The sunken eyes of the young man at the center of Duane Hopkins’s second feature convey a lifetime of obstacles experienced before his time. Barely out of his teens, Tim (George McKay) ekes out an existence stealing and fencing goods in a former industrial town in England. His parents are gone, he works for violent thugs, he’s the legal guardian of his truant sister, and debtors come knocking at their door every day....
For FILM COMMENT, Dan Sullivan interviewed the Safdies a few days before the U.S. premiere of Heaven Knows What at the New York Film Festival. At this point, the story of this film’s origins is… Josh Safdie: I don’t want to talk about that anymore! But there’s one aspect of it that I’m still interested in, which is the research that you two did. How did you familiarize yourself with this milieu?...
Neighboring Sounds is the expansion of a short film you made about an up-and-coming middle class family in Recife in the 1990s called Electrodoméstica, is that right? I wrote it in 1994, but it took so long to get financing that it became a period piece. I’m not sure I see it as an expansion, although I understand how that can be interpreted. Basically I liked the main character from that film and I wanted to bring her back....
The game’s sense of uncertain identity quickly escalates to form the crux of the carefully crafted suspense of Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s debut fiction feature, which unfolds almost entirely within the confines of an isolated house in the Austrian countryside. Pitting the uncanny against the domestic, the family’s dysfunction mounts to monstrous consequences. Their mother’s mummified face isn’t the only thing that the boys can’t recognize; her behavior is off-kilter too....
Anyone who went to the movies in America during the Seventies will remember nostalgia as a key component of the era. The first half of the 20th century in particular was continuously raided by moviemakers great, good, and indifferent, mined for its coziness and shopworn splendor in stretches of pure scenic expanse. An army of excited cinematographers, production designers, researchers, and, yes, directors was ready, willing, and able to craft luxurious beds of pastness at the drop of a snap-brim hat, drawing from a store of collective expertise to realize extended glimpses of the Dust Bowl, Delancey Street in its heyday, or migrant farm workers on the prairie....
Her is the most universal and most topical of Jonze’s films so far. Its premise—a lonely, recently separated man named Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) slowly falls in love with his artificially intelligent computer operating system (voiced chattily, breathily, and in no way artificially by Scarlett Johansson)—invites all kinds of broad, zeitgeisty pronouncements about 21st-Century Man’s Relationship to Technology (which Jonze, admittedly, plays up). But Her turns out to be something closer to the bone: a scary, sobering parable about the psychological toll of loneliness....
In her rich and wide-ranging oeuvre of experimental films, Deborah Stratman often excavates the marginalized and sometimes metaphysical narratives contained within physical landscapes. Her most recent feature-length project, The Illinois Parables (2016), uses the topography of the Midwestern state to thread together eclectic episodes from its history; Optimism, a 15-minute short that premiered at this year’s Berlinale, sketches a portrait of Canada’s Dawson City through stories of the Gold Rush and of the town’s long-standing efforts to rid the valley of a permanent shadow....
Smithereens (Susan Seidelman, 1982) Isabelle Huppert was awarded the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo at the 25th Sarajevo Film Festival last week. The prize, which has also awarded to directors Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Pawel Pawlikowski, is in celebration of her outstanding performances in cinema. Huppert’s films are screening as part of a month-long retrospective at Amsterdam’s Eyefilm Museum. Joanna Kulig, star of Paweł Pawlikowski’s black-and-white memoir-slash-meditation Cold War, will reprise her role as a singer in the Parisian club scene, this time on the small screen in Damien Chazelle’s The Eddy, a Netflix original series that extends the director’s musically-inclined repertoire....
The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion, 2021) The time is 1925, a cattle ranch in Montana owned by the two Burbank brothers. One of them, a black-clad Benedict Cumberbatch in chaps and spurs, walks into the burnished mahogany interior of a manor house, mounts the steps with a thunderous tread, and begins barking at the unseen brother. The man clearly has a problem, but what is it? Could it be a virulent case of toxic masculinity?...
Tatum O’Neal in The Bad News Bears (Michael Ritchie, 1976) “Laced with larceny…loaded with laughter! For 10% of the action, and a red Ferrari, she’d con her own grandmother.” That’s the tagline on the poster for Disney’s 1977 film Candleshoe, starring Jodie Foster, David Niven and Helen Hayes. Foster appears on the poster as a towering figure in blue jeans and a T-shirt, cocky grin on her face. She was 15 years old at the time, and in the unique position of being a Disney child star and also an Oscar-nominated actress (for her performance in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver the year before)....
What makes a movie queer? The elasticity of the term can be daunting for the uninitiated, and even sometimes for the scholar. It’s a word that’s at once emotional and academic; it can either get at the core of a film’s purpose or speak to its unspoken, barely traceable outer edges. Queerness can be deeply embedded in the fabric of a film or completely extra-textual (every Judy Garland film, for example, is generally accepted as in some way queer due to her persona and the cult fan base that grew up around the actress)....
Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019) I’ve never forgotten, and will likely never forget, when, during a lesson about the Holocaust, my 11th-grade history teacher told our class with matter-of-fact confidence that many men in the Nazi party were “homosexual fiends.” This was years before I would acknowledge my own homosexuality, but I knew well enough that this particular wording, this declaration of the “gay Nazi,” was being used to identify his aberrance more in relation to his gayness than even his fascism....
Ashley Clark, photo by Ben Katz Ashley Clark is the Director, Film Programming at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which is currently closed. Interview conducted via email, Sunday, March 22, with a followup on Tuesday, March 24, about the cancellation of this year’s BAMcinemaFest. So, how are you? What’s your day-to-day, how has it changed? “What fresh hell is this?”, basically. Hi Mark, I’m not fantastic right now, but thank you for asking!...
Broken Lullaby screened in March at Anthology Film Archives in a series entitled “Auteurs Gone Wild,” a program of outlier titles from the filmographies of pantheon filmmakers. (Two other examples: Fritz Lang’s noir musical You and Me and Josef Von Sternberg’s Japanese pantomime The Saga of Anatahan.) The plot of Broken Lullaby is a radical departure for Lubitsch, and he seized the opportunity to experiment with contrasting formal strategies, from rapid-fire montage to ritualized long takes....
Pretty Poison Whenever the name is mentioned in film circles, the question that always arises is “What ever happened to Noel Black?” In other words, how could a director who showed such huge promise with his belatedly acclaimed first feature, Pretty Poison, be unable to make another film that is a fraction of its quality during the following 25 years? The death of Black last month awakened memories of my telephone conversations with him in 1994 while I was researching my biography of Anthony Perkins....
Hey, I’m like you—I can get a little apprehensive at an austerely shot setup involving an indebted Ukrainian prostitute, her scruffy boyfriend, and dicey plans for escape from it all. Are we here to stand vigil beside another exercise in unrelenting long-take doom, as a second thread with a frustrated cop and his well-meaning wife is introduced? Fortunately, Götz Spielmann’s precision-crafted drama quickly proves to be anything but, persuasively and naturally gathering force as a potent, sympathetically observed tragedy....
