History in short

December 22, 2003

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Jack Goes Boating, 2010 - ★★★½
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The luxury of directing yourself, if you’re Philip Seymour Hoffman, is that you can just point the camera at yourself and be confident of a great performance. As is often the case for me, I spent a while worrying that it would be the cliche of a Hoffman performance. As always, he reveals depths to […]
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History of the Occult, 2020 - ★★★½
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This is conceptually perfect and, unlike many clever genre movies, it’s not undermined by the director’s pleasure in his own cleverness. The first few scenes are just a tad expository but that does not extend too far into the movie; when it’s time to be oblique and puzzling, Cristian Ponce is more than willing to […]
In Shanghai, 2001 - ★★★½
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Watching this right after Suzhou River makes me think even more about how telling stories — or filming them — affects us. In this case it’s what happens when someone doesn’t want a story told, and how that affects the story the young director was telling about his city. Lou Ye has some opinions about subjectivity.
Suzhou River, 2000 - ★★★★
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That’s the melancholic metatextual neo-noir I love. Two stories, one pair of dopplegangers, plenty of tragedy, and no real indication as to what’s real and what’s not. Our anonymous narrator says it’s a story, then says it’s someone else’s story, and who knows? I don’t think you can derive a truth from what’s presented. We […]