Posts

If you don’t like spoilers, or if you don’t find desolation a source of immense pleasure in films, you might want to skip this first paragraph. But it’s one of the subtle joys of Alex Ross Perry’s downbeat comedy Listen Up Philip that the film ends with its hero, Eric Bogosian’s voiceover tells us, about to become “an isolated and emotionless specter forever remaining a mystery, even to himself.” That there’s the faintest, barely detectable smirk on the face of anti-hero Philip (Jason Schwartzman) suggests, though, that this is a kind of happy ending—of sorts, at a pinch, in the most delicate minor key imaginable....

Steve McQueen’s Widows has all the elements of a superb, socially rooted crime thriller. It has a tight, no-nonsense premise; a prestigious cast all pretty much at the top of their game; elegant, sometimes inspired visual execution; dialogue that can have a spring-loaded snap to it; and a firm grounding in present-day tensions, sexual, racial, and political. It’s a film that gestures at brilliance—but ultimately falls short of it, because the overall picture never quite gels into something you can totally believe in....

Barbara One thing is sure in any edition of Cannes. There will be not just French films, but films of the sort that are often deemed to be “very French.” “Very French” in the sense that they have that peculiar blend of cultural specificity and formal anti-normativity that is an enduring keynote of this nation’s cinema; but also “very French” in the sense that you might not automatically expect them to mean a great deal beyond Paris’s Left Bank....

Though Harrison is determined to keep his London-based company small and British to the core, a trans-Atlantic invasion is evidently in the works. HandMade set up an office in New York last September and released its first U.S. film, Five Corners, in January. Of the 10 projects underway this year, seven will be American. Quite a leap from the early days of Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Time Bandits, irreverent low-budget comedies that channeled enough revenues into the company coffers to finance such films as The Long Good Friday, Mona Lisa, and Withnail and I....

Early in Cinema Before 1300, Jerome Hiler’s feature-length survey of medieval stained glass, the filmmaker explains that he first saw Chartres Cathedral in the pages of a book gifted to him in the mid-1960s by Charles Boultenhouse and Parker Tyler, elders of the era’s New York avant-garde. It took another 25 years or so for Hiler to travel to Europe to see the cathedral for himself. He brought a Nikon to photograph stained glass across France and England, sharing his 35mm slides with friends and, eventually, in a few public lectures....

Willard didn’t need remaking so youngsters could be wowed with new and “improved” CGI swarm-of-rats effects. It needed remaking because Crispin Glover was born to bring his clammy brio to bear on the role of the sad, mad rat man. Pallid and twitchy, glassy forehead punctuated by an inky squiggle of hair, Glover’s Willard Stiles is a pathetic monster as iconic as Anthony Perkins’s Norman Bates. And while former X-Files director Glen Morgan knows little of subtlety and cares less, the sequence in which big, black, pushy Ben, a whopper of a Gambian pouched rat (and probable monkeypox carrier), broods and plots as lily-white, know-it-all Socrates basks in Willard’s favor strikes a pitch-perfect note of gallows humor....

What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (Alexandre Koberidze, 2021) Time moves differently in Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, one of the most singular, peculiar, and lovely films at this year’s New York Film Festival. It’s not only because, with a run time of two and a half hours, there’s a lot of time for things to move differently. It’s also because this crooked modern folktale seems to resonate through several timeframes at once, combining once-upon-a-time dreaminess with classic cinema techniques to tell of things that happened long ago, things that are happening right now, and things that have not yet, and maybe cannot ever, come to pass....

FILM COMMENT’s Kent Jones sat down with director Benoît Jacquot recently to talk about Farewell, My Queen, which is now playing in limited release, with a national opening to follow this weekend. Was the novel Farewell, My Queen popular? Yeah. It won a prize, and it was really a big best-seller. Did you buy the rights early? No. About 10 years ago, I shot a film with Isabelle Adjani, Adolphe [02], and Antoine de Baecque, who was directing the culture page at Libération at the time, and he asked Isabelle and me to read the book, meet the author, Chantal Thomas, and interview her....

That’s Anomalisa—or she’s Anomalisa, to be precise, the smitten customer-service rep named Lisa whom our (anti)hero meets while beating down doors in a hotel hallway. The raw, unexpurgated story that results, an “adult movie” of sorts (in Johnson’s words) in animated form, is some strange mating of Kaufmania (albeit sharing something with the resolutely, acrobatically ordinary milieus and neurotic psychological detail of David Foster Wallace, as in The Pale King) and clean yet surreal visuals that resemble an Academy Award-animated short writ large....

A Couple (Frederick Wiseman, 2022) “If the world could write itself,” Isaac Babel once remarked, “it would write like Tolstoy.” Something similar could be said about Frederick Wiseman, the legendary nonfiction filmmaker who has studied almost every institution that has meaningfully shaped American civic and social life over the past 60 years, including penitentiaries, schools, municipal governments, community organizations, and cultural foundations. Like Tolstoy, Wiseman often works on a vast scale, sometimes with hundreds of people appearing in a single film....

—Zlata Filipovic, a 12-year-old Sarajevan girl, Sarajevo: The Portrait of the Siege On September 2, 2015, the world was shaken by the image of a drowned Syrian toddler lying face-down on a Turkish beach. Immaculately dressed, the little Alan Kurdi, a victim of the ongoing civil war in Syria, had washed ashore like a jellyfish—a harrowing sight of innocence consumed by the 21st-century death machine. A global outpouring of grief and rage ensued through sensational headlines and a long-overdue discourse on human rights, forging the image of Alan’s lifeless body into an emblem of the greatest humanitarian disaster in recent history, as haunting a representation of contemporary apocalypse as Nick Ut’s iconic photograph of the napalmed girl during the Vietnam War....

Monster (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2023) The Japanese have two words for “monster”: kaibutsu, which refers to a physical, terrestrial creature; and obake, which is more ethereal, like a ghost or specter. For Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest, he uses the former. (There’s also kaiju, but this isn’t one of those films.) Initially, we assume the monster must be haunting Minato (Soya Kurokawa), a 10-year-old boy struggling at school, and we search the film in vain: perhaps the monster is his teacher, Mr....

A part of the community from the start, Temple was witness and friend to these bands, immortalizing moments that got to the heart of the egalitarian values of the punk movement, such as The Sex Pistols’ 1977 Christmas Day benefit for striking firefighters in Huddersfield. (Temple eventually fashioned this footage into a documentary for the BBC called Never Mind the Baubles in 2013.) What distinguishes Temple’s approach from the vast majority of hagiographic, nostalgic documentaries on musicians is his ability to convey the ephemeral nature of performance while also addressing the larger cultural context in which they occurred, through found footage....

Policeman, Lapid’s debut feature, was written and directed shortly before the demonstrations that broke out in summer 2011, when tens of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to protest the ever-rising cost of living. When the film was released in Israel that August, the governmental film rating authority (analogous to the MPAA in the U.S.) limited admission to 18-year-olds and up, a decision viewed by Lapid and several Israeli journalists as an attempt to censor the film’s troubling depiction of economic inequity leading to civic uprising....

How long did it take to shoot Horse Money? Well, it was a bit erratic. Because of a lot of things. The film was supposed to include another screenwriter, a composer and actor who I met, shot with a little bit, just a few minutes. He was supposed to write two or three musical scenes. And then he died. Oh! It was Gil Scott-­Heron. He was a black American poet, rapper, musician, very, very active in the Seventies, Eighties, Nineties, and then he did a comeback with an album....

Film Comment spoke with Campillo in May. BPM screens on October 8 and 9 in the New York Film Festival before opening theatrically on October 20. What was your concept for the look of the film as you thought through this history? For the beginning of the film, I wanted a contrast between all of these people talking about things they have to do, actions they have to imagine, and then scenes of action which were quite dreamy, oneiric....

This interview between filmmakers Matías Piñeiro and Fendt (who is also a translator of subtitles and books, and a projectionist at the Film Society of Lincoln Center) took place in March during New Directors/New Films, where Short Stay had its North American premiere. Short Stay After watching Short Stay again, I couldn’t help noticing that money is a motif that runs throughout the film. The main character’s need for both a job and a roof over his head provides a social commentary on middle-class America that may not be perceived at first....

Waterworks I understand that a lot of the work you’ll be showing at Anthology hasn’t yet been seen and that there’s quite a lot of it. What is the organizing logic of the “New, but Old” program, which will screen Thursday? I’m not sure I could have designed things to be this way—that is, in such a way that I start engaging in an activity that’s intended to be productive in art world terms, but only after some kind of an interlude of decades....