Cursed Objects We Cherish

Circulating for decades as an undecipherably murky bootleg of outsized reputation, E. Elias Merhige’s experimental 1989 landmark Begotten has no dialogue or recognizable psychologies (credited characters include "God Killing Himself" and "Son of Earth – Flesh on Bone"), but possesses a violently abstract beauty to slice open your third eye. Shot on B&W 16mm, each frame then rephotographed through neutral-density filters (a meticulous four-year process), this squirmy, fleshy, loamy creation myth has a nebulous grain that moves like weather, thickening the dark and tearing open the light. The wonderful new 4K restoration's images are clearer and therefore more unsettling, an avant-masterpiece for the witching season.

Doc filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev's career examines the stories people tell themselves to justify their actions. The Tillman Story dismantled a military myth, Happy Valley probed a community protecting a monster, and Long Strange Trip found a jam band's spiritual hunger. With The Last First: Winter K2, he turns to the last unconquered prize in mountaineering: the first snowy-season ascent of K2. In 2021, dozens of climbers converged on the world's second-highest peak, including an ill-advised commercial expedition. Bar-Lev's archival team assembled a portrait from the inside (GoPros, drones, iPhones) that rejects the genre's heroic gloss. It's a gripping existentialist parable about unchecked self-regard, tragic hubris, and a racial reckoning at 28,000 feet.

Led by composer-bassist Jang Young-gyu, who scored Train to Busan and The Wailing (both screening in Metrograph's new series dedicated to him), Seoul seven-piece LEENALCHI features four pansori-trained vocalists, two electric bassists, drums, synths, and zero guitar. Finally available here after its 2020 South Korean release, the immediate psych-riff grooviness of "SUGUNGGA" hits in the guttural deliveries of four vocalists trading lines and characters (about a Dragon King who sends a turtle to find a rabbit's liver to cure his sickness!) and abrupt pitch shifts that hit like percussion. Brian Eno himself said the band "changed the way I think about music and Korea."

Two Questions for Alex Karpovsky. Though best recognized as Ray from HBO's "Girls," Karpovsky has been writing and directing idiosyncratic features since 2005's The Hole Story. World premiering tonight at the New/Next Film Festival, his new dark comedy Riptides stars Steve Little as an oddball boogie-boarder with big dreams and bigger delusions. We caught up in Baltimore today:

What itch does filmmaking scratch for you that acting doesn't? Control, mostly. Even if you get to improvise, you're there to serve someone else's vision. When you direct, you get to sculpt an idea and world in which you have the final say. It's a way to nurture your own specific creative expression. If I only acted, I would feel sort of impotent. Especially as an actor working periodically, sometimes the phone doesn't ring. When you're making a movie, you're taking action and putting your fate in your own hands.

New/Next is my favorite new discovery fest this decade. Thoughts? I don't know any festival in America at the moment that has as much hype and word-of-mouth reputation. Everyone is incredibly excited about it. At least, my circle of friends are like, "What did you see at New/Next? What got in? How does it compare?" Eric Hatch is a great programmer who I knew from the Maryland Film Fest. He just creates a buzzy festival where the parties are fun, and the filmmakers who show up are incredibly cool. I've made so many friendships from the Maryland days, that was another desire to play here.