Posts

The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, 1962) Luis Buñuel, who moved between his native Spain, France, the U.S., and Mexico, is often described as an international artist whose filmmaking and influence transcended borders. But his itinerancy was in part due to the legal and creative obstacles that he faced because of his political beliefs. Buñuel and his family traveled to Hollywood in 1938, during the Spanish Civil War, but decided to stay indefinitely when Francisco Franco’s fascist party prevailed in the conflict; Buñuel had worked as a propagandist and occasional spy for the defeated Republican government, so returning home would have been impossible....

In our ever-transient, fracturing world, sweeping discussions about identity in the name of personal or political edification tend to overshadow subtle, often more profound ruminations about individualism—those elusive circumstances that drive our fears and desires and steer us through the minutiae of daily toil into the unknown. But in The Crossing, the breathtaking debut feature by Bai Xue, the latter is perfectly distilled in the fulcrum of a girl who comes of age in between two shores divided by regional, national, and linguistic identities....

The Empire (Bruno Dumont, 2024) Ever since the beginning, the films of Bruno Dumont have seemed to come from a planet far, far away. From the stark savagery of his earlier, more naturalistic work—The Life of Jesus (1997), Humanité (1999)—to the baroque farces that have occupied him over the past decade, beginning with the slapstick murder mystery Li’l Quinquin (2014), the now 65-year-old director has made a career of leaning into cinematic artifice to draw out strange and sacred elements within French history and contemporary life....

The Competition After more than a dozen feature-length films, French director Claire Simon received her first major American honor last week: a True Vision career-recognition prize at this year’s True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri. Her latest documentary, Le Concours (showing at True/False as The Graduation but literally meaning “The Competition”), takes viewers inside la Fémis, France’s most prestigious film academy, where Simon taught for years. The film offers a glimpse of the institution’s grueling admissions process, observing the behind-the-scenes discussions between hopeful applicants and jurors, who include the film critic and director Alain Bergala and filmmaker Emilie Deleuze (daughter of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze)....

This interview took place on June 4, 2018, prior to the announcement by the current administration of its “zero tolerance” immigration policy. Had McKay and I talked a few weeks later, our conversation might have had another dimension. You’ve been working in television for over a decade. What made you come back to Brooklyn to make a film that is much in the vein of your early films? Did you still have a place in Brooklyn?...

Set mostly in a blue-collar seaside community in Massachusetts, Manchester by the Sea explores the wary relationship between an underachiever trying to piece his life back together and a typically self-absorbed teenager already familiar with loss. Dragged back to a home he abandoned, Lee is forced to deal with the banality of death—morgues, personal effects, wills, upkeep on a house and boat—while confronting a past he has tried to avoid....

Daguerrotype contains several themes that have arisen in your work before, specifically the idea that certain technologies carry spirits or have a kind of energy associated with them. Can you talk about the process of bringing this script to the screen and how you broke down the scenes? Kiyoshi Kurosawa: In terms of bringing the script to the screen, the most challenging aspect was the actual daguerreotype equipment. There are certain parts that still exist, but what you see in the movie, the very large equipment, doesn’t exist anymore....

That simplicity is the product of nearly three years of shooting with an all-female crew of five and almost no budget. Citarella is part of El Pampero Cine, a self-governing collective and production company in Argentina; her debut feature was 2011’s Ostende, an atmospheric thriller set at a resort, and on Dog Lady, she and Llinás co-direct. Along with her comrades at El Pampero, Citarella tries to rethink independent filmmaking and the way it is produced....

Children of God I was scarcely off the three-hour bus from Seoul to Jeonju before a complete stranger, concerned over my jet-lagged state, bought me a soda. Similar acts of kindness and hospitality brightened my visit for the ninth edition of the Jeonju International Film Festival. This well-curated, nigh-200-film affair, best known for its annual Jeonju Digital Project commissions, takes place in a park-encircled city with the becalmed feel of a quiet European burg and a plentiful supply of bibimbap....

Kung Hei Fat Choy Kung Hei Fat Choi! Sometime between late January and early February, the Chinese New Year holiday lands like an atom bomb. Work is canceled, relatives are visited, married couples distribute red envelopes full of cash to any unmarried people who wish them “Kung Hei Fat Choi!” and some of the year’s biggest movies get released. But unlike Christmas or summer release dates, Chinese New Year movies are their own genre....

Carmen Comes Home Thanks to a 2011 deal, the Criterion Collection is streaming 900 of its titles on Hulu, most of them in gorgeous transfers with posh (read: grammatically correct) subtitles. If you’re a fan of Japanese cinema, it’s like someone has suddenly offered you the crown jewels of the canon for a couple of bucks a month. Criterion’s catalogue has plenty of shortcomings, most notably that it ignores every single Asian film industry except Japan....

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Crappie Chan Canon. IN THE BEGINNING… was the desperation. Chan wanted to be a star so badly that he didn’t listen to his parents. They told him to never, ever get in that van with the tinted windows that slowly cruised past the playground where all the young actors hung out, the one with the hand-scrawled sign on the side that said “GEt in vaN – Be mOvie StarR....

Honeyland (Ljubomir Stefanov & Tamara Kotevska, 2019) Honeyland Set in a remote and under-resourced village in the Macedonian Balkans, Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov’s Honeyland is part environmental documentary and part epic testament to the lives of its beguiling subjects. Hatidze spends her days caring for her elderly and bed-bound mother Nazife, carefully washing her hair, changing the dressing on her wounds, and feeding her bananas and spoonfuls of the honey she methodically harvests from the mountains and man-made hives she has built next to their ramshackle house....

The Wandering Soap Opera (Raúl Ruiz, 2018) In a 1967 interview, Raúl Ruiz said of his unfinished The Tango of the Widower: “The future will be responsible for giving this film sound, which today is being stored in silent.” That future has arrived at last, with the completion of the film being overseen (quite fittingly) by Ruiz’s widow, Valeria Sarmiento. Producer Chamila Rodriguez has stated that Tango (to be Ruiz’s first and last film) hopes to see a festival release sometime next year....

Yet another wing, which has been gradually built up for the past four years and has now fully come into its own, is BAL, the Buenos Aires Lab. It’s designed along the lines of works-in-progress and co-production development workshops in Rotterdam and San Sebastian, but with a keen eye toward encouraging new and adventurous Latin American filmmakers (along with several prizes for the juried films-to-be). BAL’s growth gives BAFICI an additional dimension that makes it fairly rare—certainly in terms of sheer quantity—in the festival world....

The first documentary to win the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, Rosi’s new feature, Sacro GRA, weaves a tapestry of characters who colorfully embody the eccentricities of their setting. The GRA (Grande Raccordo Anulare), an impressive ring-shaped highway encircling Rome, was designed to better connect the lives of the city’s denizens but has instead produced obtrusive dividing lines. Rosi investigates this divide to discover a bustling world on the outskirts of Rome....

“You, Motion Picture Industry, it’s you I love!” —Frank O’Hara, “To the Film Industry in Crisis” When Frank O’Hara died in 1966 at the tragically young age of 40, the New York Times obituary headline read: “Exhibitions Aide at Modern Art Dies – Also a Poet.” This is delightfully absurd, in retrospect: there’s nothing “also” about it! But O’Hara might have agreed with the assessment. After taking a job as a clerk at MoMA, he eventually became assistant curator, putting together a number of important shows....