Actors Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard, and Anne Hathaway, composer Hans Zimmer, production designer Nathan Crowley, cinematographer Wally Pfister, stunt coordinator Tom Struthers, producer Emma Thomas, and director Christopher Nolan speak about the final installment of the Dark Knight trilogy. Featuring previously unseen behind-the-scenes video and photos.
The Woman in the Septic Tank Film festivals are as regular as bodily functions (some more literally than others). Case in point: I have yet to see Marlon Rivera’s The Woman in the Septic Tank, nor Noboru Iguchi’s Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead, but thanks to the fecal-friendly folk of Fantasia—2012 edition, in progress, now through August 7—my ignorance may soon be rectified. To characterize Montreal’s beloved genre-mash-up as mere scatology would mislead....
This year SIFF comprised over 450 films, arranged into shop-friendly categories like “Make Me Laugh,” “Thrill Me,” and “Open My Eyes.” The galas and special presentations, including Boyhood, Dior and I, The Fault in Our Stars, and They Came Together, tended to be films on the cusp of wider release. On the last day of the festival, a final screening of the latter, David Wain’s attenuated spoof on the common romantic comedy, filled Seattle’s historic Egyptian theater with the late-brunch crowd....
On Friday, Film Comment Selects 2012 presents the Russian science-fiction film Target, about a future in which some of Russia’s super-rich go in search for immortality—literally. Film Comment sat down for a rare interview with the director, Alexander Zeldovich, who returns with his first movie since the start of the millennium. Even though Target draws upon very different genres of literature, TV, and film—and espouses different philosophies—it has a very clear voice....
There are few sights in a movie more poignant than inmates in an institution—a prison, or a mental hospital—mooching around in tracksuits, because you know they’re not going to be running anywhere anytime soon. This image appears in Raymond Depardon’s documentary 12 Days, and although we see it only sporadically, in brief interludes between the film’s main chapters, you rather wish that it hadn’t been milked for its poetic or sentimental resonance—which it partly is, along with other images of human desolation, by being set to delicate piano-and-strings music by Alexandre Desplat....
I don’t have any particularly strong memories of Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street, his 1994 collaboration with Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, except that it features a brilliant performance by Julianne Moore, presented without superfluous distraction. In it, a group of actors arrive at an empty Manhattan theater and slip seamlessly from the reality of the venue space into a performance of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, as adapted by David Mamet....
I’ve spent the last decade staying away from the films of M. Night Shyamalan. I loved his early ones, even the much-maligned The Village, with its insane double twist and loopy Hawthorne-meets-Lovecraft imagery. But, like many people, I found my patience tested beyond endurance by Lady in the Water (or, as I prefer to call it, Vamp From the Damp), a film at once pompous, insipid and—let it be said once and for all—wrong, so wrong, about film critics....
Wet Woman in the Wind Of late, Western audiences may have formed the impression that Japanese cinema has become somewhat tame. The most prominent titles on the recent U.S. and U.K. release schedule, and in the Cannes official selection, have been accessible, unthreatening works from Hirokazu Kore-eda, these days making pensive but benign family dramas such as Our Little Sister and this year’s After the Storm and Naomi Kawase, whose Sweet Bean was every bit as soft-centered as the pancakes that were its theme....
In addition, you will find here no thinly rewritten press releases masquerading as actual news or opinion; no reviews of posters or trailers instead of actual movies; no trend stories about nonexistent trends; and, above all, no logorrheic, first-person monologues about perceived slight from publicists, hotel service quality while traveling, or other equally naval-gazing pursuits. Rather, the goal of this blog’s author, as it has been wherever he has written, will be to keep his head down and stay focused on what really matters: the work....
Born in the Bronx but removed to placid rural Peekskill by his father—all for naught—Ferrara came of age commuting into New York City for cinema and countercultural immersion. It’s with this that our interview began. Pasolini screens October 2 and 3 in the New York Film Festival. When did you first discover Pasolini? I saw Decameron as a young filmmaker, and that was a pretty good beginning. All these films played big-time then....
FILM COMMENT digital editor Violet Lucca spoke to Rohrwacher shortly after the film screened in the New York Film Festival, where her last film, Corpo Celeste (11), also had its U.S. premiere. The Wonders opens on Friday. Television plays a big role in the film. Can you talk about your relationship to it? On one hand, the thing about TV is its hypnotic power. I’m hypnotized by it. The same way that fairy tales have hypnotic power, because these magic elements hypnotize you....
Here (Bas Devos, 2023) The four features of Belgian filmmaker Bas Devos span a wide range. His 2014 debut Violet was a glacial, Haneke-esque drama about a teenager wrestling with an unspeakable tragedy, while Hellhole (2019) offered a mosaic-like portrait of Brussels haunted by the specter of terrorism. His third feature, Ghost Tropic (also 2019), was a departure from these trauma-driven tales, with its serene story of a widow who, after falling asleep on the metro, has to walk home through Brussels in the dark of the night....
Images from Our Time (Carlos Reygadas, 2018) Carlos Reygadas’s fifth feature captures the turmoil and ardor of marital upheaval, and the tranquility and violence that occur in places where the domestic and natural worlds meet. Set primarily in and around Reygadas’s Mexican ranch home, Our Time is a uniquely cinematic fabrication with an unusually confluent relationship to its author’s reality. It features Reygadas and Natalia López, his spouse and frequent collaborator, in the roles of Juan and Esther, a husband and wife struggling to navigate the boundaries of an open relationship....
Porumboiu is perhaps best known here for his (sort of) metaphysical detective comedy, Police, Adjective (09), a sui generis shaggy-dog investigation of language and its relation to the Law. His two most recent features, When Evening Falls on Bucharest, or Metabolism (13) and The Second Game (14), were, ostensibly, formally opposed works: the former was a fiction feature comprised of approximately 19 long takes, charting the plight of a Romanian filmmaker trying to determine where art ends and life begins amid an off-the-set romance with his leading lady; the latter was a found-footage documentary that found Porumboiu and his father discussing the days under the Communist regime while watching a VHS recording of a fateful chapter in the Eternal Derby between the country’s two most popular football clubs, FC Dinamo Bucharești and FC Steaua Bucharești, a contentious and snowy match refereed by Porumboiu’s father....
Following nearly a decade of film, video, and gallery work, American animator Jodie Mack experienced something of a breakthrough in 2013 with “Let Your Light Shine,” a traveling program of five short and medium-length 16mm films that traversed everything from classic stop-motion animation to 3-D light spectacle. That same year, she quietly began work on her first feature; the resulting 60-minute film, The Grand Bizarre, is the culmination of Mack’s many varied interests and experiments to date....
Black Mother, the new documentary feature from Khalik Allah, is a portrait of a country’s dichotomies. Traveling back to his mother’s Caribbean homeland of Jamaica, the New York–based filmmaker/photographer hones the alluring, hypnotic hypersensory aesthetic brought to light with his 2015 documentary Field Niggas. As Allah grapples with the immense self-inflicted task of mapping out national experience, the polyphonic matrix of visuals and soundscapes shifts between pristine black-and-white to VHS home video, Super 8, and vibrant HD, echoing the multitudes of the country it’s attempting to survey....
Robert Richardson on the set of Hugo (Martin Scorsese, 2011) When talking about the people who make movies, we often reserve the term “experimental” for directors. You hear plenty about the “experimental filmmaker,” but rarely see that adjective applied to other parts of the filmmaking craft. What about experimental actors, say, or experimental editor—artists who push the boundaries of their respective forms even while serving the vision of others. If we’re to think about what might constitute an experimental cinematographer in today’s Hollywood, no one fits the description better than Robert Richardson....
Espíritu Sagrado (Chema García Ibarra, 2021) Around eight seconds into the inaugural press screening at the 74th Locarno Film Festival (the first to happen physically since 2019), irony struck. In the festival’s ident, a handsome leopard—an emblem which gives rise to such covetable merch that the Locarno lanyard is often squirrelled away and repurposed for use at less graphically blessed festivals—strolls across the screen. This year, the leopard was followed by a yellow screen announcing in bold black type: CINEMA IS BACK....
