Posts

Directed by Jordan Peele of the comedy duo Key and Peele, Get Out is the horror film that we’ve been waiting for. It arrives just in time, at a moment when genre filmmaking can harness familiar tropes to reflect a post-election world that feels increasing surreal, backward-looking, and unfamiliar. Chris Washington (British actor Daniel Kaluuya), a young photographer focused on black, urban street life, is going on a country weekend trip with Rose (Allison Williams), his girlfriend of four months, who, to his dismay, has neglected to tell her family that she is dating an African American....

Mud is grounded in that awkward moment of youth where you begin testing out things you’ve seen adults do on TV—swearing, kissing, saving the day by following your heart—and quickly discover that the world doesn’t work quite that easily. And, with the exception of certain aspects of its denouement, the film, written and directed by Jeff Nichols, avoids the clichés and easy answers that most coming-of-age stories peddle and instead shows the abundance of humor, frustration, and sadness that is part and parcel of this tender age....

Whatever it is, Pacific Rim is almost certainly more than a movie. Its lengthy, frequent scenes of robot-versus-alien fist-slugging, head-crushing, and (literal) heart-wrenching fall somewhere on the spectrum—in scale, aesthetic sensibility, and intended effect—between video games and roller coasters. At certain points it feels as if you’re riding the movie, enduring it, suffering its blows and being buffeted around under its feet; at others, you have the impression of dealing the blows yourself....

Soderbergh’s second movie (after 2005’s Bubble) to be shot—by the director himself—in high-def video using a mostly nonprofessional cast for 2929 Entertainment, and the second (after Che) to use the Red One camera, The Girlfriend Experience was shot in 16 days last October, almost entirely in New York City (the Hudson Valley and Las Vegas have bit parts). Congress has just passed the bailout; Biden and Palin are debating; and expensive escort Chelsea (porn star Sasha Grey) frequently finds herself having to assuage the money anxieties of her upscale clientele....

A tiny topless discotheque, somewhere in a future that looks very much like 1973, filled with bulked-up black bodybuilders, flexing and voguing in leopard-skin briefs; a zaftig blonde Euro-grotesque, wandering like a washed-up Heimatfilm Jayne Mansfield among the musclemen, tenderly caressing biceps and pecs as she passes; a blockheaded hero in a too-tight suit, caught between two (or is it three?) realities, and slowly losing his mind… Every story Rainer Werner Fassbinder ever told depicts a highly personalized social totality in miniature—“a world in a nutshell”—so why should his long-unseen foray into the speculative and inner-spatial realms of science fiction, World on a Wire, have settled for anything less?...

A movie star of a certain age on a yacht would ordinarily be spending his time making life look effortless and splendid—but nothing could be further from what befalls the nameless protagonist Robert Redford plays in J.C. Chandor’s oceanbound survival drama. Forsaking the chatter of his risibly exposition-heavy Margin Call (11), and one-upping Life of Pi by stripping things down to the bare minimum, Chandor charts an admirably uncompromising if curiously aloof course into nothingness....

Seven years ago the photographer James Balog was something of a climatechange skeptic. In his view, nature was far too vast and supreme a force for mere mortals—in their puny insignificance—to have any lasting effect on. Now, thanks to an assignment from National Geographic, he’s a climate-change evangelist. Balog’s task wasn’t easy: he was commissioned to capture images of atmospheric transformation and their subsequent effect on the world’s landscape. He eventually came up with the idea of setting up 25 fixed-position cameras anchored to strategic points in Greenland, Iceland, and Alaska....

Purveyor of quality fluff Cédric Klapisch opens his new film with 10-15 minutes of E-Z listening cinema, lightly touching on character predicaments and quirks in a widescreen City of Lights. There’s a cabaret dancer (Romain Duris) who learns he’s terminally ill, his frumpy supportive-aggressive sister (Juliette Binoche, acting with her hair again), an antsy prof (permanently surprised-looking Fabrice Luchini) who chases a pretty student (Mélanie Laurent) after his father dies, a couple of flirtatious fishmongers, plus assorted loose ends....

Pulp screens Wednesday in Sound + Vision 2014 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. “So, what, you’re trying to get a snapshot of Sheffield? Like, the hopes and dreams of the common man?” asks Bomar, a musician, former mental patient, and Sheffield resident who dresses like a thriftier, glam-era Brian Eno. This question cum reflexive critique, casually dropped in the middle of his interview with director Florian Habicht, is delivered in a wry, leisurely manner not unlike that of Pulp front man Jarvis Cocker....

The dub-vs.-live issue, which even theorists as sophisticated as Ziggy Kracauer scarcely comment upon, is at the heart of The Death of Klinghoffer, a recent filmed version of John Adam’s infamous modernist opera about terrorism. You can read the complete version of this article in the July/August 2003 print edition of Film Comment.

Special is as special does, and Sidney Poitier is special for very specific reasons. Few can honestly say that they may have actually changed something of great importance to the world at large. Poitier can easily say that, without however much of a blush would show on his indelibly black skin. The reason is that he has walked the walk, talked the talk, and beaten clichés and stereotypes as though they had stolen something, which is what things substantially removed from the facts of life always do....

Two men amble through a high-tech laboratory, which is palpably an old-school, over-lit, studio-built set. They are research facility chief Dr. Jim Tanner (George Hamilton), whose ballpoint-crammed pocket protector seems at odds with his modified moptop haircut, and Arthur Nordlund (Michael Rennie), a stern government overseer who represents the Establishment despite being played by the hippie alien from The Day the Earth Stood Still. The pair chat amiably about Tanner’s clearly sadistic experiments in pain tolerance, undertaken at the behest of the space program....

Oscar Wilde’s novella The Canterville Ghost, published in 1887 in The Court and Society Review, is a spooky-comic hybrid. The ghost in question has frightened generations of people since then, but he’s really just a bored showoff looking for attention. MGM’s 1944 film adaptation adds one more layer of hybridization. Released just one month after D-Day, The Canterville Ghost takes place in the wartime world of the 1940s, and includes two elaborate battle sequences....

In this week’s episode, Film Comment editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish debate Curtis’s aesthetic strategies and political arguments with two old friends: Film at Lincoln Center assistant programmer Dan Sullivan, and Violet Lucca, a former Film Comment editor (and the original host of this podcast!) who now works as web editor at Harper’s Magazine. They take on a number of questions in a lively, often impassioned conversation. Is Curtis a journalist, a filmmaker, or a propagandist?...