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Niels Joaquin @nielsj.bsky.social · 6h

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

Niels Joaquin @nielsj.bsky.social · 1d

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

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Niels Joaquin @nielsj.bsky.social · 1d

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

Niels Joaquin @nielsj.bsky.social · 2d

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"

Niels Joaquin @nielsj.bsky.social · 2d

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

Niels Joaquin @nielsj.bsky.social · 3d

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

Niels Joaquin @nielsj.bsky.social · 4d

Also hard not to think of LLMs as the space where our own automation and self-negation are happening. Perhaps it does all collapse onto one language, and then no communication, and finally rebirth. Or oblivion

Niels Joaquin @nielsj.bsky.social · 4d

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"

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Niels Joaquin @nielsj.bsky.social · 5d

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

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Niels Joaquin @nielsj.bsky.social · 10d

Finished Panegyric: Volumes 1 & 2 by Guy Debord

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Niels Joaquin @nielsj.bsky.social · 12d

("the highest-quality fidelity"—Buck Swope)

Niels Joaquin @nielsj.bsky.social · 12d

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

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Niels Joaquin @nielsj.bsky.social · 12d

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?

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Niels Joaquin @nielsj.bsky.social · 13d

"Captain Whalley contemplated things once important, the efforts of small men, the growth of a great place, but now robbed of all consequence by the greatness of accomplished facts, by hopes greater still; and they gave him for a moment such an almost physical grip upon time."

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Niels Joaquin @nielsj.bsky.social · 13d

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

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Niels Joaquin @nielsj.bsky.social · 16d

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)

Niels Joaquin @nielsj.bsky.social · 17d

You always hear anecdotes about audiences laughing at Blue Velvet, etc.—and while I've rarely encountered that situation, yesterday's crowd really wasn't meeting the film on its terms

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Niels Joaquin @nielsj.bsky.social · 17d

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 🫥

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Niels Joaquin @nielsj.bsky.social · 17d

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

Niels Joaquin @nielsj.bsky.social · 22d

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 ..."

Niels Joaquin @nielsj.bsky.social · 23d

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

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Niels Joaquin @nielsj.bsky.social · 24d

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!

Niels Joaquin @nielsj.bsky.social · 25d

Man Ray: When Objects Dream, @metmuseum.org

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Niels Joaquin @nielsj.bsky.social · 25d

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 👌

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