True to form, Scream 4 wastes no time putting Ghostface back to work. Soon enough he’s chasing a buxom blonde up the stairs (and not out the front door!) and into a newly renovated garage. There she meets her grisly end by garage door, echoing a death from the first installment. The message is clear: the house may look new, but it was built to look darn close to the one in the original Scream....
While preparing and directing The Canyons I was reading James Goode’s book The Making of the Misfits, and I was struck by the similarities between Marilyn Monroe and the actress I was working with, Lindsay Lohan. (I wasn’t the only one so struck. Stephen Rodrick, a writer for The New York Times Magazine who was on set with us, titled his article about the film “The Misfits,” which appeared on the cover with the line: “This is what happens when you cast Lindsay Lohan in your movie....
When a melting pot reaches the boiling point, people get scalded. Consider, for example, that classic histrionic stew—and 2004 Best Picture–winner—Crash. Five years after Paul Haggis’s directorial debut comes the team of Yaron Shani and Scandar Copti. Shani’s an Israeli Jew; Copti’s a Palestinian living in Israel. The country they call home submitted their film for the 2009 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. The movie takes its name from the multiethnic neighborhood in the city of Jaffa, directly adjacent to Tel Aviv....
In a classic case of filmmakers prioritizing their own pitch over the actual goods, Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost put Schulman’s toothy-grinned brother Nev front and center as he investigates his fishy long-distance Facebook crush. But the woman he tracks down holds interest beyond merely serving as the filmmakers’ big reveal: as a result, Catfish consists of an hour of drawn-out guessing games, and then a compromised half-hour portrait of a unique artistic individual worthy of a film in her own right....
Talk about going back to the well: for his directorial debut, the star of Claude Berri’s Eighties Provençal standards Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring picks another tale of the French countryside previously filmed by Marcel Pagnol (in 1940). Writing the script and playing one of the title characters, Daniel Auteuil plods about in a peasant jerkin playing a good-hearted salt-of-the-earth type who’s methodically raising five daughters on his meager well-digger’s earnings....
Nevertheless, there was a spike of optimism about indie cinema’s future, accompanied by the customary crop of It girls and boys—and this time, the attention was fully warranted. Leading the pack were a pair of newcomers, Elizabeth Olsen and Brit Marling, and one old hand, Rutger Hauer, appearing in two notable films apiece. The Hauer double serving couldn’t have been more contrasting: he plays a homeless vigilante in one, and master Renaissance artist Bruegel in the other....
High Society, directed by Charles Walters, opens with a hovering helicopter shot of the “cliff walk” in Newport, Rhode Island, lined with mansions built by the robber barons and tycoons of the unregulated Gilded Age. The film is a musical version of The Philadelphia Story, the George Cukor film adaptation of Philip Barry’s 1939 Broadway hit, which starred Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and James Stewart. With Grace Kelly as heiress Tracy Lord, Bing Crosby as C....
Forty-four years before Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Leonardo DiCaprio bagged Oscar gold for The Revenant (2015), two Richards—Sarafian and Harris (with screenwriter Jack DeWitt)—dramatized their own version of the Hugh Glass story. Man in the Wilderness (1971) a truish folktale embellished by time: Glass, a trapper and explorer with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, went on an expedition led by Andrew Henry, only to be mauled by a grizzly bear and left for dead by his impatient colleagues....
No Bears (Jafar Panahi, 2022) In 2010, Jafar Panahi was imprisoned for three months on baseless charges of anti-government propagandizing and banned from making movies for 20 years. A few years later, Panahi ruefully told me in an interview that he felt he had been released into a larger prison: Iran under the rule of the Islamic Republic. The filmmaker’s latest feature, No Bears, offers a poignant illustration of what he was referring to in our conversation....
Following How far back, you ask? Well, in 1998 when I was attending the San Francisco Film Festival, I asked one of its programmers, Rachel Rosen, if she had made any discoveries that year. She singled out one movie in particular—an unheralded low-budget English film shot on 16mm. That film was Christopher Nolan’s Following. I went to its world premiere and so can now proudly boast to have been among the first to witness the birth of a major new talent....
Film Comment Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined on this episode by FC Assistant Editor Devika Girish and FC Contributing Editor Jonathan Romney, to discuss Ilya Khrzhanovskiy and Jekaterina Oertel’s DAU. Natasha, Hong Sangsoo’s The Woman Who Ran, Fabio & Damiano D’Innocenzo’s Bad Tales, and Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern’s Delete History.
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Devika attended the festival for the first time this year, as did curator and Film Comment contributor Inney Prakash. On today’s episode, they discuss their experience in Mumbai and some of the highlights of the South Asia selection, including The World Is Family by Anand Patwardhan, Against the Tide by Sarvnik Kaur, Which Colour? by Shahrukhkhan Chavada, Touch Air and Mother, Who Will Weave Now? by Amit Dutta, Trolley Times by Gurvinder Singh, and Love in the Time of Malaria by Sanjiv Shah....
On this week’s episode, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute brought together a roundtable of writers and artists who are reframing this conversation: critics Caden and Willow Maclay, and filmmakers Isabel Sandoval and Jessica Dunn Rovinelli. We asked the panel to respond to a number of excellent questions submitted by the Film Comment community, including: How does one define trans cinema? Are visibility and representation important, or should questions of labor be foregrounded?...
