confusing that both NIGHT OF THE JUGGLER and SALUTE OF THE JUGGER are getting severely-belated boosts back into the collective cultural consciousness **right now**.

Leonard and Paul Schrader, young and fun. thefilmstage.com/paul-schrade...

what is today? today is....... Lanthimos Day! (♬ "send me to war, me and the boxer" ♬) www.jigsawlounge.co.uk/film/reviews...

he could become a quadrillionaire and it wouldn't make him one iota less of a miserable self-hating clown, which is amusing to many millions of people. maybe billions.

mainly about DEAD END (1937), JULIA (1977), WATCH ON THE RHINE (1943), THE SEARCHING WIND (1946), THE LITTLE FOXES (1941), THE NORTH STAR (1943), THE CHASE (1966)...

7/2 Greta.

It's kind of cathartic to just put this on repeat

for @sensesofcinema.bsky.social, on September's @sansebastianfestival.com retrospective... HOODLUM TIME: Lillian Hellman in San Sebastian. www.sensesofcinema.com/2025/festiva...

I somehow only found out *after* he got elected that Zohran Mamdani, incoming Mayor of New York, is the son of... Mira Nair. yes, *the* Mira Nair, director of MONSOON WEDDING (Venice Golden Lion 2001), SALAAM BOMBAY!, MISSISSIPPI MASALA, the Reese Witherspoon VANITY FAIR, etc etc.

Oh my GOD. The song that Rudy Giuliani used in his anti-Zohran post is fucking AI-generated. It's a song called "September 11, 2001" and it's from some AI slop factory called The Experience. You need to hear how bad this song is. music.apple.com/cz/album/sep...

rewatched CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON today at Thessaloniki Film Festival, first time in 25 years. Went back and reread my review (I stingily rated it 7/10; would go 8/10 now). No mention of how Chang Chen steals the show, oops! Gave it a new headline... www.jigsawlounge.co.uk/film/reviews...

Sound on. Tear in my eye.

so after this week, no Ryanair for me!

"Be like Sensei Sergio — don’t try to fight them. They want to fight. Instead flow around them, create alternate structures, alternate families, obfuscate, obstruct, live your life, and wait until the monsters eat each other, which they always will in the end." outlawvern.com/2025/10/14/o...

this week learned that Armenians call Armenia "Hayastan."

And finally... let’s also celebrate the 251st anniversary of the night James Boswell got proper shitted up on booze

"Leaving aside his formidable skills, what a joy it is to see Granit Xhaka play football: looks as though he’s having the time of his life out there, and maybe he is. My joint-favourite Kosovar-Swiss, dead-heating with Gjon’s Tears." www.jigsawlounge.co.uk/film/reviews...

she's not wrong. The middle section of the advert is an overt AFTERSUN homage/pilferage.

2025 performances 1—Aleksandr Filippenko, Two Prosecutors 👇 2—Marisa Abela, Black Bag 3—Aidan Delbis, Bugonia 4—Leo Woodall, Nuremberg + Barbara Auer, Miroirs No.3 Benicio Del Toro, One Battle After Another Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Two Prosecutors Bas Rutten, The Smashing Machine

the late Peter Watkins' terrific CULLODEN (1964), the whole thing recorded from British TV in 1996. Weirdly, this is actually a very good way of watching the film (69min) as it's all about forms of media and was originally intended for the small screen. www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpot...

today = @sightsoundmag.bsky.social 2025 Top 10 deadline day. My ballot:

saw Petzold's MIROIRS NO. 3, presumed (in my profound ignorance) that *the* song therein was a recent track by by Future Islands. Turns out it's a 50-year-old Northern Soul classic by Frankie Valli (still with us, 91) and the Four Seasons. Has Valli seen the film????! www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrZK...

RIP to one of cinemas' greatest villains, Tcheky Karyo. 💔 #FilmSky

just a few weeks ago marvelled at his breakout performance as a convincingly charismatic psycho-gangster in Bob Swaim's LA BALANCE (1982), for which he was rightly César-nominated as best newcomer.

saw Corman's THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH on 35mm at @filmmuseum.bsky.social Vienna last night, a few weeks after having rewatched WARRIORS' GATE for the first time in decades. David Weston is Gino in the former, Biroc in the latter. And both feature supernatural high-jinks in medieval "castles."

finished Imamura's mindblowingly ambitious 3-hour island epic PROFOUND DESIRES OF THE GODS (1968) today via dvd, but I would travel far and spend much to see this wild masterpiece on the big screen via 35mm. All human life is here, plus myriad flora and fauna of the land, air and sea.

A dog just got into our row of half hidden cottage gardens. The dog just wanted to play - a sudden Valhalla of leaf piles, a Brigadoon of open back doors, a Shangri-La of smells and scents, and six cats who suddenly realised the world was round and contained dogs.

un éclat du vieux bloc / la pomme ne tombe jamais loin de l'arbre...

CLOCKS TONIGHT!

So, in one of the odder what-ifs of history, it’s possible that if one man hadn’t been bitten by a monkey, Greece would be much bigger than it is; Turkey would be smaller, and wouldn’t be Turkey (or Türkiye, for that matter); and Queen Elizabeth II would have married someone completely different

what Tribeca looks for in a programmer

So, unhappy 105th anniversary, Alexander, King of Greece, dead at just 27 on this day in 1920 from a macaque bite that went septic, leading – one way and another – to a *lot* of other deaths, the birth of modern Turkey, and Prince Philip marrying Queen Elizabeth II... 🧵

anybody seen Ilkka Järvi-Laturi's SPY GAMES (1999), aka HISTORY IS MADE AT NIGHT, starring Bill Pullman, Irène Jacob, Udo Kier and Bruno Kirby, with Kati Outinen as "Shopkeeper's Wife") and a score by Courtney Pine, based on a 1970s screenplay by Jean-Pierre Gorin?

haven't seen Wagner Moura in SECRET AGENT yet, but he'll need to go some to displace TWO PROSECUTORS' Aleksandr Filippenko as my #1 performance in a 2025 film. Saw it last night at the Viennale, very probably Sergei Loznitsa's strongest fiction feature yet. Balabanov meets Kafka.

Mosquitos spread to Iceland. "one of the only" plague spreads to the Guardian.

Abel Ferrara's SCENE: "blisteringly funny, delightfully profane, and startlingly honest. His stories––of his alcoholic father and his own bouts with addiction, of dealing with producers and temperamental actors, of screw-ups and successes––are endlessly fascinating." thefilmstage.com/recommended-...

After talking about it the other day so was able to find the Chief Supt Brownlow / American Werewolf in London meme!

The event organizers say 7m people showed up. That would mean ~1 out of every 50 Americans came out to protest the president

these demonstrations, in conjunction with the "diarrhoea-bomber" video made in response (and entering uncharted territories of crassness), will in future be seen as encapsulating this entire horrendous juncture of American history.

Watched The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue. First time for me, and I can see now why you all rate it so highly - a heady mix of Nigel Kneale, clever direction, and electronic sound. I loved it. But my favourite moment was when Bridget and I at the same time exclaimed “that’s a lot of biscuits!”

soccer saturday! SAFC dances with Wolves this afternoon. Koberidze DRY LEAF this evening (Viennale).

watching JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG for first time in decades on DVD. every time I see baby William Shatner (30yo) I think of Leo Woodall (now 29), who plays the equivalent role in James Vanderbilt's current NUREMBERG and gives one of the year's best performances.

when in Munich.... proper Bourdainy!

"Perhaps the most astonishing thing about this draconian legislation is that arousing suspicion is actually the offence... The suspicion could be totally wrong, but if you aroused the suspicion on “reasonable grounds” in a policeman’s head, you are guilty." www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/202...

just imagine not knowing Mahmood's "Uramaki" www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_SH...

Watching Carpenter’s THE THING. Struzan got me all nostalgic.

never change, AI

Holy shit

Can all those popular filmmakers with their giant megaphones who went after motion smoothing on TV please go after laptops and phones in screenings too? Surely there's a lot of cinematographers who will have something to say about this.