At Home With… May Picks

MADELINE CASH selects
Fitzcarraldo

Fitzcarraldo, dir. Werner Herzog, 1982

Fitzcaraldo is a film about a female breadwinner who bankrolls an Irish lunatic played by a German actor whose dream is to build an opera house in the Peruvian jungle with his friend Mick Jagger, the theme being that imposing what you find beautiful upon another culture can be a double-edged sword which, any sword designer will tell you, is bad. I’m not sure of the historical accuracy of the film but it’s a brilliant feat of Herzog’s who, to authenticate the experience, had his real crew drag a real tugboat up a real hill, documented in the making-of film Burden of Dreams (1982) by Les Blank, who later filmed Herzog eating his shoe. Plus there’s impeccable costumes and a beautiful soundtrack. Maybe not a great first-date movie but a great eighth- or ninth-date movie when you’re comfortable enough to whisper intermittently (it’s really long) and not have sex after.

WATCH FITZCARRALDO

Madeline Cash is a writer living in New York. Her debut novel is forthcoming from FSG in winter 2026.

SIMON LIU selects
The Hole

The Hole, dir. Tsai Ming-liang, 1998

In the early 2000s, I was 16 years old, browsing my local DVD rental spot in Hong Kong, when I came across a copy of this film, which would go on to change my life. I certainly didn’t know it at the time, I was just drawn to the now-iconic cover image of Lee Kang-sheng sitting half-dressed, leg through an open hole in the floor, with a beer at hand, and an expression typical to the sublime performer who would both haunt and move me to tears in this film and many others in the following years. On that first viewing, I learned lessons from Tsai that have stayed with me since—from the incredible economy of the narrative exposition in the imageless opening sequence to the accumulation of overwhelming emotion, humor, discomfort, yearning, and sometimes terror that only his brand of slow cinema can provide. I try to watch it once a year and feel ever more connected to it as time goes by. This might be embarrassing to share, but following Lee and Tsai’s last personal appearance at their MoMA retrospective in 2022, as they were being driven away I ran alongside the car for a moment proclaiming my love and admiration (in true Opening Night fashion). Lee then popped his head out the window and delivered a classic Hsiao-kang cheeky half-grin toward me, a sequence that felt lifted straight from one of their films. I’m grateful to have that moment and this film to hold onto within, as that DVD cover once said, “a world of disaster.” 

WATCH THE HOLE

Simon Liu is an artist filmmaker whose work has shown at the Toronto, New York, Berlin, Rotterdam, and Sundance International Film Festivals alongside the M+ Museum, MoMA, MOCA LA, and the 2024 Whitney Biennial. His film Signal 8 (2019) is currently available to stream on Metrograph At Home.

Graham L. Carter selects
Old Enough

Old Enough, dir. Marisa Silver, 1984

A nepo baby (Marisa is the daughter of the late Joan Micklin Silver, one of the greatest American filmmakers) who actually managed to inherit her mother’s talent for creating something out of nothing, layering lived-in detail after lived-in detail to build a fully realized world, thwarting any potential cliches with characters who clearly have a life beyond the edges of the frame. An essential New York coming of age film: “Which floor do you live on?” “All of ’em.” “All of ’em? Your father the super?”

WATCH OLD ENOUGH

Graham L. Carter is a video editor for Metrograph.