Posts

The Brat This year, the 14th for the Museum of Modern Art’s film preservation series To Save and Project, brings some rarities back to New York audiences. Particularly exciting to me, as a proud example of what film writer Will McKinley likes to call an Old Movie Weirdo, is a trio of early 1930s films that have little in common except freshly restored beauty and a bizarre line in sexual innuendo....

The core of Wavelengths, mostly short experimental work, continues to screen at Jackman, like a rebellious tribute to a bygone era. But would the sheer weight and noise of the Oscar marketing machine that rumbles annually through Toronto drown out this noncommercial program? A Field in England The fears proved unfounded. If anything, the past two years have seen Wavelengths become one of TIFF’s genuine triumphs. Retiring the Visions section and folding its fare into Wavelengths turned out to be the festival’s best move since moving from its former epicenter in tony uptown Yorkville to the more logical downtown zone where the Lightbox was built....

This year, Film Comment will unveil its much-anticipated Best of the Year poll live during a special Film Comment Free Talk! On December 11 at 7pm, join us in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Amphitheater at the Film Society of Lincoln Center for the full countdown, revealing the 10 top films of the year, as voted upon by our Film Comment contributors. Appearing in person to discuss—and perhaps debate—the results will be a selection of top critics, including K....

Reprinted from the September-October 2011 issue of Film Comment. Regular readers may have noticed that over the years I’ve used this page as a forum for grumbling or sounding off about things. Many times, I’ve found myself casting about in desperation for a topic about which I can conceivably squeeze out 500 words or so—you gasp, but all too often that’s what writing an editor’s letter comes down to. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there’s one standby you can always count on if inspiration doesn’t come to the rescue....

As a filmmaker, Woody Allen tends increasingly to be a short-story writer, but now and then he reveals his hankering to be a novelist. His work, especially of late, often hangs on a single simple premise—an American tourist slips through a hole in time, a debunker of magic falls for a beautiful mystic, a jaded philosopher puts his Nietzschean principles to the practical test—and, for better or worse, exploits that premise for whatever comic or dramatic grist it can....

When Buenos Aires police caught killer Carlos Eduardo Robledo Puch—according to his life story, as told in Luis Ortega’s El Angel—no one in Argentina knew how to deal with the young man’s beauty. At the end of the film, a glimpsed headline claims that Robledo disproves the famous Lombroso principle: put bluntly, the idea, proposed by 19th-century criminologist Cesare Lombroso, that born criminals could be recognized by atavistic deformities. In other words, they were likely to be as ugly as sin....

Susanna Nicchiarelli’s Nico, 1988 isn’t what you’d normally call a rock biopic. It doesn’t cover a whole biography, but a short spell at the very end of its subject’s life—a period that, after a career of transcendent glory and glamour, could theoretically be called bathetic. What’s more, that subject, the German singer known as Nico—née Christa Päffgen—never had much to do with rock music in the familiar, mundane sense. She may have appeared on one of the great landmarks in music history—the 1967 LP The Velvet Underground & Nico—but her own contributions to that record were less to do with rock than with a delicate, urbane balladry, a sort of balefully insistent folk lamentation....

Rudolph Nureyev. Photo by Kobal/REX/Shutterstock The life of Rudolf Nureyev might have been written for the screen. Born on a Trans-Siberian express train, raised dirt-poor in the Soviet republic of Bashkir, he overcame a late start in his ballet training to become one of the 20th century’s greatest dancers. The Soviet government was wary of his rebelliousness, but could not resist showing him off to the West as a trophy of their cultural supremacy; his dramatic defection at Paris’s Le Bourget airport in 1961 was a major blow in the Cold War....

Many movies take the form of a hall of mirrors, where narrative is reflected in the filmmaking process and vice versa. Few, however, accomplish this with the dedication, clarity, and brio of Steven Soderbergh’s fraternal twins, The Argentine and Guerrilla (bundled under the shorthand title, Che). In the press conference following Che’s Cannes premiere, Soderbergh remarked that what most fascinated him about the Latin American militant was his will. Although revolution, as Mao chided, “is not a dinner party, not an essay, nor a painting” and, despite the heady sentiments of ’68, not a film either, Soderbergh’s own will—to shape every aspect of this project from conception to release—is palpable in Che, the film that places him in the ranks of the masters....

Chan began his career in the early Eighties as an assistant director and sometime actor in mainstream films. His first directing credit was the Sixties-set ghost film Finale in Blood (93), which served early notice of the director’s taste for oddball comedy and genre experimentation. But with 1997’s Made in Hong Kong, Chan engineered a collision of independent filmmaking and mass entertainment that became his trademark. Flipping off the pretentious local indie scene, his punchy, undisciplined take on the youth film used a DIY approach to woo mainstream moviegoers....

Argentine filmmaker Pablo Giorgelli’s debut feature marks an important advance in contemporary neo-neorealist observational cinema through the adoption of a revolutionary new weapon in the directorial arsenal: babies. Just the one, to be precise, but that’s been enough to pacify restless festivalgoers since this charming, low-impact road movie won Giorgelli the Camera d’Or last year at Cannes. The tot comes into play—smiling, staring, snoozing—as an unexpected second passenger for lonesome truck driver Rubén, who is hauling lumber from Asunción, Paraguay, to Buenos Aires....

“I’m a pervert but not a phony. I am a pervert with dignity!” So says Yu Tsunoda (Takahiro Nishijima), a Japanese Catholic youth suffering from a serious mix-up in lifestyle priorities. The death of Yu’s mother prompts his father to become a priest, which in turn prompts Yu’s desperate attempts to invent sins that he can bring to Dad for confession. In search of new taboos, Yu becomes a master of ninja-style “upskirt” photography....

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Radu Jude, 2021) A rumbling: truth itself has appeared among humankind in the very thick of their flurrying metaphors. -Paul Celan Midway through Radu Jude’s Golden Bear–winning Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, the narrative is interrupted by a glossary of terms. Ideas like “Church,” “Children,” and “Blowjob,” are explicated in a procession of skits, gags, archival footage, and static images, each accompanied by a kind of caption....

Images from Mr. Jones (Agnieszka Holland, 2019) This article is part of a series of interviews conducted at the 2019 EnergaCAMERIMAGE International Film Festival in Toruń, Poland. Few directors have a body of work as equally varied and consistent as Agnieszka Holland, whose career-long examination of the 20th century’s traumas culminates in her latest film, Mr. Jones. A highlight of the 2019 Berlinale, Mr. Jones stands out as one of the rare cinematic representations of the Holodomor, the Soviet regime’s deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainians between 1932 and 1933....

Prizzi’s Honor As Charley Partanna, dim-witted son of a Mafia consigliere to the powerful Prizzi family, Jack Nicholson presides over Prizzi’s Honor, his 39th film. With sincerity fairly oozing from every pore and calculation flashing from every eyeball, the whole cunning Mafioso lot manages to make the dark side of their way of life seem an unfortunate by-product of ordinary frailties. Though monstrous, they have charm. Directed by John Huston who has kept company with such types before, most notably in Beat the Devil and The Maltese Falcon, the film features the fast-rising Kathleen Turner, Anjelica Huston, Robert Loggia, John Randolph, Lee Richardson and William Hickey as the don....

Apologies for the awkward proximity of “inventory” and “inventive.” I’ve been learning on the job since, and so has Collet-Serra, a get-down-to-brass-tacks director working in the populist, popcorn mode without an ounce of either pomposity or condescension, achieving no small measure of artistic and financial success on his own terms in so doing: his surfer vs. shark survivalist tale The Shallows, for example, hauled in six times its slim production budget in 2016....

Barbara Jeanne Balibar appears to be a woman on the run, brilliant and elusive. Originally a student of ballet, and a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, she was in films by Arnaud Desplechin and Mathieu Amalric early, when they were youngbloods of the 1990s. In Jacques Rivette’s Ne touchez pas la hache (2007), she played Balzac’s charismatic countess opposite Guillaume Depardieu’s bemused General. And as Nastassia in Pierre Léon’s The Idiot (2009), adapted from Dostoyevsky, she was a woman in charge who fires her ex-lovers, ending up triumphant, on her own....