I really need to update this more often.

PRO:

The Girl With the Golden Eyes (Jean-Gabriel Albicocco, 1961)
Remember My Name (Alan Rudolph, 1978)
The Class (Laurent Cantet, 2008)

pro:

Mes petites amoureuses (Jean Eustache, 1974)
Somehow I connect entirely with the emotions Eustache communicates—few filmmakers employ the dissolve as persuasively—but not his episodic structure: as the ending makes clear, Daniel barely progresses in any discernible way, and any lessons that clumsy amorous encounters teach him remain rather obscure. And yet, reading what I’ve just written, I’m not sure what the problem is, because youth doesn’t necessarily wear minute advances on its sleeve. I suspect if the film were spliced into several shorts, I’d prefer almost all of them to the feature. The narration—sometimes redundant, sometimes unnecessary—could use some work, but maybe I should just stop mentally comparing it to Diary of a Country Priest. (God help those using latter-day Malick as a standard.)

Beeswax (Andrew Bujalski, 2009)
Charly (Isild Le Besco, 2007)

Late Autumn (Yasujiro Ozu, 1990)
Ozu directs a Gilmore Girls episode. I’m not sure why the mother-daughter trials and tribulations feel so banal here—Naruse mined similar territory for great effect in Lightning. Setsuko Hara’s resolute solitude, as opposed to mysterious, seems kinda random.

Welcome to L.A. (Alan Rudolph, 1976)

mixed:

Green Fish (Lee Chang-Dong, 1997)
What Is She To You? (Alden Thompson Burgess, 2009)

con:

A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951)
A great play (see below) semi-destroyed by a bunch of overly literal performances and a disengaged one (Brando).

CON:

The Cinema of Ozu According to Kiju Yoshida (Kiju Yoshida, 1994)
Yoshida’s Ozu theses range from acceptably accurate, to rather pretentious, to shockingly feeble. (Most egregious is his claim that Ozu’s direction of actors was such that no two lines were delivered the same way, whereas Ozu’s directorial presence is all about flattening drama with a calm, contented manner that in fact is quite repetitive.) Then again, I’m pretty sure if a piece of my own criticism was laboriously extended to feature-length and righteously intoned over some of my favorite moments in cinema, no sane person would want to view the result. Somehow I sense that, given rumors of Ozu-Yoshida enmity, Yoshida made this film to prove to himself he still liked the man first, and make a meaningful contribution to film history second.

Literature:

PRO:

The End of the Affair (Graham Greene, 1951)
Aside from a brief foray into smug lit-crit bashing, this is a fascinating crack at 1st-person for Greene that, unlike FMF’s The Good Soldier (apparently a big inspiration), resists tapping insecurity as a source for comedy, and instead dives into the workings of jealousy with Musilian fervor.

The Violent Bear It Away (Flannery O’Connor, 1960)
A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole, 1980)
A Streetcar Named Desire (Tennessee Williams, 1951)

pro:

Outer Dark (Cormac McCarthy, 1968)
Cheating at Canasta (William Trevor, 2007)

con:

Flaubert’s Parrot (Julian Barnes, 1984)
An anti-novel whose status as an anti-novel is almost completely superfluous. Maybe the problem here is that Barnes himself is too contemptuous to achieve any distance from his contemptuous narrator, whom I suspect he means to criticize or something.

DNF:

Rushing to Paradise (J.G. Ballard, 1994)
Good when Ballard’s activist characters are relative innocents, and he subtly mines their crusades for smugness and hypocrisy; bad when they descend into dystopia, and his simplistic grasp of psychology shines through.