Posts

Near the midpoint of this finely crafted serial-killer flick, two of the leads—a pair of policemen gone rogue—have a strategic tête-à-tête. Are we going to play this “good cop, bad cop”? Brief consideration. Nope. The perp is a pedophile-rapist/ killer. As it happens, among his victims is the daughter of one of the cops. It’s an ugly scenario that demands commensurate action. “Bad cop, bad cop?” Agreed. But what if the mild-mannered teacher of religious studies is actually, as he adamantly maintains, innocent?...

Buck, which follows the four-day horse clinics Brannaman conducts nine months a year. “A lot of people want it all to be fuzzy and warm and cosmic,” he tells one group. “But it’s no different with a horse than with a kid.” This crucial line begins the tale of how Brannaman became a master of natural horsemanship. “When something’s scared for their life—I understand,” he says, while TV clips show the professional trick-roper whose father became a monster after his wife’s death, leaving horsewhip marks on Buck’s back that sent him and his brother off to foster care....

Released some months after the 10th anniversary of the events, and brought to you by the man latterly known for The Reader (aka Now I Can Read! With a Hot Nazi), Stephen Daldry’s film is evidence that the 9/11 weepie is far from extinct, if this studio-strength attempt is anything to go by. Working from a screenplay by Insider and Benjamin Button scribe Eric Roth, Daldry delivers a surprisingly engaging adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s stridently voiced novel about a precocious boy dealing with the death of his father in the terror attacks....

At a scant 77 minutes, there’s much more that Girl Model could have said about race, exploitation, and warped cultural standards of beauty. Instead, it shows what happens when people who have very little are offered the opportunity of a lifetime—and have no possible recourse when the deal isn’t honored. During the Siberian equivalent of a mall star-search, 13-year-old Nadya Vall is discovered by Ashley Arbaugh, a former model and scout who’s got more issues than Vogue....

Lawless-ness and brutality rule the frontier worlds of Australian director John Hillcoat’s The Proposition (05) and The Road (09). This time out, Hillcoat makes a foray into Virginia’s Prohibition-era moonshine country, locating a kindred sensibility in Matt Bondurant’s bloody 2008 historical novel The Wettest County in the World. But the adaptation (by Hillcoat compadre Nick Cave) is a hokey piece of pop history that wearyingly insists upon its own mythos like a comic-book blockbuster....

Sundance favorite Ondi Timoner returns with a film that essentially reprises the huckster hyperbole of the Internet’s adolescence in documentary form. The dotcom career of early-adopter whizkid Josh Harris gets rendered as a series of landmark prophesies, his reckless megalomania deployed as sexy or creepy whenever useful to the doc’s rise-and-fall hustle. Timoner’s laudable impulse to chronicle recent history is wasted on insipid overstuffed montages and redundant testimonials, skirting real engagement with the culture in favor of cover-story hooks....

Funeral Parade of Roses (Toshio Matsumoto, 1969) Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (Nagisa Oshima, 1968) The Youth Killer (Kazuhiko Hasegawa, 1976) Pastoral Hide and Seek (Shûji Terayama, 1974) Silence Has No Wings (Kazuo Kuroki, 1966) AKA Serial Killer (Masao Adachi, 1969)

Listen/Subscribe:

If you’re a longtime Film Comment subscriber, listener, or reader, or are just tuning in now, please consider becoming a member or making a donation to our publisher, Film at Lincoln Center, during these unprecedented times. Also, don’t miss details on the new streaming availability of Bacurau, The Whistlers, and Vitalina Varela, online now via Film at Lincoln Center.

If you’re a longtime Film Comment subscriber, listener, or reader, or are just tuning in now, please consider becoming a member or making a donation to our publisher, Film at Lincoln Center, during these unprecedented times. Also, don’t miss details on the streaming availability of Bacurau, The Whistlers, Vitalina Varela, and more, online now via Film at Lincoln Center.

For our latest podcast, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish sat down with Seydoux for a windswept conversation on a rooftop on the Croisette (with a surprise cameo by Viggo Mortensen!). Seydoux discussed her experiences working with Hansen-Løve and Cronenberg, the intricacies of being an object versus a subject as an actor, her thoughts on beauty in cinema, and more. Thanks to James Wham for production assistance. Thanks to James Wham for production assistance....

The films together represent a unique creative vision—one that combines genre ambitions with a defiantly indie sensibility and an unexpected sense of humor. For the first time ever, all three features are screening together in New York City, as part of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art dedicated to Järvi-Laturi, who died last year. On today’s episode, Film Comment editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited Steve Macfarlane, one of the curators of the MoMA retrospective, and Hannu Björkbacka, a Finnish critic, for an overview of Järvi-Laturi’s career and work....

“It’s all bad,” said The Act of Killing co-director Joshua Oppenheimer as he introduced the world premiere of his ethically fraught, extraordinary new film. The setup: mass-murdering gangsters in Indonesia tell all! How? By making a terrible movie recreating their exploits, of course, with Oppenheimer’s assistance. The killers, accomplices of the government-sponsored slaughter of accused Communists, ethnic Chinese, and others in the Sixties (and beyond), take center stage for nearly the entirety of the film, chewing up the scenery in rehearsals and reenactments of interrogations, killings, and a village massacre....

Once a week, usually on a Saturday afternoon, in my small-town New England childhood in the 1940s and early 1950s, we went to “the pictures” or “the picture show.” As in The Last Picture Show. We didn’t go to the cinema or to a film or even to the movies. This three- or four-hour afternoon interlude in the dark—with cowboys and Indians, Tarzan and Jane, Abbott and Costello, the Three Stooges, Tom & Jerry and Disney cartoons, triumphant World War II movies, and the occasional Technicolor romance or historical costume drama—was our reward for having suffered all week under the authoritarian yoke of the adults who ran our country and our schools, churches, and families....

I saw Munyurangabo at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival almost by accident. I knew nothing of it and had not even read the description in the 479-page program guide, which covered over 400 titles (all, of course, highly recommended!). I simply had time to pass between screenings, and its press show was just about to begin, with perhaps 20 people scattered around the auditorium. This is a common occurrence in a festival of this kind, where the policy is to squeeze in as many films as possible and hope for the best....