Festival Season Periwinkles (Patreon)

Nothing but home-baked goodness.

Mademoiselle Kenopsia (Denis Côté, 2023) [TIFF]

While watching Mademoiselle Kenopsia, it occurred to me that Côté’s tendency to move all around the aesthetic gameboard has kept his filmmaking in a rather inchoate state of development. Whereas another filmmaker would look back at Kenopsia (or any of the other films), identify its strengths and weaknesses, and then build on those strengths, Côté just keeps moving on, and this results not only in a general unevenness in his oeuvre, but a sense of underdevelopment. Each subsequent film could be better, but Côté chooses instead to begin again from the ground up. The only other filmmaker who exhibits this tendency to the same extent is probably Takashi Miike, whose audiences are not entirely distinct from Côté’s but do tend to come to the movies with different expectations.

A Normal Family (Hur Jin-ho, 2023) [TIFF]

Irony alert: you may be surprised to learn that the clan at the centre of A Normal Family are not normal at all. There are two brothers, you see. Jae-gyu (Jang Dong-gun) is an upstanding paediatrician. Jae-wan (Sul Kyung-gu) is a high-power lawyer with dubious morals. When their respective kids meet up one night and indulge in a bit of the old ultraviolence, the family is forced to make some difficult choices.

Sira (Apolline Traoré, 2023) [TIFF]

It’s not that one wants to defend these al-Qaeda cretins, but Traoré has made a film that follows the basic template of a Rambo sequel, tackling complicated geopolitics by dumbing things down.

Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros (Frederick Wiseman, 2023) [TIFF / NYFF]

The “action,” if you will, is culinary, in the sense that the bustle of the kitchens, the preparation of white asparagus, kidneys with passionfruit, or white flowers sculpted from John Dory filets, are relentlessly absorbing. But Wiseman also follows Michel and César on observational errands, speaking to the organic farmer who provides their goat’s milk, visiting one of their primary vintners, or learning about the process of aging cheeses, in great detail. These are moments that might initially feel extraneous or indulgent, until one realizes that Menus-Plaisirs is a slow film about slow food.

Trailer for a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars (Jean-Luc Godard, 2023) [TIFF / NYFF]

The trailer for Phony Wars not only stands in for the nonexistent film. It serves as a retroactive trailer for cinema itself, a real-time evolution of the medium (silence + sound + colour + motion) that heralds the medium to come, thereby positing that cinema, as Godard understood it, never really happened, and can only be conceived as a future medium, a coming attraction.