Jack Auen and Kevin Walker have been making movies together since they were teenagers, and named their production collective Cosmic Salon after an exercise from one of their high school classes. Their work—including several short films from the last few years—blends elements of documentary, history, and formal exercise, but has always aspired to genre fiction. Their shared obsession with an now-obscure conspiracy theory about a device called the Chronovisor, invented in the mid-Twentieth Century and said to view the past…

Fifth or sixth time seeing this, but first in a multiplex. Still one of the best films of the year on a big ass screen. 

My earlier review seems not to be showing up here (I guess since I posted it before the premiere) so here it is again, originally published on Not Reconciled:

I’ve been a fan of Basma Alsharif’s work since I saw her first film, We Began By Measuring Distance, however many years ago. She’s one of…

EDIT: this is #1 in my favorite films of 2025

A film as much in dialogue with (and constant quotation of) Cézanne as with Kiarostami. Like Cézanne, Koberidze wants to save the pictorial traditions of still life and pastoral landscape, and the expansive possibilities of visual art generally, from the banal, literalizing tendencies of modernity. Like Cézanne, he finds the means to renew tradition in geometric splotches of color which restructure and reinvigorate spatial perception. 

Most of the impressionist and…

Ironically, the worst thing about this film—which celebrates how music symbolically transcends the violent racial and economic contradictions which society and history have never solved—is its music design. (Individual performers innocent, Ludwig Göransson not.) 

The best thing is how the inconsistencies of its narrative and myth and metaphor are employed to say multiple correct and virtuous things about culture and colonialism and the impossibility of Black/small business capitalism, and not to save America from its own critique. Sex and music…