Why did you decide to expand Film Comment Selects to this monthly series? The Film Comment Double Feature is a spin-off from Film Comment Selects and from the magazine’s Encore department. We’ve always shown older movies in the annual series, often taking their cue from something one of our contributors has written about in the Encore section, and they generally do well, and so the idea of regularly showing one-off older movies originated there....
Yann Demange’s ’71 occupies an intriguing position in current British cinema—a rare hybrid between hard-nosed realism, on the cusp of a quasi-documentary style, and genre thriller-adventure. Set in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s, at the height of the Troubles, it suggests an unlikely collaboration between the Paul Greengrass of Bloody Sunday and Walter Hill or John Carpenter in their primes. Despite these comparisons, it’s a very individual and uncompromising film—for most of its running time, at least....
Images from Earth (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2019) The subject of Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Earth is exactly what the title suggests. It’s about the planet, but also the stuff—sod, stone, gravel, coal, marble, minerals. Most of all, it’s about mud—lots of mud, vast grey desolations of mud. The horror of Earth—and if ever a documentary was a horror story, this is it—is that our planet may still precariously be a multiplicity of rich, fertile, diverse environments, but that it’s increasingly, irreversibly being taken over by swathes of sterile murk, picked over by machines....
At a number of points in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Our Little Sister, certain characters are described in the subtitles as “useless”—notably the heroines’ divorced parents and assorted boyfriends. I have no idea how closely that English word relates to the Japanese original, and if so, whether this says anything notable about Japanese social values. But there does seem to be a theme of utility, or lack of it, running through a film in which characters seem to want to be of use to the world around them....
Written by Peter Morgan, who collaborated with Howard on the 2008 film of his play Frost/Nixon, Rush is another real-life Duel of Titans story, this time about the rivalry between Formula One champions Niki Lauda and the late James Hunt. The film begins with a glimpse of the 1976 crash on the Nürburgring track which left Lauda severely burned, and then skips back six years; what follows is heavily signposted as heading towards this Date With Destiny....
OK, so it’s a little more complicated, but in effect, the pitch for The Duke of Burgundy could be the old joke about the sadist and the masochist. The sadist stands toying with a whip, while the masochist trembles with anticipation. “Hurt me, hurt me!” pleads the masochist. After a tantalizing pause, the sadist just smiles and says: “No.” Peter Strickland’s elegantly stylized film is an extended game with the expectations that surround domination-and-submission role-play, and with expectations in general—not least the moviegoer’s....
The Swiss Arteplage Mobile du Jura (AMJ), a kind of civic-minded, itinerant forum that mixes political debate and art exhibition, recently commissioned Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville to make the 16-minute video Liberty and Homeland (Liberé et Patrie). Godard and his companion have fulfilled their duties and delivered a beautiful, funny film celebrating the landscapes and skies of the Vaud Canton, a region of Switzerland that is a country unto itself-Godard calls France “its Other....
Maestro (Bradley Cooper, 2023) In Maestro, the ambitious new film about the legendary conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, music is not the main event. Instead, it functions as an interstitial element; music is there only in the in-between moments. The core of the movie, which screened earlier this month at the New York Film Festival, is Bernstein’s increasingly strained relationship with his wife, Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), who quietly deals with his repeated infidelities....
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (David Slade, 2018) A dear friend of mine loves movies so much that the worst thing he can find to say about a film is that it is “watchable.” We know that when he says something like this, it really means that the movie is terrible, but nevertheless there is something in it, however minor, that deserves attention. The great film director John Waters, asked in an interview which films he cannot bear to watch, confessed that he simply loves to watch movies, and when he sees a bad one, he always finds something to enjoy, something as simple as the miraculous apparition of a lamp glowing in the corner of a room....
I’m a little intimidated tonight by the idea that you’re paying seven dollars to watch this broken-down person from New York address you. But thank you for coming. I hope I can provide some enlightenment and entertainment worthy of that. One thing I’d like to point out at the start—I don’t do much lecturing anymore. I’ve been sort of laying low, trying to conserve my energy for the few things I have to do, and I haven’t been traveling around....
Mr. and Mrs. Smith Her introduction in Mr. & Mrs. Smith couldn’t be less innocent: the camera tracks in to the bed where she pretends to be sleeping, until it reaches an extreme close-up of her opening her eye and looking straight to the camera. An Upper East Side wife who suddenly learns that her marriage isn’t legal, Carole Lombard’s character, Ann, becomes a conflicted, empty figure. Lombard and her magnetism fill this void with her modern persona and comedic genius: once she enters the frame, our eyes go straight to her, and cannot look away until she exits....
Gravity With the advent of CGI, people become used to the idea that anything is possible—if you can imagine it, you can make it happen. When I first saw Gravity, I assumed this was just another particularly spectacular use of digital effects and green screen. Later I discovered that I was completely wrong. There’s no use of green screen and the CGI was created before you filmed the actors—the inverse of how things are usually done....
What emerges is not only a character study of a quintessentially American type, but also a portrait of an American heartland in transition, where economic opportunity is drying up, social values are in flux, and technology is reconfiguring the way of life. (Stray Dog is often docked at his computer, using video chat, sharing photos with friends or practicing his Spanish on language software.) Stray Dog complicates a certain derogatory one-dimensional image of the South that often circulates, instead offering a richly detailed direct look at the people and their daily struggles....
Meanwhile, back in May at Zentropa Villa—the rented poolside roost for Trier’s production company, a quick taxi ride above Cannes—Noé had walked past me, and I walked in, slightly befuddled after hearing a strange but reassuring story about a scene involving a duckling. Trier was seated at a long wooden table by an open kitchen, extremely sedate and looking avuncular in beard and thin-rimmed spectacles. The House That Jack Built opens December 14; the Film Society of Lincoln Center hosts a Film Comment Talk with Matt Dillon on December 13....
Like his bold, vigorous performance, Park’s unflinching long takes work in the film like tenacious stares—often directed at scenes of violence or despair. The new film departs from the Italian Neorealist style that heavily informed The Journals of Musan. Instead, the dominant influence here is that of recent East Asian cinema. The movie’s persistence and heightened despondency recall Wang Bing’s The Ditch and Secret Sunshine by Lee Chang-dong, for whom Park formerly worked as an assistant director....
During a 50-year career Ruiz directed over 100 films—which wasn’t a big deal, according to the filmmaker: any Parisian artist would have the time to carry out such an achievement, if he would just skip all the cocktails, rendezvous, and parties he usually has to attend. Branco took part in the production of more than a dozen of Ruiz’s features. The first time was The Territory (1981), a circular Beckettian tale set in the woods....
The Romanian New Wave shows no signs of waning, with steady input from such directors as Corneliu Porumboiu, Cristi Puiu, and Cristian Mungiu. Porumboiu’s films, including 12:08 of Bucharest (2006) and his latest documentary, Infinite Football, deal slyly and playfully with the legacy of communism, while Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills (2012) and Graduation (2016) as well as Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) and Sieranevada (2016) are tense chamber dramas, marked with morbid humor....
