Posts

The 33 is a not-so-glorious throwback to the international productions of 50 or 60 years ago that would feature globe-trotting casts dramatizing historic events under the guidance of filmmakers with varying accents. The topics were often military (World War II, the Napoleonic War) and the perspective God-like. The 33 tells a story ostensibly more immediate and personal: the Chilean mine collapse in August 2010 that buried 33 miners under 2,300 feet and 770,000 tons of rock for 69 days....

Francis Lawrence’s The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1 features several stirring set pieces, but it’s mostly an epic of inaction. I mean that as a compliment. This unusual and affecting entry in the Suzanne Collins–based series is the opposite of blockbusters that set out to pop eyes and pound eardrums. As it continues the saga of the girl who survives gladiator games on her own terms, upsetting the oligarchy in the Capitol of Panem and fomenting rebellion in its 13 districts, Mockingjay 1 whips up both mordant and melancholy moods....

“I didn’t give them anything,” says Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell), the downed U-2 spy-plane pilot captured by the Soviets, to James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks), the American insurance lawyer who negotiated his release. “It doesn’t matter,” asserts Donovan. “You know what you did.” Within the complex narrative of Bridge of Spies, this frequently reiterated idea of goodness as a matter of action as opposed to appearance becomes a touchstone, guiding our way through the dark, thickening forest of Cold War politics....

Guantánamo Now in its fourteenth year, Doclisboa is among a growing number of contemporary film festivals, including FID Marseille, Cinéma du reel, True/False, and RIDM, that support a particularly radical species of documentary, one that embraces a wide range of aesthetic practices (narrative, experimental) and forms (medium-length works, video installation). What distinguishes the festival, though—apart from its emergence from Lisbon’s vibrant and tightly knit film community—is its special emphasis on the political....

—Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Rashomon Around the World with Orson Welles Pamplona’s other festival, Punto de Vista (aka International Documentary Film Festival of Navarra) proved suitably bullish in its 9th edition, resuming after a two-year hiatus brought about by the Navarran government in response to the Spanish financial crisis. Dissent from the international film community, consolidated in a petition, forced the reprieve, though Punto de Vista had maintained its cinephilic pulse during this recuperative period of “austerity” by mounting successive seminars (last year focusing on the films of Ignacio Agüero and Pema Tseden)....

78/52 The essential statistics: I spent nine days at the Sundance Film Festival, averaged about 3.33 feature films a day with panels and VR “experiences” crammed in the interstices, trudged through approximately 10 feet of accumulated snow, banged up two elbows, bravely overcame one head cold (which was going around) and one hangover (ditto), tied for third in bar trivia, made tentative plans with several dozen people and carried out maybe three, and answered the question “How’s your festival?...

Faya Dayi (Jessica Beshir, 2021) Jessica Beshir’s Faya Dayi opens with a boy zigzagging across muddy terrain on a foggy night in Harar, Ethiopia, his arms mimicking the wings of a bird or a plane. Many of the denizens of Harar, as observed by Beshir in her feature-length documentary debut, yearn to leave—to fly away. Ethnic cleansing, land grabs, and limited employment trammel the dreams of many youths in the walled city....

Italian neorealism is alive and well in the hands of writer-director Jonas Carpignano—a fairly textbook version of neorealism, at that. In his second feature A Ciambra, which lists Martin Scorsese as an executive producer, Carpignano has cast unknowns: a Roma family named Amato, who are apparently playing versions of themselves, their characters sharing their real names. The setting is the port community of Gioia Tauro in southwestern Italy, the dialogue is largely in Calabrian dialect, and the drama, as far as one can tell, seems to emerge organically from the kind of situations that Amato family members might actually find themselves in....

Towards the end of Christian Braad Thomsen’s documentary Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands, Rainer Werner Fassbinder quotes Jean Genet: “To be complete, you have to double yourself.” Thomsen reads this as evidence of Fassbinder’s protean, contradictory nature: “You can’t say a thing about him,” says Thomsen, “without saying the opposite”—to wit, Fassbinder was sometimes a hooligan, but he was also a prince. Inevitably, this week, it’s another protean prince—the slimmer one from Minneapolis—who comes to mind when considering Fassbinder and his phenomenal output....

Spike Jonze’s Her is a tender, wry, deceptively modest package—and the closer you look, the more it reveals itself to be the proverbial Movie For Our Times. It would make a neat double bill with last year’s somewhat less distinctive Ruby Sparks, about a man who falls in love with the literary character he’s created but must come to terms with the gradually evolving autonomy of a woman who doesn’t intend only to be the eternal dream girlfriend....

Hitchcock/Truffaut is, as you might imagine, a film about Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut, and specifically about the interviews that Truffaut conducted with his idol in August 1962—resulting in the book originally published in 1966 as Le Cinéma selon Alfred Hitchcock and best known in English under the same title as this documentary. Directed by NYFF director and FILM COMMENT deputy editor Kent Jones, and written by him and French critic, scholar, and Truffaut biographer Serge Toubiana, this documentary could just as aptly have been titled Hitchcock/Truffaut/Scorsese/Fincher/Assayas/Linklater/etc....

“Coda” might be considered a tactless term to apply in a documentary about a musician who, at 66, is perhaps in the autumn rather than the winter of his career. But Stephen Nomura Schible’s portrait film Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda is about an artist very much concerned, these days at least, with the idea of endings, and of what comes after. Japanese composer, soundtrack writer, and electronics pioneer Ryuichi Sakamoto was diagnosed in 2014 with throat cancer, and much of Schible’s intimate film shows him musing courageously and wryly on his own mortality: having currently beaten the condition, Sakamoto says he knows he might live for another 10 years, or 20, or possibly just one....

Habemus Papam When Otto Preminger was working on The Cardinal (1963), a film that touched upon interfaith marriage, racial bigotry, sex outside marriage, abortion and the rise of fascism among other issues, the production faced all sorts of pressures from the American Catholic Church. The film contentiously chronicled the rise to power of the titular cardinal and his personal dilemmas concerning the catholic church and faith. Shot in Boston and Rome, the Vatican liaison for the European shoot was a young German priest called Joseph Ratzinger who had served in the Luftwaffenhelfer during WWII and would eventually become Pope Benedict XVI....

Zulawski is a very philosophical director, in spite of his stated aversion to what he calls “big words.” He is fascinated by the concept of persistence of vision and he is drawn to an array of visual mediums, both technological and physical. Asking Zulawski questions about his work proves daunting, as he is himself an incessant questioner, and very defensive of his art and the details of his process. “Why am I [or why are you] doing ____?...

You took a few years off to teach and write two novels. Why did you choose to “return” to filmmaking with this adaptation? Maybe because it was simpler to do it that way. I think many writers have that fear of the white page, and it’s nicer to start with something than with nothing. But that wasn’t the main reason. I don’t really remember, but I had a lot of ideas at the time and I was wondering: “Should I write this or should I write that, should I write a novel or should I make a film, what should I do?...

Images from ALTIPLANO (Malena Szlam, 2018) A dance of horizons charged with the imperceptible vibrations of earth and sky: Malena Szlam’s ALTIPLANO (2018) ranks among the most striking landscape films of recent years and, indeed, calls for a revision of how we talk about landscape in cinema. The Montreal-based, Chilean-born Szlam films the reddish Andean Altiplano as if located on another planet (little surprise that NASA has used the region as a stand-in for the surface of Mars), an expanse of deserts, salt flats, remnants of volcanic activity, and lakes stained the same hue of their environs, that is as ancient as it is visually spellbinding....

The Delinquents (Rodrigo Moreno, 2023) The Delinquents, directed by Argentine filmmaker Rodrigo Moreno, is a delightful matryoshka doll of a movie that yields its secrets through its many meandering narrative detours. The film picks up on a mainstay theme of the New Argentine Cinema: the disquietude of workers following the collapse of the nation’s economy in the late 2000s. While numerous Argentine directors—including Alejo Moguillansky, Mariano Llinás, and Lucía Seles—have conveyed this sense of national restlessness more broadly, The Delinquents homes in on the slow collapse of a corroded late-capitalist system as the underlying cause for his characters’ woes....

Arslan sat down with Film Comment following the premiere of Bright Nights at the 67th Berlinale to discuss his incremental move away from genre cinema, the role of remote landscapes in his recent work, and the serendipitous moments that lend his latest film its unique aura. You’re known for your bold takes on genre films. Bright Nights isn’t a genre film per se, but it does deal with a familiar story of a divorced father attempting to reconnect with his son....