Posts

In the early 1960s, the 20-year film noir boom that began toward the end of World War II finally waned, its themes and concerns drifting away from the Hollywood mainstream. By the early 1970s, the genre was back as neo-noir, modernized (or sometimes just air-quoted) by directors like Alan J. Pakula (Klute), Robert Altman (The Long Goodbye), and Roman Polanski (Chinatown), who consciously and formally nodded to the past while going places that ’40s and ’50s film noir couldn’t....

Matt Cimber’s The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976) is distinctly American horror, not just in its content but in how it came to be—born from desperation. Writer Robert Thom drafted the script in a manic haze from his hospital bed, an IV drip needled into his vein. Thom had grown very ill, and his then-wife, actor Millie Perkins, was struggling to pay his hospital bills. They were destitute and stressed, and the only thing Thom could do was write....

Saving Private Ryan The opening minutes of The Story of Film, Mark Cousins’ recent 15-hour-long journey through movie history, don’t so much ease us into the subject as submerge us. Our first sight is of an Allied soldier floating deep underwater, struggling to shed his heavy backpack. The camera surges to the water’s surface, revealing the war-torn Omaha Beach of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. “This scene,” Cousins says in his lilting voiceover, “was actually shot at a peaceful beach in Ireland....

Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2022) Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s latest feature, Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, opens with a POV shot. The camera embarks on a running head start, leaps into the air, and floats for a few moments before returning to terra firma. If the sequence captures the emotional state of Iñárritu’s thinly veiled alter ego, Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho)—a man so disconnected from his professional life that he’s barely present even when his feet are planted squarely on the ground—it also, almost knowingly, offers Iñárritu’s critics a cheeky metaphor to lob against the film....

Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World is an ideal adult movie for Christmas 2018. Think of it as the true-crime paperback in the Secret Santa bag. This alternately gilded and grimy morality play—make that morality thriller—pits the richest man on Earth, international oil tycoon J. Paul Getty (Christopher Plummer), against a valiant former daughter-in-law, Gail Harris Getty (Michelle Williams). She tries to get him to pay kidnappers $17 million after they grab her artistic, willowy, hedonistic teen son, John Paul Getty III (Charlie Plummer, no relation), off a Roman street, then chain him up in the remote southern Italian countryside....

Color Out of Space (Richard Stanley, 2019) This week, the sublime becomes ridiculous, and the ridiculous becomes a trip, in two updates of horror classics considered high points of their masters’ voices: Floria Sigismondi’s The Turning, an adaptation of Henry James’s 1898 novella, The Turn of the Screw, set in 1994, and Richard Stanley’s present-day Color Out of Space, based on H.P. Lovecraft’s 1927 short story, “The Colour Out of Space....

Nichols: Clearly we were all sitting here thinking the same thing. How were you so prescient? Where did your Orwellian vision come from? Because you invented the perfect metaphor for the behavior of the Bush administration in Iraq. May: Well, oddly enough when I made this movie, Ronald Reagan was president and there was Iran-Contra, we were supporting Iran and Iraq. We put in Saddam. We had taken out the Shah....

The faces of baseball players started to slowly dissolve to the faces of movie stars in coffee table books like Immortals of the Screen and The Movies, and just as the cards had led me to baseball, publicity stills of Bogart and Carole Lombard led me to movies. A couple of years later, a book of Academy Award winners and nominees offered another guide. Even at the age of 10, this was a curiously unsatisfying index—for instance, imagine the mixture of puzzlement and enervation I felt after “finally” seeing Around the World in 80 Days....

This article appeared in the June 10 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. Slow Machine (Paul Felten and Joe DeNardo, 2020) Slow Machine’s puckish 16mm cinematography and thematic preoccupations—with performance, conspiracies, terror, and counter-terror—have elicited comparisons to the films of Jacques Rivette and Robert Kramer. But Paul Felten and Joe DeNardo’s feature debut is an undeniably personal statement on our anxious times....

The African Desperate (Martine Syms, 2022) The African Desperate, the debut film by visual artist Martine Syms, abounds in bold text, bolder colors, and wry humor struck through with a Very-Online sensibility to explore the construction of Black feminine identity. Unfolding over the course of 24 hours at an art school in scenic upstate New York, the film captures a pseudo-bohemian milieu of primarily white students and staff, many of whom can’t seem to articulate their feelings about art without spewing academic jargon—or showing their asses....

Images from Chinese Portrait (Wang Xiaoshuai, 2018) A brief sequence in Wang Xiaoshuai’s new documentary depicts the scene at a Chinese coastal resort. In one shot, a man stands gazing out at the sea while children splash around happily and families lounge on the sand in the background; in another, a middle-aged man wearing swimming trunks and a medallion looks to camera quizzically, with the thoroughly rakish look of an ageing holiday Lothario....

“Don’t be exuberant!” a doctor cautions Mathieu Amalric’s character in Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian—futilely, of course, as Amalric carries on giving, to put it mildly, one of the most exuberant performances of his career. But perhaps the warning is also a note-to-self by Arnaud Desplechin, a director noted for a stylistic exuberance that sometimes verges on mannerism. I must confess that Desplechin is a filmmaker whose voice has somehow eluded me in the past, both in terms of the specifics of his style, and the question of what preoccupies him: yes, relationships, families, people’s indecisiveness, all that sort of thing, but the matter of what Desplechin is really interested in and why somehow has never connected with me....

The Arabic word “mektoub” can be roughly translated as “fate” or “it is written,” so in theory, Abdellatif Kechiche will be able to look at the reviews of his latest film—which premiered this week in competition in Venice—and shrug, “Mektoub, my love.” Except that Kechiche isn’t one simply to shrug anything off. He’s made a reputation for being cantankerous by very openly issuing a rejoinder to Léa Seydoux, the star of his Cannes Palme d’Or winner Blue Is the Warmest Color, after she accused him of mistreatment during the shoot; he’s also notoriously prickly about critical responses....

There’s a nice moment in The Two Faces of January when, after his character has suffered a dramatic downturn, Viggo Mortensen appears in close-up. As pursued conman Chester MacFarland muses on his sorry situation in the cold morning light, Mortensen’s face looks dried-out, ashen, drained to the point of looking almost mummified. Since Mortensen appeared (very amusingly) as the William Burroughs figure in Walter Salles’s so-so On the Road, let’s invoke a Burroughsian idea here and say that this particular image is what you might call a “naked lunch” shot—it shows the moment at which all pretence is dropped, and the character is faced with the terrible truth of what’s on the end of his fork....

A Farewell to Arms Why should we bother with Frank Borzage in 1997? Many modern viewers claim to find even his greatest films moth-eaten, penny-ante affairs, the cinematic equivalents of long-forgotten Tin Pan Alley tunes or 1909 Christmas cards. What do they have to offer us beyond the illusory comfort of an imagined past? There’s a director I know who’s fond of saying that he’s more interested in what current filmmakers are doing (even the mediocre ones) than in studying “classic cinema,” older films touching him only to the degree that they illuminate modern experience....

Film strips from Five Year Diary (Anne Charlotte Robertson, 1981–1997) Against a dark background, Anne Charlotte Robertson faces the camera. Light comes through the window and catches the left side of her face. She is a filmmaker, a gardener. She is 45-years-old, single, childless. “I shall try to imagine being happy,” she says, “I shall hope for miracles.” From the soundtrack’s left channel, she speaks over herself, doubling the voiceover: “You can see my face is rather stiff....

Adrienne Corri in The River (Jean Renoir, 1951) Published by the Duke University Press earlier this month, Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space by Priya Jaikumar examines eight decades of films shot on location in India to show how attending to filmed space reveals alternative timelines and histories of cinema. The following excerpt combines multiple sections from the book and has been edited and condensed for length. Like rivers, and like Renoir’s film that evokes a sense of liquid eternity, there is an endlessness to the stories that flow and ebb from The River’s location shoot in India between 1949 and 1951....