What a surprise, Pickpocket (at Harvard Film Archive) is a masterpiece… So is Documenteur, with Jacquot de Nantes not far behind. Documenteur suffers from poor sound recording and dubbing, and the English voiceover can be hard to understand, but man, what poetic power! One of the great films of the 1980s. Varda remains the greatest female director & possibly the most underrated filmmaker of all time… As interested as I am in Patrick Keiller’s working methods, Robinson in Ruins is as dry as Robinson in Space, confirming my feeling that Keiller should’ve left his muse in London … Hong Sang-soo is a discovery. The zooms in Book chon bang hyang reveal a self-assured director unafraid to go against at least one trend of the moment… The only film seen in new release this month is Carnage, a poor specimen indeed. As Peg says, there’s something wrong with a movie that uses the word “faggot” to get laughs, especially in 2012. Homophobic, misogynistic, misanthropic—there’s nothing the film doesn’t hold in contempt, but considering who the director is, its portrayal of victims is the most abhorrent thing of all. The film sits with you like a glazed, sugared jelly donut, and gets worse the more you think about it… Los Angeles Plays Itself is a great movie about the movies (and, perhaps more so, about Los Angeles), which retains its greatness on an iPad. It looks good projected too, of course!

Not on Mubi:

Beauty Knows No Pain (Elliott Erwitt)
The Deer Garden: The Romantic Forest (Per Kirkeby & Jørgen Leth)
Neige au village (Martin Rit)
Rough Riders (John Milius)
Diesel (Robert Kramer)
Something to Live for (George Stevens)
“Cinéastes de notre temps” Jerry Lewis, Pt. 1 (Andre S. Labarthe)
Saudade (Jean-Claude Rousseau)

What I Saw: 2012