After noticing all my “Film Favorites” pieces were from decidedly older films, I decided to incorporate a few new ones to the mix for balance, starting with a couple under-seen modern films from the most recent year I don’t cover in my “newer films” section, 2007. Both of these films are desperately under-seen and subversive masterpieces of modern cinema in wholly different ways.

My Winnipeg

Guy Maddin has made a career out of recreating early silent and sound cinema. His films approach us as documents of a long-lost time, alien products of our own making. They feign documentaries, but they test the line with a sort of fragmented operatic grandiosity. However, if My Winnipeg is a document, it’s hard to say to what, or in what form. Is it a reflection of the ’20s as it was lived, or as films from that period depicted it? It’s both, in fact, and much more, bleeding together art and life with rambling, rambunctious, disharmonious, elliptical force and playing around with cinema and its relation to life in some of the most unexpected of ways.
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