One morning, a letter arrives in the mail for Geoff. The body of Katya, his former lover, has been found perfectly preserved in a Swiss glacier. She was lost during a hiking accident with him in the early 1960s. The uncanny discovery unsettles Geoff, and as he grapples with this (literal) ghost of his past, Haigh shifts our attention to Kate, who finds the event unexpectedly difficult to get over....
On April 2nd, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will honor Catherine Denueve at the 39th Annual Chaplin Award Gala. In conjuction with the event, we reprint Arnaud Desplechin’s interview with Catherine Deneuve from the November/December 2008 issue. CD: Is this going to be serious? AD: It’s for Film Comment. It’s a bit like an American Cahiers du Cinéma. CD: I don’t read Les Cahiers. I buy it but I don’t read it....
The Nun With his Competition entry The Nun, Guillaume Nicloux has followed in the footsteps of Jacques Rivette and tried his hand at adapting Denis Diderot’s 18th century novel. Despite offering an aesthetically gorgeous period piece that exhibits the impressive talent of its young lead Pauline Etienne, this new adaptation pales in comparison to the French New Wave master’s 1966 version. The film’s downfall is primarily structural. Nicloux tells the story of Suzanne, a 16-year-old forced to take the veil by her family only to be cast into a life of heinous abuse, through a nobleman reading a manuscript of her trials given to him by his ailing father....
The Fall of the House of Usher At the very least, I’m going to take my sweet time, and while the cream of criticism have been in Park City, Utah, marveling at the veritable Ali Baba’s Cave of indie gems which we’ll see through 2015, I’ve been scraping up the lees of the year that was. Looking at a list of every feature film which had a weeklong theatrical run in New York City in 2014, I find that I have seen approximately 100 of the titles listed, the total number of which must run in excess of 2,000....
Rust and Bone If there has been a defining motif to the first half of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it has been that of the human body in extremis. Three of the strongest entries in the official competition—Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone, Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Love and Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills—feature central characters who are bound and gagged, for sale to the highest bidder, or literally cut off at the knees, in films that bring a physical, visceral intensity to stories of religious oppression, sex tourism and life on the margins of the working class....
The description of the film is simple enough: a woman (Marion Cotillard) has one weekend to convince her co-workers to sacrifice a pay raise so that she can keep her job. Simple but scathing, quiet and moving, Two Days, One Night—the new film from the Dardenne Brothers—struck a powerful chord here at Cannes today. With the festival passing its midpoint, journalists at the film’s press conference hurled calls of “bravo” when the Belgian siblings entered....
Watching writer-director Joss Whedon handle the staggering number of superheroes, just plain heroes, sidekicks, super-enemies, super-frenemies, and super-friends with potential benefits in Avengers: Age of Ultron is like observing a 3-D chess master struggle with an epic bout of whack-a-mole. The subtitle might be Age of Ultron but the meta-message is: “We’re in the Age of Marvel: prepare or be square.” (Warning: to know what’s happening at the beginning, brush up on the mid-credits scene in the last Captain America movie....
You’d never know from watching Bridge of Spies that its hero, James B. Donovan, was a commander in Naval Intelligence during World War II, and as general counsel to America’s wartime spy service, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), helped frame guidelines for the creation of the CIA. As the associate to the chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, he was responsible for collecting a visual record of Nazi genocide and presenting it as evidence....
In Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man is an over-eager 15-year-old obsessed with earning full-fledged membership in The Avengers. His impatience at joining these costumed superstars and becoming a publicly acknowledged world-class superhero cements the character’s position in the Marvel Universe. But it also undercuts his appeal. When did Spider-Man, Marvel’s original crazy, mixed-up teenager, turn into such a go-getter, such a joiner? It takes the entire duration of the movie for him to make peace with his true self as “your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man....
Yorgos Lanthimos, the director of the widely acclaimed movie The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which won a screenwriting prize at Cannes, practices fill-in-the-blank cinema. He offers outrageous premises, a self-conscious deadpan style, and actors skilled at straight-faced absurdity. Then he suckers us into providing meaning, feeling, context, and even the rules of his games. In the world of his commercial breakthrough film The Lobster (2016), single people get a month and a half to find and pair off with a suitable partner....
You can’t separate the turbulent beauty of Kenji Mizoguchi’s early masterwork, The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (39), a Japanese classic now receiving its American theatrical premiere run, from its lacerating honesty. It’s an impassioned yet critical depiction of a woman sacrificing herself for her husband’s art and the man growing as an artist and a person—just not in time for them to share a happy life. Unlike Mizoguchi’s international hits, The Life of Oharu (52), Ugetsu (53), and Sansho the Bailiff (54), which unfold in medieval settings, this film takes place in the 1880s, in the bustling theater worlds of Tokyo and Osaka (as well as in some tawdry provinces)....
Robert Zemeckis is one of the few A-list writer-director-magnates who consistently strives to break new ground in technique and subject matter while mounting movies with the narrative sweep and color that can unite all sectors of an audience. His 2015 film about Philippe Petit’s breathtaking wire-walk at the World Trade Center, The Walk, was a triumphant collaboration between a moviemaker high on hope and adventure, and an actor, Joseph Gordon-Levitt (as Petit), who, in his own lithe, sly way, and with bursts of inspiration, summoned a comic daredevil performance comparable to any of Burt Lancaster’s....
Set in a contemporary Hungarian state that decides to enforce canine racial purity, White God features the tantalizing spectacle of a 200-strong dog pack wreaking revenge on petty bureaucrats who are only following orders as they impound mixed breeds. The canine avengers also target evildoers who sell fighting dogs on the black market and train them to battle to the death. As a snob-appeal treatment of the kind of slob-appeal scenario designed to put audiences through the wringer, running the gamut from “Awwww” to “Ugh,” the film has played at major festivals like Sundance and even won Cannes’ Un Certain Regard Prize....
Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019) The 76th edition of Venice opened with something other than Hollywood spectacle—Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Truth, starring Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche as mother and daughter artists in a pleasing passive-aggressive battle of wills—and, whether or not this was a direct result, the temperature seemed cooler on the usually overheated fall hype machine. Not that the actual weather was merciful, as a clinging humidity descended upon the sleepy island where the festival takes place....
Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal: The Movie Comedy needs politics, and politics needs comedy. There’s no point in belaboring the boon that election years offer in terms of entertainment. As the personalities have gotten bigger (and, for conservative politicians, are now apparently gaffe-proof), the manner in which they’re lampooned has also outgrown mere SNL sketches and impersonations. Following Donald Trump’s win at the New Hampshire caucus, last week Funny or Die presented the “lost” 50-minute adaptation of his 1987 memoir/self-help/business book Trump: The Art of the Deal, titled Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal: The Movie....
Three Promises (Yousef Srouji, 2023) Every year, during the first weekend of March, the programming team behind Missouri’s True/False Film Festival offers something of a rarity in the often overwhelming festival scene: a concise but reliably solid lineup of nonfiction films, live music, and multidisciplinary art installations that make for a robust but manageable viewing experience. Located in the college town of Columbia, True/False unfolds in an intimate and gloriously walkable setting....
Yalitza Aparicio as Cleo in Roma, (Alfonso Cuarón, 2018). Among the thicket of memory-scenes that form Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, one of the most devastating, for me, takes place inside the Cine Metropolitan in Mexico City. The film’s Mixtec lead, the maid Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), has told her lover Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) that she’s pregnant with their child. After a long pause, Fermín excuses himself and slips out of the theater, leaving Cleo alone to watch the final reel of Gérard Oury’s La Grande Vadrouille (1966), an elephantine, sentiment-logged wartime comedy which was France’s biggest box-office hit for over forty years....
His Lost Name The Busan International Film Festival has crawled from the wreckage of a complex and troubling controversy involving the festival’s connections to a demanding city government, which had provided about half of BIFF’s funding. After the city threatened to defund the festival for screening the political documentary The Truth Shall Not Sink with Sewol in 2014, major filmmakers boycotted the festival, and a few years of internal strife set the organization back significantly....
Bitter Lake King Abdullah’s death was met with mournful respect by Western leaders (the Obamas flew to Riyadh for his funeral) even though the kingdom he ruled over with an iron fist forbids women from driving and walking in public unaccompanied by men, has beheaded 10 persons in 2015 alone, and banned public cinemas until very recently, when an IMAX that exclusively shows science documentaries opened in Khobar. (Where are all the freedom-loving cinephiles when it comes to Saudi Arabia?...
