Cuarón’s return to his native Mexico is also a belated sequel of sorts, or at least pendant, to the film that made his international reputation, Y tu mamá también (2001). That film explored contemporary Mexico through the bildungsroman of two pampered scions of the country’s bourgeoisie; the reality of Mexican working-class life was perhaps implicit as part of a travelogue backdrop, but was effectively absent from the heroes’ solipsistic experience....
Immediately after the film’s premiere in Venice, Film Comment spoke with a ruminative Solnicki about the sensibility and sensitivity on display in Kékszakállú. It screens October 4 and 5 in the 54th New York Film Festival. Viewers might be confused to hear that the film is inspired by Bartok’s opera—and then see a series of scenes often consisting of teenagers milling about. The film is inspired by the opera, but in a Bartokian way....
For once, an interviewer had stumped Orson Welles. In a hotel room in 1960, a seemingly innocuous question from a television reporter about a sense of home has him searching his pockets for a matchbook. He pauses, eyes downcast, his brow dented in thought. “I suppose it’s Woodstock, Illinois, if it’s anywhere,” he replies. “I went to school there for four years. If I try to think of a home, it’s that....
There are endless things to say about Buscemi, closing in on 50 later this year—from his early days as a stand-up comedian in the East Village in the Eighties to his work both in front of and behind the camera on The Sopranos to his still unrealized dream project, an adaptation of William Burroughs’s Queer—and it’s a little odd interviewing him about Interview. In the real world, Buscemi is hard to reach, doesn’t do much publicity, wouldn’t meet in person—in short, the whole process of setting up the interview took on many of the trappings of how art and media have been derailed by celebrity culture, which of course is at the heart of Interview....
Amalie R. Rothschild’s 1990 documentary Painting the Town: The Illusionistic Murals of Richard Haas contains a catalog of the trompe l’oeil works of Haas, a Wisconsin-born artist who made his name in the Seventies with a series of public art commissions that seemed to redress some of the damage wrought by so-called redevelopment and urban renewal by painting “architectural illusions” onto plain blank walls. Haas’s popular murals, inspired by traditional work in Munich and the Liguria region of Italy, are invitations to think on the squandered potential, short-sighted demolition, and deferred dreams that mark (or mar) public urban space, overlaying the ideal city onto the real city....
Lola Early in Jacques Demy’s 1961 debut, Lola, the shiftless, young-ish Roland (Marc Michel) slips into a Gary Cooper movie and emerges transformed. Suddenly resolved to leave the small-town France setting of Nantes (Demy’s birthplace), our hero, a dreamer who claims not to dream, is inspired to learn how to live, one artfully smoked cigarette at a time. The idea that real life is lived elsewhere, or indeed submits to any scheme, makes a melancholy fool of Roland, who is bound to experience further disillusionment in Nantes the moment he re-encounters his childhood crush, a burlesque dancer who now goes by the name Lola (Anouk Aimée)....
Competition: Bong Joon-Ho, Okja Robin Campillo, 120 Beats Per Minute Sofia Coppola, The Beguiled Jacques Doillon, Rodin Todd Haynes, Wonderstruck Michel Hazanavicius, Le Redoutable Naomi Kawase, Radiance Yorgos Lanthimos, The Killing of a Sacred Deer Sergei Loznitsa, A Gentle Creature Kornél Mundruczó, Jupiter’s Moon François Ozon, L’Amant Double Lynne Ramsay, You Were Never Really Here Andrey Zvyagintsev, Loveless Hong Sangsoo, The Day After Un Certain Regard Cecilia Atan and Valeria Pivato, The Desert Bride Kaouther Ben Hania, Beauty and the Dogs Sergio Castellitto, Lucky...
Courtesy of Artists Space Retrospectives can be grave affairs. When the artist has already died, I find these events troubling, much like “celebrations of life.” Retrospectives are joyous because of the pleasure of experiencing the artist’s work, for the first or the fifteenth time, but they are also marked by the end of a vision. No matter how many masterpieces an artist makes there is always the chance for at least one more until suddenly, cruelly, there isn’t....
A more accurate moniker, overheard at this year’s 6th annual Art House Convergence (AHC), might be the People’s Republic of Cinema. From January 14 to 17, the Convergence was held as usual in Midway, Utah, just a short distance from Park City, allowing attendees to head to Sundance immediately afterward. The latest edition drew nearly 350 participants including many representatives, owners, and operators of venues that specialize in screening many of the titles written about in FILM COMMENT....
Midway through Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, the titular slave-turned-gunslinger puts a bullet through the heart of his former master, who once said he “liked the way he begged” for his wife’s mercy. Django gets the last word: “I like the way you die, boy.” Django Unchained makes the case that it’s sometimes okay to like the way people die. For 45 agonizing minutes of the film’s nearly three-hour runtime, Django and his bounty-hunting partner-in-crime Dr....
We expect professional critics, whenever they discuss a given film, to prove why it makes sense to talk about this movie as opposed to any other. Often the work is done for the critics ahead of time, by the programmers, producers, and archivists who bring new films to theaters and resurrect older ones from obscurity. In any case, there’s a burden to explain why a long-neglected film has something to say about the way we live today, why, for lack of a better word, it is relevant....
The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus may be dead, but the Marvel Cinematic Universe lives. For any director, organizing the ins and outs of myriad superheroes and villains while making sure to send in the clowns must be like playing ringmaster for the current Greatest Show on Earth. The MCU sometimes employs visionaries so bold and tangy they can execute that job and transform entire franchises, like Taika Waititi in Thor: Ragnarok (2017) and Ryan Coogler in Black Panther....
In The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Bill Nighy plays retired civil servant Douglas Ainslie to perfection. And why wouldn’t he? In its combination of diffidence, sensitivity, and a sort of bewildered dash, it’s the ultimate Bill Nighy role. It’s one of many elements that have made this unlikely franchise about an eccentric Indian golden-years hotel into a global hot ticket. Nighy puts the sex into sexagenarian, just as co-stars Judi Dench and Maggie Smith create a blessedly sharp and multifaceted depiction of octogenarian female bonding....
Galvanized by the intersection of personal, subjective rumination, and social history, the essay has emerged as the leading nonfiction form for both intellectual and artistic innovation. In contrast to competing genres (the PBS historical epic, the updated vérité portrait, the tabloid spectacle), the essay offers a range of politically charged visions uniquely able to blend abstract ideas with concrete realities, the general case with specific notations of human experience. The filmmaker’s onscreen presence-like similar gestures by New Wave directors, an acknowledgment that what goes on in front of the camera bears the imprint of a distinct sensibility behind it—is not in itself an infallible guide for tagging this notoriously tricky form, but it reminds us that a quality shared by all film essays is the inscription of a blatant, self-searching authorial presence....
The Master Celebrating its 20th year, the Busan International Film Festival should scream stability. One of Asia’s biggest film festivals, screening approximately 300 movies from 70 countries, host to the 10-year-old Asian Film Market (1,500 badge-holders and counting), and housed in the brand-new $150 million Busan Cinema Center, the event looks like a temple of permanence from the outside. But inside, the BIFF is a festival in crisis, both logistically and artistically....
Elle At the exact midpoint of this year’s Chicago International Film Festival, Paul Verhoeven’s Elle played to a sold-out theater in one of the largest of seven screens the festival commands for two weeks in the downtown AMC complex. Two-thirds of the folks in those seats seemed to anticipate the kind of hard-charging yet sophisticated provocation one might expect from Verhoeven and Isabelle Huppert. This crowd traded favorite extracts from Cannes reviews before the lights went down and debated how self-aware Showgirls really was....
The Wonders The Midnight Sun Festival in Finland defies the see-it-first mandate that guides so much programming and critical response, but without being a mere exercise in cinephilic nostalgia. Founded in 1986 by Aki Kaurismäki, Mika Kaurismäki, and critic/filmmaker Peter von Bagh, the festival (which ran June 11 to 15) features a mix of up-and-coming filmmakers, retrospectives of underappreciated and established directors, obscure genre surveys, and contemporary Finnish cinema. Nestled among ancient forests, the five-block-wide town of Sodankylä boasts intimate, easily accessible venues that allow you to drift from one fantastic film to the next without any pesky downtime....
