The remake is a tricky thing. On the one hand it raises the issue of an absence of ideas in the culture industry. On the other it paves the way for projects that provide a modicum of perverse fascination. (Think Terry Gilliam remaking La Jetée as 12 Monkeys or Gus Van Sant doing whatever it was he thought he was doing with the shot-by-shot remake of Psycho.) Filmmaker Trent Harris jumps the remake gun with his project Beaver Trilogy....
Selling the conceptThe only person I had to pitch it to was Lorenzo di Bonaventura at Warner Bros. I said it’s about these existential detectives who people hire to investigate their lives and the nature of reality, and it’s going to be a comedy. So I wrote that, and then Lorenzo left Warner Bros. after a very famous altercation, and I was there with all these people that hated him and didn’t want to do anything that had his stink on it, and I didn’t know them....
Certified Copy There were three masterpieces released theatrically in New York City in 2011: Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. All three take the high European art cinema from the Fifties and Seventies as their aesthetic point of departure (Certified Copy explicitly referencing Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy, Poetry’s finale, a virtual homage to Antonioni’s L’Eclisse), but give off a peculiar, disenchanted, almost played-out sense that the grand aesthetic project is itself broken in some profound way....
Consuming Spirits There has never been more entertaining and ambitious animation available to the curious than there is right now. Thanks to the advances and ever-increasing availability of digital animation technology, work is being created in a seemingly unlimited number of styles in all corners of the world, and far more is available online than you would ever have the time to watch. (The website cartoonbrew.com is a helpful portal to animation history and recent studio and independent work....
There Is a Stone (Tatsunari Ota, 2023) Nine years ago this month, the Jeonju International Film Festival relaunched the Jeonju Cinema Project. Initially founded in 2000 to fund the production of digital short films by well-known directors (under the name Jeonju Digital Project), the rechristened and rejiggered program has spent the past decade producing three to five features per year by less established talent, shepherding each project from initial investment stages to distribution....
Princess Mandane The princess has been made a prisoner in her own palace, somewhere deep in the land of the Tartars. Her name is Mandane, and though she governs the principality of Mingrelia, she was taken captive by her own Council of Ministers when she told them that she wanted to abdicate the crown. Meanwhile, half a world away in France, Étienne, a factory worker living a humdrum existence with his loving, plain fiancée Annette, has volunteered to help his company install electric wires in Mingrelia....
Images from O Fantasma (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2000) Now here’s a movie image to kick off the millennium: a young man tightly encased in a form-fitting rubber fetish suit and mask, the only part of his body visible his brooding, bee-stung lips, scours and scavenges and scurries crablike around a monumental trash heap on the outskirts of Lisbon. Utterly feral yet driven by identifiable human desires, he catches a stray rabbit and carries the terrified creature around by its ears, only stopping to drink from a brown, fetid puddle that will summarily make him vomit....
Mad Max: Fury Road, George Miller For all its fun and goodwill, the new Star Wars couldn’t hold a candle to that other retooling of a 70s/80s action franchise, Mad Max: Fury Road. While Star Wars felt stuck in the past, Mad Max showcased a director taking familiar elements and making them feel fresh. Minimalist in all the right ways, and leaping over the top everywhere else, this was a project that could only exist as a film....
From the beginning, Lady Gaga’s constructed pop persona has always been that of a performer struggling with the concept of celebrity and the meaning of stardom. Singles such as “Paparazzi” and “Applause” satirically redefine the contours of the love song so it becomes about the romance between Lady Gaga and her true romantic partner: success. On her first album, even before she was officially enshrined as a superstar, she was already wailing, “We live for the fame, fame, baby / Isn’t it a shame, shame, baby?...
Sergei Loznitsa is one of contemporary cinema’s most underrated humanists. The Belorussian mathematician turned filmmaker cut his teeth on documentaries before making the switch a decade later to fiction with the ironically titled My Joy (10), one of the most recent entries in the longstanding Slavic tradition of grim and frostbitten (not to mention long and languorous) parables about endless cycles of violence and the general pointlessness of life. The film earned him just as many accolades (a Palme d’Or nomination at Cannes; director Andrei Zvyagintsev calling it the best Russian-language film of the decade) as condemnations (accusations of everything from self-hating Russophobia to good old-fashioned misanthropy), which proved, if nothing else, its success as a provocation....
Images from Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019) Midsommar is a many-splendored—many-categoried—thing. Aesthetically, it’s sun-blanched, flower-child “daytime horror,” with a color palette seemingly borrowed from a Coachella photo spread. Narratively, it’s nordic pagan “folk horror,” where terror lies in the arbitrary irrationality of human social codes and cultural tribalism. Commercially, it’s the kind of glossy, conceptually ambitious, highly stylized “elevated horror” whose makers tend to self-reflexively emphasize the qualities that differentiate their work from “mere” genre cinema, and whose contours have been litigated by a certain kind of trend-hungry critical discourse for several years now....
Based on Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Parkland takes its title from the Dallas hospital where Kennedy was treated after being shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, and where Oswald was later treated after being shot by Jack Ruby. Written and directed by journalist Peter Landesman, Parkland takes place over the course of four tension-filled days during which those who were most touched by the assassination find their lives altered, and like Oswald’s and Kennedy’s, improbably connected....
Scarlet (Pietro Marcello, 2023) Set in the French countryside between world wars, Pietro Marcello’s Scarlet is a tender, sumptuous fairy tale, adapted with painterly sensitivity from a 1923 novel by Soviet author Alexander Grin. Raphaël Thiéry gives a late-age breakout performance as Raphaël, a heavy, dour man who returns from World War I to find his wife deceased and his infant daughter Juliette in the loving arms of a caretaker named Madame Adeline (Noémie Lvovsky)....
Edgar Wright specializes in amiably hectic fanboy cinema. The British filmmaker’s superlative handling of zombies (Shaun of the Dead, 04), mid-Twenties directionlessness (the cult TV series Spaced), and bromantic cops (Hot Fuzz, 07) has translated well across the pond, making him (for better or worse) part of the nerd culture that has turned into a cash cow. His latest film, The World’s End, continues the rapidly edited, beer-soaked, goopy geekery, but this war between blokes and robots fizzles....
Len Wiseman’s Total Recall has just the right level of ambition and quality of execution to make for an enjoyable fly-under-the-radar late–summer movie. The film comes with the curiosity factor of what will be different from Paul Verhoeven’s original starring Arnold Schwarzenegger that—like much of what the public entertained and enabled in his films of the Eighties and Nineties—is memorable only for a handful of groan-worthy Arnold catch-phrases and a couple more outrageous visual effects and gags....
A serene middle-aged man sits down at what is apparently a rolltop desk. Around him, shallow darkness, and the arms and torso of an assistant standing by his side. The man pulls up the rolltop (the sound of wood sliding over wood) to reveal a pipe organ. He plays a single, resounding note as he pulls out the stops. A cut, to four teenagers walking up a set of stone stairs (the sound of their footsteps)....
Parallel Mothers (Pedro Almodóvar, 2021) Enthusiasts and scholars of Pedro Almodóvar’s work have learned to read his oeuvre as a flaming immersion in the troubled waters of desire, a theme that recurs even in the titles of his films and the name of his production company, El Deseo. This inclination to highlight the filmmaker’s eye for existential entanglements and rapturous passions has overshadowed the other pillar of Almodóvar’s universe: the search for truth, understood as the fuel for the most extraordinary personal journeys, but also as a matter of social and historical justice....
Like the ruminating bird of its title, Roy Andersson’s latest film (the concluding chapter in his trilogy about “being a human being”) perches decidedly above the world it studies, gazing down fixedly upon its inhabitants from a perspective at once sympathetically engaged and assiduously distanced. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence surveys an array of characters—mostly urban sad sacks whose pallid skin and doughy physiques externalize some inchoate malaise—though the film returns most consistently to a pair of traveling salesmen hawking some truly depressing novelty gags....
In Good Kill, the war movie, like the postmodern warfare it depicts, looks a little different from the norm. Ethan Hawke plays a former fighter pilot who now spends his days remotely flying armed drones and raining death down upon target individuals selected by his superiors. He does so from what resembles a trailer in an Air Force base outside Las Vegas, raising existential (and legal) questions: is he really a soldier at war, or something closer to a particularly deadly technician?...
