DREAM STORY

I’ve been in a real Eyes Wide Shut phase these last couple of weeks. A lot of deep-dive overly analytical videos on the film have been recommended to me on Instagram recently and I have to admit that some of them make some interesting points. 

 

The film also trended on Twitter the other day and it’s being pushed on Tubi (where I ended up watching it). Much like when C-19 shut the world down in March of 2020 and everyone was rushing to post their thoughts/reviews/feelings on Safe, Outbreak, Contagion and other virus-related movies, I think a lot of the recent Epstein and Diddy news has people trying to connect all of that to Eyes Wide Shut and anything EWS-related.

I guess this blog post means I’m participating…


Outside of hardcore Eyes Wide Shut Fans, it seems like folks don’t realize that there are three other film adaptations of the original source material: Traumnovelle. Two films before EWS (Traumnovelle and Il cavaliere, la morte e il diavolod) and one recent adaptation from 2024 (Dream Story). I don’t even think a lot of hardcore Kubrick fans acknowledge this. I didn't even know the most recent adaptation existed until recently. It isn't good but it's also fascinating to me.

You would think someone like me with a blog like PINNLAND would jump at the opportunity to make comparisons and sidebysides, but it’s kind of pointless. Someone also did the work for me (the 1983 Italian version is left out but you get the idea).

  

There is certainly a nice-sized Venn diagram crossover of Eyes Wide Shut cultists and diehard Kubrick fans, but there are separate groups that don’t always intermingle. Believe it or not - there are online communities of folks that are obsessed with Eyes Wide Shut that don’t necessarily care about all the Easter eggs in The Shining or the historical details of Barry Lyndon.

Personally, I find the diehard Stanley Kubrick fans that are obsessed with combing every detail of every one of his films to be the most interesting people. Sometimes they make outrageous claims and their theories are incredibly forced, but I still find them to be fascinating and sometimes incredibly knowledgeable.
The EWS folks have a lot in common with hardcore Boards Of Canada fans. I fall in to the unique Venn Diagram of people that love BoC’s music, Kubrick’s films and Eyes Wide Shut as a standalone entity outside of Kubrick's filmography. About three months ago I joined the Boards Of Canada Reddit group and immediately made the correlation between those people and EWS people.

For those that aren’t familiar with Board of Canada - they’re an electronic music duo from Scotland that relies heavily on Easter eggs, half-truths, occult imagery and anonymity. One could make a fairly easy argument that these elements describe both Kubrick and Eyes Wide Shut.

Occult man-made circles, pentagrams, hexagrams, stars and other images are often associated with BoC’s music and Eyes Wide Shut.


Obsessive fandom can sometimes be incredibly informative even if they're base is rooted in batshit crazy theories. I do think it’s important to be overly familiar with Stanley Kubrick’s filmography and style of filmmaking when dissecting Eyes Wide Shut. He’s famous for his attempts at accuracy, OCD-like work-rate and avoiding continuity errors. This makes his work more intriguing in my older age because for someone so supposedly obsessed with “perfection”, there are a lot of possible plot holes and intentional continuity errors in some of his films. I like to think that Kubrick has been messing with his audience on purpose much like how most of the characters surrounding Dr. Harford in the story of Traumnovelle/Eyes Wide Shut have been messing with him (and how Boards of Canada loves to mess with their fans).


The first two adaptions of Traumnovelle are lesser known because they're basiclly B-movies. And on a personal note - they just aren’t very good (the 1983 Italian iteration is quite goofy). The most recent adaptation isn’t good either but it’s kind of fascinating for a variety of reasons.

On one hand, Dream Story is trying to stay true to the source material but with a modern twist. The basic premise is still there. A doctor stumbles upon multiple levels/worlds of sexual perversions after his ego is bruised from learning that his wife has sexual desires for another man (an underground organization of powerful elites may or may not be behind a chunk of the doctor’s discoveries). It’s best to not judge this movie from the trailer. It looks like an SNL skit parodying Eyes Wide Shut. On some level Dream Story does try to take from Kubrick's adaptation but there are some differences.
This time around director Florian Frerichs throws in more surreality, elaborate dream sequences and elements of S&M that aren’t in the other movie adaptions. Eyes Wide Shut certainly plays around with reality and throws in a dream sequences/fantasy, but it’s not the same. Dreams Story has total breaks in reality way more frequently. But because Eyes Wide Shut is also a modern retelling of Traumnovelle starring two major movie stars directed by one of the most legendary filmmakers - Dream Story will always be in the shadow of Kubrick.

Eyes Wide Shut aside, Dream Story does itself no favors. The acting is flat, the chemistry between the actors is almost non existent and Florian Frerichs clearly takes from Eyes Wide Shut as if we don't see it. Sometimes word for word! This is fascinating to me. Has there ever been a cinematic remake/adaptation/reinterpretation that tries to stay true to the original literary source material but also lifts/borrows/steals/copies from one of a previous cinematic iteration? Maybe John Carpenter's The Thing? 


Dream Story is really only made for people that are Traumnovelle/Eyes Wide Shut completists or folks that stay up late and watch random stuff on tubi when they can't sleep. I guess I’m somewhere in between.

BLACK AT YALE

Last year I was recommended this film by my good friend Chris on an episode of The Pink Smoke podcast and I’m surprised I hadn’t heard of it before. This is truly a unique documentary that was ahead of it’s time. What makes Black at Yale so great is that it isn’t celebratory. Had this documentary about Black students at Yale university in the early 1970s been made by most filmmakers, it would have more than likely been a film celebrating the small demographic of Black students admitted to the college. It would have been seen a win. Instead, this documentary is a cautionary tale about the potential dangers of being “the first” or one of the earliest Black people to do something. This movie opened up a potential lane for more films to explore the negative side of being an early Black person to do something, but very few people went down that path. Instead - folks gravitated towards the stereotypical Christian-minded NAACP way of thinking where every early achievement by Black person is seen as nothing but a positive, and if you’re critical in any way you’re part of the problem. Sadly, this way of thinking continues to have a grip on Black folks now more than ever. If you don’t blindly celebrate every “win” achieved by a Black person then you’re a self-hating coon. And is it me - or does the “coon” insult no longer have the sting it once had? Nowadays, “coon” means everything and nothing at the same time. You vote Democrat? You’re a coon. You identify as a Black conservative? You’re a coon. You’re Black with a white spouse? You’re a coon? See what I mean? Anything can make you a coon at this point.

Anyway…

Getting in to Yale in the early 70s as a Black student is truly a major accomplishment. But once you get past that, you realize that you’re very isolated with little to no support or community. That kind of stuff matters. Especially back then. This is what the documentary hammers home. The film focuses on a few specific Black Yale students and their experiences on campus. From the jump you can see the mild depression in the students as they talk about their somewhat disappointing time on campus. Naturally they experience things like racism but that’s that not even the worst part. It’s racism and discrimination combined with being alone. In the south, if you experienced racism and bigotry as a Black person you still had a community of your own to fall Back on. In New Haven Connecticut, there were only so many Black people there at the time. And the Black locals with no affiliation to Yale would sometimes delineate from the few Black Yale students out of misplaced spite. So they’re facing forms of opposition from all sides.
This is incredibly unique to me because there has always been this slightly inaccurate portrayal of this “all for one” mentality when it comes to the Black struggle when in reality there were many internal opposing civil wars going on between Black folks during and after the civil rights movement. 

The problem is, the cautionary or overly critical Black folks that want to assess a situation before going all in are usually portrayed as "the problem" and are grouped in with the true snakes and sellouts within the Black community which is just unfair. 

Black at Yale / Chameleon Street

What’s most fascinating about this movie is that one of the subjects of this documentary isn’t actually enrolled in the college as a student which is a whole separate unique story in itself. I’m surprised Black At Yale isn’t paired with Wendell B Harris’ Chameleon Street more often. Not only is Chameleon Street based on a true story, but one of the chapters in the film involves the main character pretending to be a student at Yale. The fact that this has happened twice in life is kind of amazing to me.


Black at Yale speaks to my type of critical thinking. There are plenty of like-minded Black folks out there from all generations that would connect with this underseen gem of a film which is now on YouTube for free…

SUGAR HILL

I rewatched Sugar Hill in full recently after almost 30 years and it might be one of the most miscategorized movies ever. By the mid/late 90s, any movie that was part of the Black-American film boom at the time got grouped in to that “urban”/“hood” genre. What started out as essentially “post-Boyz in tha Hood cinema” (menace II society, south central, New Jersey drive, strapped, juice, above the rim, etc) eventually branched out to stuff like Deep Cover, King Of New York, New Jack City, Drop Squad, Dead Presidents and Sugar Hill. That’s a pretty lazy and borderline racist grouping of movies. Deep Cover was a noir crime drama. Dead Presidents was a post-Vietnam crime story. Sugar Hill was about organized crime. Drop Squad had nothing to do with traditional criminality at all (it was actually a response to all of the movies out at the time that sort of romanticized that stuff). If a movie had a predominantly Black cast and an ounce of “grittiness” it got called “hood” or “urban”.

It also didn’t help that a lot of these films shared the same actors, writers, producers and directors. Tupac starred in Juice and Above The Rim. Samuel L Jackson appeared in Juice, Fresh and Menace II Society. Laurence Fishburne starred in Boyz In Tha Hood and Deep Cover. Donald Faison co-starred in both New Jersey Drive and Sugar Hill. Bokeem Woodbine starred in Strapped and Dead Presidents. Khandi Alexander played the stereotypical drug addicted hood mom in Menace II Society and Sugar Hill. And a lot of the background/supporting cast from Boyz In Tha Hood showed up in South Central, Poetic Justice and Menace II Society. Sugar Hill was written by Barry Michael Cooper who also wrote New Jack City and Above The Rim. These three movies don’t have a whole lot in common but they were all birthed from the same person.

New Jack City / Sugar Hill

New Jack City / Sugar Hill

Menace II Society / Sugar Hill

These predominately Black films from the 90s also featured a rapper-turned actor in a prominent role and had high profile hip-hop soundtracks with a lot of the same artists providing the songs. 

In 1996 the Wayans brothers released Don’t Be A Menace In South Central While Drinking Your Juice In The Hood which kind of killed the unofficial “urban movie” genre. But the damage was done. To this day folks will still miscategorize stuff like Deep Cover and New Jack City with Menace II Society and South Central. 

On one hand it’s quite bigoted to group all these movies together, but it’s also easy to see how, at a quick glance, one could group a lot of these movies together on face value.

I say all this to say that Sugar Hill should really be grouped in with other modern smaller scale mob/organized crime movies. It’s certainly not on the level of Goodfellas, Casino or the first two Godfather movies but it is definitely a great second-tier crime movie. Instead of Juice or Menace II Society, Sugar Hill deserves the same notoriety as Donnie Brasco, The Funeral or A Bronx Tale. Sugar Hill and Carlito’s Way are cinematic first cousins. Both New York City-based movies involve a protagonist villain trying to leave their criminal past behind for a woman. Unfortunately there’s always been this inability to connect predominantly Black films to predominantly white films the same way people connect and correlate same-race films…

In Sugar Hill, Roemello (Wesley Snipes) and his brother Ray (Michael Wright) are high-level New York City drug dealers. Roemello grows tired of the criminal life and plans to leave it all behind with his girlfriend Melissa in the midst of a gang war started by Ray. 

The story eventually turns in to a tug of war between Melissa and Ray. One side wants to pull him away from his dangerous lifestyle while the other side wants to keep him from leaving. 

Unlike some of the aforementioned movies, Sugar Hill is actually visually stunning. That’s not to say that films like Juice or Deep Cover don’t have stunning shots. But for the most part, the movies associated with the “urban” genre aren’t really recognized for their striking visuals. Sugar Hill is different. I don’t know how intentional this was but the wardrobe colors combined with the dark skin of the actors make for a nice contrast. It kind of planted the visual seeds for later films like Belly. Outside of just the visual similarities, the relationship between the brothers in Sugar Hill parallels the relationship between Nas and DMX in Belly right down to the level-headed partner wanting to leave behind their life of crime while the emotional unpredictable partner wants to stay a criminal. 

Sugar Hill is more of a slow burn than a typical shoot 'em up gangster flick. The explosive violent moments are few and far between. What we get instead are scenes of Snipes questioning his existence as a crime boss with a looming noir-ish jazz heavy score. This is mob/mafia/organized crime story that has more in common with other existential crime films like Sonatine and Hana-bi than it does King of New York. 

This is overdue for a proper reassessment.

SIDEWALK STORIES

I suppose the most alarming takeaway from Charles Lane’s Sidewalk Stories is that even though it was a remake of an almost 70 year old film at the time (Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid), the basic premise still applied to late 1980’s New York City. Lane never shied away from his giant homage to Chaplin but the bigger emphasis was on poverty and how bad it was even in the modern era. The cast of Sidewalk Stories is mostly Black so you could delve deeper in to race but a lot of the supporting and background characters are mostly white. Charles Lane has absolutely explored issues concerning race in his other works but I honestly don’t think this was his goal here. I think he was trying to make a general observation about poverty in the modern era and how it effects everyone.

There really isn’t much left to say about this movie after 35+ years. All the interesting and insightful stuff has been said. Outside of the race of the main characters there really isn’t anything different between Sidewalk Stories and The Kid. It’s essentially shot for shot. I don’t have anything new and/or profound to add.

What hasn’t been touched on a whole lot are the film’s influences outside of The Kid and the later films it would go on to influence. I find all that stuff interesting. Sidewalk Stories is a visual film and it hasn't really been looked at through that lens.

It [SIDEWALK STORIES] definitely came from THE KID - Charles Lane, hiddenfilms.com

The Kid / Sidewalk Stories 

The Kid /
Sidewalk Stories 

The Kid / Sidewalk Stories 

The Kid /
Sidewalk Stories 

The Kid /
Sidewalk Stories 

The Kid /
Sidewalk Stories 

A common theme of silent cinema was poverty. Even if you aren’t a silent movie aficionado, close your eyes right now and think about the basic elements of a standard 1920s silent movie. Scraps of bread, dirty faces, holes in shoes, winos, etc.

Sidewalk Stories is really one giant homage to the silent genre.

homelessness was the thing that made me make the film - Charles Lane, moveablefest.com

Menilmontant / Sidewalk Stories 

Speedy / Sidewalk Stories

The Gold Rush / Sidewalk Stories 

The Gold Rush / Sidewalk Stories 

It should also be noted that Sidewalk Stories was a sequel to a lesser seen short film that Lane made in film school which was also an homage to the silent genre and laid the groundwork for his debut feature…

The Gold Rush / A Place In Time

The Gold Rush / A Place In Time

Sidewalk Stories was sort of a difficult film to track down for years but one huge momentary positive about the popularity of The Artist (2011) is that the director Michel Hazanavicius supposedly credited Lane’s Sidewalk Stories as a major influence. This brought some attention to the underseen film. I say supposedly because while Indiewire, Film Comment, TIFF, The Atlantic and more all say this - I haven’t actually found a direct quote from Hazanavicius himself. Film critic Ashley Clarke did note that Sidewalk Stories had a series of screenings in France in 2002 which is where Hazanavicius may have seen it.

Sidewalk Stories /

The Artists

Sidewalk Stories /

The Artists

Lane would eventually acknowledge The Artist and it's similarities to his movie...

Now that Sidewalk Stories is finally on a proper blu-ray you should check it out if you haven’t…

maXXXine

Maxxxine is certainly better than the other two films in the Maxine trilogy but that isn’t saying much. I recognize this isn’t a very good movie but I also kind of enjoyed it. Unlike Pearl and X, this movie has the guts to try to be fun and entertaining whereas the other two are quite boring. Maxxxine certainly fits in with the other movies as they’re all about our female protagonists wanting to be famous no matter what, but the tone switches this time around. Pearl and X don’t work for a multitude of reasons but the main issue is that they’re boring. Boring can be good sometimes but not in this case. It’s sort of a failure when your films about pornography and axe murdering are stale and uninteresting. I think this is a fair criticism because Ti West didn’t set out to make boring deconstructed slasher movies. It’s clear from the editing, music and overall tone of the first two movies that he wanted to make something exciting. The thing about Ti West is that he’s good at ghost stories. Traditional horror and slashers aren’t really his strongpoint. I think the Maxine trilogy is proof of that (click here to read my thoughts on X from a few years ago).

This is a very unintentionally silly movie with a lot of cartoonish performances and sometimes silly dialogue. But the biggest issue is there’s too much going on for a 100 minute movie. In addition to Maxxxine’s never-ending quest to become a movie star, she’s still on the run from the murders in the first film (there’s a sleazy private investigator on her trail that knows about her past). She’s committing all new murders this time around and there’s a serial killer called the nightstalker on the loose that’s killing girls around her. The movie could have been simplified and condensed. But I was still entertained. My attention never strayed like it did with X and Pearl.


Maxxxine has drawn a lot of comparisons to Boogie Nights. I guess that’s because both movies are about the adult film industry. But any shot, scene or comparison from Boogie Nights that folks bring up in relation to Maxxxine all come from older films (the famous mirror shot at the end of Boogie Nights was an homage to the ending of Raging Bull which, knowing Martin Scorsese, was probably inspired by something earlier).

If anything, Bette Gordon’s Variety feels like the movie that Maxxxine takes from the most. Both movies are about women in the adult industry being pursued by stalkers. Variety and Maxxxine have lots of specific scenes and moments that are too identical to not mention even if they are coincidental.

Variety / maXXXine

Variety / maXXXine

I noticed this potential nod to Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere…

Somewhere / maXXXine

and Tales of Hoffman…

Tales Of Hoffman / maXXXine

Visual homages aside, Maxxxine’s twist in the end borrows heavily from Paul Schrader’s Hardcore. Enough time has passed since this movie’s release so I’ll just reveal it - the nightstalker is revealed to be Maxine’s evangelical father trying to get her to leave the adult film industry and come back home which is similar to George C Scott’s character in Hardcore (minus the serial killing).

Hardcore / maXXXine

Hardcore / maXXXine

The crazy stalker element comes right out of Ken Russell's Crimes of Passion

Crimes of Passion / maXXXine

I guess I don’t have a huge issue with all the homages considering the prior films in the trilogy are also reference heavy. I knew what to expect. If anything, the coincidental similarities to older films are the best thing about it (I didn’t particularly care for the Psycho sequence that’s literally set in the actual Psycho house)


This isn’t a post to try and convince anyone that Maxxxine is misunderstood (I’m sure in about twenty years or so history will be re-written and it will find a new cult audience of apologists). This movie’s reputation is understandable. Maxxxine deserved all the negative criticism it received. I just thought there were a handful of semi-interesting qualities about it that shouldn’t go ignored even if the overall end product is a misfire.

SISU: ROAD TO REVENGE *UPDATED*

Sisu: Road To Revenge is what you should want in a fun non-groundbreaking sequel (click here to read my thoughts on the first film). There’s continuity, the tone is the same, there’s a more interesting villain, and the violence/action sequences are upped a little more this time around.

Even the visual references and homages are the same...

Max Max: Fury Road / Sisu: Road To Revenge

The spirit of First Blood is still there

I could talk a whole day about this. What First Blood did to me when / was 10 years old basically changed my life - Jalmari Helander, Collider.com

First Blood / Sisu: Road To Revenge

First Blood / Sisu: Road To Revenge

We still get references to old westerns like Stagecoach

The biggest influences style-wise were a lot of old Western movies - Jalmari Helander, loudandclearreviews.com

Stagecoach / Sisu: Road To Revenge

Stagecoach / Sisu: Road To Revenge

And while it isn’t identical, the usage of chapters is very similar to Inglorious Basterds (chapters one going in to their respective opening scenes are incredibly similar in spirit).

Inglorious Basterds / Sisu: Road To Revenge

This time around, instead of nameless third reich soldiers, “The man who refuses to die” is battling soviet soldiers led by the man who killed his family years ago (there’s a bounty on our protagonist's head for a war crime he committed against the soviet army years ago). It’s important to note that the story is set during the final year of World War 2.
Like I already mentioned, this movie is similar in tone to the first one but takes the action sequences up a notch. Sisu: Road To Revenge is incredibly fast paced and far from boring. Stephen Lang gives the standout performance as the lead villain and arch nemesis to the film's hero. On a sidenote - I like how much Lang has been leaning in to being typecast as the tough menacing older guy in most movies these days (Avatar, Don’t Breathe, Public Enemies, etc).
While we aren’t killing Nazis this time around, the gratuitous violence is still kind of justified. Sisu: Road To Revenge leans in to the 80s stereotype of killing evil Russian soldiers hellbent on destruction. 

Speaking of 80s action films - there appears to be an obvious Die Hard reference towards the end of Sisu 2...

Die Hard / Sisu: Road To Revenge

Die Hard / Sisu: Road To Revenge

One particular sequence borrows heavily from the first Terminator film...

Terminator / Sisu: Road To Revenge

Die Hard / Sisu: Road To Revenge

Die Hard / Sisu: Road To Revenge

And some Indiana Jones

I like to think it's more Indiana Jones kind of Action - Jalmari Helander, CinemovieTV

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade / Sisu: Road To Revenge

The film even references the silent era

For Heaven's Sake / Sisu: Road To Revenge

I don’t mean to call this movie mindless fun as an insult, but it is some of the best mindless entertainment you’ll find in a movie this year.

WHERE TO LAND *UPDATED*

Please don’t treat this like a traditional review. I am a big Hal Hartley fan and pretty biased. Much like his last feature film; Ned Rifle, the band has gotten back together again on a slightly smaller scale. Ned Rifle featured almost every Hal Hartley stock actor from every era of his filmmaking. This time around the movie stars all of his “day ones”: Robert John Burke, Bill Sage and Edie Falco (non-day one Hartley regular Dwight Ewell also makes an appearance). Even the score, done by Hartley himself, is reminiscent of early stuff like Unbelievable Truth and Trust. Just off of those aspects alone, I am very nostalgic. It’s difficult for me to shake all the underlying history associated with Hartley’s latest film (again - do not take this as a traditional review).

Where To Land is extremely meta to Hartley’s life. I know filmmakers don’t always like when critics or analysts forcibly connect events in a movie to their personal life but the story is about a once popular aging semi-retired filmmaker of romantic comedies who’s having a midlife crisis. He doesn’t have any children and is unmarried. He’s drawing up a last will and testament and suddenly wants to stop filmmaking all together and work as a groundskeeper (he develops a fascination with cemeteries). He also may or may not be the biological father to an aspiring young film writer. Because of all these recent changes in his life, everyone around him mistakenly assumes he’s going to die soon when in fact he’s just making arrangements for later in life and is looking to do something new.

I can’t speak to Hal Hartley having a mid-life crisis because I don’t know him, but he is a filmmaker who’s output isn’t as steady as it used to be. He doesn’t have any children and while his movies are considered “art house” or “indie”, they are in fact romantic. Love and romantic relationships are a major part of almost every film he’s made over the last 40 years. 

Speaking of “arthouse” - Hartley makes sure to portray his cinematic-self as a down to earth “every man” instead of a pretentious cigarette smoking artsy filmmaker that dresses in all black. I’m not saying that’s an accurate description of art house filmmakers, but from Bergman to Godard, there’s this basic American SNL/Simpsons stereotype of the depressed artsy filmmaker. Of what little I know about Hartley outside of filmmaking, he’s a very nice guy that’s down to earth (he is from the working class neighborhood of Lindenhurst, Long Island).

Hartley even throws in a self-referencing easter egg. How else am I supposed to take this??

Where To Land

Bill Sage 30 years apart in similar scenes/moments in Hartley's Flirt and Amateur...

Flirt / Where To Land

Not only is Flirt (1995) one of his most romantic films, but it’s also the film he’s most proud of (he said this years ago in an interview for the AVclub).

This is in no way a late period film from a legendary director just going through the motions or "playing the hits", but there are a lot of callbacks to his earlier works...

Theory Of Achievement / Where To Land

Ambition / Where To Land

Trust / Where To Land

  

Another interesting Easter egg is Hartley’s ongoing nod to Godard. After almost 40 years it could be seen as lazy to keep comparing Hartley to Godard, but he certainly goes out of his way to reference or namedrop Godard in his work…

Where To Land

Hartley referencing Godard over the years...

Alphaville / The Book Of Life

Alphaville / The Book Of Life

Oh, Woe Is Me / Henry Fool

First Name Carmen / Simple Men

First Name Carmen / No Such Thing

Band Of Outsiders / Amateur

It’s common for filmmakers to have one of their regular actors play them in their own movie. Both Harvey Keitel and Matthew Modine have played iterations of Abel Ferrara. Denis Lavant has played slightly fictitious versions of Leos Carax throughout their 40 year actor/director relationship. This time around, Bill Sage plays a slightly fictitious version of Hal Hartley. Who better to play "Hartley" than his most regularly used actor?


This isn’t a movie that you just stumble upon. You’re either a Hal Hartley fan like myself that sought this out, or a film critic/writer that covers independent cinema. At this point, Hartley is an American independent film legend so his features will always gain attention from specific publications and journals (this is his first feature in over a decade).
I know this is a contradiction but Where To Land is one of my favorite films of the year but I would only recommend it to other Hal Hartley fans or folks that are in to interesting independent/art films outside of movies that might play at an AMC.

On a personal note, as someone who questioned their morality a lot this year (due to serious health issues which have now been dealt with) and was constantly surrounded by loved ones - it hits close to home when one of my personal favorite directors makes a film dealing with the same stuff.