year). May 2025 bring both just as many strong films and better results in the things and places that matter.

There and Everywhere, My Dear [HERE and HERE]

December 6, 2024Ryan Swen Reviews Tags: new release Leave a comment

Here
Here

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Bas Devos
Directed by Robert Zemeckis

It’s nothing new to have films with the exact same title within a few years of each other, an only mildly less amusing variation on the confluence of two films with similar subject matter coming out at the same time. There have been no fewer than three films in the past five years to have the English title of Limbo, and two films named Dogman have competed in major film festivals in the last six; film critic Neil Young has even utilized the Twitter hashtag #ThisTitleIsTaken to note the eternal recurrence of titles such as Home, Chaos, and Eden. Such dubbings point as firmly to the undying relevance of the themes they evoke (for better or worse), but it also suggests a desire for a flexible mind on the part of the viewer: many filmmakers might find it useful to outline but not relate the precise nature of the limbo or the home that their film will tackle.

What separates the latest and most potentially tantalizing iteration in this trend to date is, at least initially, the inevitability. When Here premiered at the Berlinale last year, and it became apparent that Cinema Guild would opt to release it in 2024, it seemed more and more likely that it would align with Here‘s release year. I thought of the idea of this review many months ago and, despite more than a half year separating the releases of Here and Here—along with 2024’s fellow travelers of Walter Salles’s Oscar contender I’m Still Here, the belated week-long run of Christopher Harris’s 2001 experimental film still/here, and various other films like Here After, I Like It Here, and You Can’t Stay Here–I endeavored to write about what may seem two entirely separate films solely linked by their names.

I want to stress that, though confusion and obfuscation are key aspects of reading this review, this is a sincere attempt to discuss two continuously generative films that hail from entirely different sources of inspiration and are aimed towards divergent affects. They also, coincidentally enough, come from two directors on the opposite end of their artistic careers and the spectrum of visibility. Here is the Belgian filmmaker Bas Devos’s fourth feature film, and is at best his second to make a breakthrough stateside. Each of his films—all low-budget works resolutely belonging to the arthouse—have incorporated celluloid in some way, even going so far as to involve 65mm for certain shots in his first two features, and they operate with a conscious miniaturist sensibility, all running under 90 minutes and dealing with individuals’ experiences of the city and people around them. By contrast, Here is Robert Zemeckis’s twenty-second feature film at the tail-end of a career full of whiz-bang Hollywood filmmaking, alternately acclaimed and despised technical experimentation, and curious reckonings—both purposeful and unconscious—with nostalgia for the American Century, even as it was still in progress. His oeuvre involves too many different digressions and periods to easily summarize, but it’s safe to say that, despite some abiding supporters (including myself), his level of critical and popular support at this time might be even below the few but largely glowing reviews that Devos has received.

Here has been characterized, largely accurately, as belonging to a new phase of Devos’s career after his first two notably pessimistic features Violet (2014) and Hellhole (2019). His third feature, the nocturnal city reverie Ghost Tropic, premiered a scant few months after the latter and heralded a much less harsh outlook, a shift to 16mm, and a greater incorporation of nature within the city of Brussels that has served as Devos’s primary location. Here, like its fellow Brussels-set films, is concerned with the immigrant experience in a less precarious sense than many contemporary works, using their enclaves and quotidian interactions to explore what it means to exist in a place that is both home and not home. Here‘s protagonists initially seem to embody these two separate mindsets: Stefan (Stefan Gota) is a Romanian construction worker preparing to return to his native country on holiday, though he may his extend his “stay” indefinitely; Shuxiu (Gong Liyo, who was also an editor on Wang Bing’s monumental Youth trilogy) is a Chinese bryologist (researcher of mosses) who teaches at a university and helps out with her aunt’s restaurant, with no mention of any plans to alter her life.

Life alterations (and lack thereof) form the central conundrums surrounding Here. Based on Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel—a 304-page tome itself expanded from a 6-page comic story in 1989, if there weren’t enough versions of Here already in play—it aims for what scans as an immensely ambitious undertaking: to chronicle the events of a specific place from prehistoric times to the modern day in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Like its source(s), Here uses a fixed, slightly askew perspective—here somewhere on the wall between a house’s living room and dining room; the graphic novel is closer to the corner of the room and produces a more angular yet more “neutral” composition, while the comic story’s point of view only looks at a corner of the living room by the window—that, in the film’s most publicized gambit, restricts Zemeckis to a single camera set-up for the entirety of Here.

It should be said that, despite my great admiration for both films, Here is a definitely stronger, more cohesive, and ultimately more beautiful work than Here. The opening shots of each swiftly communicate both the intentions and the level of subtlety each is operating on: Here observes a construction site in the distance with trees largely covering it in the foreground, an elegant interplay in emphases between the human-constructed city and the nature that will assert itself in fits and starts within these confines before eventually fully taking over the narrative. It’s difficult to talk about what exactly constitutes a shot within Here, since it uses the source’s technique of placing frames within frames to capture a part of the spot of land at a different time from the primary tableaux surrounding it, but Here opens with a car driving in front of the house, different frames within frames capturing three different cars along the same trajectory, before a multitude of views of the home interior and/or undeveloped land at different times that eventually resolve into the first dialogue scene with Here‘s central couple, Richard (Tom Hanks) and Margaret (Robin Wright), as they enter what was the former’s home for more than half a century. Elegance is and isn’t the name of the game for Here which, for all its narratives—intersecting in space but not time—reveals itself to be the tale of the Young clan, from the time that Richard’s parents moved into the house after World War II to his moving out in the early 2000s. For many, that sixty-year timespan feels reminiscent of the last time Zemeckis, Hanks, Wright, and co-screenwriter last collaborated on a film, resulting in the vastly more popular Forrest Gump thirty years ago. While Here‘s hokeyness and eagerness to track the times that are a’changin’ do strike a chord of recognition, it’s a comparison that feels as limited as the film’s perspective.

Speaking of which: one of Here‘s most brilliant moments reveals the canniness of its aesthetic strategy: the first definable “incident” on this patch of land, both chronologically and in the unfolding of the film, shows the extinction of the dinosaurs, complete with copious amounts of lava and fleeing reptiles. Any conventional treatment of this event, a spectacular global disaster, would feature grand sweeping shots of the devastation that showed off the scale of the barren, fiery landscapes. Here, on the other hand, refuses such elaborations, and its restraint signals the divide between this patch of land and others; while much can be inferred about the (eventually literal) outside world and a great deal is brought into the house, spoken about, and shown on television, it is left to the imagination what might happen. Here is a film that revels in imagination, in the direct images of its characters’ experiences and the thrumming richness of the world that surrounds them. Though it takes place over five days and four nights, its sense of time feels considerably more porous than the ordinary cycle of light and dark. Part of that has to do with Stefan’s habitual insomnia, which stretches out nights to achieve not the sustained mood of Devos’s previous film, but instead a slippage between waking and dreamed life.

Both Stefan and Shuxiu experience this second state at one point: the latter’s represents her first entry into the film, describing in Mandarin Chinese voiceover a morning in bed where she briefly forgot the names of the things surrounding her, moving from panic to an acceptance of a oneness with the world that is broken up by the sound of an outside siren. The images that accompany this recounting, a series of shots in the woods of the mosses and trees, precede Shuxiu’s first on-screen appearance, and are echoed during a brief nap Stefan takes while paying a visit to the hospital his sister works at. It’s possible to see Here as a film simultaneously highlighting and dismissing the unity of world. Though the various occupants of the land fall into consciously rhyming cycles, sometimes in a manner that manages to be equally revelatory and short-sighted—an early airplane fanatic and patriarch dies from the Spanish flu, while the Latine housekeeper for a Black family (notably the only domestic worker in the whole film) is all-too-unsubtly shown developing COVID—the swath of experience inevitably calls attention to the disparities on display.

The Youngs live in a continual state of middle-class malaise, with Richard forced to give up on his painting aspirations by an unplanned pregnancy, becoming an insurance salesman while he and Margaret continue to live in the house with his parents and siblings; a 1940s couple eventually gets rich by inventing the La-Z-Boy chair and immediately departs for California; two other families live there for a seemingly brief period of time before a death drives them away. But through all the passings in their own family, the Youngs stay far longer than they should, as much at the mercy of capitalist striving as their own inertia. Here reflects this emotional turmoil with an eerie placidity, incorporating their sufferings with those of others—including a Lenni-Lenape couple whose own family formation coincides on-screen with Richard and Margaret’s, eventually concluding with the woman’s death from old age—into the inexorable passage of time. Though certain milestones are clearer than others (none moreso than a television showing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, a sign of Zemeckis returning to the roots of his debut I Wanna Hold Your Hand), the signposting that generally occurs is resolutely ordinary or undercut: New Year’s Eve 2003, the end of the Revolutionary War being met with a verbal shrug. The origins of the La-Z-Boy, as much amusing on-screen attention as it gets, seem to be forgotten by history, and the only thing that people point out is the beautiful historical building across the street, belonging to, of all people, Benjamin Franklin’s extra-marital son, who staunchly backed the British colonial forces. The famed inventor and Founding Father makes an appearance, but that grand house is literally backgrounded at almost all times, a footnote in history only notable because it happens to be the only colonial governor’s mansion still standing today. To be overshadowed by barely remembered history is something of a terrible state of existence.

Here has a few half-remembered invocations of history, both anthropocentric and natural: a friend of Stefan’s points out that the first trains to travel in mainland Europe arrived in Brussels, which he in turn mentions to Shuxiu a little while after she tells him that mosses were the first plants to grow on land. Where the great anguish and only half-convincing catharsis of Here lies in all the ways the modern world can make a person feel small, Here is largely content with that designation, even embracing it in many ways. It’s useful of course to see the mosses that become so crucial to the last third of Here as a synecdoche for the film’s aims: a thing that grows everywhere without people noticing it—Stefan even draws a comparison to himself—that is itself “a forest full of life.” But this move into nature only heightens the more (figuratively) subterranean beauty of the abutting city in night and day, and draws further attention to the ways in which Stefan was already interacting with nature: his preparations of soup to fully empty his fridge before his journeys, the various seeds that mysteriously appear in his pocket, his trip to a communal garden. Here is much more about finding the joy in the place where you live, but Here‘s slender narrative invokes this idea when it comes to Stefan’s situation: in an early scene in his apartment, he looks out his window at the city, before turning back and saying “this is my home” in Romanian, a phrase that, depending where you look, has a completely different meaning.

Here has garnered many divergent reactions and points of comparison—Michael Snow’s structuralist masterpiece Wavelength, the fixed proscenium staging of the Lumières, the grand-scale suburbia of The Tree of Life, the similar constraints of Steven Soderbergh’s Presence from this year—but it’s worth pointing out what, to me, strikes me as some key differences from the little I’ve glimpsed of the graphic novel (I’ve read and liked the comic story decently). Though the central narrative appears to be similar, there’s an abstract quality to much of Here, with its constant aim to find contextless juxtapositions between similar activities across time, that Here, for all its strengths, does not attempt to emulate: even as the constant shifting makes it purposefully difficult to get fully acclimated to the various storylines for the first twenty minutes or so, this does ultimately aim to tell a set of linear stories.

And yet, Here‘s adherence to traditional dramatics and relatively coherent screen elements produces its own daring innovations and reference points. The former is the removal of the year designation within each frame within the frame, automatically producing a destabilizing effect wholly removed from the greater use of such frames in the comics. While guesses can be made as to the origin of these individual shots, and the frames within frames are used more to transition between scenes rather than to constantly interrupt the proceedings, the effect is of a time period (minutes or decades apart) intruding upon one another, where the death march of the narrative becomes only crueler and more sobering when juxtaposed in the same frame with a celebration at another time. Méliès might be the better silent cinema pioneer to refer to, both in terms of cutting-edge technology—the extensive use of generative AI to de-age the actors during the take is never completely convincing but feels remarkably close, an uncanny valley Zemeckis has dwelled in for many years—and in a self-conscious theatricality. The living room runs deep into the background, though not quite as much as the graphic novel’s, but while Here varies its focal points’ distance from the camera well, many scenes are played rather close, with characters frequently looking disconcertingly off-screen past the camera, or beginning or ending a scene by walking towards or away from an unknown sector. Perhaps the film’s single most galvanizing moment expands the viewer’s sense—knowingly jarring them away from the perspective of the characters—of the space with a sublimely simple device.

The ending of Here is as ambiguous as the ending of Here is unambiguous, but both find a clear place of resolution that centers around a realization of all that remains forgotten and uncomprehended. Even though Here‘s title is used frequently, down to being the very last word spoken, the formal choice that accompanies it acts as a revelation for the audience that, once again, was apparent to the characters all along. Here contains a much more modest, yet no less impactful movement of its own, carrying within it an unmistakable sense of tenderness and curiosity that explores an interior rather than exterior space. Nick Newman (via Adam Nayman) has a much more cynical view of the final perspective of Here‘s, and it’s true that its neat narrative tidiness speaks just as much to all that has been lost and the even further diminished stature of this central couple, but the very last frames within the frame—returning to look once more at the little living room where centuries of personal history have taken place—feels remarkably in line with Here‘s mosses: a mini-forest of life, full of pleasure and pain.

Taipei Mansions

The official website of Ryan Swen.

Author: Ryan Swen