While it may have taken playing a Bond villain and now a famous cannibal on American TV for Mads Mikkelsen to gain widespread recognition, those following his Danish film career have long known that he’s a superstar. And Mikkelsen, one of his country’s finest actors, in collaboration with Thomas Vinterberg, one of its finest directors, delivers what may be his strongest performance yet in The Hunt, which rightfully won him the Best Actor Award at Cannes last year....
Few contemporary filmmakers have James Gray’s ability or ambition to match exquisite craft with emotionally complex storytelling. At first blush a departure from the director’s four previous features (all set in modern times), this bleeding-heart historical melodrama is more like the troubled soil from which the other films have sprung—a story of sacrifice to foster, define, and haunt future generations. Ewa (Marion Cotillard) is a Polish Catholic who flees the Great War for America, only to discover new dangers and indignities....
It’s the final weekend of business for the dilapidated, rumored-to-be-haunted Yankee Pedlar Inn (an actual, still-operating “haunted” New England destination). That means it’s also the last chance for its curious, charmingly geeky employees Luke (Pat Healy) and Claire (Sara Paxton) to discover if there’s any truth to those rumors. During their waning days on-site they banter, drink beer, trade off shifts so the other can sleep, and briefly interact with the few remaining guests, consisting of a dejected woman and her young son, a boozing television star turned mystic (played by Kelly McGillis), and later a creepy old man who insists on staying in his former honeymoon suite located on the now-off-limits third floor....
Hooked on classics, Catherine Breillat takes another fairytale for a spin, and her first step in reexamining the story of Sleeping Beauty is a logical one: what the heck did the unconscious princess dream about all that time? Her answer—bearing in mind that her protagonist is a kid when she nods off thanks to a witch’s curse—suitably features enchanted reindeer, gypsies, ice queens, beloved older brothers, ghost trains, and the stirrings of amorous longing....
For a while now the focus of Site Specifics has been the cinematic enterprises and varied modes of moving image that are somehow indebted to, born from, or entirely made possible by the potentialities of this Internet thing. This issue, we give props to an old-media style of exhibition repurposed for—and thriving in—the ether of the Web: Tank.tv. Ostensibly the haute vlog of slickster culture quarterly Tank Magazine, since 2008 Tank....
Getting Sonic Youth to do the soundtrack for Olivier Assayas’s cerebral neothriller demonlover was perfect typecasting-this beautifully splintered exploration of point-and-click behavior guided by malevolent remote control fits the group like a binding latex bodysuit. You can read the complete version of this article in the September / October 2003 print edition of Film Comment.
Following a late evening hanging out at the Yarrow bar with Movie City News duo Kim Voynar and Ray Pride and Oxford Film Festival’s Melanie Addington, and strategizing how to keep the conversation lively while not-so-stealthily eating Kim’s cheese fries, I wake up just in time to bolt out of bed and make my way to the Eccles Theatre for the first of a hoped-for five-film day. Entering the lobby, I see IDPR’s Bebe Lerner and attempt to say hello....
After a hearty breakfast of Airborne tablets, a mini-hoagie saved from the day before and a tankard of O.J., I’m on my way to see Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. I have a lot of friends involved in this one, from Texas Renaissance man David Lowery (who wrote and directed the film as well as co-writing Sundance entry Pit Stop and editing another Sundance entry Upstream Color) to producer James Johnston to various people in the cast....
Little Men A handful of new films ascended at Sundance at the festival’s midpoint. Earlier this week in Park City, Ira Sachs’s strikingly observant and powerfully insightful new film, Little Men, along with Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson and Sara Jordenö’s Kiki emerged as highlights of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Sachs has been coming to the festival since he was a kid. The son of a local, he attended his first Sundance at the young age of 14....
Advise and Consent “I ain’t really Henry Fonda,” said the man whose iconic roles could inspire a second Mount Rushmore. “Nobody could be. Nobody could have that much integrity.” It’s a sobering thought, that the alter ego of Tom Joad, Young Mr. Lincoln, Juror No. 8, and Hollywood’s most upright Wyatt Earp could in fact have feet of clay. He was the first to admit it was true: “I’m not that pristine pure; I guess I’ve broken as many rules as the next fella....
Baby Rose Marie The coming of sound may be encumbered with more print-the-legend misconceptions than any other moment in film history, from the myth of stars destroyed by squeaky voices to the notion that talkies burst upon an astonished world with The Jazz Singer (1927). Actually, sound film stuttered through a series of false starts, and with each development—Edison’s synchronized Kinetophones in 1913, Lee DeForest’s 1922 sound-on-film breakthrough—talking pictures roused some excitement but were dismissed as a novelty, a gimmick that could never compete with the fluent artistry of silent film....
The cinema isn’t easy Because life is complicated And art indefinable. Making life indefinable And art complicated. —Manoel de Oliveira, “Cinematographic Poem,” 1986 (translated from the Portuguese) Since this century has taught us, and continues to teach us, that human beings can learn to live under the most brutalized and theoretically intolerable conditions, it is not easy to grasp the extent of the, unfortunately accelerating, return to what our 19th-century ancestors would have called the standards of barbarism....
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On December 14, 2023, as part our annual winter list extravaganza, Film Comment Editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish led a panel of special guests—Bilge Ebiri (critic, Vulture), and Amy Taubin (critic and FC contributing editor)—for a live real-time countdown of the films topping our year-end critics’ poll. The evening featured a lively discussion (and some hearty debate) about the films as they were unveiled—and now it’s here in Podcast form, for your home-listening pleasure....
Forever destined to be viewed as the poor man’s Berlin—albeit a kinder, gentler one—the IFFR trudges onward, undaunted. Much like those who attend it. Serious-minded, the festival does its level best to deliver the goods in the certain knowledge that most right-thinking A- and B-list filmmakers are aiming past them at the Berlinale or Cannes. Les Revenants Rotterdam tries to do “fun,” but it’s a lost cause. As usual, a sprinkling of Asian genre entries, a couple of tough-as-nails “Scandi-crime” thrillers, and the occasional more or less mainstream-commercial art film are about as close as the festival gets to catering to those looking for the satisfactions of straightforward classical filmmaking....
The July/August 2018 issue of Film Comment featured a selection of letters written by Paul Schrader to his brother, Len, during the late 1960s and early ’70s. Schrader’s “Letters to Len” capture an extraordinary, perhaps unrepeatable era—and now his unique perspective continues online in expanded form with a special interactive feature. Read on: Although I’ve made films about men who kept journals, I never kept one myself. I was not a collector....
