M. Leary

Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001)

(Ed. Note: This was originally published at The Matthew’s House Project.) Or, David Lynch 101 Mulholland Drive is the latest addition to a bizarre canon. This canon is a body of work slowly spreading out through film history on a trail pioneered by films designed to defy conventional methods of understanding. Next to Tarkovsky’s stark clarity or […]

M. Leary

The Decay of Fiction (O'Neill, 2003)

(Ed. Note: This was originally published in The Matthew’s House Project.) Is this really just a Detective remake? “My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come […]

M. Leary

Wavelength (Snow, 1967)

(Ed. Note: This was originally published in The Matthew’s House Project.) Wavelength has been a fixture in the canon of avant-garde filmmaking ever since its first appearance in 1967. As much performance art or installation art as filmmaking, it is just one 45-minute cut of an extended time-lapse zoom focused on a spot on the wall between two […]

M. Leary

Le rayon vert (Rohmer, 1986)

(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.) The Green Ray (sometimes known as “Summer” due to a quirk in its American distribution) is one of Rohmer’s more personal films, which is saying a lot. His films are typically about well-defined individuals coming to terms with themselves through a moral or emotional crisis. Rohmer’s indirect style […]

M. Leary

The Sun (Sokurov, 2005)

The Sun is the final installment of a three part series of biopics planned by Alexander Sokurov, one of the most consistent and unpredictable directors currently on the scene. Each film covers a key moment in the life of a world leader, the first two films,Moloch and Taurus, featuring Hitler and Lenin. The Sun follows around the surprisingly enigmatic Hirohito […]

M. Leary

Unknown Pleasures (Jia, 2002)

(Ed. Note: This was originally published at The Matthew’s House Project.) In the first scene of Unknown Pleasures, a teenager rides his motorcycle through the streets of Datong, the heart of a Chinese province as affected by its rapid economic development as it is by the Western influences that this commercial growth has enabled it to embrace. […]

M. Leary

Kings and Queen (Desplechin, 2005)

(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.) Kings and Queen is about is about the sort of people who are self-deluded, and what happens when these treasured delusions are no longer conceivable. Adjacent to this theme is a collection of characters that are not only deluded, but are so caught in their idiosyncracies that […]

M. Leary

Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (Angelopoulos, 2004)

  (Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.) The Weeping Meadow, the first installment in a planned trilogy narrating the fortunes of Greece in the 20th century, is an odd sort of history. More operatic than descriptive, more transcendental poesis than mere reportage, and more steeped in vision than memory, it is legitimately Homeric […]

M. Leary

The Life Aquatic (Anderson, 2004)

(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.) “Towards an Appreciation of the Ridiculous Jaguar Shark” Others have covered this film well enough, so I only offer a passing remark. All the while reveling in a battery of self-references lining the interior of Anderson’s script, The Life Aquatic also seems bent on taking on a life of […]