In her 2008 book The Years, the French writer Annie Ernaux evokes the feeling experienced by a woman waking up in mid-afternoon after a post-coital snooze with her lover, and experiencing the return of many other moments in her life, from childhood on, when she similarly found herself waking from afternoon slumber. All those impressions become somehow simultaneous in her mind, as if they had all been written on top of each other....
Now aged 89, Agnès Varda has possibly, over the last two decades, had more fun than any filmmaker alive. Having rediscovered the possibilities of low-budget, intensely personal filmmaking thanks to camcorders in The Gleaners and I (2000), she has also reinvented herself as a much respected video and installation artist; turned Paris’s Fondation Cartier and other venues into a re-creation of her beloved holiday island of Noirmoutier; filled her house with an installation of brooms, in an obscure gag punning on a French slang word for “years”; and attended art fairs dressed as a potato....
The last film by Italian writer-director Alice Rohrwacher was called The Wonders—but with her follow-up, she’s truly produced a wonder, one that confounds understanding marvelously. Her second feature, The Wonders confirmed Rohrwacher as a genuine poet of bucolic intimacy, with its heightened, part-autobiographical evocation of a childhood spent as the daughter of a back-to-the-land beekeeping family. The world of that film exuded its own charmed strangeness and didn’t really need the glittering spectacle of Monica Bellucci as a fairy-like TV star to ensure its otherworldliness....
You may not have heard of Olga Hepnarová, but unfortunately it seems that she was something of a pioneer. The last woman to be executed in Czechoslovakia, Hepnarová, then aged 23, was sentenced to hanging in 1975 after driving a truck into a crowd in Prague on 10 July 1973, killing eight people. It so happens that on Wednesday, the day I sat down to watch I, Olga Hepnarová, a man who has now been identified as Khalid Masood did something very similar in London, killing three people and injuring 40 by driving into them on Westminster Bridge, apparently a terror attack in the name of Islamic State....
Given that Nightcrawler is all about TV journalism, its content hardly screams “Breaking News.” The film reveals that freelance TV news-gathering is a nasty, amoral business, and that TV news-broadcasting is sensationalist and cutthroat, a fertile breeding ground for opportunistic bottom-feeders. There seems little to add but to ask: so, what else you got? Even so, while Nightcrawler is neither revelatory nor exactly up-to-the-minute, still this debut feature from writer-director Dan Gilroy (brother of Tony, and writer on The Bourne Legacy, Real Steel, and Tarsem’s insane The Fall) has an efficient, concentrated punch....
Images from Santiago, Italia (Nanni Moretti, 2019) One thing we learn from his new documentary Santiago, Italia is that Nanni Moretti is not a bad interviewer, and that he’s also modest. This comes as a surprise because the Italian filmmaker and actor has long been renowned as one of the foremost comic narcissists of contemporary cinema, pursuing his wry self-portraiture from the mid-’70s on, most famously in his ’90s breakthrough films Caro Diario and April....
Images from The Gentlemen (Guy Ritchie, 2020) Guy Ritchie’s new film The Gentlemen is highly instructive for students of the British class system. By “class,” I mean partly the still entrenched hierarchy that runs from the titled rich down to the proletariat—although within Ritchie’s own class system, each sector has its own hierarchy: the top level running from high-rolling toffs down to seedy cash-strapped aristos; the bottom tier from salt-of-the-earth-diamond-geezers to nasty little toerags....
Which is where we find filmmaker Peter de Rome, the “grandfather of gay porn,” whose pioneering shorts and two features unfold at the intersection of art house and smut, products of the moment when softcore sex movies briefly rubbed shoulders with the avant-garde and produced movies like Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (63), Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (63), Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (64), and the Kuchar Brothers’ Hold Me While I’m Naked (66)....
The Man With the Golden Arm recording session, 1955 When I was 17, it was a very good year—though I was probably closer to 14. Like any discerning middle-schooler in the late Nineties, I listened to Frank Sinatra records (all right, CDs) until I knew them backwards and forwards, as even my untrained adolescent ear could appreciate how Frank’s incomparable phrasing made a lyric like “I’m sure that if I took even one sniff, it would bore me terrif—ic’ly too” sound as conversational as if he were describing his lunch....
“What’s the most important thing in life?” That is the question Special Forces Major Archie Gates (George Clooney) poses, out of the blue, at a pivotal moment in David O. Russell’s 1999 film Three Kings, his absurdist take on the aftermath of Desert Storm. This man-of-action’s answer? “Necessity.” Five years, two wars, and one national catastrophe later, the same question, more or less, provides the basis of Russell’s extraordinary and truly delightful new comic panorama, the improbably titled and unfashionably Heartfelt I ♥ Huckabees....
Set in an Israel facing fresh internal divisions, Nadav Lapid’s politically shrewd, strikingly shot debut has two beginnings and an ending that offers no true sense of closure. Precisely calibrated, the film starts out by observing the bonding rituals of a counter-terrorism officer and the close-knit unit to whom he is unswervingly loyal. The corps of macho professionals come together for a family gathering with spouses, greeting one another with comically loud backslaps....
These are the broad strokes of Stephen Frears’s Philomena, and they are all true, and they will make you angry, and they will tear your heart to pieces. The source is the book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee by Martin Sixsmith, the venerable BBC Moscow and Washington correspondent who went on to become communications director for the Department of Transport. He’s played with slightly sneering, Oxford-bred contempt by Steve Coogan (who adapted the screenplay together with Jeff Pope), while Philomena is Judi Dench in the kind of performance by which entire careers are defined....
Too Late to Die Young (Dominga Sotomayor, 2018) Dominga Sotomayor describes her film Too Late to Die Young as “a memory in the present tense.” The seed of the film—or the spark, one might say—came from a rediscovered VHS tape with footage of a wildfire that broke out on New Year’s Day, 1990, in an off-the-grid community in the hills above Santiago, Chile, where the director was then a 5-year-old living with her family....
On the Adamant (Nicolas Philibert, 2023) When Nicolas Philibert first saw Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies, he was shocked. In a recent conversation between the two filmmakers in the French magazine Le Nouvel Obs, Philibert voiced the distress that so many have felt over the decades when watching Wiseman’s 1967 documentary about the treatment of mental patients at a Massachusetts hospital and correctional facility. What struck him was “the blindness of the guards, the social workers, and the doctors towards their own brutality....
Though much of the coverage of this event focused on the militants’ destruction of those ancient texts, Abderrahmane Sissako (who was born in Mali, grew up in Mauritania, and currently resides in France) began creating his story based on a news report of a couple’s death by stoning during the city’s occupation. Like his previous features Bamako (06) and Waiting for Happiness (02), Sissako’s emphasis on the quotidian unsettles preconceived notions about the weighty reality of radical fundamentalists: cultural contradictions and language barriers abound among the jihadists, while the townspeople are resilient but not irreproachable....
Remember My Name I’m calling from New York, where the Quad is hosting a retrospective of your work. You’re scheduled to appear at a few of the screenings. Yeah, that’s the plan. I’ll have my captors let me know what the schedule is. It’s pretty weird, like lifting a rock and having a crab see the sun for the first time. I’m just thrilled that they’re showing the movies. At least two-thirds of the prints are the only ones in existence....
Claire Denis said that making Let the Sunshine In was liberating for her and served as therapy to the hardships of producing High Life, her upcoming science fiction film starring you, André 3000, and Robert Pattinson. How was your experience acting in Let the Sunshine In? The script was very well written, and I took it as a challenge to have to abide by such a demanding, almost literary, text, but also as a gift, because you rarely get such well-written scripts....
Bellocchio’s latest film Dormant Beauty consists of four interwoven stories—each centering on some difficult choice or crisis of conscience, and building to a moment of either disappointment or grace. A young man finds himself torn between fraternal duty and love; a former actress takes the veil in the hope of effecting a miracle; an aging senator wavers between his conscience and his career; a doctor develops feelings for his suicidal patient....
In the 1970s and 80s songwriter and actor Paul Williams was a ubiquitous pop culture icon. He appeared frequently on Johnny Carson’s couch, guested on game shows and sitcoms and played memorable roles in movies like Smokey and the Bandit (77) and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (73). Behind the scenes he was one of the premier architects of the sound of the Seventies, having written a slew of insta-classics covered by The Carpenters, Three Dog Night, David Bowie, and others....
