In a year that saw the passing of Jean-Luc Godard, it’s astonishing to see a sometimes overlooked fixture of golden age European art cinema, Jerzy Skolimowski, directing one of his strongest films now—with a donkey for a star, no less. Boxer, poet, actor, painter: the 84-year-old director has brought a restlessness to his career, often expressed on film through a muscularly lyrical approach to mobile camerawork that remains unique in many ways. His classic Deep End (1970) heaves and wheels and gawps alongside its awkward, sexually frustrated teenage protagonist, Mike, who stalks a facsimile of curdled Swingin’ London shot in […]

Watch the trailer for 84-year-old Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski’s Eo, the director’s first film in seven years. The titular donkey is originally part of a traveling circus troupe (under the loving care of a young woman named Kasandra) before he’s shuttled off to a string of different owners. These subsequent caretakers oscillate between cruelty and tenderness, randomly determining the sweet donkey’s quality of life. Greatly influenced by Robert Bresson’s 1966 film Au Hasard Balthazar, Eo premiered at Cannes earlier this year, where it tied for the Jury Prize with Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s The Eight Mountains. In his […]

I’ve hit the fatigue section of my journey. Time is irrelevant, and I spilled several glasses of water during pitch meetings because my motor skills are suffering. I read back on my last journal, and it seems like a story from a stranger, someone much saner than I. It was probably the Top Gun: Maverick-themed military fly-by that opened this portal to another dimension. Does anyone know if the red white and blue smoke coming out of their engines were supposed to be celebrating France or the USA? 5/19 I woke up feeling weird. I only slept for four hours […]

“What if this movie’s just a donkey green screened onto a bunch of Koyaanisqatsi-looking footage?” I joked to a friend as the lights dimmed for Polish master Jerzy Skolimowski’s new film, Eo. It wasn’t, but honestly I wasn’t as far off as I thought. Touted (in the media, at least) as a remake of Robert Bresson’s 1966 classic Au hasard Balthazar, the 84 year-old’s latest offers one of the more radical updates of that film imaginable. Pitched somewhere between sacrilege and tribute (Skolimowski is a notorious Bresson fan, even if his work has rarely shown his influence), Eo is an […]