Recent Highlights
Things I've enjoyed from my watching, listening, and reading... in a few pairings.
At this point in the year, I’ve watched far fewer movies than I normally would have. There are a few reasons for that, but one is that in my leisure time, I’ve given a bit more of my attention to other art forms. With that in mind, I’m spotlighting a few works - some new, some not - that I came to recently for the first time, and loved. Should readers have thoughts about any one of these cross-medium pairings, I’d enjoy hearing them.
Film and a novel: The Shrouds (2024) + Vineland (1990)
I picked up Thomas Pynchon’s novel in anticipation of PTA’s supposedly very loose adaptation, “One Batter After Another,” which is set for release later this year. While reading it, I watched Cronenberg’s latest not once, but twice. This made for a few weeks in which I was pleasurably immersed in paranoia, serpentine plotting, and darkly absurdist humor.
TV and a documentary: The Wire (2002-2008) + Public Housing (1997)
This is a connection that I know others have already made, but since I dove into David Simon’s acclaimed series shortly after catching Frederick Wiseman’s tremendous documentary (props to SIFF and The Beacon for collabing on a Wiseman series), this relationship is currently top of mind. The show’s even-handed, novelistic depiction of poverty, drugs, and corruption in Baltimore feels heavily indebted to Wiseman’s sweeping look at public housing in Chicago.
Film and an album: Bound (1999) and FKA Twigs’ Eusexua (2025)
One of the sexist (and best) records of 2025 so far came out mere weeks into the year. In an absolutely stacked follow-up to the more relaxed Caprisongs, Eusexua delivers glitchy club music that’s at once hard-edged and alluring. Those descriptors might also apply to Bound, the Wachowski’s stylized neo-noir, whose eroticism and nods to Old Hollywood I thoroughly enjoyed. Sexual liberation is the name of the game for this pairing.
Film and a memoir: Caught by the Tides (2025) + The Years (2002)
Okay, it was all the way back in October of last year that I watched Caught by the Tides at VIFF, but with its theatrical release in Seattle just a month out, now feels like the right time to endorse it. Together with Annie Ernaux’s brilliantly reflexive, deeply moving memoir, you have two texts with much to say about the passage of time, the nature of change, and the relationship between images and memory.
Film and an album: Universal Language (2024) + DJ Koze’s Music Can Hear Us (2025)
Matthew Rankin’s gently comedic Kiarostami riff is another film I caught in Vancouver last year, but it’s available now on VOD, and streaming on Kanopy. With its transposition of Iranian cinema to the wintry streets of Winnipeg, this wonderful film shares a multicultural spirit with DJ Koze’s entrancing new album. In Music Can Hear Us, lyrics arrive in a variety of languages, and each track is a swerve to a different style of electronic music. Handily among the best of 2025 in their respective mediums.
