It’s about the most basic hanger there is for a story—the simple question: who’s stronger and fitter? Who would win in a fight? Godzilla or Mothra? Jason or Freddy? Alien or Predator? Kramer or Kramer? Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice might have been a lot better if it had simply and honestly tried to serve this reductio ad absurdum-dum premise, but it tries to do a lot more besides, and ends up a crashing bore....
A reassuring article of faith has it that political repression tends to have a salutary effect on art. The classic piece of evidence often cited is the imaginative energy of writers in Stalinist Russia—one of whom, Mikhail Bulgakov, provided in his novel The Master and Margarita a defiant motto for the impossibility of stifling creativity: “Manuscripts don’t burn.” Those three words last year became the title of a clandestinely produced drama by Mohammad Rasoulof, a director who had been arrested in 2010 by the Iranian government, at the same time as his better-known compatriot Jafar Panahi....
A popular trick among us film critics is to identify a given film as “really” a Western, wherever in the world it’s set, and particularly if it takes place in the present. It usually requires just a few recognizable genre elements: a stretch of sunbaked landscape, some equally weather-beaten faces, and the odd horse always helps. A second level to this parlor game involves fitting the right national food to the film....
Meeting Gorbachev (Werner Herzog and André Singer, 2018) What becomes a legend most? These days, an interview with someone equally legendary. It will probably depend on your age, and your sense of the comparative importance of cinema and the real world, whether you think the true legend featured in this week’s film is Werner Herzog or Mikhail Gorbachev. It should be said that Meeting Gorbachev, a documentary by the German director and André Singer, gives us relatively little of Herzog’s now trademark idiosyncrasy, which has been a little distracting in some of his recent work....
In July last year, Bülent Arınç, Turkey’s deputy prime minister, gave a speech on moral decline, in which he declared that women “should not laugh loudly in front of all the world.” It’s presumably his voice that is heard on TV in the Turkish film Mustang, insisting that “women should be chaste and pure and know their limits.” Arınç’s harangue resulted in thousands of Turkish women going online to post photos and videos of themselves laughing; now there’s an extended riposte to the attitudes he represents in this striking debut feature by Deniz Gamze Ergüven....
The expanses of the Old West can hardly have been a joyous place for anyone, but over the last couple of decades, several films have focused on showing how brutal the frontier was for women. Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff and the poignant Zoe Kazan showcase in the Coens’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs have shown women’s physical and spiritual endurance tested to the limit during the pioneer experience, while Tommy Lee Jones’s The Homesman showed women driven mad by that life....
“Ragnarok” in Norse mythology essentially means the end of the world, the ultimate battle, the twilight of the gods—the whole apocalyptic shebang, basically. As usual in a Marvel movie, the stakes are as big as they can conceivably be—and yet what makes Thor: Ragnarok stand out is that it is a bit of a throwaway sideshow, a flip divertissement that seems to cheerfully mark time before the three-ring circus of next year’s Avengers: Infinity War (a film that it’s safe to assume will be neither flip nor remotely throwaway)....
The heroine of Mike Leigh’s wonderfully subtle and relentlessly harrowing new film is a cheerful, compactly built middle-aged woman who spends her waking hours in perpetual motion. Indeed, the first thing one might notice about Vera Drake is her gait. She seems to have arrived, likely early in life, at the simplest and most reliable method of moving forward while transferring weight from one leg to the other. Compared with the way most people propel themselves about the world, this is a remarkable accomplishment....
Whether you find them to be chauvinistic, culture-poaching typists or essential reading for youthful self-discovery, it’s incredibly difficult to find anything new to say about the Beats. And while Richard Lerner and Lewis MacAdams’s 1986 What Happened to Kerouac? will only serve to reinforce either view of their work and influence, its comprehensiveness and clean construction make it a must-see for anyone interested in documentary filmmaking. Comprised of archival interviews, slurred television appearances, and minimal scrolling text, the narrative circles from the booze-soaked, puffy-faced end of Kerouac’s life back to his glorious late nights in Times Square....
War Book Folded into a programming strand called “Everyday Propaganda,” War Book—a kammerspiel if you liked it, and a filmed play if you didn’t—locks us in a conference room with a group of British government officials and ministerial aides convened for a three-session rehearsal of an imaginary scenario for World War III as it unfolds day by day. In this case it’s triggered by a nuclear strike on India by Islamic militants affiliated with Pakistan....
Fantozzi Except for a few brief notices in the trades, the death of Italian actor Paolo Villaggio on July 3 went virtually unnoticed outside of his native country. In Italy, news of his passing sent shockwaves through the national conscious with a magnitude that is in itself revealing. An unofficial national day of mourning was observed with quasi-religious devotion in a country notoriously split on pretty much everything. Images of his face adorned the front pages of all national newspapers; heartfelt homages and teary farewells pervaded online media; literary magazines published erudite dissections of his cultural significance....
Histoire(s) du cinema: chapitre 2 (Jean-Luc Godard, 1997) For the Art and Craft department in Film Comment’s May-June 2020 issue, Manu Yáñez Murillo wrote about subtitling, interviewing Darcy Paquet, subtitler for Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, the films of Hong Sangsoo, and many others. He also interviewed Andrew Litvack, who has subtitled for Jean-Luc Godard and Olivier Assayas. Litvack here details the give-and-take with filmmakers that is involved with subtitles, as well as reflecting on his practice....
As in Idi Amin, Schroeder’s probing, disquieting portrait in The Venerable W. allows his subject to speak for himself—no editorializing is required to drive home the ruthless bigotry of a man who, in the film’s opening scene, compares Muslims to a species of over-breeding catfish. Canny juxtapositions emphasize the film’s central contradiction—the idea of a “violent Buddhist”—but Schroeder is keenly attuned to the fact that this irony is largely a consequence of the Western tendency to paint Eastern religions in broad, fetishistic strokes....
In Jackie Goss’s 2007 short Stranger Comes to Town, the director repeats the axiom that there are only two stories in the world: man goes on a journey, and stranger comes to town. In her latest work, The Observers, the town is the stranger—a mountaintop observatory—in a film that approaches everything from the location’s point of view. The humans in The Observers are Dani Leventhal and Katya Gorker, Goss’s assistants who perform the duties of actual Mount Washington Weather Observatory scientists....
Film Comment spoke with Lertxundi by phone about what she learned from Thom Andersen, her music obsession, and her search for an embodied cinema. 025 Sunset Red I’ve been curious about your path from Spain to Los Angeles, and how you got into filmmaking. I was really into music and photography and art in general growing up. Not really so much into film. I wasn’t drawn to narrative film, and I hadn’t seen any other kind growing up in the Basque Country....
In her documentary Anton’s Right Here, featured in this year’s New Directors / New Films, Russian film critic Lyubov Arkus reflects upon the challenges of looking after an autistic boy. She spoke with FILM COMMENT about her subject’s special connection with the camera and the impact of filming on the boy (and his father). Each time we hear Anton say “Anton’s right here,” it’s in a very different context. What range of meanings did the line have for you, and how does it reflect the film’s overall project?...
Images from The Treehouse (Trương Minh Quý, 2019) To the disappointment of his parents, Trương Minh Quý quit film school in 2008 to pursue independent production. He went on to complete nine shorts and two features, and in August, the 29-year-old director returned to Locarno to present his latest film in the Filmmakers of the Present section. The Tree House is set in 2045, about 33 million miles away on Mars, which is now occupied by humans....
I first encountered Serbian filmmaker Ognjen Glavonic through his nonfiction film, Depth Two (2016), which screened in the Balkan competition at Dokufest, the Kosovo-based documentary festival. It was a screening of uncommon gravity, considering the location, and uncommon bravery, considering the taboo nature of its subject. Visually comprised of modern-day images captured at Kosovar and Serbian sites tracing a 1999 atrocity and its cover-up (coterminous with the last days of the Balkan wars and the NATO bombings), and accompanied by audio testimony by witnesses, perpetrators and survivors, Depth Two is a staggering work of moral exhumation....
All images from Babyteeth (Shannon Murphy, 2019) Despite whatever you might presuppose about a film centered on an ill teenager who falls hard for a rakish 23-year-old drug addict, Shannon Murphy’s Babyteeth is a sprightly and electric debut feature. Written by playwright Rita Kalnejais, it’s a funny and formidable chronicle of the moment-to-moment negotiations in a family making the most of a closing window. The Australian ensemble is terrific: Eliza Scanlen (soon to be seen as Beth in Little Women) poignant as Milla, the sick teen; Essie Davis and Ben Mendelsohn both excellent as Milla’s parents; and the elastically energetic Toby Wallace as the interloper, Moses, a role that earned him the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Actor in Venice, where the film had its world premiere in competition....
Love Letter Born in 1963, Japanese writer-director Shunji Iwai first drew attention through offbeat television dramas like Ghost Soup. But his breakthrough feature was Love Letter (1995), an international success that received a U.S. release under the title When I Close My Eyes. Love Letter has many of the hallmarks of Iwai’s style: sweeping camera movements tied to formal framing; a score mixing rhapsodic pop with classical themes; a storyline that breaks into unexpected tangents; and jarring shifts in tone from comedy to cruelty and hopelessness....
