What we call popular culture is, to a certain extent, a collective delusion, in which prognosticators, using sheer guesswork, assign importance to the herd movement of audiences and critics as being indicative of trends. Special priority is attributed to properties whose only measurable intrinsic worth, putting aside the intangible that is “quality,” is the financial investment that’s been made in them, all of this ineffably influenced by the shadowy machinations of PR....
The Judge What do (500) Days of Summer, The Men Who Stare at Goats, In Bruges, Safe House, Snow White and the Huntsman, Draft Day, The Judge, Bad Teacher, and 47 Ronin all have in common? If you answered, “They are all poor-to-awful movies,” you would be correct. If you answered, “They all appeared on the Hollywood Black List,” ditto. Amid the crowded field of meaningless distinctions that we call “awards season,” The Black List is a fair contender for the most meaningless of all, for it confers honors onto movies which don’t yet exist, like a Most Beautiful Baby contest honoring promising zygotes....
Competition Palme d’Or: The Square, Ruben Östlund At the post-awards press conference, Almodóvar praised the “brilliant” film for taking on “the dictatorship of being politically correct,” which he decried as being just as awful as any actual dictatorship. That jived with my grumblings about the film’s reactionary bent and, together with the screening of Twin Peaks at the festival, confirmed that it was 1990 again. At the ceremony a few moments before, Östlund directed the audience—which perhaps awkwardly included other filmmakers up for the same prize—in a group “scream of happiness....
Beyond the adrenaline-spiking action sequences, what lies at the heart of Winocour’s formal exercise is the psychological reality of a man who lives with the constant burden of fear and anxiety. Hers is a cinema of perceptions that immerses the audience in a cathartic experience in which the boundaries between imagination and reality are continuously blurred in the most Lynchian way. FILM COMMENT spoke with Winocour in Cannes about Antonioni’s influence on Disorder and her sensorial approach to cinema....
Wonderstruck premiered in competition on the second day of the Cannes Film Festival. It tells the parallel stories of two deaf preteens—one living in 1927 and the other in 1977—who embark on solitary adventures to New York City, seeking truths about their personal pasts. They ultimately find answers and inspiration at the American Museum of Natural History. Dioramas inside that museum play a key narrative role, as does the Queens Museum’s Panorama of the City of New York—a miniature model of the city built for the 1964 World’s Fair that becomes the centerpiece of a stunning, handcrafted sequence....
Why should every manner of director hanker to make movies that are “character-driven”? What a terrible phrase that is! It makes drama feel like heavy labor. Nearly every interview with writer-director James Gunn hails him for turning Guardians of the Galaxy into a “character-driven” sequel. But who goes to see a Guardians of the Galaxy movie for deeply motivated characters? Gunn has cited Mike Hodges’s giddily beautiful Flash Gordon (1980) as a crucial inspiration, but I wouldn’t say Flash Gordon is packed with character....
For Barry Levinson’s nimble, big-hearted comedy-drama Rock the Kasbah, writer Mitch Glazer has come up with Bill Murray’s richest role in years, one that exploits the comedian’s love of tawdry old-time show biz and rejuvenates him at the same time. The result is a frisky, inventive, and endearing performance in a movie that is, like its lead character, full of surprises. As Richie Lanz, a one-time rock tour manager who sees himself as an inspired agent/manager and signs up with his protégé for a USO tour to Afghanistan, Murray displays the ability to think on his feet and on his back and in all postures in-between....
“I couldn’t relate to the characters.” That statement is probably the fastest way to get me to stop reading a review with interest and switch to hatefully skimming it. Why not save yourself and everyone else a couple hundred words and simply write: “I am unwilling or unable to step outside of my limited, lived experience for 90 minutes”? (It reminds me of Louis CK’s response when his daughters complain about being bored: “You live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of....
Letters to Max The shift in status of the term “avant-garde” from noun to mere adjective (“avant-garde poetics”) in the festival-within-a-festival’s self-definition may be indicative of change, as is this year’s co-programming threesome (veteran Gavin Smith, Dennis Lim, and Aily Nash), for the first time including a woman. The lack of attention to truly unconventional and experimental works given by most major U.S. film festivals puts a lot of pressure on NYFF to be both exhaustive and innovative, and over the years “Views” had been both lauded and damned for such ambitions....
The Shape of Water Press screenings at the Venice International Film Festival take place primarily in two buildings on the Lido, the Palazzo del Cinema and the Palazzo del Casino. These were built in 1937 and 1938 respectively (in record time, the festival website points out), and the Casino’s majestic halls and windows can put you in mind of The Conformist as you dash off an email among ever-replenished legions of European journalists....
Flashmob—that’s the title of the next Michael Haneke film, which will start shooting this summer. It’s a multi-character drama partly set in the U.S., and deals with what Haneke describes as “the fragile relationship between media and reality,” and focuses on a number of people who meet through the Internet, with their disparate stories brought together at the end by a flash mob … Derek Cianfrance is reeling in Michael Fassbender for the lead in The Light Between Oceans, an adaptation of M....
Coconut Head Generation (Alain Kassanda, 2023) Alain Kassanda’s observational documentary Coconut Head Generation opens with a newsreel from 1952 documenting the inauguration of Nigeria’s first university, the University of Ibadan (UI), unveiled by Lord Tedder, then the chancellor of the University of Cambridge. Some 67 years later, this relic of British imperialism would begin fraying at the seams, propelling Nigerian youth to rise up against the state violence becoming increasingly pervasive on and off campus....
The announcement follows a months-long hiatus prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic and the efforts of Film at Lincoln Center, the magazine’s publisher, to ensure the organization’s long-term financial viability. FLC’s theaters remain closed, but resuming the publication of Film Comment has long been a priority of the organization and its staff. “We are so thrilled to bring Film Comment back!” said Publisher Eugene Hernandez. “It has been such a challenging year and although so much remains uncertain, we know that there has been a glaring absence in our film community without Film Comment’s essential critical voice....
Belluscone: A Sicilian Story Some of the most intriguing titles in this year’s edition of Film Comment Selects—which begins this Friday and runs through March 5—resist easy categorization and prefer to flirt with two or three genres at a time. There’s enough song, dance, and glitz in Belluscone: A Sicilian Story, for example, to justify calling it some kind of musical-essay, but director Franco Maresco, who began filming the documentary in 2011, is more interested in a different kind of show business: the sleazy populism of Italian politics....
Never mind being naïve enough to imagine ever seeing a film that will change the world, but even the most hardened critics, in their heart of hearts, come to Cannes with the dream at the back of their minds that at some point, we’ll see one film that will at least change cinema. Most years, that dream is pretty comprehensively disappointed, and this year it has indeed been disappointed day after day, in a festival that offered the most mundane official selection in recent memory....
For me, watching Eric Rohmer’s 1984 film Full Moon in Paris—Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune, re-released this week—was a pure dose of that fabled malady, Proustian Rush. This is one of those Rohmer films that capture their particular moment perfectly, in this case 1980s Paris in its high phase of post-modernist chic. You might think of Rohmer as a quintessential Sixties and early-Seventies director because of his Moral Tales series, but for me he embodies French cinema in the Eighties....
Just under a year ago, the Chilean feature Gloria became what you’d have to call the feel-good hit of an otherwise glum Berlinale competition. Any film that ends with its heroine on the dance floor, getting down to what’s effectively her own disco theme song, is bound to come across as feel-good one way or another—although as upbeat endings go, Gloria’s is deliciously slow-burn and more than tinged with ambivalence....
Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 is one of the legendary “impossible objects” of modern cinema, and for a long time was one of the great (almost) unseen films. The result of six weeks’ shooting and six months’ editing, it was originally shown only once, in a work print, in Le Havre in September 1971 (reputedly, the projector broke down). It later resurfaced in the late Eighties and early Nineties, and has even become available on DVD, but there’s no substitute for immersing yourself in a big-screen projection, which is now possible thanks to the film’s restoration....
I can’t remember when a film last gave me such a surge of pure pleasure—no, outright euphoria—as The Great Beauty. I’ve always been partial to the baroque, crazily exuberant imagination of Italian director Paolo Sorrentino, even when his films are as infuriatingly undisciplined as his last, the self-consciously oddball road movie This Must Be The Place (11). But The Great Beauty—in Italian, more musically and abstractly titled La grande bellezza—sees Sorrentino ramping up his customary excess and taking it genuinely into the realms of the sublime....
