Love Is Colder Than Death is a striking title—dour and grandiose in a way that invites thoughts of black-clad chain-smoking art students. Fassbinder’s 1969 debut feature lives up to its name—which isn’t a bad thing—as it bounces among Franz, a hoodlum (played by the director) who refuses to join a crime syndicate; his girlfriend/prostitute, Johanna (Hanna Schygulla); and Bruno (Ulli Lommel), a thug sent by the syndicate to follow Franz....
Frankenstein When it comes to revitalized creatures, few are reanimated as frequently as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Adapting the 19th-century novel to modern Los Angeles, director and writer Bernard Rose practically aspires to enacting a miracle on film, with all the cracked, unheeding Proselytism of a mad scientist. Lest the idea of “Frankenstein in L.A.” conjure the unintentional horror of Crime and Punishment in Suburbia, Rose’s film finds refuge in the voice and narrative of Shelley’s original text....
The Earth’s Forgotten (Mario Ruspoli, 1961) The Films of Mario Ruspoli are streaming on OVID.tv. As his long friendship and association with Chris Marker might suggest, Mario Ruspoli is something of a trickster. This collection spans the Rome-born, Paris-dwelling filmmaker’s short documentaries from 1958 to 1972, which might suggest, with their rough aesthetics and salt-of-the-earth subject matter, an underrecognized adept of cinéma vérité. But closer viewing reveals each of these unassuming, humble films—composed of handheld shots of peasants and interviews with madmen in blindingly back-lit black and white—as the product of a restless, playful mind uninterested in presenting an audience with any semblance of unadorned reality, or even truth, other than the filmmaker’s own....
Before We Vanish starts with a delicious flurry of black comedy flourishes. A schoolgirl walks toward a house with a goldfish in a plastic bag, followed by an ominous soundtrack rumble and a touch of lens flare, then a woman comes out of the front door, whom we then see being dramatically yanked back inside… The sequence culminates in a wonderfully casual bit of traffic chaos, to an incongruously flip passage of oompah-oompah music from composer Yusuke Hayashi....
We don’t know much about the protagonist of Blue Ruin, except that he’s let himself go, learned a few survival skills in the process, and is something of a family man—as you have to be if you undertake to avenge the killing of your parents. Otherwise, Dwight (Macon Blair) just wanders through a course of unusually desperate actions in a state of almost machine-like automatism, performing many of his tasks in panicked confusion, as if he’s observing someone else far more naturally reckless doing them....
In Albert Camus’s 1942 novel L’Étranger (variously translated as The Outsider and The Stranger), the Algerian killed by the anti-hero Meursault has no name: he’s simply l’Arabe. That omission recently prompted Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud to write a book that has—as you can imagine in the year of the Charlie Hebdo massacre—been much discussed of late, The Meursault Investigation, in which the anonymous character’s death is discussed by his brother, and in which he at last is given a name, Moussa....
You don’t call a film Leviathan if you want it to be perceived as a gentle, intimate little art-house offering. You choose that name either to decorate an opulent SFX blockbuster—which Andrey Zvyagintsev’s film most certainly is not—or if you want to signal that you’re making a heavyweight statement, with lofty metaphysical connotations and with a heavyweight target in sight. That about fits the Russian director’s remarkable fourth feature. Leviathan certainly carries metaphysical resonance, sometimes explicitly invoked, sometimes alluded to in cinematography that conveys a stark impression of human isolation and vulnerability in the midst of indifferent nature; that won’t come as any surprise to admirers of Zvyagintsev’s 2003 debut The Return....
All images from Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach, 2019) In one of the many elegant details that fill Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, there’s a framed magazine article hanging on a wall, a feature profiling couple Nicole and Charlie. Some astute sub-editor titled the piece “Scenes From a Marriage” because the Barbers are not just married, but also theatrical collaborators; the editor also clearly had Ingmar Bergman in mind, and so does Baumbach....
Gabriel Mascaro’s Neon Bull is one of those films that plunge you into a world that seems profoundly strange, even though it’s fairly clear that pretty much everything in it is derived directly from the real. The Brazilian director (interviewed here by Violet Lucca) has just been the subject of a Film Society of Lincoln Center retrospective including his documentaries; Neon Bull fascinatingly straddles the adjacent areas of fiction and the seemingly immediate representation of an actual, extremely specialized milieu....
Much of the action in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Third Murder is seen from one side or another of a pane of glass. It’s the partition in a jail interview room, separating a prisoner and his attorney. The implication is clear: there are different truths to a legal case, and what they are depends on which side of the glass you happen to sit. Much the same is true when it comes to appraising Kore-eda’s film: considered from one angle, The Third Murder is a complex, alluringly elusive affair; from another, it’s merely slippery and nebulous, gesturing at profounder insights than it delivers....
The Lonedale Operator The close-up is partially a product of technological evolution, but it’s also the result of an artistic evolution. The lenses required for close-ups were available early on. When filmmaking began, directors had a 30mm and a 50mm lens, and before long they had a 75mm. You can see the focus problems they were having with close-ups starting with Griffith. Filmmakers then shot during the daytime, and needed a lot of sunlight and a very high f-stop to get clear focus....
Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006) Google “Inland Empire explained,” click around a bit, and you won’t be disappointed: the truth, or at least a halfway persuasive plot synopsis, is out there. That is, unless you’re the type of person—or in this case, the type of David Lynch fan—who reflexively scoffs at the idea that this particular director’s films can or should be explained. Few filmmakers in the history of the medium have had their work so consistently and assiduously strip-mined for Meaning—symbolic, ideological, psychoanalytic, cinephilic—as Missoula’s finest....
Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021) Licorice Pizza, the long-withheld title of the long-awaited new film by Paul Thomas Anderson, is deliciously apropos. Savoring the vibes of his beloved San Fernando Valley, Anderson has concocted an eccentric, deeply appealing coming-of-age tale that is also, depending on where you bite, gratuitous and irritating. The movie is both too much and not enough, a sprawling picaresque stuffed with local pleasures that swerve through and around a slow-burning love story no less perverse—but far less reflexive and persuasive—than the brooding obsession of Phantom Thread....
Denis’s father was a French colonial administrator, and she was raised in Africa until she was twelve years old. She began her career in cinema by entering IDHEC, the premiere French film school, in 1971. Subsequently, Denis was an extra on Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer, observed figures like Jacques Rivette and Dušan Makavejev at work and, in the Eighties, rose to the ranks of first assistant director, in which capacity she was employed by both Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch....
Atlantics (Mati Diop, 2019) Though she’s considered a first-time filmmaker by Cannes standards, Mati Diop is hardly a newcomer, having spent more than a decade working as an actress in films by Claire Denis (35 Shots of Rum), Antonio Campos (Simon Killer), and Matías Piñeiro (Hermia and Helena), and directing a small but vital collection of shorts. Her mid-length Mille soleils (2013) played throughout the world, mostly in documentary festivals, as did the haunting short Atlantiques (2009); that film shares a title with her first feature, which appeared in the Main Competition this year at Cannes....
Mambar Pierrette (Rosine Mbakam, 2023) At the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, among the many history-sweeping epics and time-devouring titles by (largely Western) auteurs, the Directors’ Fortnight selection Mambar Pierrette risks flying under the radar. The fiction debut by documentarian Rosine Mbakam, the film is at first glance a modest drama about a seamstress in Douala, Cameroon struggling to pay the bills, raise her three kids alone, and protect her rickety home and workshop from the floods that threaten to swallow up everything, like some kind of cosmic joke....
FILM COMMENT spoke with Loznitsa at Cannes about Maidan, which opens Friday for an exclusive one-week run at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. (Last month, the director visited Anthology Film Archives for a discussion following the screening of three of his short films, including Reflections, as part of Flaherty NYC.) The style of the film is quite distinctive—mostly wide, fixed-camera shots of crowds, with mobile shots for the running battles with the police....
Joan of Arc of Mongolia (Ulrike Ottinger, 1989) A key figure in the New German Cinema, Ulrike Ottinger has written, directed, and photographed approximately 25 features and shorts. Born in Germany in 1942, she moved to Paris in the 1960s to study art. Returning to Germany, she made her first film, Laocoön & Sons, between 1972 and ’73. Her early titles explored Berlin using both fiction and documentary modes, while later works opened up her views on feminism and politics....
