La La Land What is it about festivals that can make critics write as if they’re dictating pull quotes? Twitter formalizes the practice, but the temptation to blurb has long existed for those sending dispatches from the highly exclusive front lines of the release calendar. See a movie, leave your mark, and maybe, just maybe, you can make or break the film’s career and be present at the birth of glory (which you helped create)....
Images from 1917 (Sam Mendes, 2019) The first thing I saw after emerging from a press screening of Sam Mendes’s World War One drama 1917 was a poster for the film, with the tagline, “From the Director of Skyfall.” Mendes’s film, set in the trenches and on the battlefields of Northern France, proposes to offer a vivid evocation of combat in the penultimate year of the Great War: a closing caption pays tribute to the director’s grandfather Alfred H....
Drew Goddard’s Bad Times at the El Royale is an exceedingly clever film, although it’s not quite clever enough; it’s a brisk number, but at two hours 21 minutes it’s definitely not brisk enough. It’s one of those films that dare critics to give away anything about its twisty plot and devious construction; as it starts to unpack its surprises early on, it puts a reviewer in that position where all you can really do is hold up a big “SPOILER WARNING” sign at the start, and forge ahead as best you can....
In the American apocalyptic imagination, the very idea of the Great Outdoors is inherently fraught with peril, since urban writers and filmmakers seem naturally inclined to believe that inconceivable horror lurks beyond the city gates—as witness such recent screen fictions as The Walking Dead and The Road. The British imagination, conversely, still tends to picture the countryside as a stable, timeless haven, which is why British radio listeners still tune religiously to the BBC’s agricultural soap opera The Archers....
Images from The Other Lamb (Malgorzata Szumowska, 2020) The French proto-absurdist Alfred Jarry famously set his 1896 play Ubu Roi “in Poland—in other words, nowhere.” The Other Lamb, the latest film by Polish director Malgorzata Szumowska, appears to take place anywhere but Poland. Shot in Ireland, this English-language co-production between Ireland, Belgium, and the U.S. is possibly set in present-day America—we glimpse the Stars and Stripes, and a Little League jacket—but the action seems really to happen in a landscape of the mind, a transcendental nowhere-and-nowhen particular....
We Are the Giant It may not be strictly true to say that history is happening faster than ever. But today—thanks to electronic media in general, and social media in particular—we can certainly see and hear it happening with much shorter delays than ever before. Traditional television, radio, and print coverage struggle to persuade us that they’re not entirely redundant in the Twitter age, with news breaking and spreading the very moment that it happens....
Beauty is not something that English-language film critics tend to talk about that often, at least not with any seriousness. We might note in passing the splendor of a film’s cinematography or design, but beauty—as an integral part of a film’s makeup—doesn’t always concern us that deeply. French criticism, on the other hand, will constantly refer to un beau film or un bel article, and I remember once snorting impatiently at a Cahiers du Cinéma review that ended by lauding its subject as “a film which teaches us what beauty is in cinema,” or words to that effect....
“If they cut off my head, what do I say? Me and my head, or me and my body?” muses the hero of Roman Polanski’s The Tenant, at the point where his intrusive neighbors have so whittled away his peace of mind and integrity of body that he might be about to disappear up just such a conundrum. A lot of whittling goes on as well in The Pianist, on a much grander scale....
How much trouble could a mathematician get into? In Andrei Gruszniczki’s subdued drama set in Communist Romania, Sorin (Sorin Leoveanu), a talented 35-year-old professor living with his mother, attracts the attention of the secret police. The problem: he isn’t a Party member, and to make matters worse he has clandestinely published a paper in an American journal. It’s enough to keep his career stalled despite his abilities—the same frustrating predicament, ironically, that faces the investigating Securitate agent (Florin Piersic Jr....
Left to right: Charles Silver and Scott Eyman Begin at the beginning. In 1987 I came to the conclusion that in order to avoid alcoholism brought on by desperate boredom—the occupational hazard of journalism before it was replaced by stark fear—I needed to write a book. Since the topic I chose was Mary Pickford, and the only extant American print of Rosita was at the Museum of Modern Art, it was time to travel....
What did you have the two main actors, Brady Corbet and Mati Diop, do for their auditions? Brady didn’t audition. He and I have known each other for four years. We met at Sundance, I was there as part of this Variety Ten Directors thing. Brady is incredibly smart, a sweet and sensitive guy. His knowledge of film is remarkable, and he is also a filmmaker himself. We worked with him on Two Gates of Sleep [10], on a short film, Mary Last Seen [10], on Martha Marcy May Marlene, now on Simon Killer, and probably something else....
Last Summer (Catherine Breillat, 2023) Ten years after the release of her last feature, Abuse of Weakness (2013), Catherine Breillat returns with another tale of vertiginous desire. Unfolding in an idyllic country home seemingly cut off from reality, Last Summer tracks the affair between a steely attorney, Anne (a formidable Léa Drucker), and her 17-year-old stepson, Théo (Samuel Kircher), a spindly, James Dean–esque charmer. An adaptation of the 2019 film Queen of Hearts, by the Danish-Egyptian director May el-Toukhy, Breillat’s long-awaited return engages anew with the filmmaker’s perennial fixations: the friction between marital love and carnal desire, the rejection of victimhood, and the expression of a sexual freedom that disavows the strictures of propriety....
In his 2020 book Jeder schreibt für sich allein (Everyone Writes for Themselves), Anatol Regnier traces the lives of prominent authors who chose to continue working in Germany during the Nazi era. Regnier tells their stories chronologically from 1933 up to the immediate postwar years, in the process revealing the various ways in which artists compromised their principles, became reconciled to their fates, and in many cases openly collaborated with the Nazi regime....
Is the group that Batko spies on, The Club for New Thinking, based on a real “subversive” association? Are elements of the film based on actual events or real rogue agents? Before the fall of Communism, there were various clubs like that at Sofia University—small debating groups of young aspiring intellectuals. Some peculiar fellows among them produced pieces of cryptic samizdat, and most of them still flatter themselves with words like “dissident” and “rebel....
With Oslo, August 31st (opening Friday), the Norwegian director of lit-set chronicle Reprise turns to a more solitary portrait of a sharp-witted, depressed addict looking up old friends. FILM COMMENT spoke with Trier shortly after Oslo screened in March as part of New Directors / New Films. What led you to adapt Le Feu Follet for the 21st century? And how did you go about translating the Paris of its main character, Alain, to Anders’ Oslo?...
