It’s a pleasure re-watching Joan Micklin Silver’s restored Between the Lines (opening February 22 at Quad Cinema in New York), 42 years after it was made. I saw it when it was first released, and it played no small part in changing my life: it fueled my nagging desire to be a journalist, and in particular, made me want to be a rock critic, a career I dabbled with for a while....
When I interviewed Pedro Almodóvar a while ago about his latest feature Julieta, he told me why he liked the writing of Alice Munro, whose short stories the film is based on. It was because somehow he found himself knowing less about the characters at the end than he did at the beginning. Whatever you might call this strange quality—mystery? obliqueness? discretion?—there’s much of it to be found in Little Men, the new film by writer-director Ira Sachs....
One of the most beautiful objects in Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship is a cake—a perfect 1790s cake. It’s gorgeously designed and presented, and looks altogether historically plausible as just the kind of treat that might have been served at an English social event of the period, or that might have appeared in a still life or in the background of a contemporary social portrait. But it also somewhat resembles other cakes that we may have seen in other elegantly mounted historical films....
In the age of #BlackLivesMatter, one watchword for filmmakers might be #BlackLivesMatterInDetail. One thing we need to know about African-American experience is the minutiae: there should be films that present the ordinary, everyday reality of these lives in forms that resist cliché and hyperbole, refuse to glamorize, mystify, or stereotype. There is certainly a plethora of different possibilities for black American cinema to explore right now, from the Brechtian operatics of Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq to the exuberant pop myth-making we can no doubt expect from Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther....
The late Raúl Ruiz, who spent the larger part of his career away from his native Chile, regarded himself not as an exile, but as an “exote.” He said, “You’re an ‘exote’ when you go everywhere and each country looks like a different place, impossible to deeply understand. After that experience, you return to your own country, and your country is more enigmatic than the rest of the world.” Ruiz’s posthumously completed The Wandering Soap Opera—to all intents and purposes his final film, although it was shot in 1990—can be seen as a returning “exote”’s attempt to make sense of a homeland that had changed in his absence....
Wim Wenders once said of his film Wrong Move (Falsche Bewegung) that it was about “how to be able to grasp the world through language.” He may or may not have specifically meant words, written or spoken, but verbal communication certainly comes thick and fast in this 1975 feature, now reissued in a 4K restoration. It’s a film dense with philosophizing and speechifying, and the most thoroughly literary of all Wenders’s films....
You don’t often get a directorial swan song as explicit, or as darkly funny, as the late Aleksei Balabanov’s tenth and final film. In this sideways homage to Stalker, a group of urban pilgrims in an SUV speed toward a devastated Zone-like location outside St. Petersburg where it’s permanently winter. There, a derelict church bell-tower supposedly contains a portal to eternal happiness. But there’s the pervasive sense—as there is in Russia generally—that it’s kind of too late....
It’s been a few years since your last film, The King of Escape [09]. How did you choose the story for your latest? It’s not a bad idea to talk about this film in relation to the previous one. After my last film, I took some time off, about a year, working with a friend, just writing and developing the idea for a script. And the script really was the total antithesis of what this one is....
“All tragedies begin as a love story,” Joachim Lafosse asserted following a screening of Our Children, at last year’s New York Film Festival. The statement certainly applies to the Belgian writer-director’s film, which begins in the throes of young love and ends in quadruple infanticide (as revealed in an eloquent opening sequence). Ripping its morbid story from the 2007 Belgian headlines, Lafosse takes an anti-sensationalist approach to his storytelling, exploring rather than explaining the macabre reality of a young woman’s descent from happiness to psychosis....
Her first feature, Theatre of War—like her play Minefield, which is currently touring Northern England—brings together British and Argentinian soldiers who fought in the Falklands War in 1982 to discuss and reenact their experiences. Based on accounts from over 70 soldiers Arias spoke to, a group of six veterans recount their (and other soldiers’) traumatic memories of combat, training, and the psychological fallout of the war (such as substance abuse and the suicides of comrades) against blank backgrounds and in locations that may or may not be the same ones they’re talking about....
Being in a Place – A Portrait of Margaret Tait (Luke Fowler, 2023). Courtesy of Luke Fowler, the Modern Institute and the estate of Margaret Tait. The subjects of Luke Fowler’s poetic portraits run the gamut: the radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing, labor historian E.P. Thompson, queer disco composer Patrick Cowley, Fowler’s mother, his neighbors. Typically shot on 16mm, the Scottish artist’s films draw on archival materials to create impressionistic encounters with life trajectories....
Arieh Worthalter and Nadège Trebal in Twelve Thousand (Nadège Trebal, 2019) When I first saw Nadège Trebal’s Twelve Thousand as a programmer for the Locarno International Film Festival, I was struck that I had rarely, if ever, believed in the physical connection between an on-screen couple the way I did in that established between the lead characters Frank and Maroussia in a sex scene early in the film. This is not a question of explicitness—one barely sees any skin—but of a specificity of behavior that avoids the clichés of sighing romance and blissful acrobatics to achieve something closer to real life, and real heat, allowing the embarrassed or aroused viewer to recognize that this coupling is a necessity....
Although inspired by Mosab’s memoir, Son of Hamas, the film does not simply recount the life of the Palestinian scion accused of betraying his family and his people. Instead, Schirman’s third documentary feature hones in on the unlikely yet enduring relationship Mosab forged with his Shin Bet handler, Gonen Ben Itzhak, over their years working together. Centering the film on interviews with Mosab and Gonen, Schirman distills a tight emotional core bound up in the evolving dynamic between these two compelling figures....
Madness is contagious in Paul Sanchez Is Back! (2018), Patricia Mazuy’s tragicomic account of a fugitive killer’s return to civilization. Spotted in the Var region of southern France a decade after slaughtering his wife and four children, Paul Sanchez (Laurent Lafitte) becomes the existential obsession of Marion (Zita Hanrot), a female gendarme in pursuit of adrenaline and glory. Taking advantage of his notoriety to contact a local reporter who happens to be Marion’s lover (Idir Chender), the chameleon-like Sanchez sends the young woman down a spiral of manipulation that constantly blurs the lines between truth and fiction, private and public, politics and myth-making....
Spheeris has since put some distance between herself and the motion picture business, but now, courtesy of Shout! Factory, The Decline of Western Civilization is back, available on home video for the first time since the days of VHS. At one of what is certain to be a string of public screenings to memorialize this momentous turn of events—to a packed house at the Brooklyn Academy of Music—I was able to sit down in the green room with Spheeris and her daughter, Anna Fox, the primary mover and shaker in putting the Decline films before the public eye again....
In his 2004 book-length interview with Piotr Kletowski and Piotr Marecki, entitled Życiopis, Szulkin described his family’s World War II trauma: his father, scientist Paweł Szulkin, came from an assimilated Jewish family; his grandparents died in the Holocaust and his father immigrated to France in the 1960s. Szulkin grew up as Poland’s television was coming into its own. He sees in the medium, and in the media generally, a failed utopia, their transformative potential squandered on mass entertainment....
Polish cinematographer Slawomir Idziak has left an indelible mark on modern cinema with his work on Krzysztof Kieślowski’s metaphysically charged, atmospheric films. The two men’s collaboration, which began with A Short Film About Killing (1988), and lasted through Three Colors: Blue (1993), yielded uniquely evocative, voluptuous images that reflect the characters’ subjective experiences. In A Short Film About Killing—a haunting indictment of capital punishment imbued with a feeling of impending doom—Idziak combines stylized color and lighting with nervous handheld camerawork to depict a disenchanted youth’s descent into murder in communist Warsaw....
James Gray: [Scanning the menu] Chocolate donut, sugar donut… This is really expanding my midriff. [Addresses the waiter] I haven’t the slightest idea, what’s a triple chocolate donut? JG: That sounds terrible for you, I’m not doing that! I’ll have a corn muffin. Two Lovers FILM COMMENT: Tell me a little bit about suspense. I watched Two Lovers [08] again recently and I noticed how even in that film you included a very suspenseful, tense scene: Joaquin Phoenix is hiding behind Gwyneth Paltrow’s door and she’s talking to Elias Koteas… JG: Yeah, I know what you’re talking about....
