Leigh Whannell and James Wan photographed by Godlis on March 3. On the occasion of the opening of Insidious on Friday, April 1, Film Comment is pleased to bring you the film’s director and writer’s Guilty Pleasures. SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS (1937) & POLTERGEIST (1982) James Wan: When I was a kid, there were two movies that had a huge impact on me. The first was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs....
One Fine Morning (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2023). Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. About a third of the way into One Fine Morning, the luminous new feature from Mia Hansen-Løve, Léa Seydoux’s Sandra is shown in the throes of a dream, her sleeping face under superimposed images of a quicksilver seal twirling in a murky sea. The animal spins and then turns suddenly toward the camera, snapping open its jaws and propelling toward the lens, just as Sandra snaps awake....
20 Discs to Watch ★ Aloha, Bobby and Rose Floyd Mutrux, USA, 1975; Doppelgänger Releasing ⦿★ Au hasard Balthazar Robert Bresson, France, 1966; The Criterion Collection ★ Before We Vanish Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, 2017; Virgil Films ⦿★ La Belle noiseuse Jacques Rivette, France/ Switzerland, 1991; Cohen Media Group ★ Blue Denim Philip Dunne, USA, 1959; Twilight Time ★ Caught Jamie Patterson, UK, 2016; Cinedigm ★★ Cristian Mungiu x 2: Beyond the Hills, Romania/ France/Belgium, 2012; Graduation, Romania/France/Belgium, 2016; The Criterion Collection ★ The Curse of the Cat People Gunther V....
Soul death by a thousand cuts in Our Children comes through brisk ones in the editing room. As teacher-turned-housewife Murielle has four children, one after another, Belgian director Joachim Lafosse makes her interminable days of work and stress palpable through measured means rather than a surging dramatic arc. Giddy young love with her Moroccan husband Mounir (Tahar Rahim) grows into parenthood with its challenges, cushioned at first by the generosity of Mounir’s adoptive Belgian father, Pinget (Niels Arestrup), a wealthy doctor....
All images from Karelia: International with Monument (Andrés Duque, 2019) In 2007, the Las Palmas International Film Festival in the Canary Islands curated a program devoted to a so-called “D-Generation” of Spanish filmmakers: the “D” was for Documentary, but also for Digital. Under that label, figures such as Isaki Lacuesta, Lluís Escartín, or Los Hijos collective shared a common interest in documentary as a playground for experimentation and the crafting of film essays....
Born and raised in New York City, Pankow began his career as assistant editor to Jerry Greenberg on Kramer vs. Kramer (79) at age 26. Greenberg, who cut The French Connection and Apocalypse Now, became a mentor to Pankow and brought him on as an assistant on his next project, De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (80). Besides De Palma, Pankow has also edited films for Abel Ferrara, Robert Benton, Paul Schrader, and Zal Batmanglij (not to mention a couple of Jean-Claude Van Damme movies with Ringo Lam and Tsui Hark)....
Passion The oft-repeated assessment that Passion is Brian De Palma’s “return to form” comes right on schedule. Similar claims have been made every 10 years since 1992, when he released the borderline-parodic erotic thriller Raising Cain, and again in 2002 with his Parisian tour de force Femme Fatale. It can be argued that De Palma has been exercising an eternal return to form since 1976, when he first broke into the mainstream with Carrie using the split-screen technique he explored in Dionysus in 69 (70)....
It’s on that same day that we’re introduced to the quotidian struggles of Laetitia (Laetitia Dosch), a single workingwoman with two infants. Getting out the door every morning is a battle in and of itself, but on this particular day, the children’s unrelenting screams are compounded by a pestering boyfriend, a hapless first-time babysitter (Marc-Antoine Vaugeois), and an apparently dangerous ex-husband, Vincent (Vincent Macaigne), lurking outside the building. Leaving strict instructions with the babysitter not to allow her ex into the apartment, Laetitia sets off via moped for Rue de Solférino, where she’s covering the election for a TV news station....
Self-Portrait: Window in 47 KM (Zhang Mengqi, 2019) Sheets of rain clear the streets of people. Trains are cancelled, the road is blocked. Despite the typhoon, the cinemas are full. This is Yamagata, a small city in the mountainous northeast of Japan. The 16th edition of its biannual international documentary film festival (YIDFF) has just began. YIDFF is known for programming politically engaged non-fiction film across several competitions, special programs, and retrospectives....
Exposé du film annonce du film “Scénario” (Jean-Luc Godard, 2024) So many last films, each one conceived, shot, and edited as if there might not be another. Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: “Phony Wars,” directed by Jean-Luc Godard, premiered at Cannes in 2023. The film had been finished in 2021, but was not released until eight months after Godard’s death in September 2022. “Phony Wars” was not the only film Godard was working on in 2021....
Robert Redford, New York, 1959. Photo by Ron Greene Having never performed—except athletically—until you began studies at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, how did you feel the first time you got up in front of people? Robert Redford, New York, 1959. Photo by Ron Greene Angry, because I was self-conscious and not feeling a part of anything. The idea of becoming an actor seemed strange and lesser than. But something unfamiliar was clicking inside....
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019) This interview with the director of Portrait of a Lady on Fire took place at Cannes where it premiered in competition and won Céline Sciamma the prize for Best Screenplay and the Queer Palm. The full interview will appear in the November-December 2019 issue of Film Comment. To what degree were you thinking about the many movies that have been made about a male artist and the woman who inspired him?...
An Introduction The King of Comedy Martin Scorsese: When I think of comedy, there are so many legendary names that come to mind. One of them is here tonight, of course. He doesn’t need an introduction, but I’m going to introduce him anyway. I saw him for the first time in the movies in the late ’40s. He had a partner at the time, and as the years went on, we got to know him better and better....
The Killer Danny Lee finds you disappointing. You don’t disgust him, because he’s learned to expect the worst, but your existence reminds him of how low we as a species can get. Look at his face. In the 145 films he’s appeared in since 1971, Danny Lee is annoyed, exasperated, skeptical, wryly amused at the futility of the human condition. He raises his eyebrows to convey “You must be joking?...
Of the North There’s not a frame of footage in Of the North that director Dominic Gagnon actually directed—at least as the word is commonly understood. The same goes for Sergei Loznitsa and his new film The Event. Of the North is comprised solely of video clips shot by dozens of Inuits and uploaded to the Internet, while Loznitsa’s raw material is archival footage gathered by a Leningrad-based TV crew during the last days of the Soviet Union in 1991....
After winning the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Call Me by Your Name, James Ivory is moving full speed ahead on an adaptation of “The Judge’s Will,” the final short story by his lifetime creative collaborator and friend Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Their partnership extended back to the early ’60s, when Ivory and Ismail Merchant asked her to adapt her novel The Householder into a feature film, and she became a screenwriting third of the central Merchant-Ivory Productions triad, author of 23 scripts including Howards End, A Room with a View, and The Remains of the Day....
Alejandro G. Iñárritu (credit: Richard Harbaugh / ©A.M.P.A.S.) Hollywood is really good at celebrating itself. Oscar week in Los Angeles, the series of shows and soirees that cap awards season, drives that point home. In fact, in recent years the kudos have increasingly seemed to be tied to the industry’s perception of its own fate. During a time of change for both industry and audiences alike, Hollywood increasingly uses its Oscar stage to honor movies about movies....
