Question: Does anyone care if Paste‘s Criterion round-ups publish the month after they’re intended for? This used to bother me just on grounds of professional, writerly pride, but I’m not sure anymore if it’s worth me being bothered by; by the time these pieces land, every release from the preceding month is commercially available, which feels like a useful consumer guide (even if, in Internet years, we’re way out of date).
Anyways. Good stuff from September. I loved My Man Godfrey. My only gripe about the experience is that I’m only now, in my 30s, getting around to it. I also loved revisiting A Raisin in the Sun, which today feels like it’s in conversation with films about black American experiences released in 2018 – BlacKkKlansman, Sorry to Bother You, Blindspotting, Black Panther*, The Hate U Give, Hale County This Morning This Evening, and so on and so forth**. (I’ve even written about a bunch of those!)
There’s also a nice bit about Andrei Rublev in here, which you may recall I wrote about back in August when the film ran in theaters in NYC. But that’s a different piece. And you should be focusing on this piece. You can head over to Paste Magazine to read the article in full.
*I know Black Panther takes place primarily in a fictional African nation, but its villain’s backstory…well, you know.
**You could expand this to TV to include Dear White People and Atlanta and Insecure, but I’m bored with TV.
A Constant Visual Feast 