Film by Ezekiel Yu
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A scene from Francis Ford Coppola's "Megadoc," as reviewed by poet/critic Zeke Yu for the automachination literary magazine, depicting the director looking up with his hands in the air, against the soft orange glow of a lamp and home library.

Non sum qualis eram: on Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megadoc” (2025)

Watching Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (2024) was a strange experience. On the one hand, to see one of America’s greatest directors still at work, flourishing a mostly self-financed, original work of art to the public was genuinely encouraging. On the other hand, witnessing such an ungainly, out-of-step vision progress to its bizarre conclusion seemed also a reminder of how, generally speaking, artists tend to lose expressive power as they age, and that not every personal passion project is necessarily worth sharing with the world, prior filmography be damned.

However, when you’ve directed The Godfather Trilogy, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now, the only tangible difficulties in the way of getting your movie produced are, by and large, logistical. That is not to say that Megalopolis had an easy development process: Coppola conceived of the story in the 70s and, after casting switch-ups, complicated financing arrangements, and the working-out of his own bugbears regarding the project, began legitimate principal photography in 2022! But that is to say, if you are Francis Ford Coppola, if you want to get a movie made, odds are it will get made—so most of the gushing about how incredible it was, circa the 2024 premiere of Megalopolis, that a director of his age and reputation released a highly idiosyncratic, genre-defying movie in this world of shameless IP-regurgitation seemed a tad overdone. After all, most aspiring artists have some kind of idiosyncratic vision they want to put out, but most aspiring artists don’t also own multi-million dollar wine and resort companies to fall back on if major studios reject your proposals. […]

Film by Ezekiel Yu
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A still from Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights," depicting Heathcliff and Catherine (Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi), in an embrace during a cloudy sunset at sea. It is being reviewed by film critic Ezekiel Yu for automachination literary magazine.

Blundering Brontë: on Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” (2026)

When I first read Wuthering Heights last year, though I could acknowledge and even admire its more forward-thinking aspects, I remained generally unmoved by the melodrama, propelled as it is by stupidity and sensationalized behavior/sentiments. These are, of course, staples of the Gothic Romance, and how Emily Brontë muffles the hysteria by concealing the meat of her story underneath a more sane (albeit “unreliable”) narrative layer assuredly plays a part in why it has retained the status of a classic almost two centuries after its publication; although it is certainly the plot’s brooding avenger Heathcliff and his doomed romance with Catherine Earnshaw, not clever literary technique, that most strongly lives on in public imagination.

Such is why most film and TV adaptations excise the original enfolding narrative and mainly focus on the Heathcliff/Catherine dynamic, plus the two’s involvement with the neighboring Linton Family; and ending the story when Catherine dies, heartbroken, as her childhood love rages at their ill-starred fate. It’s a smart choice for the sake of efficiency (stuffing an elaborately plotted novel such as Wuthering Heights into the confines of a feature-length production requires significant cutting anyway) but, as a result, leaves the audience with a sopping pile of melodrama undamped by the source material’s conceit of a more or less neutral POV being narrated to and reacting with reserved distress at the goings-on. […]

Poetry by Don Moss
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A black and white self-portrait in reflecting mirors by filmmaker, poet, and photographer Joel Parrish, to whom Don Moss's poem "Hawkeye" is dedicated.

POEM: Don Moss’s “Hawkeye” (for Joel P.)

HAWKEYE  

(for Joel P.)

1
Wishing the now of captures lingered
So one might shoot again,
But culling the big twelve,
Several were set aside for next-of-kin
2
The miss-framed better-forgotten
Refractions of light
In cahoots with chemistry
Of that grainy time
3
Of tempered view
Fawning chameleon memory
The white of a face
Planed in a burning blink, […]

Film by Ezekiel Yu
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Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal standing in a forest in Chloe Zhao's "Hamnet", as reviewed by poet and film critic Ezekiel Yu for the automachination literary magazine.

Passion’s Tatters: Reviewing Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet” (2025)

There is a legend that Johann Sebastian Bach’s sublime Chaconne, in his “Partita No. 2 in D Minor for Solo Violin”, was composed as a memorial to his first wife, Maria Barbara, who unexpectedly passed while Bach was away on a two-month work trip. It is based mostly on apocryphal evidence, and bolstered by certain musicological analyses pointing to salient themes/motifs common to that style of music; but really the main appeal of this theory is that it makes sense, to our contemporary sensibilities, that a work of such staggeringly intense emotive power could only come from a place of commensurate emotional intensity in the artist responsible for its creation.

Of course, there’s no solid reason to believe that this really was the case. Bach, in particular, actually seemed to be among the more quotidian of the canonical Western composers, as much of what has been passed down to posterity regarding his personal life consists of rather workaday details typical of any diligent craftsman, extraordinarily prolific though he was: Concerns over employment, instrumentation, the skills (or lack thereof) of the musicians available to him, etc. Much of this also arrives to us secondhand, from the reports of his colleagues and progeny—whoever Bach was to himself, in his own words, we have very little idea of.

But after Bach came Romanticism, and the notion of a composer producing a tour de force out of the welter of his deep mourning simply strikes the modern art lover as perfectly natural; and doubly so if such a work bears the sort of solemn profundity that the last movement of the Second Partita does. Beethoven, after all, had his Immortal Beloved—why shouldn’t his Baroque predecessor have something like that, too? Never mind that the man seemed to whip up masterpieces at the drop of a hat—his duties as Thomaskantor at Leipzig obligated him to compose a new cantata every week—or that the great artists end up creating their major works out of a wide range of inspirations and emotional contexts. His wife died, and he was not there to witness her death. Hence: Chaconne. […]

Poetry by Don Moss
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A still from Alex Sheremet's and Joel Parrish's upcoming documentary on the Georgia poet Don Moss, looking out in profile in the dark.

Poetry on Film: Don Moss’s PRO SE

Pro Se

Inside, that highly practiced part of one
Spoke louder with the intent to note
What could be deciphered by focused pure
Repetition, and details might amount,
Clearly point, to woven particulars

Of the moment it directed these words’
Tracing, as charcoal copies that headstone’s
Call to attention of the infrequent
Visitor, of the whole damned repeating
Rebelling wish to dig up, get out, before […]

Film by Ezekiel Yu
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A shot from Sam Raimi's "Send Help," depicting Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien washed up on a beach, where she holds a knife pointed towards him. The film is being reviewed by Ezekiel Yu for the automachination literary magazine.

Role Reversal: Reviewing Sam Raimi’s “Send Help” (2026)

Your boss is not your friend.

You might get along with them, may even like them to a certain extent, but make no mistake: They exist on a higher plane. Their priorities differ from yours. Crack jokes with them all you want, or go bowling with them at the End of Year function, or what have you. None of that changes the fact that you are an underling. Say one wrong thing—or a few wrong things, in an untimely sequence—and all it takes is a snap of their fingers, an obligatory sit-down with HR, and you’re back on the job hunt, desperately peddling your employment profile in the virtual cold.

I’ve had some bad bosses (the micro-managing, drug-addicted kind). I’ve also worked under a few that I got along with swimmingly. Again, all more or less inconsequential: They are there to tell you what to do, and you are there to do what they tell you to do. Simple as that. Under the current socioeconomic regime, this is as hard-baked a commandment in one’s working life as the Laws of Thermodynamics are in physics. Resist these constraints at your own peril.

SEND HELP’s Bradley Preston isn’t just a bad boss. He’s an insufferable one.

Film by Jessica Schneider
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An image of musician Scottt Walker, subject of Stephen Kijak's documentary "Scott Walker: 30 Century Man," as reviewed by Jessica Schneider for the AUTOMACHINATION literary magazine.

Betraying Sunday: Stephen Kijak’s “Scott Walker: 30 Century Man” (2006)

Sundays are reserved for Ella. That is, Ella Fitzgerald. I’ve always associated her music with the melancholy of Sundays and rain—her voice offering the last glimpse of hope one might feel before having to return to work on Monday.

Yet, this Sunday I deviated, and instead I listened to Scott Walker. This is after having watched the 2006 documentary, “Scott Walker: 30 Century Man”, which is currently streaming on Criterion. I always love learning about new artists, and now Scott Walker is another to join my roster of names that I’ve discovered late. Among them are singer-songwriter Judee Sill and Sixto Rodriguez, both of whom were neglected in their day.

Scott Walker, however, follows a different trajectory, in that he was well known in the 1960s when he recorded with The Walker Brothers (not brothers and none named Walker, they were a seeming ‘boy band’ at least superficially). He then went on to record his solo work, only to disappear and return wearing a baseball cap to release avant-garde songs. (In fact, it was believed that The Walker Brothers would become the next Beatles—wishful thinking, I suppose.) 

Film by Ezekiel Yu
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A film still from Kelly Reichardt's "Wendy and Lucy," depicting the actress Michelle Williams, as reviewed by poet and film critic Ezekiel Yu for the automachination literary magazine.

Good Girl: On Kelly Reichardt’s “Wendy and Lucy” (2008)

Not every film needs to be complex in order to impress; nor is “impressiveness” a virtue one must always necessarily achieve in order to create successful art. By “impressiveness” I suppose I mean something like “bigness” or “grandiosity” or some baroque plot convolution(s) that leave a viewer struggling to put the pieces of the story in their correct order. Certainly there are many great films that operate in an almost puzzle-like manner (think of the austerely cryptic quality of Last Year at Marienbad, or Memento’s dove-tailing plot structure) but one would be remiss to forget the undeniable pleasures—and merits—of a simple story, simply told, whose only bells and whistles are certain subtleties that can be so slight one is liable to miss them on first viewing.

I was struck by this dichotomy very recently after seeing two movies, one right after the other: Bi Gan’s Resurrection (2025) and Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (2008). Resurrection, epic in most senses of the word, bowls one over with complex film-craft illusion and a narrative so bizarre (at least to this Westerner) it borders on alienating; and though its visual language intrigues—touching the sublime, at times—Resurrection’s indulgence of unconventionality can veer into the downright silly, or is even sacrificed for the sake of some mawkish emotional beat. (A film that handles similar meta-themes and likewise explores the visual potentialities of cinema to the nth degree, but, in my view, does so far more efficiently, is Tarsem Singh’s The Fall.) […]