Jacob Mikanowski is a graduate student in modern European history at U.C. Berkeley, currently living in Warsaw. He writes about television, film, and the worst of the twentieth century. His work also appears in Bookslut. 
“The sheer physical immensity of this space threatens to hijack everything else in the film, and it’s a testament to Reichardt’s directorial intelligence that she lets it, and that she makes it work as part of a larger project.”
“Malick invites us to marvel at a universe created for our benefit and an afterlife in which all our cares will be resolved. The best part of the movie — Brad Pitt taunting his sons, willing them to rebel against an authority he doesn’t believe he deserves — vanishes behind a scrim of inane space flotsam, while the combination of the two endows Jack’s childhood with a world-historical weight it can’t possibly bear.”
“When you fall in love with someone who is asleep, are you attracted to her spirit, some ineffable essence in her being? Or are you skating on the edge between voyeurism and necrophilia?”
The Strange Case of Angelica, dir. Manoel de Oliveira Sleeping Beauty, dir. Catherine Breillat On the face of it, the story of sleeping beauty should be a terrible subject for[…]
Le Quattro Volte, dir. Michelangelo Frammartino Cold Weather, dir. Aaron Katz All of a sudden, reincarnation has become a major subject in contemporary film. In Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall[…]
Biutiful, dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu Enter the Void, dir. Gaspar Noé Cities are hard to pin down on film. For decades, hardly anyone bothered to try. Usually they’re just scenery,[…]
Festivals & Awards · Lists · Reviews
#7: “A family drama about the dangers of beekeeping.”
“Boonmee establishes Weerasethakul as our reigning master of the spiritual style: no one else moves across the lines that separate animals from humans and the living from the dead with greater ease or less fuss.”
“At the moment of greatest peril, the monks respond by having a little soirée.”
Warsaw/Chicago Film Diary 1. Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky The perils of virginity, or I Was a Teenage Were-Swan. Black Swan is a hot mess: preposterous if you listen to the[…]
Des Hommes et des Dieux, dir. Xavier Beauvois On the night of March 26, 1996, seven Trappist monks were abducted from the Monastery of Tibhirine in Algeria by members of[…]
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the winner of this year’s Palme d’Or[…]
Warsaw Film Festival Highlights (plus a few stray thoughts) 1) We Are What We Are – dir. Jorge Michel Grau, Mexico The set-up could come out of an old neorealist[…]
This is apropos the DVD release of Lost Season 6: A lot of people were disappointed with the series finale of Lost, disappointed to the point they felt it betrayed[…]
Dishonored Dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1931 Marlene Dietrich and Mata Hari: it sounds so obvious once you say it. It didn’t take long for Josef von Sternberg, to put the[…]
I recently got back from a few days at the Era New Horizons Film Festival in Wrocaw. When I was there, most of the excitement centered on Xavier Beauvois’ Of[…]
Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Reviews
“The doubled Hitchcock mirrors the Hitchcock double, who in turn reflects Hitchcock pretending to play himself.”
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
“Today’s Rosa Moline would treat her lack of sophistication as a resource and her isolation as a launching pad.”
Experimental & Underground · Memoir
“Because they assume that memory is fallible and experience inassimilable, they’re more like inquests or excavations than diaries or memoirs. Instead of reminiscing, they dig.”
Beyond the Forest Dir. King Vidor, 1949 In America, the tagline read “Nobody’s As Good As Bette When She’s Bad.” In French they simply called it La Garce, ‘the bitch.’[…]
