Mad Max: Fury Road George Miller, U.S. Carol Todd Haynes, U.S. Spotlight Tom McCarthy, U.S. Inside Out Pete Docter & Ronnie del Carmen, U.S. Clouds of Sils Maria Olivier Assayas, France Phoenix Christian Petzold, Germany Ex Machina Alex Garland, U.K. Brooklyn John Crowley, U.K. The Assassin Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan Tangerine Sean Baker, U.S. The Big Short Adam McKay, U.S. Anomalisa Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson, U.S. Sicario Denis Villeneuve, U....
Free Chol Soo Lee (Julie Ha and Eugene Yi, 2022) On June 3, 1973, Yip Yee Tak—a member of the Wah Ching gang—was shot to death on a crowded street corner in San Francisco’s Chinatown. When confronted with photographs of potential suspects, three white witnesses identified Chol Soo Lee as the perpetrator. A Korean immigrant with a juvenile record, Lee had just been reported for accidentally discharging a gun that seemed to match the caliber of the murder weapon....
The Prostitutes of Lyon Speak Out (Les Insoumuses, 1975) The Practice of Disobedience is available to stream on Another Screen. “So, at the heart of it, your feminism consists of what, precisely?” a French television host asked actress, activist, and video-maker Delphine Seyrig during an interview in 1986. “In my communication with other women… listening to other women, talking with them,” Seyrig responded. It’s a succinct summation of what the documentarian Carole Roussopoulos, Seyrig’s collaborator in the video collective Les Insoumuses, described as the collective’s éthique du tournage or ethics of filming: using the camera to amplify and empower the voices of women....
The Rain People (Francis Ford Coppola, 1969) When pregnant Long Island housewife Natalie Ravenna (Shirley Knight) embarks on a cross-country road trip to nowhere in particular, she’s not burning rubber in a supercharged metaphor-on-wheels; she takes the family station wagon. She calls her husband often from roadside phone booths, but her explanations are as confused as he is. She’s not out to find herself, or the real America. She merely observes that her days used to be her own, and now they belong to her spouse, and she doesn’t want to bring a child into a domestic situation she views as a comfortable trap....
And if you really do have questions, director Eric Atlan will be in-person for both shows.
Context being everything, I know exactly why I liked Godard Mon Amour a year ago, when it premiered in Cannes: it was because I was convinced I was going to hate it. A film about Jean-Luc Godard and Anne Wiazemsky from the director of The Artist, with teaser stills of Louis Garrel with his hair cropped and tufted to look like the balding mid-’60s JLG—this wasn’t a promising prospect. But if a film confounds your expectations positively, it tends to earn major bonus points....
The young men of Lords of Chaos have faces white as funeral ash, clothes black, black as the abyss; they also sometimes wear stonewashed denim and sturdy Nordic jumpers. These are the denizens of the black metal scene, kids from nice Norwegian middle-class homes who dedicate themselves to a singularly gloomy form of reaction against suburban conformity. It’s the old story of bourgeois rock ’n’ roll revolt, but with a singularly bleak edge....
There’s a famous shot in Rossellini’s Rome Open City that is sometimes taken as a benchmark of the irreducibly real in cinema. Trucks are passing under a bridge, seen from above, when suddenly a dog rushes into the road from outside the frame—then turns and rushes back the way it came. This image is sometimes held up as emblematic of the way that neorealist cinema laid itself open to contingency....
We’re often told that filmmaking is a visceral pursuit; When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism gives us a case of a filmmaker literally putting his guts on screen. Corneliu Porumboiu’s 2013 feature contains an extract from the endoscopy video of a director named Paul—winding pink tunnels, foamy discharge, and all. Intriguingly, in this narrative about the process of shooting a film, it’s the only piece of footage we see....
Closeness This year has not been a goldmine for out-of-the-blue discoveries in Cannes, but the Un Certain Regard section provided a significant, if flawed, minor-key debut from a director who should be worth keeping an eye on. Tesnota (Closeness) is the first feature by Kantemir Balagov, a young director who studied under Alexander Sokurov in Nalchik, in the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, north of Georgia. The film doesn’t feel remotely like Sokurov, being nearer in its claustrophobic visual style and its dramatic concentration to the Dardennes....
If you want to look back on those good old days of the Clinton boom economy, then order a copy of The Restaurateur, Roger Sherman’s documentary about Danny Meyer’s ambitious gamble to build two soaring restaurants on Manhattan’s Madison Square Park back in the heady days of 1998. How your heart will swell with nostalgic yearning as you hear Mr. Meyer lament about how difficult it is to find good restaurant help in those caramelized years before unemployment hit 10 percent....
Just a few months into Reagan’s Morning in America, it was wartime in Philadelphia. In May 1985, police mounted a disastrous assault on the militant group MOVE, which had holed up in a West Philadelphia rowhouse. Eleven people were killed (five of them children), 61 homes burned down, and, as Jason Osder’s intricately assembled found-footage documentary Let the Fire Burn shows, everybody lost. History repeats itself, and returns to life, in Osder’s expert work of collage....
Applying her DIY ethic to filmmaking, My Name Is Hmmm… is an emotionally dark if visually bright portrait of girlhood for which she wrote the script and designed the sets, and which she co-edited. The designer has been in a committed relationship with cinema for quite some time (see our Nov/Dec 2006 issue for Amy Taubin’s profile, “Off the Rack”). Frequenting Paris’s moviehouses as a teenager, she cultivated a taste for American and European films alike—j’aime le cinema reads one of her T-shirts....
Photo by Jaap Buitendijk © 2023 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. Amid all of the discourse rustled up by Greta Gerwig’s Barbie—from pessimism about Mattel’s unabashed deployment of indie-film talent in service of product placement to both joy and exasperation at the film’s sparkly-pink, nudge-nudge/wink-wink representations of feminism and masculinity—one thing has seemed clear: that Gerwig is a director with a vision. Barbie is a beautifully crafted and exuberantly silly movie rife with the contradictions and inversions of a truly postmodern work....
The United States of America (James Benning, 2022) In 1975, James Benning and Bette Gordon, two graduate students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, took a pair of road trips to New York and Los Angeles. With a 16mm camera mounted in the back seat of their car, they intermittently filmed their journeys, capturing images of the American landscape as news broadcasts and Top 40 radio hits drifted from the speakers....
Let’s begin with the end. Could you talk about the opera performance that concludes the film—which has the extraordinary line, roughly: “Do you understand your sin”? The final opera in the film, Yu Tang Chun, is a well-known story in China. It’s about a woman who is unfairly treated and incarcerated, and over the course of the story her lover tries to rescue her. I had seen this story when I was a child, and one of the most affecting scenes in this opera is when the woman is being tried in court....
Fragmentation is a big part of your filmmaking. I might not have thought that necessarily after Reprise and Oslo, August 31st, but now it seems central to your technique. With those films, it went with the storytelling—the rapidity of the young writer’s ascent, and the volatility of emotions. In Louder Than Bombs, the fragmentation is a way of giving us some space, giving us a distance, from what is actually rather difficult material....
The troglodyte who picks this overripe plum is Vincent Lindon’s surly coachman Joseph, not only a vicious Jew-hater but a suspected child sex killer. Their coming together in crime and lust intensifies Jacquot’s allegory of Dreyfus Affair–era France’s long slide into full-blown anti-Semitism and collaborationism. Célestine’s vapid response to Joseph’s racist invective and her smiling at the Schadenfreude of the village gossips feasting on the precise details of a little girl’s rape and murder cast her as the worst kind of passive colluder....
In Cannes, the film was something more than a work in progress, but it feels much more cogent in the completed version. What exactly have you changed? [Producer] Pascal Caucheteux showed it to Cannes and they really liked it, but we’d only been editing it for five months, so it wasn’t quite there. We had to do the mix in five days, which is fine for a short film, but it was totally mental....
