Posts

The Curse (co-created by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, 2023) “He has somehow melded Jacques Tati and Mark Cuban,” wrote Benny Safdie of Nathan Fielder in Cinema Scope in 2016, perceptively drawing a bead on the Canadian business-school grad–turned–culture jammer’s well-practiced yet uncanny mixture of megalomania and grace. More specifically, Safdie was praising the 22-minute masterpiece “Smokers Allowed”—for many, the apotheosis of Fielder’s acclaimed Comedy Central series Nathan for You (2013-2017)....

Mia Hansen-Løve’s new film, Bergman Island, is becoming increasingly imminent—Cinetic Media recently offering a first look at the film, which will likely compete for a Cannes debut. Starring Mia Wasikowska, Vicky Krieps, and Tim Roth, the film “revolves around an American filmmaking couple who retreat to the island for the summer to each write screenplays for their upcoming films in an act of pilgrimage to the place that inspired Ingmar Bergman....

Classic Ghost Stories of M.R. James Although M.R. James (1862-1936) has long been regarded as the greatest of British ghost story writers, his works were not immediately felt to be suited to the moving image. James, a serious academic at Cambridge and Eton, was a Christian archaeologist, a lover of ancient manuscripts and ecclesiastical history. He was also, as one surviving colleague described him in Gatiss’s documentary, most likely a “non-practicing homosexual....

Johnny Depp and Faye Dunaway in Arizona Dream (Emir Kusturica, 1993) The first—and then second—time I saw Emir Kusturica’s Arizona Dream was January, 1995, during its week-long run at the Chicago Art Institute. A friend read an intriguing review of the film and we took the bus down and settled into the theater, trying to warm up after being out in the brutal winter. My friend and I were enraptured by the film’s heady blend of poignancy, hilarity, and magical realism, not to mention the performances from Faye Dunaway, Jerry Lewis, Johnny Depp, Lili Taylor, and Vincent Gallo....

The works of major artists in their lesser-known media can provoke a certain dizzying scrutiny. Critics assuredly tackle them, querying their contents. Can they stand apart from the masterpieces? Do they unveil a secret subtext in the major works? Or finally—inevitably—what do they show us of the artist’s inner life? These questions have chewed at understandings of Russian film pioneer and amateur draughtsman Sergei Eisenstein almost since the first exhibition of his drawings in 1932....

Even setting aside the discomfort at seeing Woody Allen play a late-blooming pimp, John Turturro’s Fading Gigolo still feels tainted. Allen plays Murray, an out-of work New York City shopkeeper who convinces part-time florist Fioravante (Turturro) to do a little sex work on the side when Murray’s dermatologist (Sharon Stone) asks him if he knows anyone in that line of work. To its credit the film wastes no time getting off the ground, and very quickly Fioravante is a moderately successful “gigolo,” with Murray procuring a small pool of wealthy ladies who keep coming back for more....

Co-written by his wife, Veronika Franz, Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Love—the first of his Paradise trilogy—follows Teresa (Margarete Tiesel), a 50-year-old Austrian single hausfrau who travels to a Kenyan beachside resort to escape her frustrating, sexless existence and sullen teenage daughter. There, Teresa is excited to learn from a friend (Inge Maux) the ins and outs of scoring what the out-of-shape women cannot get at home: sex, and a measure of companionship, with young men....

It sounds like an intriguing proposition: novelist Cormac McCarthy (author of No Country for Old Men and The Road) pens an original screenplay about an upstanding lawyer who gets caught up in the U.S.-Mexico drug trade. But even though has an all-star cast, a large budget, the backing of a major studio, and direction by Ridley Scott, the result often underwhelms. The film opens with some risqué bed play between the eponymous Counselor (Michael Fassbender) and his lovely girlfriend, Laura (Penelope Cruz)....

Once Upon A Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019) by Nicolas Rapold “A glib formula might describe Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood as combining the middle-ager, last-chance gambit of Jackie Brown and the lurid revisionist urge to punch up history in Inglourious Basterds. But it’s something at once mature and madly, deeply, and now less collector-ishly in love with Hollywoodland and, even more, its far-flung margins—and here, in the most artificial of settings, Tarantino achieves something genuine and heartfelt....

The Zone of Interest (Brian Glazer, 2023) In The Zone of Interest, the home of Rudolf and Hedwig Höss is alive with sensory activity. The family’s dog plays with the children, and barks in response to the snarls of prison dogs on the other side of the wall. The flowers bloom thanks to Hedwig’s diligent labors in the garden, and breathe in heavy, ashen air. The baby cries—in delight or horror?...

What’s in a name? When it comes to identifying a group of highly auspicious films made by a collective of prodigiously talented generational contemporaries, it can mean the difference between wider recognition from the critical/festival/distribution establishment and consignment to obscurity. (To wit, how many mumblecore films have seen the light of day thanks to the coinage of that term?) So far, relative anonymity has been the lot of Serge Bozon and a half-dozen other young French cinéastes who, between 1997 and 2005, contributed to the film journal La Lettre du cinéma, and who have since gone on to create a series of films as highly original and formally innovative as any of the more celebrated “new” national cinemas (Argentina, Romania, South Korea) that have dominated the conversation over the last decade....

Level Five I remember discussing Chris Marker’s last feature film, Level Five, with a friend of mine when it first came out. She was generally enthusiastic, but irritated by what she described as “an old man’s view of the Internet.” I did not share her annoyance, but I could see what she meant. Even at the moment of its release, before the impact of the accelerated obsolescence that today makes the film look definitively dated, the computer hardware and digital hypermedia effects—which both appear in Level Five as characters, and had been used to create it—looked distinctly quaint, old-fashioned, and clumsy....

For numerically titled Russian movies of the moment, stick with 4 instead of 12. Old soul Nikita Mikhalkov’s appropriation of the 12 Angry Men template is a bloated series of harangues that feels too long even before its full 154 minutes have shuffled by. A Moscow jury is sequestered in a cluttered school gym (for lack of suitable facilities) to hash out a unanimous verdict on a young Chechen accused of murder, addressing issues of retribution, rule of law, and Russian cultural identity along the way....

In Ramin Bahrani’s first two features, Man Push Cart and Chop Shop, the vibrant detail of fresh locales and daily hustles mitigated threadbare scripts and touch-and-go nonpro performances. Goodbye Solo relies on forced character dynamics and two clunkily directed, monotonous turns, in a milieu—a cabbie’s spread-out North Carolina territory—that fails to take satisfactory shape. Upbeat chatterbox Solo (Souléymane Sy Savané) has agreed to drive watery-eyed curmudgeon William (Red West) to a far-flung mountain ridge at an appointed date....

André Téchiné is no Jean-Jacques Beineix (duh). But there is one curious degree of separation: cult Gallic scribe Philippe Djian wrote the books that became Beineix’s Betty Blue and Téchiné’s latest, Unforgivable. The new film’s plot is so complex it’s a bit of a miracle that the director makes it so fluid and breezy—but that’s to be expected from a card-carrying master of the post–Nouvelle Vague. Novelist Francis (André Dussollier) has come to Venice looking for a quiet place to work....