by Peter Valelly

In his latest opus, veteran oddball filmmaker Peter Greenaway brings his ornate, grotesque, and visually immaculate style to bear on a particular and peculiar chapter in the life of Soviet ur-auteur Sergei Eisenstein. As its title suggests, Eiseinstein in Guanajuato follows the iconic filmmaker during an extended stay in Mexico. In the early 1930s, Eisenstein arrived in Guanajuato seeking to create an epic film chronicling Mexican history and politics, sponsored financially by left-wing muckraking American novelist Upton Sinclair. The project never quite came together, but not before Eisenstein blew through his budget shooting dozens of miles of film—all while allegedly undergoing a sexual awakening thanks to an affair with Jorge Palomino y Cañedo, a young academic who had been appointed his guide to Mexico.

by Peter Valelly

Directed by André Turpin, who has also served as a cinematographer for queer Québécois filmmaking wunderkind Xavier Dolan, among others, Endorphine is a masterclass in style in search of a stronger foundation of substance to ground itself in.
 
Stripped down to its most straightforward thread of plot—something along the lines of: “a teenage girl grapples with the trauma of witnessing her mother’s murder”--Endorphine might not sound like a film that would turn out to be a mindbending meditation on the nature of time, the permeability of reality, and the power of the unconscious mind. But that’s exactly what the film becomes over the course of its lean 83-minute runtime. Slowly and fitfully at first, the film veers into choppy narrative digressions and strange loops. Then, around the halfway mark, the story leaps ahead into the abstract while still remaining just barely tethered to its emotional core.

by Peter Valelly

Norwegian writer-director Eskil Vogt’s Blind follows the psychological wanderings of Ingrid, a housewife who has recently and unexpectedly lost her sight. As the movie begins, Ingrid has quietly made a personal decision to never leave her Oslo apartment, and finds herself working on a novel in a depressed, hallucinatory, intermittently drunken stupor, emotionally adrift and increasingly unhinged. 

by Peter Valelly

Todd Haynes’ 1995 film Safe—not only the writer-director’s finest work, but one of the best films of the past 30 years—is searing, prescient, and intimate. However, despite its potent emotional gravity, it’s not an entirely straight-faced film, but it’s also not quite a satire. Instead, it’s infused with subtle currents of camp and melodrama, which buttress rather than undermine its delicate and humane portrait of one woman’s inner psyche and its oblique exploration of the fear that undergirds modern social norms. 

1956’s The Searchers, the definitive work by the iconic director John Ford, is effectively the pivot point in the history of the cinematic Western, representing the summation and apex of the genre’s traditional form and therefore the launching pad for its many reinventions. It’s also a masterpiece in the surest sense of the word, suffused with epic adventure and gripping drama and equipped with a stacked roster of compelling performances—none moreso than John Wayne’s legendary star turn as Ethan Edwards.

by Peter Valelly

by Peter Valelly

by Peter Valelly

Director and co-writer Sean Baker’s marvelous Tangerine is a delirious, delightful, and unhinged snapshot of queer Los Angeles, a willfully noncommercial and even at times abrasive film shot on a handheld iPhone 5s and brimming with sex, drugs, violence, and vice (and, in one scene, no small amount of vomit). Underneath, however, it’s also a bracingly emotionally bare character piece that reimagines the tradition of cult cinema and revitalizes the legacy of queer filmmaking.

Director: Sean Baker
Writers: Sean Baker, Chris Bergoch
Producers: Sean Baker, Karrie Cox, Marcus Cox, Darren Dean, Shih-Ching Tsou
Editor: Sean Baker
Cast: Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, Mya Taylor, Karren Kargulian, Mickey O'Hagan, James Ransone

Runtime: 88m.
Genre: Comedy/Drama
Country: USA
Premiere: January 23, 2015 - Sundance
US Theatrical Release: July 10, 2015
US Distributor: Magnolia Pictures

by Peter Valelly

by Peter Valelly