All Schradersniping aside, I think my problem with the “transcendental” approach comes down to the fact that it presumes an answer, goal, and destination, where the films, for me, seem to live in their ambivalence, and in their efforts to find expressive form for ambivalence. Even the titles point to this. When they stray from their source materials, or the noncommittal act of naming a central figure, they land in a zone of hesitancy that is, I think, characteristically Bressonian....
“I’ve never seen a dead man,” says, oddly enough, Peter Lorre, in Jean Negulesco’s border-hopping 1944 crime thriller. Lorre reins it in to play a detective novelist, an innocent abroad whose curiosity lands him on the trail of international man of mystery Dimitrios Makropoulos (Zachary Scott in his movie debut). The scoundrel is presumed dead, but his legend gives rise to multiple flashbacks’ worth of urbane swindles across Old Europe....
Layla Fourie In Pia Marais’ Layla Fourie, the titular protagonist is a single mother of one working as a polygraphist in Johannesburg. After being assigned to conduct lie detector tests on job applicants at a casino, she drives with her young son to the faraway location. En route, she accidentally hits and kills a man with her car. Afraid of the likely consequences for a black woman killing a white man in a country still haunted by the ghost of apartheid, she decides not to report the incident to the police and buries the body in a garbage dump instead....
Carlos Olivier Assayas, France/Germany The Social Network David Fincher, U.S. White Material Claire Denis, France The Ghost Writer Roman Polanski, France/Germany/U.K A Prophet Jacques Audiard, France/Italy Winter’s Bone Debra Granik, U.S. Inside Job Charles Ferguson, U.S. Wild Grass Alain Resnais, France/Italy Everyone Else Maren Ade, Germany Greenberg Noah Baumbach, U.S Mother Bong Joon-ho, South Korea Toy Story 3 Lee Unkrich, U.S. Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal/France/Spain...
Birdman I am writing in the aftermath of a week of Oscar takes, and the takes on those takes, a process that reminds me of that playground game where you would mash your hand down on your friend’s hand until it’s immobilized, and then he’d try to pry his hand out from under your hand and trap your hand, and so on, ad infinitum. Kids have a lot of time for this kind of thing, whereas adults aren’t meant to, and so I try to tune out the hot take sweepstakes, if only because the tenor of the discourse, in tone if not political content, reminds me more than anything of Ed Anger, the fictitious Weekly World News editorial columnist who always began his vitriolic screeds with some variation of “I’m madder than…” (“Helen Keller at a silent movie,” “a [sic] Irishman without cabbage in his pants,” etc....
Jean Epstein’s reputation in the U.S. has largely rested on The Three-Sided Mirror (27) and The Fall of the House of Usher (28) and they remain his best-known films. Both are great, but hardly tell the full story of this important artist. A more complete picture of Epstein can now be seen thanks to a beautiful box set of 14 features and shorts, most transferred from restored 35mm prints held at the Cinémathèque française....
The promise of Juliette Binoche and Edgar Ramirez paired as a passionate, volatile couple made writer-director Marion Laine’s A Monkey on My Shoulder about as essential viewing as any new French film premiering in the Cannes Market. It would also surely be a reasonable example of a French film with major stars and considerable Cannes pedigree that nevertheless had very likely been seen and rejected by the festival. In this case, the absence of a Binoche-Ramirez pairing in the official selection is all too clear: Laine’s drama, based on Mathias Énard’s novel, Remonter L’Orénoque (Traveling Up the Orinoco), ends up being a royal mess, an emotional tennis match with the two actors volleying and proceeding to rip down the net....
Sans soleil Defining qualities of the peripheral visionary: obliquity, modesty, thoughtfulness, humor, critical engagement, a retrospective appreciation of experience. His peripatetic, zigzag mind travels on (what else?) cat feet, sidling through crowds of refugee-like images. Melting-plot specters come from everywhere—Moscow, Tokyo, Paris, Havana, Okinawa, Cape Verde, Vertigo’s San Francisco, Tarkovsky’s Solaris, cyberspace, Ouija boards. (I keep forgetting: Is La Jetée the archaic prequel to 12 Monkeys or the science-fiction sequel to Laura?...
Amanda Donohoe in The Lair Of The White Worm (Ken Russell, 1988) There’s a decision every genre director must make when plotting their films: how much should the audience know about the villain? How much should they identify with them? Ken Russell’s answer to that question for his adaptation of one of Bram Stoker’s more obscure folktales, The Lair of the White Worm, ended up birthing one of the most deliciously wicked cinematic villains of all-time, Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donohoe)....
Soundtracks compiles seven tracks written for five films from 1969 to 1970, one of which, Cream (1970) by Leonidas Capitanos, is presumed lost. Released in 1970, Soundtracks represents a turning point in the band’s early career, recorded just as they began to tighten their groove. Though a few of the tracks on the album were recorded much later than others, Soundtracks preceded the official releases of the band’s two best (and best-known) albums, 1971’s Tago Mago and 1972’s Ege Bamyasi....
Everything about La La Land balances the retro and the cutting-edge, including the title phrase, which has a definite 1980s ring to it but may be coming back strong, just like denim jackets. Damien Chazelle’s musical about two Los Angeles dreamers, a jazz pianist named Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) and a struggling actor named Mia (Emma Stone), is a slender, charming anomaly—a nostalgia trip geared for immediacy. Chazelle’s script combines a girl-meets-boy story with a glad-rags-to-riches tale, then filters it through the films of Astaire and Rogers, Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, Vincente Minnelli, and, especially, Jacques Demy....
The Old Man & the Gun, the affable, often funny, “mostly true” story of Forrest Tucker, an aging gentleman bandit in the 20th-century Southwest, has been promoted and widely accepted as an ideal sendoff for Robert Redford, its star and actual subject. In one of many retirement statements, Redford told Entertainment Weekly that he wants to go out as an actor on something “very upbeat and positive.” If so, I wish he’d retired after working with the same writer-director, David Lowery, on the terrific Disney remake of Pete’s Dragon....
The 2005 New York Film Festival’s other tale of cinema hailing from the Far East, Who’s Camus Anyway? riffs intertextual where Hong Sang-soo’s film waxes meta. Mitsuo Yanagimachi’s first film in 10 years, WCA? has the cinephilic zeal of youth but the assured touch of a mature pro. A week in the life of a Japanese student-film production, the film kicks off with a breezily orchestrated six-minute take introducing us to the main players: the assistant director in the midst of a casting crisis, the motorcycle-riding director, his obsessed girlfriend, assorted crew members, their outwardly grave professor (secretly smitten with a student), and the student film’s cinephile producers, who are discussing movies with long opening takes....
With southern Europe charged with Mediterranean laziness and punished with cruel austerity measures, Germany is once again at the helm of Old Europe, a state of affairs that directly benefits the Berlinale. Talks of cuts and other financial hardships, common at almost any other festival these days, were conspicuously absent in Berlin. Yet not even the festival’s evidently generous budget, a bounty that ultimately derives from the brutal austerity measures the German-dominated EU is imposing on southern European countries, averted a shapeless and watered-down selection....
Film Comment magazine’s annual year-end survey of film critics, editors, and past and present contributors has been released with Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, which kicks off a five-day run at the Film Society today, topping the list of 50 Best Released Films of 2011. The end of the year brings many “best of” and “critics picks” lists, not a few of which have also featured Malick’s deeply personal and polarizing film....
“I quickly realized that this was leading nowhere,” says the subject of Corneliu Porumboiu’s Infinite Football, musing on his elaboration of a new set of sports rules. The viewer may sigh in agreement. Throughout the film you keep asking yourself, where is this leading? And why is Poromboiu showing us what we are so patiently watching and trying to make head or tail of? Here’s something of a paradox. Football (i....
Roland Barthes famously said, “Garbo’s face is Idea, [Audrey] Hepburn’s is Event.” The facial showdown between Idea and Event is played out again in Les Hautes Solitudes, Philippe Garrel’s black-and-white silent film of 1974, which receives its first-ever U.S. theatrical run at the Metrograph this week. In it, Idea is incarnated by Jean Seberg, Event by Tina Aumont—in the sense that Seberg is consistently enigmatic, elusive, the embodiment of a semi-absent melancholy, while Aumont incarnates a sexuality that is impish, perverse, irreducibly physical....
Since the advent of CGI, people no longer talk much about “unfilmable” novels—or if they do, they generally mean novels that can’t easily be filmed because they’re too nebulous, or bulky, or purely linguistic. But anything that simply involves spectacle and the fantastic is no longer a problem, as long as you can afford armies of VFX techies to crunch algorithms. But here’s a prime example of a novel which was long considered a classic case of the unfilmable: Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours, the title usually translated as Froth on the Daydream, though it literally means “The Froth of Days....
