The Other Ariel Rotter

It’s no surprise that the search for identity is a recurrent cinematic motif in Argentina, a country that has been wracked by constant political and social crises over the past 15 years. Whether in dramatic comedies like those of Daniel Burman, offbeat fare like Martin Rejtman’s Silvia Prieto, or more personal films like Celina Murga’s Ana and the Others, the question “Who am I?” seems unavoidable. Case in point: Ariel Rotter, director and co-writer of The Other (07), which won the Grand Jury prize at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival as well as the Best Actor award....

April 14, 2024 · 3 min · 635 words · Arthur Kriss

Two Views Of Robert Altman

April 14, 2024 · 0 min · 0 words · Brian Aguirre

Uncharted Islands Paracme

Glitch Envy (Jodie Mack, 2010) Two years ago, PARACME launched as a streaming service dedicated to animated films without dialogue. With the eventual addition of work by legendary animator Lawrence Jordan and selections from the library of avant-garde distributor Canyon Cinema, this narrow focus has expanded to include all varieties of experimental and artist-made films. While Canyon was not directly involved in the creation of the streaming service, Jonathan Marlow, the site’s founder and a Canyon board member, told me that the genesis of PARACME was the distributor’s desire “to have more of the collection digitized for educational institutions....

April 14, 2024 · 4 min · 753 words · Sarah Ragsdale

W C Fields For President

FIELDS, A MAN OF FIRM RESOLVE Campaign resolutions are nothing more than overgrown New Year’s Resolutions: they are thrown together hastily at the last minute, with never a thought as to how they may be gracefully broken. Now, I am a candidate with years of experience in the making and breaking of New Year’s Resolutions, and what I can accomplish with those, I can certainly accomplish with campaign resolutions. From my long months of study on the question of New Year’s resolutions I have come to many important conclusions....

April 14, 2024 · 5 min · 965 words · Stacey Gardener

Waking Life

Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021) A central scene in Memoria, the entrancing new film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, takes place in a sound studio. Jessica (Tilda Swinton), a British woman living in Colombia, attempts to describe a phantom sound she has been hearing—a task made even trickier by the fact that she is not fluent in Spanish. “It’s like a big concrete ball… that falls into a metal well… and is surrounded by sea-water,” she fumblingly ventures....

April 14, 2024 · 6 min · 1109 words · Mary Nykiel

Word Pictures The Day After With The Seagull And On Chesil Beach

The Day After Much of Hong Sangsoo’s The Day After (2017) takes place in a publisher’s office crammed with paper—manuscripts stacked on the floor, books piled on tables and shelves. The film itself, like the office, is small, densely layered, and packed with words. People talk over meals, cups of coffee, and far too many bottles of soju (the story is, among other things, a wry commentary on the dangers of the Korean tradition of mixing work and booze)....

April 14, 2024 · 9 min · 1796 words · Edith Rouse

A Face In The Crowd Jay C Flippen

The Wild One A shriveled-up little vampire in a wheelchair, his flesh as weathered and corrupt as a crab apple left too long in the sun, barks at a buxotic wondergirl who’s spilling out of a microscopic party dress two times too tiny for her ample charms: “Babydoll, will you shut that thing off?!” Her name is Shawn Devereaux, and she’s kittenishly fiddling with the hi-fi in Russ Meyer’s under-sung censorship satire The Seven Minutes (71), while the meaty-faced pig-men in the room have important business to discuss....

April 13, 2024 · 4 min · 705 words · Bonita Lueck

Best Movies Of 2011 Film Comment S 2011 Critics Poll

ENTER OUR READERS’ POLL! You’ve heard our take on this year’s crop of films. Now it’s your turn to give us your top picks and your takes on the movies of 2011. We’ll print the poll results in our March/April issue and publish your comments on our website—and all entries will automatically be entered in a contest for free DVDs from the Criterion Collection! Stand up and be counted: send your ranked list of the year’s 20 best films (plus your rants, raves, and insights) with your name, address, and phone number, to fcpoll [at] filmlinc....

April 13, 2024 · 4 min · 752 words · Eva Bridges

Bombast Williamsburg On Screen

It is for this reason that I have a particular interest in films that show places that I have been, or could be, and this week I would like to say something about films shot in North Brooklyn, particularly the precincts of Williamsburg. I am in something of an elegiac mood, because I am in the process of leaving the apartment where I have lived for eight years, located near the Grand St....

April 13, 2024 · 12 min · 2382 words · Bobby Moore

Cannes Dispatch 4 Risk It S Only The End Of The World

Risk Wearing a leather jacket, his hair dyed a new shade but hidden underneath a protective helmet (and his eye color altered by contacts, yet obscured by dark sunglasses), Julian Assange is on a motorcycle, riding through the streets of London. In this poignant sequence from Laura Poitras’s new documentary, Risk, he’s freely weaving in and out of traffic while Radiohead’s “I Might Be Wrong” plays on the soundtrack. Assange’s bike trip plays as a rare recent moment of liberation for the Australian activist....

April 13, 2024 · 7 min · 1427 words · Amber Winter

Cannes Market Watch El Puesto

The little-noticed Cannes section organized by France’s primary alternative distribution network ACID (Cinéastes de l’Association du Cinéma Indépendent pour sa Diffusion) is one of those open secrets of the festival. Most attendees are at least vaguely aware of it, but few actually check out the program. A visit to l’ACID can yield some real pleasures, such as Aurélien Lévêque’s El Puesto , a mesmerizingly beautiful nonfiction film shot in widescreen 16mm and projected in an elegant 35mm blow-up print....

April 13, 2024 · 3 min · 616 words · John Nakamura

Cinema 67 Revisited Persona

Some directors are eager to help shine a light on the meaning of their work, especially if that work tends to bewilder audiences. Ingmar Bergman was not one of those directors. On Apr. 2, 1967, one month after his film Persona opened at New York City’s Festival Theater on West 57th Street, an interview with the New York Times ran in which he said, “I can’t talk to you about Persona at all....

April 13, 2024 · 6 min · 1263 words · Deborah Jones

Close Reading Endless Night

Endless Night (Eloy Enciso, 2019) When Endless Night (Longa noite) reaches the final panel of its triptych, it descends, as promised, into the liminal darkness of a forest at twilight. Or perhaps it’s dawn—throughout the sequence, it’s never clear whether the light is coming or going. It’s also unclear whether our solitary guide, Anxo (played by visual artist Misha Bies Golas), is seeking someone or being sought. Some years have passed since the end of the Spanish Civil War, and the former fighter in the Republican army has returned to his hometown in Galicia without injury, and without notice....

April 13, 2024 · 5 min · 958 words · Leo Swinton

Common People Aki Kaurism Ki

April 13, 2024 · 0 min · 0 words · Catherine Nash

Critical Dialogue Frances Ha

The legend of the French New Wave imagines a horde of dissatisfied critics, drunk on Hollywood and pulp, taking to the streets in broad daylight to re-create, as filmmakers, their favorite romances and noirs. However accurate (or not) this picture might be, films like Breathless, Band of Outsiders, or Shoot the Piano Player did aim to rework American popular cinema in a milieu that was pointedly “real,” gritty, un-movie-like. It’s a fitting irony, then, that the films of Truffaut, Godard et al have become integrated into cinema’s collective cultural imagination: the Paris of Breathless is as much a part of our fantasy movie-verse as the New York of Pickup on South Street or the Los Angeles of In a Lonely Place, and Belmondo’s smirk as much the mark of a star as Bogart’s slouch—all of them awaiting to be re-imagined, transplanted, adapted, revised....

April 13, 2024 · 4 min · 806 words · Barbara Arsenault

Deep Focus 13 Hours The Secret Soldiers Of Benghazi

Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi tells an eyewitness version of what happened on September 11 and 12, 2012, in Eastern Libya, with gripping, relentless immediacy and heartbreaking empathy. It adopts the perspective of the lamentably small security team that battles waves of anti-American attackers both at Benghazi’s U.S. diplomatic compound and, later, at the team’s own base, “the Annex,” a supposedly secret CIA outpost. As private contractors with the CIA’s Global Response Staff (or GRS), these half-dozen men are not obligated to venture into harm’s way at the compound....

April 13, 2024 · 8 min · 1608 words · Juanita Brown

Disgrace Under Pressure Blue Jasmine

Woody Allen’s great subject is mendacity, and that’s no laughing matter. There’s barely a chuckle to be had in Blue Jasmine unless the sight of Cate Blanchett knocking back handfuls of Xanax with Stoli chasers tickles your funny bone. It would be an exaggeration to say that Blanchett’s performance is the movie. On the other hand, Blue Jasmine would be unimaginable without her. In Allen’s best film since the undervalued Match Point, and maybe since Crimes and Misdemeanors (both similarly dark social satires), Blanchett plays Jasmine, once wife to Hal (Alec Baldwin), a Wall Street Ponzi scammer of the Bernie Madoff variety....

April 13, 2024 · 3 min · 593 words · Nellie Selvage

Festivals Berlin 2017

On the Beach Alone at Night Of the films that premiered at the 67th Berlinale, more than a few were marked by an audaciously direct engagement with the facts of the world. Their motivation perhaps grew less from a hunger for reality amid the uncertain political climate engulfing the entire planet than by a pervasive sense that one need not bother delving so deeply into the recesses of the imagination to find something worth putting on the screen....

April 13, 2024 · 10 min · 2044 words · Kay Blanchard

Film Of The Week Only Lovers Left Alive

Only Lovers Left Alive presents two more characters who are both undeniably cool—in the sense of cold-blooded—and something like already dead, insofar as they’re immortal, undead. The lovers of Jarmusch’s new film, his latest idiosyncratic take on genre tropes, are vampires in love—Adam and Eve, agelessly old, already on at least their third marriage to each other, and pledged to each other forever, or at least as long as the quality red stuff is available to keep them immortal....

April 13, 2024 · 7 min · 1451 words · Elizabeth Newman

Film Of The Week Youth Paolo Sorrentino

Here’s the thing. As a rule, I get as much pleasure—as much sheer fun—out of Paolo Sorrentino’s work as I do from that of just about any filmmaker. And I probably had as much pleasure from his new film Youth as I did from anything else this year. Yet I have to admit that it sometimes becomes glaringly apparent that Sorrentino is not what you’d normally think of as a great filmmaker—at moments, you find yourself wondering just how in control he is of his material....

April 13, 2024 · 9 min · 1888 words · Wm Robison