Posts

Our podcast then flashes forward for a final dispatch from the Sundance Film Festival, a live discussion from the Kickstarter House featuring two directors the magazine has supported who have made films with the help of crowdfunding: Laura Dunn, who co-directed Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry (shown in Sundance’s Spotlight section), and Dustin Guy Defa, who directed Person to Person (in the NEXT section). Dunn’s prior feature, The Unforeseen (2007), was deemed “best film of the festival, hands down” in these pages, and so we were eager to see where she took Look & See, a Kickstarter project....

The same could be said of Lee’s epic new miniseries NYC Epicenters 9/11→2021½, a deep-dive into New York City’s recent history of trauma and resilience, from the September 11 attacks to the COVID-19 pandemic. On today’s podcast, FC editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish sat down with Amy as well as critic, artist, and archivist Ina Archer to discuss the fascinating sprawl of the show, a highly personal tribute to the spirit of Lee’s hometown....

A scene in which Dickens encounters a young prostitute underlines that not only is he a devout social crusader, but that he is also the last man to exploit a vulnerable girl. And yet that’s exactly what he does to Nelly when he secludes her as a kept woman, warning her that (though separated from his wife Catherine) he will only be able to visit her when his family commitments and work allow....

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (James Mangold, 2023) “Too many Nazis,” growls Indiana Jones. I would add: too many punches to the face, too many bullets, too many arrows, too many dank caverns and murky passageways, too many speeding vehicles that eject passengers like Tilt-a-Whirls without a rail, and too many digitally enhanced stunts that turn human beings into Gumby toys. What makes Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny bearable and occasionally even touching is that Harrison Ford proves indestructible....

I will admit that I have yet to explore every corner and crevice of Chris Marker’s Immemory. I suspect that any fan would make the same guiltless admission. After you’ve browsed through Marker’s first CD-ROM, you will want to leave areas of it unexplored. That way, you can extend your relationship with this precious object long past the point that you’ve thrown other relics of the all-but-obsolete medium into your deepest desk drawer....

Yasukuni When a suit announces before a press screening that the film you are about to see has “problems,” it can be a little off-putting. But that’s what happened at this year’s Berlin Film Festival with Li Ying’s decade-in-the-making documentary Yasukuni, an exploration of the slippery nature of history, tradition, and memory, which takes as its subject Tokyo’s notorious Yasukuni Shrine. Established in 1869 for the worship of eirei (“heroic spirits,” i....

Hapkido Though the situation has improved a bit in recent years, there was a time when Hollywood couldn’t create a strong female action hero to save its life. For every movie featuring an Ellen Ripley, Sarah Connor, Alice or Katniss Everdeen, Asian film industries managed to produce several dozen more entertaining, hard-hitting action flicks featuring strong female characters portrayed by butt-kicking heroines, many of them real-life martial arts champions or physically gifted dancers or performers....

Our prognosticators were able to reach consensus or unanimity in six out of Oscar’s ten top categories. They figure that if the Academy perceives The English Patient‘s Anthony Minghella as having inherited the mantle of David Lean, his trophy shelf should look like the mantel of David Lean as well. But the mirror has two faces, and 8 out of 12 soothsayers anticipate that Old Hollywood will sentimentally acclaim Miss Lauren Bacall as Best Supporting Actress over four deserving competitors (not to mention the unnominated Renee Zellweger and Courtney Love)....

Water and Power (Pat O’Neill, 1989) The flight path into LAX runs east to west over the city. The planes line up around Vernon, cross the L.A. River, and skim the 405 freeway, landing just short of the beach. The passenger gets a pretty good overview of what to expect on the ground: a kind of giant neural network spilling over uneven terrain into oblivion. “Confronted with sudden disaster,” wrote Joan Didion, “we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames…” In the final approach, the planes pass just to the left of Inglewood Park, the cemetery where my dad’s ashes were buried following his sudden death....

A Thousand Suns The films of Mati Diop conjure faraway places. Characters both fictional and quasi-documentary long for locales beyond their reach, or sometimes, as if in a trance, they drift magnetically toward them. No matter where the films take place, there is always the specter of somewhere else, and, perhaps with it, the possibility of a different life. These evocations of distant locations—a friend’s tropical Yucatan adventures relayed by text message in Snow Canon (11), memories of home mournfully recalled in Big in Vietnam (12), and the idea of an opportunity-rich Europe worth risking one’s life for in Atlantiques (09) and A Thousand Suns (Mille Soleils, 13)—suffuse the concrete worlds her characters inhabit so that her films often seem to be in multiple places at once....

Closed Curtain The most politicized film of this year’s Berlinale celebrated its premiere in today’s Competition section. Closed Curtain by Iranian director and film world cause célèbre Jafar Panahi represents the second violation of his 20-year ban on filmmaking. Despite a direct appeal from the German government, Panahi’s travel embargo was not lifted for the film’s premiere, so his co-director Kamboziya Partovi presented it instead. Closed Curtain’s opening establishes the film’s tone and self-referential focus: from the inside of a house, a long stationary shot shows the view through the bars of a locked window gate where in the distance, inaccessible, lies the wide open sea and the world beyond it....

Nobody’s Daughter Haewon Haewon is an acting student that has recently had a secret affair with one of her professors, Seongjun (who is also, this being a Hong film, a film director). Finding herself lonely after her mother expatriates to Canada, she calls up Seongjun and flirts with the idea of resuming their romance. The remainder of the film follows Haewon as she wanders around Seoul, meets with friends and acquaintances, encounters potential new lovers, drinks a fair bit of soju, and comes to grips with the impossibility of her attraction for Seongjun, a married man with a newborn child....

Far From Heaven Todd Haynes, U.S. Adaptation Spike Jonze, U.S. Y tu mama también Alfonso Cuarón, Mexico Talk to Her Pedro Almodóvar, Spain About Schmidt Alexander Payne, U.S. Time Out Laurent Cantet, France The Fast Runner Zacharias Kunuk, Canada Punch-Drunk Love Paul Thomas Anderson, U.S. Russian Ark Alexander Sokurov, Russia/Germany Gangs of New York Martin Scorsese, U.S. Minority Report Steven Spielberg, U.S. Spirited Away Hayao Miyazaki, Japan In Praise of Love Jean-Luc Godard, France/Switzerland...

One Fine Morning (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2022) Gravity and levity coexist in a delicate balance in all the films of Mia Hansen-Løve, but perhaps none is as effortlessly poised as One Fine Morning, the French director’s latest work of autofiction. The film follows Sandra (Léa Seydoux), a young widow and mother in Paris, as she grapples with two distinct life events: the cognitive and physical decline of her professor father, Georg (Pascal Greggory), whose fast-progressing Benson’s syndrome—a neurological condition that affects speech and vision, among other aspects—necessitates moving him into a care home; and a budding affair with a handsome cosmochemist, Clément (Melvil Poupaud), who is stuck ambivalently in a stalled marriage....

Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024) The familiar Cannes Film Festival ident that opens Official Selection screenings exudes a perfume of the Eternal Ideal. The virtual camera climbs a flight of red-carpeted CGI steps, up through shimmering blue water into a starry night sky. It’s as if the viewer’s eye, or cinema itself, is emerging from immersion in a sort of oceanic disinfectant, cleansed of base, earthly concerns. Earlier this week, Cannes Artistic Director Thierry Frémaux announced, “This year, we tried to have a festival without any controversies”—a tall order in 2024 of all years....

Because Chris Marker is one of the most important filmmakers in the history of cinema (the central figure and innovator of the essay-film genre), and one of the most elusive (refusing to allow himself to be photographed, suppressing showings of his earlier films, given to cryptic poetic statements), any publication that takes us closer to his mind and soul will be welcomed and cherished. Especially by his fans. In recent years, the octogenarian Marker has been involved in making museum installations, CD-ROMs, and publications drawn from a lifelong archive of images taken around the world....