A stark, wrenching, and overwhelming viewing experience, shot in a cinema vérité style that becomes increasingly fragmented as events accelerate, United 93 is a film of two interwoven parts; its first half is primarily concerned with depicting what went wrong on the ground, offering a riveting and meticulous inside view of the appalled helplessness of those manning the Eastern Seaboard’s air-traffic-control system and the failure of the air defense chain-of-command....
Our current cover features the fractured image of Honor Swinton Byrne, star of Joanna Hogg’s loosely autobiographical The Souvenir, in which she plays a young film student engulfed by a difficult relationship. In an interview for BOMB, Hogg explains that she began planning the story in 1988, “around three years after the experience itself ended,” and details the dilemma of confronting her younger self, as both “pre-career filmmaker” and “rough subject of the film....
Martín Rejtman Four years after the release of Two Shots Fired, Martín Rejtman is in preproduction on his next feature film, a comedy called La práctica (roughly, “The Practice”). The story of an Argentinian yoga teacher who lives and works in Santiago, Chile, allows Rejtman, a key figure in the New Argentine Cinema, to explore his country’s identity against a different national backdrop. “La prática will be my first film shot outside Argentina, with an Argentinian protagonist played by Esteban Bigliardi, but the rest of the cast is mostly Chilean,” Rejtman told Film Comment....
Last Flag Flying (Darryl Ponicsan) After his agent suggested he write a sequel to his 1970 novel, The Last Detail, Darryl Ponicsan speculated on where he might find his trio of Navy vets in the early Bush era. The result, his 2003 novel Last Flag Flying, bears an oblique connection to the Robert Towne/Hal Ashby version of The Last Detail. “Otis Young, who played Mulhall in the original, left films to become a preacher, and then he died young,” Ponicsan, 79, said in an interview after Richard Linklater’s adaptation of the book had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival....
Regardless of whether you love him, hate him, or are completely unaware of him, Tsui Hark remains the most important Chinese film director working today. He burst onto the scene as part of the Eighties New Wave1, and has since made 54 features, 31 as director, and produced blockbusters in every genre known to man. In the process he has lit up most of the stars in the Hong Kong heavens (John Woo, Chow Yun-fat, Jet Li, Brigitte Lin, and Ching Siu-tung all owe their careers to Tsui)....
Two scruffy drifters climb up a bluff on a stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway in the opening shot of Leslie Stevens’s Private Property. Where did they come from? Who knows. Behind them, their beach footprints lead straight into the ocean. All monsters should come crawling out of nowhere like Duke (Corey Allen) and Boots (Warren Oates), then stroll across the road and extort some orange pop and a pack of Viceroys from the first human they encounter—a gas station attendant who refuses to meet their eyes....
Unlike the cinema, the theater has long been a queer safe space. So it’s unsurprising, perhaps, that a majority of the most sympathetic queer films from the mid- to late 20th century originated on the stage. However primitive aspects of them may seem from our ostensibly more enlightened vantage point in 2018, such plays-turned-movies as The Children’s Hour, Tea and Sympathy, The Boys in the Band, and The Dresser (leaving aside the repressed queers of Tennessee Williams for now) all risked alienating the mainstream in ways that most films do not, simply by virtue of having gay characters in central roles....
A History of Violence (#1) “The great thing about this movie was the experience it invited. To watch the visceral violence unfold and listen to the audience cheer only to soon begin moaning and then go silent brought the theme of this movie to life in a way few films can ever achieve.” —Hans Morgenstern, Miami “Radically re-envisioning elements of High Noon and Out of the Past, violence metastasizes outward from the initiating diner bloodbath, igniting the destructive impulses swimming just below placid surfaces, finally contacting the viewer through a classicist’s fusion of the visceral and the suggestive....
Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video By Peter Alilunas University of California Press Less and less does cinema live exclusively in the movie theater. Despite the relative boom of repertory theaters in metropolitan enclaves, the temptation of streaming services, bootlegged torrents, or DVD/Blu-ray means that viewers—especially if their visual appetites deviate from the norm—have other options. Orthodox film scholarship still remains overwhelmingly committed to tracing the lineage of the Hollywood studio system or the European art movie, leaving many varieties of moving images on the periphery....
When a muezzin call echoes over a black pre-title screen, you know you’re engaged with that top-shelf Hollywood product, the 21st-century war film. Beneath the amplified Arabic chant, a subsonic throb morphs into the rumble of an Abrams tank that appears on screen, up close, from the perspective of the Marines moving warily alongside it down a debris-strewn city corridor, preparing to breach a cinderblock housing complex. Street tension cuts to watchful repose on a nearby rooftop where Navy Seal Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) cradles a long-barreled, sound-suppressor-tipped M40 rifle....
Combining documentary and fable, Le quattro volte depicts life in an unnamed hilltop town in Calabria, Italy’s southernmost region. The village is surrounded by a vast tract of forested countryside that beautifies and isolates in equal measure. Nature here is not the stuff of bucolic idylls but rather as Hayao Miyazaki conceives it: imposing and awe-inspiring. Quietly and with formal rigor, Michelangelo Frammartino’s film observes the community’s daily labors and religious ceremonies, using stationary long shots and extended takes that allow the pastoral beauty and the inhabitants’ rural practices to speak for themselves....
Installation view of Neighboring Animals (Mary Helena Clark, 2024). Photo: Gregory Carideo. Courtesy of Bridget Donahue Gallery. Over the last decade, a tendency has appeared within the field of “artists’ moving image” that might be called “writers’ moving image.” Across festivals and gallery spaces, language, whether as text or speech, is found time and again layered atop montage-based work. Within this subset, Mary Helena Clark is exemplary, if atypical: her words serve to complicate her pictures, in contrast to the more common approach of using language to close down the available meaning of images in the name of discursive certainty....
Early on a frigid Valentine’s morning in some desolate village within the Ontario hinterland, talk radio DJ Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) is assailed by an unidentified woman while driving to work. She slaps his car window and utters something indistinct before slipping right back into the wintry wee-hour darkness. In a movie founded on the precarious shortcomings of language, this inciting incident with a seemingly urgent yet indecipherable apparition is all too apt....
With its nocturnal outcasts coolly roaming semi-industrial streets and transfigured by music, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night begs comparison to Jim Jarmusch. Yet its simmering sense of discontent and alienation—inspired by director Ana Lily Amirpour’s own dissociative feelings while wearing a chador on a previous shoot—expand into a subtle commentary on sexual politics in Iran. Lawn worker Arash (Arash Marandi) feels crushed by the weight of the country’s patriarchy, though not as one might expect: he takes care of his father, a widowed heroin addict deeply in debt to drug dealer Saeed (Dominic Rains)....
When the title of your movie recalls Walter Hill’s The Driver, and the font on the poster references the one for Michael Mann’s Thief, you’re setting high expectations in the cool-masculinity-professionalism department. But the director of the Pusher trilogy and a movie about Vikings has never been at a loss for movie-movie swagger, even if the success of his films leans heavily on the sustaining of trance-like states more than moviemaking chops....
The problems with Lukas Moodysson’s first film in English (plus Thai and Tagalog) cannot be ascribed to language barriers. He’s fluent in English, and made the unforgettable Lilya 4-Ever (02) without speaking a word of Russian, demonstrating he’s exempt from that particular handicap. The real trouble with Mammoth is that Moodysson, more practiced in subtlety than he’s given credit for, exhibits none here. He labors to make a point, and his take on globalism and its effects on modern family life lacks the heart and emotional complexity that distinguish his early features Show Me Love (98) and Together (00)....
