Tag: american film

Film by Alex Sheremet
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A snapshot of Alcatraz Prison, with the text "Brett Story's 'The Prison in Twelve Landscapes'" underneath it, as reviewed by poet and filmmaker Alex Sheremet for his literary magazine, automachination.

Soul on Ice: Reviewing Brett Story’s “The Prison in Twelve Landscapes” (2016)  

Not long ago, my co-director, Joel Parrish, told me of an excellent film which combines minimalist scripting with unconventional imagery, grounding both through a cleverly-unfolding theme. It helps that this theme is ‘big’ (prison and its encroachments), yet the artistic choices in Brett Story’s THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES should be studied by documentarians of all stripes. Lacking plot, it is full of self-contained vignettes which work the viewer in subtle ways. Though deeply opinionated, the film has no cheap politicization. There is music (or rather, a soundtrack), with ambient sound front and center, while found objects, such as the prison telephone calls bookending the narrative, help establish its emotional draw. “Man, I sho’ wish y’all can be home for my wedding,” one such message relates. “I’ma go tie this knot one mo’ time, and that’ll be it for me. But that’s alright, when y’all do come home, we’ll be here waiting on y’all.” In this exchange, Brett Story manages to characterize both speaker and prisoner, yet shows neither—thus revealing both. In fact, no prisoners are shown at all except those long out of prison. The only crime ever named is that of an unsecured trashcan lid and the resulting two-week stint in jail. In a deft move, the viewer is allowed to fill the gap of cause and effect, which works because aggregate causes are so well limned. Even the film’s title assumes an omnipresence across vantage and time, one that can be seen—and therefore scrutinized—through all of them. […]

Film by Ezekiel Yu
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A still from Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza's "Warfare" (2025), as reviewed by Ezekiel Yu, depicting American soldiers in Iraq shouting, laughing, and celebrating in a small room.

Collapse: on Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s “Warfare” (2025)

Though Warfare is certainly one of the most visceral films of the year, there is also a curious distance to it; this has partly to do with the all-encompassing generalization of the title. It’s not named after the squad(s) of Navy SEALs involved, nor “The Battle of Ramadi” (the 2006 Iraq War conflict on which the action is based), nor any other event-specific element the salience of which would have worked perfectly fine as title—it’s simply “warfare.” This is what happens in war, the choice seems to say. Swap these young American soldiers for WWII paratroopers or Napoleonic cavalrymen, or Zulu warriors, for that matter: at the end of the day, they can be substituted for any number of able-bodied youths who are sent off somewhere to fight together and kill and, likely, die.

Yet, at the same time, there are things about this particular episode of bloodletting that are inextricable from its period in history. These are American Special Forces, and the writer-director team of Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza (a former SEAL whose firsthand account of Ramadi serves as the basis of Warfare’s narrative) do not skimp on the accuracy of militaristic procedure: their script is almost entirely jargon, though judiciously peppered with boyish camaraderie and moments of unfiltered human horror. Even a naïve viewer can see that the attention to detail is unique, and the film certainly takes its time walking the viewer through the almost bureaucratic process of holding down a defensive position, under enemy fire, whilst requesting extraction after your position has been exposed. […]

Film by Ezekiel Yu
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Rose Byrne's character in Mary Bernstein's "If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You" (2025), as reviewed by the poet and film critic Ezekiel Yu for the automachination literary magazine.

Just Tell Me What To Do: Reviewing “If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You” (2025)

Parenting isn’t easy, and motherhood—from pregnancy to birth to postpartum to the entirety of life—often gets ugly. In fact, the experience of childbirth is among the most physically violent things that can happen to a human body; there is breakage and leakage, and much blood, and intense labor, and those are only the brute physiological facts of the matter. There are all sorts of methods and procedures to make this process more bearable, of course, but all that aside, you are still being rendered as a passage, a causeway; inert and gorily split open so that some small, helpless entity, molded in you, borne heavily by you, can come howling out.

Is that a cynical way of putting it? Maybe, but all the same, when the overwhelmed protagonist of Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, Linda, says to her therapist, “I’m one of those people that’s not supposed to be a mom”, one has little difficulty believing it. Never mind that she may have ulterior (i.e. deceptive) motives for stating this: The film is really one long protracted state of crisis, where Linda gradually comes to terms with the feeling that she is unfit to be the mother of her child, and in many ways takes the shape of a birth-trauma metaphor, as the main action kicks in with water breaking through Linda’s apartment roof and is throughout concerned with the physical/emotional toll this resultant burden of care obligates one to uphold. […]

Film by Ezekiel Yu
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A still from Paul Thomas Anderson's "One Battle After Another," as reviewed by poet and critic Ezekiel Yu.

¡Viva la Exageración! – Reviewing Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” (2025)

Paul Thomas Anderson’s title seems to echo the famous quote about history, but it could also easily be applied to raising a child. It is fitting, then, that the main action of One Battle After Another involves the hunt for a missing child, since a large part of parenting has to do with the risk of your child’s endangerment, and the consequent hope that you have given them the tools necessary for their well-being in the event that endangerment does arise.

Broaden the scope of a single child to an entire generation, and you have one of the film’s primary concerns—anxieties, even—over which many of its characters incite conflict, and/or try to secure on their own often blinkered, and ridiculous, terms. Anderson’s camera (operated by Michael Bauman, on 35mm and using VistaVision cameras) even seems to operate like a helicopter parent, tracking its subjects constantly through the American proto-dystopia, as diligent on its targets whether they are walking down hallways or on car chases through heavy traffic. And the child in question, Willa Ferguson née Charlene Calhoun (Chase Infiniti in her big screen debut), is by turns idealized and diminished by her elders until she is finally given the opportunity to dictate her fate in the film’s climax. […]

Film by Ezekiel Yu
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A shot from Paul Cox's "Man of Flowers," depicting the protagonist (Norman Kaye) touching a statue, as reviewed by poet and critic Ezekiel Yu of the North Texas Film Critics Association.

The Bouquet She Makes: On Paul Cox’s “Man of Flowers” (1983)

She is young and pretty, a little mousy, with an artsy shock of hair. He is middle-aged, with severe, hawkish features, and is almost always formally dressed. She gigs as a model and shacks up with a volatile, once-notable artist who treats her callously. He is single, jobless but with a great deal of money, and spends his time collecting art and practicing the organ at the local church. His name is Charles, and her name is Lisa, and they seem to have met at a community art class where Charles is a student, painting, among other things, Lisa’s naked body.

But outside of class, for $100, Charles has Lisa come to his ornate home so that he may watch her—methodically, smilingly—fully disrobe. He can only last so long before he is overwhelmed, and he must escape to another room.

It’s a striptease, of course, though for Charles Bremer, the label is too crude. And since Charles is the protagonist, his is the point-of-view Dutch-Australian director Paul Cox has viewers co-engage with for the majority of the narrative; her disrobing is shown to the tune of an opera, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammemoor, as Lisa strips to her skivvies and beyond, and the camera cuts to a seated Charles, who looks increasingly perturbed by her gradual revelation. […]

Film by Jessica Schneider
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A shot from Richard Linklater's classic 1990s film, "SubUrbia," as reviewed by Jessica Schneider thirty years later.

1990s Eternal Ennui: Reviewing Richard Linklater’s “SubUrbia” (1996)

There was something unusual about American culture in the 1990s. For one, this was the final generation privy to the ‘safety bubble’—a time before 9/11, before the Internet became a necessity rather than a luxury, and before the world lived on their phones. As someone who underwent her teens and early 20s throughout this time, I can say there was a sense of ‘living in the present’ that is unlike today. (After all, in summer one is only alive at night.)

This was a time that gently evoked the 1960s and ‘70s, where poetry was ‘popular’ (slam, Allen Ginsberg, and the Confessionals), young women were having memoirs published about their depressions, women song writers were being taken seriously, and with that there was this sense of ‘possibility’, at least among those who were white, middle-class, and living in the suburbs. So much is possible at 3 a.m. in a Denny’s. But there was also this idea of invincibility—that this Blockbuster Rental on every corner era would always be, so one need not aim for change. Films like Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites (1994) and Kevin Smith’s Mallrats (1995) touch upon this, but nowhere else is this eternal ennui seen better than in Richard Linklater’s SubUrbia. […]

Film by Ezekiel Yu
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A still from Ari Aster's "Eddington," depicting Sheriff Cross (Pedro Pascal) in red light, as reviewed by film critic Ezekiel Yu.

Once Upon a Time: On Ari Aster’s “Eddington” (2025)

There’s a shot in Ari Aster’s latest feature Eddington when the protagonist, Sheriff Joe Cross, endures a moment of great public humiliation that calls to mind John Ford’s great closing shot of John Wayne in The Searchers: an open doorway, suffused with desert light, within which a man, and others, are framed. But here, the moment passes quicker than in Ford’s film, with very little accompanying magnitude; at least not anything of the sort that sends that tall, lonely figure off into the horizon.

Joaquin Phoenix, for one thing, is not John Wayne, and his Joe Cross is not the same man as Ethan Edwards, although both men are fueled by deep-seated resentment. Phoenix pitches Cross’s voice asthmatically high, almost choked, and is far less physically imposing than the Duke; more often than not, one senses Cross ineptly attempting to present himself as the sort of swaggering character Wayne would play in a John Ford picture, rather than naturally embodying it. (The scene in question being this point’s flagrant proof.) Seeing as Aster built Eddington up from the remains of a scrapped Western, the amount of references and visual homages should come as no shock to the attentive viewer, and how the writer-director molds his new creation around those conventional themes and techniques for contemporary times is certainly a major factor of its appeal. […]

Film by Jessica Schneider
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A still from David Lynch's "Eraserhead", featuring Jack Nance with his iconic hair, as reviewed and analyzed in Jessica Schneider's retrospective analysis of the film.

Embracing the Oddness: David Lynch’s “Eraserhead” (1977)

Have you ever thought of life in terms of allegory? Where everything is an illusion, even reality itself? And secondly, is it necessary to ‘understand’ all parts of a particular something, especially if that something is reflective of one’s man’s neurosis (or not)? If you’re looking for straight answers in David Lynch’s Eraserhead, you will be disappointed. Rather, in order to welcome this film, one must first embrace the idea of allegory, sort of akin to Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. (An influence for this film.) I mean, think about it—once you come to accept that Gregor Samsa has, in fact, turned into a giant bug, the story itself is actually pretty straightforward. The same can somewhat be said for Eraserhead. Once you come to accept the distorted universe in which Henry lives, then it can sort of fall into place.

First, let’s begin with the setting. Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) lives in an industrial, dilapidated hellhole with no trees or greens, merely buildings, rain, mud, muck, and plumes of smoke. He works as a printer at a factory, lives in a crappy building with low ceilings, and has holes in his bedding, with no space to grow or bloom. In short, we can presume that he hates his life. Across from him lives an attractive, flirty woman who informs him that someone named Mary wants him to come over for dinner. (Said woman later seduces him.) When they speak, there is this aloof detachment to their voices, as though they’re moving about in a dream. Then, when Henry joins Mary (Charlotte Stewart) and her parents for dinner, conversation goes as (somewhat) such: […]