March 2025 Roundup

A great enough month of watching films that it was difficult to narrow down the best new discoveries into a neat list. Honorable mentions include Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia, Norman Jewison's Fiddler on the Roof, and all 14 films included in my third annual birthday celebration marathon.

In case you missed it, Stephen has started up video game coverage, which can be found collected in the new Games tab, leading off with his review of Monster Hunter Wilds.

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Discoveries

The Last Angel of History (1996)
dir. John Akomfrah

A fascinating artifact, a blended dialogue between past and future that wraps documentary in an afrofuturism shell. Presents a fictional protagonist known as the Data Thief, a mysterious figure from a dystopic future digging through the history of pioneering black electronic musicians to discover their connection to the cosmos. What may have been an interesting, albeit simplistic talking head style doc featuring the likes of funk musician George Clinton and the culture surrounding his work becomes an explosion of ideation, a future finding solace in the past, making sense of a people's history through their music. The film's data thief segments were sampled on clipping.'s latest album Dead Channel Sky, a cyberpunk concept album reviving hard rave sonic stylings and weaving a long history of science fiction into its lyricism. A beautiful synergy that seems to prove the theories of The Last Angel of History - the present has dug into the past, searching through the ruins of a collapsing dystopia and finding relics that inform the rebuilding of culture and affirming the central position of black artists and their connection to a cosmic understanding of the world around them.

Miller's Crossing (1990)
dir. Joel & Ethan Coen

On a whim, I watched the Coen Brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There last month (not on this list, but excellent regardless). I realized I only had two films remaining in the Coens' filmography to watch - The Ladykillers and Miller's Crossing. The Ladykillers almost isn't worth mentioning, a truly horrendous exercise in garish southern caricatures, racist depictions across the board, and an awful Tom Hanks accent that never should have been put to screen. Thankfully, I saved Miller's Crossing for last, a breath of fresh air that reminded once again that the Coens are some of America's greatest working filmmakers when they're in the right mode. Almost chilling how the Coens' hyperviolent, prohibition era mafia film feels like a mirror to modern thuggish business, where everyone spouts mantras about ethics in their illicit practices while gunning down anyone who gets in their way. Also, a good movie about hats.

Romance & Cigarettes (2005)
dir. John Turturro

A genuine oddity - John Turturro's overcranked horny musical starts bizarre and only gets weirder as its characters intersect and develop, but it couldn't be any more of a delight for anyone who revels in this exact kind of fully sent chaos. James Gandolfini cheats on Susan Sarandon with Kate Winslet (providing an absolutely unhinged performance with an equally unhinged accent) and his life is thrown into complete chaos, which mostly means that Gandolfini and co. spontaneously burst into singalong jukebox musical numbers. A neighborhood of lonely men singing their woes and dancing in the streets, a group of firefighters falling hopelessly in love with Kate Winslet dancing in a flaming window, Christopher Walken recounting the time he murdered his wife while shimmying through a diner. Gandolfini throws Winslet into a lake and she performs a mournful ballad underwater, torn apart because Gandolfini has called off their affair. It's a wild ride, fully committed to the bit and all the better for it.

Joyride (1977)
dir. Joseph Ruben

Joseph Ruben, you can't fool me - set your film in Alaska all you want, but any keen Washingtonian can spot that this was largely shot in the Pacific Northwest, with town sequences filmed in Cle Elum and others on Hood Canal. So it gets the local bias bump for being more shot in Washington than most films that are actually set here, but thankfully it's a great film on its own. Brilliantly casts three young nepo babies (Desi Arnaz Jr., Robert Carradine, and Melanie Griffith) as aloof, miserable drifters who get sick of L.A. and decide to move to Alaska, only to find the frigid atmosphere less than welcoming and the churning gears of capitalism more dangerous than they expected. The American dream quickly devolves into an icy nightmare, and idealism shifts to crime just to keep warm and survive, misery slowly enveloping as the reality of their situation slowly sets in.

Dangerous Game (1993)
dir. Abel Ferrara

A film about the simultaneous trauma and catharsis of artistic pursuit, featuring Harvey Keitel as a crystal clear Ferrara self-insert embroiled in filming his latest project. As Keitel's character exorcises his demons through a film about the meltdown of a marriage and the dissolution of his protagonist's ego, it becomes clear Ferrara is exorcising his own demons through the process of the film, a recursive imprint of celluloid on celluloid, a match lit to watch it all go up in flames, searching for some kind of impossible redemption through anger and violence, lines blurred and performances disappearing into the ether as they meld into reality. Reveals itself through scuzzy scanline playback screens and exhausted analysis of performance, only to explode as it cuts to footage from Burden of Dreams where an exasperated Werner Herzog details the futility of his own artistic pursuit. Spend months breaking your body in an attempt to move a steamboat over a mountain, even if you end up with a masterpiece - nobody could ever convince you to be happy about it. Misery top to bottom, will we ever find ourselves?

Rewatches

Spring Breakers (2012)
dir. Harmony Korine

An absolute treat to see Harmony Korine's neon-washed nightmare splashed across a massive IMAX screen. An understandably divisive film given its grating, abrasive atmosphere and its scummy, grimy character portrait of spring break debauchery, but one that continues to cement itself as an all-time masterpiece every time I revisit its searing vision of the American dream. Painted through bubblegum sunsets and kaleidoscopic neon nightclubs by long time Gaspar Noé cinematographer Benoît Debie, splattered with a synth-laden sonic atmosphere by way of Cliff Martinez's effervescent score and Skrillex's era-critical dubstep soundtrack. For better or worse a nightmarish vision steeped in an image of 2012 America, youth in search of deliverance from the malaise of reality, only finding solace in blood and violence. The dream lasts until it shatters through your skull.

After Hours (1985)
dir. Martin Scorsese

Simplicity exploding into mastery by sheer force of direction, a chaotic mess of character tropes undermined and dismantled over the course of a single night as anxiety cyclically dissolves into brief moments of catharsis before beginning anew. There's certainly a lot to be said about how Paul's callous self-centered worldview begets each of the situations he finds himself in, a sort of cosmic karma for his freewheeling, fly by night mindset that casts everyone around him aside as he endeavors to find his way home through the rain-slicked New York streets. Yet despite whatever deep analysis that could be applied to Paul's endless nightmare of bad cascading to worse scenarios as his evening becomes a madcap comedy of errors, it all feels completely irrelevant in the face of Martin Scorsese directing this with such fervor, every shot a revelation as this surrealist purgatorial punishment upon a foolhardy office worker becomes pure cinema. Steam simmers atop neon-lit asphalt, rain patters softly outside disparate diners and bars full of the kinds of oddball denizens only the late hours offer, and every character bursts to life through Scorsese's soulful lens.