Continuing through the new additions to the S&S Greatest Movies list, I’ve already seen The Piano, new at #50, so the next up is Chantal Akerman’s News From Home at #52.

Akerman, of course, is also the director of the list’s new #1, Jeanne Dielman, a movie I adore; but I was a little surprised to see this on the list, because I’d always gotten the impression that she was kind of a one-hit wonder — someone who’d made a single brilliant movie, and then a bunch of perfectly decent ones that didn’t rise to its level. And after seeing this (and having previously seen her first film, Je, tu, il, elle), I… kinda still have that impression.

So this movie is a bunch of carefully composed shots of New York locations — in streets, in subway stations, on the subway, out of a car window, off a boat. The shots linger for a long time, generally static but with a few pans (and of course vehicles moving). Along with these shots, a narrator reads letters from Akerman’s mother.

The letters are aggressively (or at times, passive aggressively) banal: Are you doing okay? We miss you. You should write more. We’re doing well, but I’m feeling tired. You should move back home. Did you get the money I sent you? We’re not even mad that you moved away, but seriously, you should come home. Please write back.

For a minute, I thought those letters might be building up to something, that maybe the movie was going to kind of do a thing where these moments seem so banal, but then your mom dies and you realize they were so important, but… nope. They’re just there. (And for a lot of the movie, they aren’t there: There’s not constant voiceover. Probably a good two-thirds of the 90 minute runtime is completely silent, except for the sounds of the city.)

To the extent this movie is interesting to a modern viewer, it’s because it’s a portrait of a particular time and place, New York City in 1976, the decay years when the city was gray and smoggy and dirty. Which… it definitely is that (although I had to kind of keep checking myself on my “decay” judgments, because like obviously those cars aren’t all actually super-old cars, new cars actually looked like that in 1976 — and maybe some of the businesses that looked like they hadn’t been updated in forever actually just had been with brand-new dated-looking signs).

It’s definitely fascinating to see the city and the people in it (the fashions! and they’re all so skinny!) from this lost era. But like… Akerman didn’t make this as a period piece. When she released it, anyone in NYC could step outside and see what she was seeing. While there is a formalist vision to her shots, and blah blah themes of alienation in pairing them with the letters, I don’t think that by itself would be enough to carry you through 90 minutes back in 1976, and I can’t imagine what else would.

This may be ahistorical, but my suspicion is that this movie got a muted response on its initial release, and then when it was released on DVD by Criterion in 2010, people exploring her post-Jeanne Dielman oeuvre found a film that had aged into being interesting.

If I sound a little negative here, it’s also the case that I did sit for 90 minutes and watch this movie without multitasking on my phone or anything. Maybe it took some age to make this movie interesting, but it’s got the age at this point. Drink now.

That said, a question in the back of my head with these new-to-the-list movies is: Should they be on the list? Is the 2022 list better than the 2012 list for having them on it? For most of the new additions (definitely including The Piano), my answer is an enthusiastic yes. With this, though… well, it’s not an insult to say that maybe it’s actually only one of the 500 best movies ever made, you know? And that’s probably where I end up.