3 Best Movies To Watch After Koyaanisqatsi (1983)
The Inventor
The Inventor is an odd little film. It is a mess throughout, and there are many instances where I got the sense that writer/co-director Jim Capbianco did not know what kind of story he was trying to tell or who his audience was. And yet it possesses an undeniable charm, one that sticks with you. Continue Reading →
草間彌生~わたし大好き~
The man behind the podcast An Invitation discusses how his appreciation of the director fueled his intensive dive into her films. Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation is a slow-burn horror about the dinner party from hell, one we should all be grateful not to attend, but podcaster Jim Penola thought otherwise. Instead, he invites listeners to sit down and stay awhile with An Invitation to the Invitation, a 15-part series that breaks down the 2015 film scene by scene. It’s full of thoughtful audio essays and radio-play style re-enactments set to an original score from his brother and composer John Penola. Taking hundreds of hours to write and produce, it’s unlike almost any other film podcast streaming today, pushing the genre into refreshing new waters. The second season of An Invitation launched in December 2022 and explores Kusama’s most recent work, 2018’s Destroyer. Continue Reading →
The Social Dilemma
Jeff Orlowski's documentary about the effects and ethics of social media lacks enough emotional depth or practical solutions to work. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) Did you know that the Internet is scary? Don’t worry, you're about to hear it again. Did you know that companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google store your information in order to sell it to advertisers? Of course, but maybe it'll really sink in if you hear it one more time. And—just bear with me—were you aware that these companies are so fine-tuned that they can track how long you stay on one given page, post, or picture? Of course you did, but The Social Dilemma doesn't care about that. There are a handful of working parts to Jeff Orlowski’s latest documentary, but rather than make use of its potential to say something new, it simply sticks to the most basic information and fleshes it out with some good old fashioned fear-mongering. It's part regular doc, part dramatic reconstruction, and mostly an insipid polemic, which, when paired with its potential to comment on the ethics of privacy and social manipulation, comes off as a regurgitation of what's been said before. Continue Reading →