Before My Heart Falls Sébastien Rose, Canada Cherchez Hortense Pascal Bonitzer, France Su Re Giovanni Columbu, Italy Fat Shaker Mohammad Shirvani, Iran Roland Hassel Måns Månsson, Sweden The Complex Hideo Nakata, Japan Drug War Johnnie To, Hong Kong Lesson of the Evil Takashi Miike, Japan A City Is Blackmailed Dominik Graf, 2006 Easy Rider James Benning, U.S
“EEEWWoaoaoaaaaooooonnnnaaaaaeeeeyyyiiiiiiAAAAAAAYYYaaahhhhhhhhhhgggaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaa…” “This one line of dialogue goes on for about the last 23 minutes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (aka ’Saw 1), ”says Tobe Hooper, who directed it. “It covers the infamous, excruciating Dinner Table Sequence (which was filmed nonstop for 36 hours straight until the last pennies of the $160,000 budget ran out). It may be the longest solid scream-track ever to shake out darkened American movie houses....
In Hollywood, nothing is ever as it seems. Reading the year-end reports, one could be forgiven for concluding that 2002 was a very good year. Overall box office was at a record high, and it seemed like just about every weekend brought another blockbuster to a rabid audience. The only problem with this assessment, however, is that it is dead wrong. Sure, there were a number of extremely profitable films released this year....
The Swap and How They Make It In some small way, however, I was also a part of the Kim’s story. I was an assistant manager at the chain’s location at 85 Avenue A in the East Village, up until a week before its closing in fall of 2004, almost 10 years ago. The Avenue A store had first opened in 1987, when the side business in video rentals that Korean businessman Youngman Kim—I never knew anyone to call him anything other than “Mr....
A Provincial Hospital (Ilian Metev, Ivan Chertov, and Zlatina Teneva; 2022) Karlovy Vary is a distinctive setting for a film festival. Located about 60 miles west of Prague, the green, heavily forested Czech spa city features long rows of colorful, picturesque buildings clustered like flowers along either side of the river Teplá. In the center of town is the Hotel Thermal, an imposing concrete complex that has been the main site of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival since 1977....
Childhood of a Leader To gain an understanding of the impact of Scott Walker’s music, a brief rundown of his acolytes is telling: his famous devotees include David Bowie, Brian Eno, Jarvis Cocker of Pulp, Johnny Marr of The Smiths, Radiohead, and Nick Cave. Drawing little from his contemporaries, Walker’s few influences make fractured appearances in his solo work, and hardly filter into his overall sound. His primary influence, which he has often cited, is not music but the cinema, his “first love” and the reason why he continues to “think in images” when he writes music....
Francesco Rosi’s 1979 adaptation of Christ Stopped at Eboli starts as Carlo Levi’s piercing threnody for the peasants of south-central Italy and ends as an intense celebration of the people who expanded his heart and thought. Sitting in his studio in Turin decades later, the grizzled, leonine anti-Fascist Carlo Levi (Gian Maria Volonte), reflects on his “internal exile” in 1935 to the remote region of Lucania for his opposition to Mussolini’s Abyssinian War....
Images from Good Boys (Gene Stupnitsky, 2019) Profanity and banality make for a joy-killing combination in Gene Stupnitsky’s sixth-grade, fourth-rate farce Good Boys. Its low-down high concept—“suburban tweens talk dirty”—wears out to the point that curse words function as white noise. Even the twist built into this concept—the kids don’t understand what they’re saying—rarely generates witty or felicitous lines, though I did like when the hero defined “nymphomaniac” as a woman who makes love on land and sea....
“We are obsessed with technique, hag-ridden by Facts, in love with information,” the seminal cultural critic Dwight Macdonald complained about his fellow Americans 58 years ago. Hollywood, he wrote, “gives us miracles in ‘authenticity’ of costume and furniture, all verified by experts, but doesn’t bother about the authenticity of the human beings who wear the costumes and sit on the period chairs, reversing Marianne Moore’s famous description of the poet as one who creates ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them....
Leaving the courthouse where he’s just been falsely charged with the assault of a student, Joe Pascale (David Oyelowo) has serious insult added to his already injured reputation: an angry mob of black people awaits. As he makes his exit he’s verbally abused and then pelted with a slimy red tomato-like object. Joe, the only black teacher in a school of predominantly black teenagers, is not having the best of days....
Item of the Week: Sad news from the world of motion pictures. Yesterday 35mm film projector manufacturer Kinoton announced they were dissolving the company effective immediately. This leaves only two companies standing: Italy’s Cinemeccanica and Japan’s Tokiwa … We’ve found out more about Mia Hansen-Løve’s Most-Likely-Coming-Soon-to-a-Film-Festival-on-the-Cote-D’Antibes project about the 1990s DJ scene, which was shooting last fall in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Eden is based on the experiences of the director’s brother Sven, a superstar of the “French Touch” DJ scene, who co-wrote the film....
Flashpoint William Tannen, 1984 Streaming on multiple platforms With an unbelievable cast and a healthy dose of paranoid politics, it’s a shame that this fun 1984 action flick isn’t better known. Kris Kristofferson stars as a typically grizzled border patrol agent who, with hot-head partner Treat Williams, discovers a half-buried jeep containing a corpse that just might be the real assassin of JFK. As the rebel cops creep closer to the truth—with help from wised-up sheriff Rip Torn and local girl Jean Smart—menacing government suits Miguel Ferrer and Kurtwood Smith descend and the bullets start flying....
The Seed of Man (Marco Ferreri, 1969) In Marco Ferreri’s bleak 1969 fantasy The Seed of Man, a young couple lead an eerily idyllic life in a remote beachside house after an apocalyptic event wipes out much of the population. The young man, Cino (Marco Margine), has created a museum filled with objects from the world that once was (including a record player and a large wheel of parmesan cheese); meanwhile, the young woman, Dora (Anne Wiazemsky), happily gives herself over to the day-to-day....
It would be a handy phrase to describe one of those elusive films that don’t quite congeal in ways that make stable sense: you could say such a film was “like Claire Denis in space.” And now, that’s what we’ve got: Claire Denis in space. High Life is Denis’s science fiction film—although it’s no more strictly an exercise in that genre than her Trouble Every Day was regular horror, her Bastards a by-the-book thriller, or Beau Travail a docudrama about the pressures of life in the modern Foreign Legion....
Michel Chion, the French theorist of sound in film, once said that he was unimpressed by the idea of Dolby stereo, until he realized that the technology introduced a new instrument into the “orchestra” of cinematic sound: silence. Very few films directly concern themselves with sound in film—in the sense that they are designed to be about listening as much as looking—and among that select number, even fewer are about the possibilities of silence, or even quiet....
The Gleaners & I Deep within the bohemian labyrinth of Paris’s Left Bank is an unobtrusive doorway that opens onto a narrow, leafy courtyard decorated with various objets the owner has collected during a half-century’s worth of filmmaking. Since the late Fifties, the rue Daguerre has been home and atelier to Agnès Varda, the place where she and husband Jacques Demy (who died in 1990) raised a family and produced their films....
