My favorite rep screenings in 2025, for Screen Slate www.screenslate.com/articles/bes...

Magellan (2025). Diaz's slow-cinema approach is so effective here. Reminded me of Meek's Cutoff or Lancelot du lac, where the adventure that one might traditionally expect gets de-mythologized, and all that remains for the viewer to contemplate is the terror of a brutish world

Normalize having @letterboxd.social and Goodreads in your website footer nielsjoaquin.com

I made a personal website! nielsjoaquin.com It has three main sections: - Writing. I've migrated all my posts from Medium - Logging. This will supplement Letterboxd and Goodreads (e.g., a simple, complete reading list) - Data. Hobby projects like my silly friend tracker

More EOY catch-up: The Phoenician Scheme (2025) Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (2024) It Was Just an Accident (2025)

Sentimental Value (2025). Man, people love Trier's last two films, but they really don't do it for me ... Oslo, August 31st is better than both, but I think it's largely because of The Fire Within, which I love (both film and book)

I think my favorite object at The Met's Divine Egypt (even though there are big ones like a scarab) is this coiled-snake game board. In an era when Catan gets a multi-picture deal at Netflix, it's oddly comforting to know that people were also playing board games > 4000 years ago

Finished Angels by Denis Johnson Johnson's first novel: "the wonder of life assailed him" Title story of Johnson's last book of fiction: "This morning I was assailed by such sadness at the velocity of life"

Out of the Past (1947), in 35 mm. "If I don't talk, I think. It's too late in life for me to start thinking." I love every Mitchum performance I've seen

Waiting to Exhale (1995), in 35 mm - Thought of Regina Hall's line in Scary Movie: She don't love herself‼️ - Babyface's work here and throughout the '90s is incredible. The bridge on "Not Gon' Cry," with its subtle shift to glimmers of acceptance, is just a classic Babyface move

Finished Exile and the Kingdom by Albert Camus "And what about you," said Rateau, "Do you exist, then?" [...] "No, I'm not certain I exist. But one day I will, I'm sure of that." (Reminds me of this Thoreau sentiment)

Finished V. by Thomas Pynchon. Right out of the gate, he was already so brilliantly imaginative, lyrical, hilarious. It's intimidating to think about the intellect and creative power it took to conjure these narratives out of the horrors (and occasional joys) of the 20th century

Trafic (1971), in 35 mm. The absurd camper van is the funny version of this thesis from The Society of the Spectacle: "glorifying the latest commodities at a time when increasingly extensive campaigns are necessary to convince people to buy increasingly unnecessary commodities"

Wake Up Dead Man (2025). Rian Johnson is so good at these! I'm just really heartened by the popular success of his original screenplays. And the thematic depth and emotional richness of this one really fortify his genre hijinks. My favorite installment so far

¡VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN!

The Castle of Purity (1972). My first Arturo Ripstein—had never even heard of him until this BAM series!

Bugonia (2025). I enjoyed a Lanthimos! The thing that annoys me about something like The Lobster is that its universe is so explicitly constructed to set up the easiest targets for satire. Bugonia's humor is sharp, bleak, well earned; its ending leaves you exactly where it should

Finished The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, as well as Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Shout-out to lint_ax (on Twitter), from whose posts I learned about Debord

Onibaba (1964), in 35 mm. One of the best depictions of food insecurity AND of sexual desperation? "Dover Beach" speaks of "the turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery," where there actually are no demons, and we're simply left to ourselves at the "naked shingles of the world"

Cat People (1942), in 35 mm. I love all the ways that Schrader and team expanded this into (IMO) a richer film, but the original is wonderfully effective in its smaller scope. Night of the Demon is similar in how it plays with the gradual tension of giving way to the supernatural

Queen Kelly (1929, released 1932), DCP. And that rounds out my NYFF this year. Remember to balance out your schedule with some revivals! Always inspiring to see this kind of restoration work

Marty Supreme (2025). Good Time to Uncut Gems to Marty Supreme is a legendary filmography in the making. As intense as those films (if you can imagine), with a complex role for Timmy, delusional and despicable, charming and scrappy. What a team (Khondji, Fisk!) across the board

Miroirs No. 3 (2025). Going for a climactic musical performance when you already made one of the best ones!

Little Boy (2025). The best structural films make you slow down and focus so intensely that you realize how the normal pace of life has warped your ideas about what deserves attention. I just came across a relevant phrase from Debord: "the empire of modern passivity"

The Fence (2025). Just as in his first collaboration with Denis, Isaach De Bankolé shows his immense power even in characters who have to hold back their emotion

Sholay (1975). This was on my watch list for a long time—I first heard about it from Mark Cousins's The Story of Film. Lucky to experience the brand-new restoration with a cheering audience, especially since I have almost no exposure to Indian cinema outside of the Apu Trilogy

Mare's Nest (2025). DeLillo's play within the film is a very concentrated dose of his language: what it signals, how it collapses. Thought of The Names: "language ... existed mainly as a medium of politeness between people, with odd allowances made for the communication of ideas"

Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 1960s in Brussels (1994); I'm Hungry, I'm Cold (1984). There's a shot in Portrait where Akerman just lingers unhurriedly on her protagonist's face, and you feel so much empathy for all the self-doubt and sexual confusion of adolescence

Finished Panegyric: Volumes 1 & 2 by Guy Debord

One Battle After Another (2025), in VistaVision 35 mm. Scene report from 11:00 PM showing: projection went black two times early on, but the projectionist fully recovered! 🎞️ I was surprised by how similar VV felt to IMAX 70 mm, with its squarish frame and incredible quality

I had this question about VistaVision several years ago, and now that the format is back, I was wondering ... When Vertigo was in its original theatrical run, did the great majority of people just see it projected in standard 35? How many theaters could show a VistaVision print?

Finished Joseph Conrad's "Youth" & The End of the Tether. Tether is a stark depiction of what money is like with no assets to your name: you gamble what little you have on yourself, and a life of labor is rewarded only by the terror of making money in old age to fund your old age

MacGruber (2010), DCP. Famously a favorite of DGA president Christopher Nolan. (I didn't like it, but I did love the recurring gag where MacGruber takes his stereo/tape deck with him every time he gets out of his car, mainly because I'm old enough to get it)

Cat People (1982), in 35 mm. I love how it succeeds as a monster film, a horror film, a supernatural film, an erotic art film. Will ignore the MoMA audience's full-blown laughter 🫥

Hot Pepper (1973), DCP. As always, Les Blank distills so much wisdom and audiovisual poetry and life into < 60 min

Finished A Smile of Fortune by Joseph Conrad, from the 1910s like "The Secret Sharer" and The Shadow-Line, and written with the same melancholy (beautiful) voice. He casually starts sentences like: "But, living in a world more or less homicidal and desperately mercantile ..."

The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), in 35 mm. I continue to collect these Fassbinder compositions!

Belle of the Nineties (1934), DCP. Who else could deliver "His mother should've thrown him away and kept the stork" but Mae West? Also, was looking at what I've seen in McCarey's filmography. A great reminder of the range!

Man Ray: When Objects Dream, @metmuseum.org

Histoires d'Amérique: Food, Family and Philosophy (1989), DCP. For the opening weekend of their complete Akerman series, MoMA got Sonia Wieder-Atherton to play a few cello pieces at the top of the program, and she cross-faded the last one into the opening titles of the film 👌

Finished Balzac's The Girl with the Golden Eyes. Bold to spend the 1st 20% on a detailed outline of the class system! "Almost all these men are shriveled in the furnace of affairs. And a man who lets himself be caught in the gears of these immense machines can never become great"

Dunkirk (2017), fifth time in any 70 mm, third in 5/70 mm. This rewatch was really moving and bumped the film to Nolan's top tier for me. His braided chronologies, at different speeds, are both his structural showmanship and a thematic emphasis of his characters' fated crossings

Silver Bears (1977), in 35 mm. A crash course in money, banking, the stock market, capital, and capitalism. I don't even think anything had to be exaggerated—that's just ... actually how it works

Written by Bob Dylan in Mills Bar on Bleeker [sic] St in New York City on 14th day of February for Woody Guthrie 🥹

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), in 35 mm. The multi-story cross-sectional set is one of the coolest things Wes Anderson has created. And when he tracks Murray and Wilson through it as they ascend to the deck ... 👌

Finished Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky (tr. P&V). In the first section, I thought that this would be a book that only moody teenagers would enjoy now. It was partially redeemed by all the moments in Part II where I was like Ahhhhh shit he just like me fr

Apocalypse Now (1979), in 35 mm, 2001 Redux cut. I didn't know that they made IB Technicolor prints this late in the game—apparently the final years for the process! My first watch of any version. With whatever expectations (cautious?), still awestruck, phew

Clueless (1995), fourth time, second in 35 mm. Heckerling and Silverstone created such a fully formed character that, where other high school movies (like 10 Things or Easy A—both good films!) end up leaning on stylized, self-consciously clever dialogue,