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Articles by Patrick Preziosi
The Depths of Hamamatsu: On Tomoko Yoshida’s “Dunderhead”
Tomoko Yoshida | translated by Adam Sutherland | Dunderhead | ISOLARII | June 2026 | 324 Pages Patrick Preziosi is a writer and used book dealer born and based in Brooklyn, New York. His work on literature, music and film has appeared in Bandcamp Daily, Screen Slate, Commonweal, We Jazz, and more. He runs the used bookstore Red Hook Books with his wife, Tanya Chernyak, in Brooklyn.
Close to the Bone
Jim Thompson with his cat, Deadline (Jami Reed/Library of America) Jim Thompson, the most detectably modernist, entertainingly ludicrous, and titillatingly depraved crime novelist of the twentieth century, hit upon his working method in the early 1930s as he submitted story after story to the serialized pulps and true-crime magazines of the era.
Poetlike: On Richard Hell’s Godlike
Richard Hell | Godlike | NYRB Classics | February 2026 | 168 pages The original copy for Richard Hell’s 2005 novel Godlike, a shaggy transposition of Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine’s tawdry, painful fin de siècle dalliance to 1970s New York City, made no mention of either of the French poets, almost as if it were embarrassed by its high-art aspirations.
How Karen Borca Brought the Bassoon Into Free Jazz
LISTS How Karen Borca Brought the Bassoon Into Free Jazz By Patrick Preziosi · May 26, 2026 The endlessly expanding landscape of American jazz in the 1960s into the 1970s meant there was for the incorporation of instruments whose idiosyncrasies may have made them seem like an odd fit.
Now What?: On Phil Freeman’s “In the Brewing Luminous” and J. Hoberman’s “Everything Is Now”
At some point during Cecil Taylor’s 2016 residency at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Phil Freeman, critic, journalist, and author of the first ever Taylor biography, In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor, gifted the pianist Rihanna’s then newly released Anti.
Gained In Translation
It can be tough to keep up with poetry when there’s so much of it. The pressure is even greater in a year when Ben Lerner brought out a new collection, Craig Santos Perez became the first Pacific Islander to win the National Book Award, and the Nobel-winning Louise Glück passed away. Then there’s all the great work that was translated into English in 2023.
Saturn Bowling — Patricia Mazuy | In Review Online
Patricia Mazuy, now six films deep in a three-decade-plus career with Saturn Bowling, has always risked a certain, tantrum-centric filmmaking, favoring characters with shared psychoses who butt heads with one another and all those around them. She alienates via general unpleasantness, but it’s even more rewarding to penetrate those barriers and discover the primalness that charges her work.
Master Gardener — Paul Schrader | In Review Online
In hindsight, Paul Schrader’s career has been a repeated jettisoning and reappropriation of extraneous artiness, new off-kilter filmic shapes of inscrutable quality emerging at an otherwise reliable clip, especially this past decade.
You Don't Have To Win: Robert Aldrich and ...All The Marbles
The great midcentury director's final film follows a female wrestling duo trying to eke out a victory on the road. T he California Dolls—two female wrestlers on the precarious, almost-more-than-amateur circuit—and their trainer/manager/driver/publicist/agent are driving along some truss bridge deep in the crevices of the Rust Belt, casually arguing over the health detriments of cigarette smoking.
Los olvidados — Luis Buñuel | In Review Online
Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados, released, rather perfectly, at the midpoint of the century, is perhaps one of the most uninviting kickoffs to a director’s second life ever.
Marlowe — Neil Jordan | In Review Online
For a director like Neil Jordan, whose long, seemingly middle-of-the-road filmography actually houses digressions from respectable adaptation into unrespectable pulp and soap, a Raymond Chandler homage would be expected, even more so a riff on a preexisting riff. Marlowe, named after the perennial detective, is itself based on John Banville’s The Black-Eyed Blonde, as much an homage to Chandler and Marlowe as it is a continuation, written under the pseudonym of Benjamin Black.
Local Hero — Bill Forsyth | In Review Online
Credit: Criterion Collection / Warner Bros. Bill Forsyth may have to bear the reductive, buzzy distinction of having “put Scottish cinema on the map,” but he at least did so with both a disarming degree of separation — shifting the sensation of discovery onto his characters — and an expectedly warm familiarity.
Alcarràs — Carla Simón | In Review Online
From the first frame of Alcarràs, Carla Simón alerts the viewer to the integrality of the summery Catalonian landscape of her film. Within these windswept fields and misshapen buttes resides the Solé family, modest peach farmers — partially based on the director’s own family — and played by a rugged cast of nonprofessionals.
The Boston Strangler — Richard Fleischer | In Review Online
In 1968, Richard Fleischer democratized the participants of the crime procedural with The Boston Strangler, spearheading a new school of form as applied to the frameworks of M or The Sniper, all seemingly enacted from moment to moment, scene to scene.
Ragged Generosity: Exploring The Films of Boris Barnet
The work of an unsung, but essential Soviet director is ripe for discovery via a YouTube channel. T o fully acclimate himself to the script for an impending film, the Soviet director Boris Barnet would cut up the writer’s work and reassemble it atop a continuous scroll because “a script must be spliced into one roll, like a film.
’Tis time to shake the Kremlin walls!
To read about Vladimir Sorokin is to be inundated with suppositions about real-world analogues. Who or what was the inspiration for this passage of remarkable scatology, violence, profanity, fascistic activity — or some amalgamation of the four? Often considered Russia’s leading contemporary novelist, Sorokin’s work has been long suppressed by the authorities of his own country.
A Hostital Drama at War with Itself
The long-awaited third season of Lars von Trier’s comedy of paranormal errors The Kingdom again takes place in the newly renovated Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen’s largest hospital, and bears witness to all sorts of unresolved and irresolvable hostilities, both of the supernatural and bureaucratic kind. And like the first the two seasons, which originally aired on Danish television in 1994 and 1997, it finds plenty of room for merciless satire and soap operatics.
A Couple — Frederick Wiseman | In Review Online
A Couple reflects a shift in Wiseman’s work, his fascination in institutional minutia pivoting to more transcendentalist territory, to moving effect. Performance — itself a form of fiction — is a constant amongst the disparate subjects of Frederick Wiseman’s work: lectures, speeches, reprimands, all delivered with the attempted believability of your standard actor in an audition.
Frederick Wiseman on 'A Couple' and Honoring Sophia Tolstoy
Frederick Wiseman’s A Couple is many things, but most importantly, it’s not the master documentarian’s first narrative feature, nor is it even his first epistolary work. Although these projects are an inarguable rarity amid his steady output of totemic documentaries, A Couple is the product of a sturdy knowledge in classical drama, as previously made apparent in 2002’s The Last Letter, whose material was carved out from Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate.
Stars at Noon — Claire Denis [NYFF '22 Review] | In Review Online
Stars at Noon is the perfect externalization of a lovers-on-the-run experience, a fitting send-up to its source material. A gnarled, lightbulb-spotted, two-dimensional plastic facsimile of a red palm tree in an empty plaza and a close-up of Margaret Qualley’s face are the introductory images of Claire Denis’ Stars At Noon, a prologue of sorts that already pledges fidelity to the bruised lyricism of author Denis Johnson’s prose, whose 1986 novel serves as the source material.
'Showing Up' Review: Art of Life
Kelly Reichardt’s films, across genres and period settings, have negotiated the required capital for even the most modest means of day-to-day survival—to the point where returning to a more superficially low-stakes milieu is like a jolt. Showing Up drifts freely through a Portland art school and its surrounding community, though at its center is a sculptor, Lizzie (Michelle Williams), who’s finishing a series of figures for a gallery show.
NYFF22 Archives | In Review Online
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I Came By — Babak Anvari | In Review Online
I Came By is all superficial signaling, failing to build any actual substance, subtlety, or genre thrills into weightless construction. Babak Anvari is less a horror director than he is a capital-C Concept peddler, dressing up ideas in portent and stopping short of payoff. He’s the platonic ideal of the rightfully derided trend of “elevated horror,” without enough visual splashiness to draw the attention of A24 or Neon (enter: Netflix).
Flowing — Mikio Naruse | In Review Online
The titles of Mikio Naruse’s films were once baroque mouthfuls (Three Sisters With Maiden Hearts, Wife Be Like a Rose!), but as his own filmmaking shed the vestiges of controlled, if extraneous, flourishes, his nomenclature adopted a similarly simplistic descriptiveness: Floating Clouds, Scattered Clouds, The Other Woman, Hit and Run, Wife, Yearning. Flowing (1956), however, may be the most summative, for both film and director.
Interview: Lodge Kerrigan on Remastering Keane, Rehearsing on Location, & More
As American indie cinema continues to make startlingly popular in-roads into extremely suffocating subjectivity—as evinced by the success of the Safdies’ Good Time and Uncut Gems, as well as the critical attention paid toward Eliza Hittman—it’s important to uphold the foundational impact of Lodge Kerrigan’s four films.
Casque d’or — Jacques Becker | In Review Online
“The mise-en-scène flexes emotion like you flex your muscles.” So said Bertrand Tavernier of Jacques Becker’s Casque d’or, an observation applicable to the latter’s all too short directorial career, which exists as a roundelay of assuredly personal works, even if the respective material would suggest otherwise.
Irma Vep — Olivier Assayas: A Dialogue on Episode 8 | In Review Online
Patrick: So we’ve made it to the finale, Ryan. In our last correspondence I wrote of Assayas’ proclivity for compartmentalization, boxing different characters away once they’d served their temporary purpose. Of course, such a metaphor also implies an “unboxing,” so to speak; Assayas may have abruptly stemmed what’d otherwise been a flowing arc, but he’ll later embroider these victims of the script back in, while also swapping others out.
Irma Vep — Olivier Assayas: A Dialogue on Episodes 5–7 | In Review Online
Ryan: I originally intended to open this second part of our correspondence with a scene I thought was in this stretch from episodes five to seven, but it turned out to be from episode four. More than anything, I think that gives a sense of the odd way in which Irma Vep has operated in serial terms, after all one of the cruxes of the entire endeavor.
Fat City — John Huston | In Review Online
The American cinema of the 1970s is a deep, deep well of intersecting delusion and pyrrhic victories, though hindsight has made it so that’s it become easier — and perhaps even necessary — to separate the films that indulge such disillusionment as an addendum, and those which adopt it as an animating ethos.
Irma Vep — Olivier Assayas: A Dialogue on Episodes 1–4 - In Review Online
Patrick: Hi there Ryan. Happy to be corresponding with you once again! And on the deceptively dense new work from Olivier Assayas, a miniseries revamp (reboot? remake? retooling?) of his 1996 film Irma Vep.
Bruno Dumont: Landscape Players
There is no defined rubric to be a Bruno Dumont player: the director has spent his career weathering comparisons to Bresson and his predilection for mechanical acting, though the work of his nonprofessionals is erratic and unpredictable, equally prone to distracting facial tics as they are all-out despondency, sometimes moving beyond histrionics into a wholly unique viscerality.
Body Words: Cronenberg, Kavan, Delany, Dick
It is a rarified echelon to belong to, that of the repeat lead players in the films of David Cronenberg. Unless you count Robert A. Silverman’s auxiliary appearances, or Robert Pattinson’s modest screentime in Maps to the Stars, it’s a club reserved solely for Jeremy Irons (1988’s Dead Ringers, 1993’s M.
Clint Eastwood: Period Piece Portraitist
Clint Eastwood likes inky color patterns, tar-black shadow cutting across battleship grey sterility, and drab, olive-green dress.
Advise & Consent — Otto Preminger - In Review Online
Saul Bass’ poster for Otto Preminger’s Advise & Consent (1962) shows the dome of the Capitol neatly dissected from the building itself, the title emerging as if it were stowed away in a Pandora’s Box, which in some ways, the film is. Open one line of political inquiry, and suffer the attendant maelstrom, personal vendettas enacted in the name of the “public,” skeletons lining every closet, every past and current liaison violently scrutinized.
Pursued
Raoul Walsh’s name may be synonymous with a sort of full-throated and knockabout ribaldry, as conveyed by the likes of Errol Flynn, James Cagney, or Wallace Beery, but in Pursued (1947), the director shifted his penchant for singular heroes away from the charming (and even ingratiating) and toward the despondent, as embodied by one Robert Mitchum in the role of Jeb Rand.
Los conductos — Camilo Restrepo - In Review Online
Los conductos is a disarmingly personal film that is also masterful in its understanding of the way artifice interacts with realism. Camilo Restrepo has made a feature film the only way he can: wielding the detritus-fascinated and tactility-obsessed temperament that colored his mercurial documentary work to spin out a cathartic and despairing fantasy for his real-life subject.
Suburban 'Scope
Martin Ritt’s 1957 film No Down Payment opens overlooking a Los Angeles freeway, traffic blurring in every direction as the credit sequence moves along the various roadways, discernibly inching away from the city-center, though the crush of vehicles––and thus, people––never dwindles.
The Man in the White Suit — Alexander Mackendrick - In Review Online
One of the most paradoxically romantic scenes in any film ever can be found in Alexander Mackendrick’s second film for Ealing Studios, 1951’s The Man in the White Suit. In this scene, Joan Greenwood visibly falls in love with Alec Guinness when he unloads a heap of scientific argot upon her, even though she clearly has no idea what he’s talking about.
Taboo — Nagisa Ôshima - In Review Online
By the time of Taboo’s 1999 release, after a 13-year period of filmic silence, Nagisa Ôshima had already released what could be considered two capstone projects for the varying, protean strands of his zigzagging career.
Black Crab — Adam Berg - In Review Online
Credit: Jonas Alarik / Netflix Black Crab is a mishmash of apocalyptic signifiers and sci-fi recency without ever establishing much of a core. The world has ended a few times over in Adam Berg’s Black Crab: all-consuming civil war, global warming abetted eternal winters, post-apocalyptic societal fallout, the bubbling threat of chemical warfare.
Ruby Gentry — King Vidor - In Review Online
On the set of 1946’s Duel in the Sun, King Vidor was constantly assailed by a positively megalomaniacal David O. Selznick, who extrapolated new subplots and mini-climaxes from the already lurid western scenario, as well as imposed multiple other directors’ visions on Vidor’s so as to center and emphasize the beauty of the producer’s wife and star, Jennifer Jones.
The Trout — Joseph Losey - In Review Online
“A little more passion, though, would have been appreciated.” So says Dave Kehr of American — by way of London by way of France — director Joseph Losey’s Mr. Klein, his 1976 film of Nazi ascendency and distorted identities.
The Tragedy of Macbeth | Joel Coen
The Tragedy of Macbeth is masterful in its fusing of the artificial and elemental, a bit of Shakespearean subterfuge that justifies this umpteenth take on the eponymous play. The Coens excel in films that flaunt a superficial mastery of genre, form, and cinematic grammar, all to arrive at intentionally depleted and exhausted conclusions.
West Side Story | Steven Spielberg
Spielberg’s authorship is distinctly felt in this version of West Side Story, and more than in the original, it here truly feels as if life exists beyond the music. The New York City of Robert Wise’s 1961 West Side Story — rendered as line-drawings in the overture and then shot from above in a helicopter telephoto sequence — no longer exists, if it ever did in the first place.
The First Wave | Matthew Heineman
The First Wave isn’t much more than an ornamental object, pointlessly self-assured in its distasteful aesthetic manipulations. The compartmentalization that contemporary documentary tends to engender — divorcing thematic intent from aesthetic misguidedness — is undoubtedly exacerbated in the time of the COVID-19 film.
Zeros And Ones | Abel Ferrara
Zeros and Ones’ study of violence and digitality is the latest proof that Ferrara thrives in the spaces between knuckleheaded obviousness and total abstraction. A supreme sculptor of the effects of spiritual and physical isolation, Abel Ferrara has made a good number of films that comment on our “current moment” well before the current “current moment” was truly upon us.
Bulletproof | Todd Chandler
Bulletproof is a Wiseman-like doc of observation and contrast, refusing sensationalism and impressively navigating its slippery material. Todd Chandler’s Bulletproof is a present-tense documentary, not at the sole behest of its scope, but because of how its subject is so thoroughly burrowed into the minds of — at the very least — the entire nation.
The Velvet Underground | Todd Haynes
The Velvet Underground proves an interesting resting place for a litany of period detritus, but stumbles when foregrounding its titular subjects. Todd Haynes, a noted semiotician, tends to reconstruct rather than document, reincorporating tokens of his beloved ’60s and beyond into parallel narratives, as in his fractured Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There (in which the musician’s name is never actually spoken), and the David Bowie-adjacent glam fantasy Velvet Goldmine.
Southern Comfort | Walter Hill
Walter Hill famously bristled at his film Southern Comfort being referred to as a Vietnam allegory; such denial has had him labeled as inexplicably stubborn, as he’s even quoted as conceding that the 1981 film could withstand and even encourage such a reading.
Who You Think I Am | Safy Nebbou
Who You Think I Am attempts to speak to our current Internet age, but mines only shallowly with its picked-over storytelling mode. Juliette Binoche, for nearly her entire career, has juggled a specific experiment in actorly debasement and a more conventional luminescence that clinches her top-billing in otherwise forgettable, quasi-romantic fare.
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