The Brooklyn Rail

Dear Readers,

Each December/January, we strive to torment you with a list of movies you missed out on. Some of them you just missed by less than a year. Others you missed by about a century. A couple critics muse over historic films lost to time or ones that never made it past a great idea. There’s something poetic about being obsessed with a movie you’ll never watch. Our critics romanticize about what a movie might have been or might have meant to cinema history. We make visible the invisible visions of the contemporary films that left an impact on the festival circuit or in brief theatrical releases but are now excluded from the current conversation due to their unavailability. Maybe, one day, we hope, you will actually see one of these movies that has left such an impact on us.

—Laura Valenza, co-film editor

 

The Attack of the Giant Moussaka (1999)

The tried-and-true disaster movie often involves the interwoven narratives of an ensemble cast reacting to some type of catastrophe. The disaster movie acts as a kaleidoscopic lens that shows society in the face of sublime terror—whether the threat is a natural disaster (an Earthquake or The Towering Inferno), extraterrestrial invasion (Independence Day), or the arrival of a giant monster (any iteration of Godzilla). Now, what if every single element of that premise was absurd, and the threat was a gargantuan, throbbing slice of moussaka, a Greek casserole of eggplant and minced meat? Panos H. Koutras’s The Attack of the Giant Moussaka (1999) answers that very zany question with the Greek take on a John Waters flick. After a UFO zaps a serving of the Greek dish, the moussaka grows to mammoth size and rampages through Athens, smothering every screaming bystander in its path. The ensemble includes a cocaine-addled wife of a corrupt and ineffective politician, a vapid broadcast journalist, and a character named Tara (styled like Divine in the Waters films) who falls in love with a gay astronomer. As for the aliens? They’re sultry female models straight out of Austin Powers. Despite its cult status in France and Japan (and Koutras’s relative prominence as an indie filmmaker in Greece), The Attack of the Giant Moussaka is extremely hard to watch stateside. I managed to procure a bootleg DVD, but this camp classic merits much better physical media treatment.

—Harrison Blackman

 

The Great Gatsby (1926)

Every film lover has their grail—that one piece of cinema they will always chase, always romanticize. Mine is Paramount’s silent 1926 adaptation of The Great Gatsby. Released that November, nineteen months after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel was published, this first cinematic Gatsby sets my mind reeling. For one, it’s contemporaneous of the book and all its lavish flapper trappings. (How that must have crackled and fizzed at the time!) It’s also, by all accounts, the most faithful big-screen version—something I yearn to experience after a lifetime of bum versions that misunderstand the text and fetishize the twenties at the expense of the narrative. And, most importantly, it’s a lost film; all that remains is a sixty-second trailer you can watch on YouTube. The footage teases the cast—Warner Baxter as Jay Gatsby, Neil Hamilton (Commissioner Gordon in the sixties Batman TV series) as Nick Carraway, Lois Wilson as (a book-accurate dark-haired) Daisy Buchanan, Hale Hamilton as Tom Buchanan, and (gasp!) a young William Powell as George Wilson—in scenes that include pool-side parties and champagne-soaked revelry at Gatsby’s West Egg mansion.

The film is “important,” I suppose, as a missing piece of Hollywood and Fitzgeraldania; the trailer suggests Gatsby is standard quick-and-cheap silent fare, understandable for a book that flopped with readers. For me, though, the movie exists as a luminous apparition of an era that has haunted my imagination since I first read Gatsby in high school. What I wouldn’t give to see this adaptation, to revel in its purity and Jazz Age Hollywood excess.

That phantom pain is particularly acute as we near the end of this Gatsby centennial. But perhaps I should take a lesson from the old sport and not chase ghosts. This great film I’ll never see probably exists best in the fantasy I’ve conjured in my mind. Grails, as Gatsby teaches us, are meant to be unattainable.

—Dante A. Ciampaglia

 

The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes (unreleased)

I betray my Jersey allegiances once again: who’s better than Joe Dante? Dante is not quite under- but rather mis-appreciated. He’s not only the author of Gremlins (and truly, what studio hit ever reckoned more sharply—and especially in its Looney Tunes-esque sequel, joyously—with art and capitalism in the age of hyper-reproduction?) but a consummate craftsman who refuses to reduce the art of moviemaking to the advancement of either authorial brand or a platform for subversive talking points. Dante’s run of studio-hopping in the mid to late eighties has all the mad-science feel of an artist whose affection for moving images and their daffy history is matched only by a conscience that refused to capitulate to the American free market. Rather than withdraw from the commercial method, Dante subverted it from inside—like his mentor and one-time employer, Roger Corman, before him, Dante’s films celebrate film history. The predictable, frustrating bore that is just-post-aughts Hollywood reveals a craven evolution into an app to be optimized. This new Hollywood has so staunchly abandoned Dante that his recent (and less recent) history is littered with almosts, projects tanked by inadequate funding and cuts.

Take your pick of the most egregious Best Film He Never Got to Make; mine would be The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes, a biopic retelling of the period in Corman’s life when he directed his delightfully misguided psychedelic freak-out, The Trip (1967). Kaleidoscope Eyes had multiple script rewrites through its stops and starts, including one by Michael Almereyda, and got as far as a 2016 staged reading directed by Dante and starring Bill Hader as Corman. A Corman cameo itself was shot in 2017, in the event that the vaunted schlock-sopper died before the money could be gathered.

How does the story end? Corman died, the money never got there. It’d be a bummer if it was surprising, but instead it’s maybe just proof of how miraculous a Corman or Dante movie is in the first place. What an extravagant, vulgarly satisfying pleasure that, in a world increasingly dominated by grubbers who look at a sunset and see only dollar signs, there remains a bit of low poetry in the eyes of our best gremlins, those who remain, and those who we miss. Too bad nobody’s feeding these poets after midnight.

—Frank Falisi

 

Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo (2019)

Cannes 2019: Rumors spread about a three-and-a-half-hour movie composed of nothing but bouncing butts. Half the audience supposedly walked out on opening night. It was hailed among the worst premieres since Vincent Gallo’s Brown Bunny (2003). I took an interest and was soon seated in a near-empty theater for a reprise of Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo, the second installment of Abdellatif Kechiche’s Mektoub trilogy—really a single, nine-hour film that had been split into parts. Intermezzo is a standalone detour, in that it takes place across a single evening inside a Sète nightclub. Burdened by secrets, desires, and fears, the characters of Mektoub take a break to go dancing.

There truly is a lot of ass-shaking in Intermezzo, but it’s far from the only part of the film. Kechiche’s longwinded naturalism fully captures the feeling of a night out at the club, from the limpid sensation of time passing to music to the silent intimacy that one develops with strangers. As so often happens when I go dancing, I encountered these characters, with no knowledge of their backstories, and slowly worked out their relationships to one another through body language alone. Erotics become narratives on the dance floor. Kechiche instinctively grasped this fact, making for a film unlike anything else I’ve seen.

I later learned that the director, financially insolvent after producers balked at the length of his would-be opus, had premiered Intermezzo without licensing any of its music. It probably exists now only as a file on a hard drive somewhere in France. Just like a night raving, it was a magical moment that’s now only a memory.

—Nolan Kelly

 

Star Wars: A New Hope (Episode IV) (1977)

As a kid, in our house, we had one unlabeled VHS that was sacred. It was my mother’s copy of a commercial-free airing of Star Wars: A New Hope (Episode IV) (1977) on cable in the early nineties. She still has that copy now, even though she no longer owns a VHS player, because you can’t really get this version anymore. For the twentieth anniversary of the original trilogy, LucasFilm released a digitally-remastered box set that gave the whole series a new look, using updated special effects technology that just hadn’t been possible in the seventies, causing some versions of scenes to disappear into the ether, and others to be added out of thin air. If you’ve never seen the film, it’s a total delight for sci-fi fans of any age or era. A young Luke Skywalker learns that he’s not the average farmer he was raised to believe he was, but actually the son of a powerful Jedi Knight, an ancient protector of peace across the galaxy. He accompanies another Jedi, a couple of droids, and a pair of scruffy mercenaries to join the rebellion against and defeat the powerful Galactic Empire. Some things you won’t see anymore in the adventures they get up to in the film include gems such as the smear of Vaseline on the camera lens and carefully placed mirrors to hide the wheels of “floating” vehicles for wide-shots, or jerky puppets of alien creatures featured in the background of scenes. Perhaps most famously is the loss of the “Han shot first” moment in the cantina, which was re-edited in the later version to have the mercenary fire second out of self-defense. And, one thing you’ll see changed in the later remaster is the big crime boss Jabba the Hutt himself, who only appears in the 1997 remaster of A New Hope. The original has no such scene with the character as we know him! But, the likelihood of finding one of these pre-remaster versions is rare, unless you have a mother like mine who refused to give up her first copy of her first favorite film.

—Isabelle Lang

 

Le avventure di Pinocchio [The Adventures of Pinocchio] (unreleased)

Once upon a time there was Le avventure di Pinocchio [The Adventures of Pinocchio]. Once upon a time, or maybe not. Only the screenplay and a handful of frames remain of what should have been the first Italian animated film. Before Walt Disney, before Guillermo del Toro, this never-completed feature film was likely directed by Raoul Verdini and Umberto Spano. Although we can’t be sure of the directors’ identities, we know some of the main designers were Gioacchino Colizzi, Mameli Barbara, and Verdini.

The historical context is important: the film was made in 1935 in the midst of Italy’s Fascist era. The autarchic regime imposed by Benito Mussolini did not spare cinema. Alfredo Rocco, president of the propagandistic International Educational Cinematograph Institute, intended to overthrow American hegemony in the field of animation by commissioning the adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s novel—ironically, considering that Pinocchio’s themes of freedom are decidedly anti-fascist.

The making of the film was troubled. Technical means were limited and costs were high. Production stalled prematurely, leading the production to failure. In the mid-1930s, Walt Disney acquired the rights to Pinocchio. Legend has it that the Hollywood studio came into possession of the original negatives of the Italian movie, using them as inspiration. Supposedly, they are still stored in a vault in Burbank.

—Damiano Panattoni

 

April (2024)

Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April (2024) thrilled critics at the 62nd New York Film Festival and enjoyed a brief stint in theaters in April 2025, once it was acquired by Metrograph. Since then, it has not been screened or made available for streaming in the US. It is certainly not allowed to be screened in Georgia, where it was filmed and set. The title, the setting of the film, and the release date were all chosen for their metaphorical power, spring as a period of rebirth. April follows an obstetrician, Nina, as she delivers babies in a women’s clinic and provides illegal abortions in the countryside. The hospital investigates her for any indication of malpractice after a stillbirth—though the accusations are clearly a sham spurred by the bigotry in response to her stance on abortion. The film is ethereal, toys with magical realism alongside unflinching cinéma vérité, and heavy breathing and perspective shots dominate; Kulumbegashvili and her interviewer describe the movie like a living body during a post-screening Q&A at Metrograph back in April. The camera witnesses actual births in a real maternity clinic in Georgia, where the film was made in secret with the cooperation of the doctors. Kulumbegashvili spent a year in the clinic, earning the trust of doctors and patients. The stakes in the film are nearly as high as the stakes surrounding it. The director preserves the anonymity of those real people who appear in the film in order to protect them from blackmail. Both Kulumbegashvili and her cinematographer faced police investigation during April’s making. April’s cinematography reveals Kulumbegashvili’s love for Georgia’s beautiful scenery, but she says she is no longer allowed to make films in Georgia. The interviewer replies to this news: “Welcome to America, where everything is fine.”

—Laura Valenza

 

Unrecorded Night (unreleased)

When David Lynch passed away at the start of this hell year, he left a vast crater of potential masterworks behind. Lynch radically altered visual conventions with Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017. It was his final full-length project. With its completely audacious storylines (withholding its hero from the audience for around fifteen hours) and its striking imagery cementing Lynch as the foremost surrealist of the twenty-first century, it was, arguably, his greatest work. In the early 2020s, there had been whispers of another project coming, working title: Wisteria. Lynch’s long-time collaborator, Kyle MacLachlan, fueled theories about something being in the works when he posted a picture of the titular plant to his Instagram profile. Mark Frost, the co-creator of Twin Peaks, and several others who starred in the 2017 continuation of the cult series, likewise shared images of wisteria online. Lynch had reportedly been meeting with Netflix.

In the meantime, the filmmaker made absolutely no mention of anything he’d been working on outside of his weather reports, which he performed from 2005 to 2009 and resumed from 2020 to 2022. The rumored Wisteria eventually took on the mysterious title Unrecorded Night. Cinematographer Peter Deming confirmed the existence of the project in June, telling Nick Newman of The Film Stage, “David really liked what he called ‘the continuing story.’… He was like, ‘I’m not going to make any more movies. I’m just going to make longer stories because I love the longer story.’… Unrecorded Night was the same way.”

Although there is some hope that Lynch’s family may release the screenplay, we’ll never know what that longer story could’ve really been. David Lynch’s power lives on, in dreams.

—Conor Williams