What was the inspiration for this film? It all started from a very basic feeling. It was very early spring, the beginning of March. It was cold, yes, but you could feel the promise of spring in the air. These moments—your heart wants to burst with all the feelings and possibilities of a new beginning. You walk down the street, and you see people walking beside you with blank faces, and you know very well that they feel the same....
All images from Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, 2019) No film in Cannes this year made it clearer that whether you see beauty or ugliness largely depends on where you steer your gaze than the audacious Bacurau, by the Brazilian filmmakers Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles. Bacurau takes place in Brazil’s sertão, or backcountry, which in cinema thus far has been represented mostly as wild, bewildering, and parched—Brazil’s Wild West....
Unlike Alonso’s past cinematic journeys into the unknown (from Libertad, 01, to Liverpool, 08), the Argentine setting of Jauja lies firmly in the distant past, during the campaign to suppress indigenous peoples that was known as “The Conquest of the West.” Mortensen’s character has arrived to join this effort, but as an engineer, he occupies a somewhat less heroic-sounding position, and when his daughter elopes, his search feels all the more desperate and quixotic (even if it looks beautiful)....
Austrian Pavilion (Philipp Fleischmann, 2019) Over the past six years, Philipp Fleischmann has quietly forged one of the most unique projects in contemporary cinema. Beginning with his 2013 film Main Hall, the Austrian filmmaker has taken as his primary subject institutional spaces of a certain cultural-historical significance. But rather than merely record or reflect on these spaces—which have thus far ranged from Vienna’s Secession Building (Main Hall, 2013) to a theater at the Austrian Filmmuseum modeled after Peter Kubelka’s Invisible Cinema (The Invisible Cinema 3, 2018)—Fleischmann instead utilizes his films as ideological tools to mediate and comment on the finer points of each institution’s art-historical legacy....
In her work over the last three decades, Austrian filmmaker Ruth Beckermann (recognized most recently for the luminous epistolary drama The Dreamed Ones) has consistently merged the personal and the political through a variety of docu-fiction devices. Beckermann not only lived through the Waldheim affair, but captured much of the ensuing protests as a young radical with an interest in then-nascent video recording technology. Returning to this footage thirty years later, Beckermann was struck by its modern day parallels, not only with the current Freedom Party of Austria–Austrian People’s Party alliance, but also its larger resonances with the rise of nationalism, “alternative facts,” and the Donald Trump administration....
The Bride with White Hair A betrayed Brigitte Lin shrieks until her hair turns white before she reduces a temple full of swordsmen to giblets. A disheveled Tony Leung Chiu-wai stands on top of a skyscraper, pointing a gun at Andy Lau, who stands at ease in his designer suit, hands clasped behind his back. Jimmy Wang Yu sits at a table, calmly drinking wine, as nervous swordsmen circle around him, weapons drawn....
The Man Who Stole the Sun is a bona fide classic of Seventies cinema. It was ranked as the seventh-greatest Japanese movie of all time by the influential film magazine Kinema Junpo, and appears constantly on “Greatest Movie” lists from critics and directors (here it is on Satoshi Kon’s). Yet the 1979 film is criminally under-screened in the West. Like El Topo or A Clockwork Orange, it’s one of those rare movies that exists so far outside the boundaries of its chosen genre that there’s almost no other film to compare it to....
Rupture The Suitor The eponymous suitor is entirely out of his element, self-conscious in his incongruity with his environment. He is acutely aware of his surroundings, but ever so slightly out of sync. Unlike in Keaton’s films, where being out of sync is sometimes violent, Etaix faces instead of pratfalls a repeated frustration of desires. The Suitor The Suitor Much of Étaix’s humor isn’t based on sympathy for his character, necessarily, but, much like Tati, on his relationship to the absurd spaces that he finds himself navigating....
In Jackson Heights It was terrific theater. For 18 extraordinary, excruciating minutes this past spring at the Hot Docs Film Festival, Frederick Wiseman sat across from a firing line of industry gatekeepers at the Hot Docs Forum pitch session. Call it the master and the money. Wiseman participated in the event voluntarily, perhaps even hopefully, though not happily. (The night before, during a more congenial public discussion about his work, he tersely said of the impending Forum: “I’d rather not express my opinion about the event....
Johnnie To is currently shooting The Sparrow, a look at a gang of pickpockets working the Hong Kong environs. He is also preparing for Cannes with Election, an operatic take on HK indigenous criminal fraternities – the triads – that became so enormous that it split into two films before being condensed back into one. Triads have a long history in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and their complicated, quasi-historical ceremonies and rules have given them a mythical edge....
Film Comment, May-June 1975 This fall saw the veneration of Amos Vogel in numerous tributes honoring his astounding achievements—particularly Cinema 16, the New York Film Festival, and Film as a Subversive Art. The dozens of lovingly organized screenings of some of the hundreds of films Vogel programmed, championed, taught, or wrote about, with thousands more waiting their turn, have revealed that however much one may know of his work, there was more—always more....
—Helen Mirren on being cast as Queen Elizabeth II Prime Suspect “I’m not the bloody Queen,” Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison scolds her abashed male driver for addressing her as “Ma’am” instead of her preferred “Guv.” Tennison may not play royalty in the hit British television crime series Prime Suspect, though she does rule there as a queen bee. But over a long career on stage and screens large and small, Helen Mirren, who plays the spiky policewoman, has enacted a raft of bloody Queens, one of whom won her a richly deserved Oscar and swelled her already solid cachet with royalty-loving American audiences....
When pundits romanticize how great criticism was “before the Internet,” they usually end up talking about the Sixties and Seventies. It’s a revealing sleight of hand. Though that period remains the high-water mark for many cinephiles, for critics the nostalgia is particularly acute. Where classical-era auteurs had little use for the cognoscenti, the post-Cahiers moment of the Movie Brat was one in which criticism and creation mutually enriched one another....
“They have stories to tell… unfortunately,” said Chantal Akerman after a screening of her 2002 documentary From the Other Side (De l’autre côté) last Thursday at the French Institute Alliance Française in New York. “Unfortunately,” because the stories Akerman hears in the film are about death in the desert—the final resting place of Mexicans desperate for work who perished crossing into the United States. Perched cross-legged on her chair onstage at FIAF (next to CUNY professor Jerry W....
Pedro Costa at the 57th New York Film Festival. Photo by Godlis Film Comment featured Pedro Costa’s magisterial Vitalina Varela—in theaters this week—on the cover of our January-February issue, along with an extensive interview with Costa by Jordan Cronk. We also had the pleasure of welcoming the Portuguese master as a guest on the Film Comment Podcast. To commemorate the release of what we called, “quite possibly the most beautiful film of 2020,” we asked the filmmaker, whose love of new wave and punk is evident from films like Colossal Youth to Ossos, to compile a playlist of the music that inspired his latest....
Imogen Poots and director Sophia Takal on the set of Black Christmas (2019) How dangerous small moments can be. Hopes shatter in a pause that goes on too long. A small smile can stop you in your tracks. You were hoping for a bigger smile. Is something wrong? The sight of a human back can be devastating. It’s turned away from you. A turned back makes you feel needy. Feeling needy is unbearable....
© Lilies Films / Courtesy of Neon It is a simple story, in some ways like the kind of dream a shrink might term autobiographical. In such a dream, a recent experience in your waking life is transformed so that time past and time present become one. You might be the age you are now but living in the house where you spent your childhood, or you might visit your grandparents and find them welcoming you to their brownstone walk-up, long ago torn down to make way for a high-rise, which is simultaneously occupying the same place on the block....
