Let’s start with some numbers. At Rotterdam this year, 37 of the festival’s 189 new features were world premieres, as were 76 of its 280 or so new shorts. Among the new features, had you attended the Cannes, Venice, and Toronto film festivals (never mind Locarno, Vienna, and elsewhere), you could have already seen 48 of them. This year, over the course of eight days, I viewed 38 features. Of these, eight were world premieres....
Not everything that opened in 1967 was a gem, a classic, or a future entry in somebody’s canon. Yes, in January of that year, the options were rich; you could go to a theater in New York and see Blow-Up, or Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels, or Sergio Leone’s 1964 A Fistful of Dollars, which had just made its way to American screens for the first time. You could view the result of Roger Vadim directing his wife Jane Fonda in The Game Is Over, or the first film from Mike Nichols (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?...
Made in U.S.A. In 1967, the New York Film Festival turned five—already old enough to have become a yearly ritual for New Yorkers who eagerly awaited the announcement of the titles via an advertisement in the New York Times Arts & Leisure section, and also old enough to have established certain traditions that persist to this day. Then, as now, the festival’s main slate was rigorously curated by a selection committee with an emphasis on international cinema, and by 1967, the festival had already begun to program a few panels and a tiny handful of revivals (Abel Gance’s Napoleon, Rouben Mamoulian’s Applause, and King Vidor’s Show People)....
Looking for the best online casino in Italy without AAMS? Visit this website for non AAMS casinos in Italy: https://www.stranieri.com/ You Only Live Twice “The whole thing has become a Frankenstein monster. The merchandising, the promotion, the pirating—they’re thoroughly distasteful . . . They’re like comic strips. I am fighting for money and time. I want to get as much money as I can. And I want to do them in as little time as possible, so I can fit in other things that mean more to me....
With his chiseled, matinee-idol looks, his improvisatory lifestyle, and the provocative boyishness of his personal appeal, West Coast jazz trumpeter Chet Baker (1929-1988), in his Eisenhower-era heyday, was as potent a symbol of 1950s rebellion as James Dean. But ’50s rebels were a peculiar breed—nonconformity could be an awfully ambiguous program. Baker, a natural, idiosyncratic musician, couldn’t help going his own way musically, despite changing musical styles, and he couldn’t kick his addiction to heroin....
It’s tempting to call Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation a nightmare vision of a small Transylvanian town, but what’s truly haunting about the movie is how casually almost everyone in it accedes to corruption and pettiness. Graduation hinges on an awful coincidence during a momentous time in a teenager’s life. A day before she starts taking a set of exams that should clinch her scholarship to Cambridge University, Eliza Aldea (Maria Dragus) falls victim to a brutal assault—an attempted rape that leaves her head bruised and one arm in a cast....
Spotlight combines the crackling pace and grip of a “procedural” with the illuminating textures of a first-rate social novel. This impassioned slice of American city life, layered with nuance, humor, and revelation, is the most penetrating movie yet from actor turned writer-director Tom McCarthy (The Station Agent, The Visitor, Win Win). The film is named for the “Spotlight” reporting team at The Boston Globe. McCarthy focuses his crisp intelligence on this investigative squad’s breakthrough work, in 2001, to expose child abuse and its cover-up in the Boston archdiocese....
Paul Feig’s Spy is a piquant pick-me-up. Unlike his borderline-insane buddy-cop farce The Heat (13), Feig’s espionage comedy hurtles along like a real action film. The tension crackles and the audience cackles as the CIA strives to derail the sale of an ultra-portable, terrorist-ready nuclear device. Spy riffs on the glamour and jeopardy of globetrotting adventures. Filled with chases, showdowns, and improbable escapes, this movie derives its charm from every ingredient being just a little off....
Fassbinder died either on the evening of June 9 or the early morning of June 10 in 1982, just three weeks into the editing of Querelle. As has been well-documented elsewhere, his prodigious filmic output and drug abuse fed off each other: his body was discovered by Julie Lorenz, his editor and occasional lover, in the apartment of fellow director Wolf Gremm, next to notes for a film about German-Polish socialist agitator Rosa Luxemburg....
From The Lincoln Cycle Now in its 37th year, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, has turned a town in northern Italy into a site of pilgrimage for fans and scholars of early cinema from around the world. For a week in early October this year, Pola Negri’s face was plastered all over town, long queues snaked through the central piazza before a screening of Lubitsch’s Forbidden Paradise (1924), and you couldn’t grab a gelato or a glass of wine without hearing snatches of conversations about camera negatives and wet-gate scanning....
Metro Manila The genre film is a recombinatory art, experimentally joining disparate well-worn elements. It has made Frankenstein mingle with everyone from Abbott & Costello to Aaron Eckhart’s generously oiled abs. These mutant artifacts are most successful when the stitches are hidden, as in last year’s Riddick, which combined survival horror, a locked-room siege, and a monster movie into one swiftly moving package. International genre products borrow from different thematic gene pools, but still aim for that kind of coherence....
Not everyone is happy about Roman Polanski having a new film in competition in Venice—especially since the festival only has two women directors competing this year. Some commentators have considered it an act of some chutzpah for Polanski to make a film about a historic case of unjust accusation and punishment—J’Accuse (aka An Officer and a Spy), his account of the Dreyfus case which divided France in the 1890s. In reality, it would be seriously stretching a point to interpret Polanski’s new film as being in any direct way about his own experience, although his depiction of Dreyfus’s exile on Devil’s Island certainly rhymes with his concern with the pain of isolation, from The Tenant to The Pianist....
The definitive word on Avengers: Infinity War may have been said this week by comics author Warren Ellis. The nineteenth in the series of Marvel movies—the crowning piece in this phase of the ever-expanding edifice that is the so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe—Infinity War is, Ellis says in his blog, “perhaps best understood as an unprecedented brand power move. It is not ‘a film’ as that term is commonly understood. It is a sequence of connections....
It may not surprise you to hear that Stuart Murdoch’s musical God Help the Girl is a little, well, precious. It’s a word that crops up endlessly in discussions of the writer-director’s other job as singer and main songwriter for Scottish group Belle and Sebastian (their very name, from a Sixties French TV series about a boy and a fluffy dog, tells you you’re not dealing with Mastodon). Murdoch delivers his elegant, witty lyrics for the band in a light, reedy voice, projecting an effete café-society persona that makes Morrissey look like a burly pub landlord (these days, of course, Morrissey does look like a burly pub landlord)....
No one would ever apply the term “extreme cinema” to Wes Anderson’s charming, increasingly whimsical confections. But if there was ever a cinema of excess, Anderson’s obsessively baroque films—overloaded with more detail than even the most manically attentive viewer could absorb—are surely it. His live-action films so far have never felt oppressive or airless: the vividness of his actors’ presence refuses to let his supremely artificed worlds become entirely mechanical, although Anderson sailed perilously close to the wind in the dollhouse universe of The Grand Budapest Hotel....
Jean-Luc Godard subtitled his 1967 feature Weekend “a film lost in the cosmos.” But if there’s any film that truly deserves that title, it’s On the Silver Globe, a philosophical epic of science fiction cinema by Polish director Andrzej Zuławski, who died in February this year. On the Silver Globe is the prime film maudit in the oeuvre of a director who pretty much specialized in films maudits—certainly in works that dealt, one way or another, in transgression, transcendence, and excess....
Is this what I’ve been missing? After a year of watching from the sidelines as dozens of major studio movies have come and gone—a cleansing tonic highly recommended for any critic too long in the trenches—with this column (and the nascent blog on which it appears), I step trepidatiously back into the waters of weekly film reviewing, and find myself immediately questioning the sanity of that decision. For it is still the first quarter of the year, that time when studios, basking in the warm glow of Oscar, go back to doing what they do best—assailing moviegoers with junk....
Hold Back the Dawn (1941) It was one of Billy Wilder’s first writing credits, starring Olivia de Havilland and Charles Boyer, and it’s about people who just don’t belong. She’s a schoolteacher, and he can’t get over the border, so he marries her by lying to her because, really, he just wants to get into the States. He’s a gigolo, but ultimately he falls in love with her. I went up to Billy Wilder once and said, “I love that movie....
Joachim Trier. Courtesy of Neon. I want to reflect on the term “guilty pleasure” a little bit. It intrigues me. What is a “guilty pleasure”? It can’t just be what has not been well-received by critics, because then—I’m being a bit polemical here—Vertigo would be on that list, or It’s a Wonderful Life. Movies that now, in the modern context, we all agree are masterpieces. Then I think, is it about sexuality?...
