Serra sat down with FILM COMMENT at Cannes shortly after The Death of Louis XIV premiered as an Out of Competition selection to talk about his unique on-set process, his film’s more restrained tone, and working with one of French cinema’s most beloved actors. You once described your previous film, Story of My Death [13], as “unfuckable.” Your new film, The Death of Louis XIV, isn’t all that difficult by comparison....
By the end of the summer of 1967, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde would rewrite the rules for onscreen violence in American movies, and Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night would take Hollywood’s depiction of race relations to a place it had never quite gone before. But 50 years ago this month—before either of those two films were released—Robert Aldrich helped, in a way, to prepare audiences for both of them....
The title and the epigraph alone—Godard’s “cinema lies, sport doesn’t”—suggest an array of Gallic musings about athletics. When writer-director Julien Faraut tells us he put together this documentary from 16mm rushes shot for the French Sports Institute (INSEP) at the 1980-1984 French Opens, we fear we may get a dry technical critique of an idiosyncratic tennis genius. But to borrow the subtitle from Willa Cather’s story “Paul’s Case,” John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection turns out to be an extraordinary “study in temperament....
What’s astonishing about Isabel Coixet’s Learning to Drive, a fictional rendering of Katha Pollitt’s personal essay of the same name, is the way the film turns Pollitt’s wry, feminist take on the breakup of a seven-year relationship into a victim fable. The Pollitt character, Wendy Shields (Patricia Clarkson), remains a woman of letters. She’s a New York–based literary critic rather than a leftist columnist and poet like Pollitt. Unfortunately, she composes just one withering review of her former mate, Ted (Jake Weber): she says that Ted’s next woman should get ready to support him because he hasn’t been able to win tenure in 20 years....
Images from Like a Boss (Miguel Arteta, 2020) “Good ideas do not come to me if they are forced,” says Tiffany Haddish as a natural born cosmetics whiz in Like a Boss. Haddish should apply that precious wisdom to her movies. Almost everything about Like a Boss is contrived and labored. From the opening scene of Haddish, as Mia Carter, recounting her latest sex dream to her best friend, housemate, and business partner Mel Paige (Rose Byrne), to the final shot of the two screaming “We did it” as their new makeup company “Proud” goes international, Like a Boss means to celebrate the potent beauty of sorority....
Manglehorn When an actor in his early prime rights himself from a tailspin, tastemakers are quick to embrace him as a comeback kid and then “brand” the phenomenon. Ben Affleck suddenly became “a Renaissance man” for directing Gone Baby Gone and Argo. Matthew McConaughey, after Mud, Magic Mike, and Dallas Buyers Club, enjoyed his “McConaissance.” When one of acting’s elder statesmen begins to get not just a second or third but a fourth or fifth wind, his resurgence fails to rouse the same excitement....
In The Sisters Brothers—a violent, whimsical, transfixing, and ultimately moving Western—frontier assassins Charlie and Eli Sisters, played with deadpan bravura by Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly (respectively), are as droll as Reilly and Will Ferrell in Step Brothers. They’re odd-couple hit men: a sober gentle giant (Reilly’s Eli) and a seething alcoholic killer (Phoenix’s Charlie). Phoenix, an old pro at inchoate turmoil, proves that he can be scary-funny, not just one or the other, especially when he toys with people who double-cross him or think they can give him the jitters....
For all of their technical brilliance, the vast majority of Hollywood’s animated features are weighed down by scripts that couldn’t possibly appeal to anyone of driving age or older. For more thoughtful and nuanced feature-length animation aimed at a broader age group, one has to look overseas for the most part. However, relatively few international animated films are released here, which doesn’t leave much to choose from in compiling a best-of-the-year list....
Pablo’s Winter On a gorgeous Saturday afternoon in late September, I was second-guessing my choice to remain in the faintly mildewed Bay View Cinema in Camden, Maine while a delicious, mid-60s breeze was drifting in from the Atlantic outside. The film up on the screen had already played at numerous festivals since its premiere back in March, rendering it unlikely to be worth the real estate in my festival coverage, and thus in direct competition with the formidable specter of that mid-60s breeze, not to mention the fresh shellfish that never seemed more than a few feet away....
The Most Beautiful Country in the World “Can we have truth with images?” James Benning asked this to his audience at the 16th edition of the Doclisboa documentary film festival, after the screening of his new film, L. Cohen, presented in a double bill with his earlier work measuring change (2016). Both movies—the first capturing a two-minute full eclipse of the sun, plus 20 minutes before and after it, and the second dedicated to Robert Smithson’s famous landscape artwork Spiral Jetty—deal with how our notion of narrative time becomes diffused when we lack physical markers, such as a human figure, movement, or changes in light....
In 2016, an Icelandic fishing trawler brought up four reels of muck-covered film from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The find was tailor-made for Bill Morrison, the poet laureate of distressed celluloid, who that same year released Dawson City: Frozen Time, an enthralling cinematic essay about a cache of silent movies unearthed from the Yukon’s permafrost. In this case, the waterlogged reels proved to be no lost masterpiece, but a popular, though critically derided, Soviet film called The Village Detective (1969), a vehicle for the prolific actor Mikhail Zharov....
Images from Chalk (Rob Nilsson, 1996) Chalk is an exciting rediscovery—a crackling, nervy gem from what now seems like a very distant era. Except that it’s not from the era you might assume on first sight. Rob Nilsson’s film was made in 1996 (although it wasn’t released in the U.S. till 2000), but has the distinct look and feel of a film from the mid-’80s, with its intense colors and glaring neons, and the heightened melodramatic register of some scenes....
Late in the five-hour-and-20-minute Indian crime epic Gangs of Wasseypur, the elderly politician and crime lord Ramadhir Singh (Tigmanshu Dhulia) asks his minions why they think he is still alive when so many of his contemporaries and their would-be successors have wound up dead. The reason, he explains: “Because I don’t watch Bollywood movies.” All his friends, he says, wanted to be the veteran screen actor Dilip Kumar, while later generations of men fancied themselves as stars Amitabh Bachchan, Salman Khan, or Sanjay Dutt, and it led them to ruin....
At least since D.A. Pennebaker’s Dylan portrait Don’t Look Back, it has been understood that the real performance moments in a music documentary don’t happen on stage. They take place behind the scenes, in the dressing room, where the artist doesn’t let slip the mystique slip, but instead simply mounts a different kind of show: a heightened display of the “real” self for the camera’s benefit. We get a fair few such moments in Sophie Fiennes’s Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami, in which, as you might expect, the singer treats us to one or two regal snits....
Green Book is a road trip into another era, in more ways than one. It’s a quietly mischievous comedy-drama about race, unimpeachably well-meaning in an old-fashioned way—but something of a benign dinosaur in the age of Get Out, BlacKkKlansman, and Sorry to Bother You. Directed by Peter Farrelly, half of the fraternal team behind such artfully lunkish ’90s farces as Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something About Mary, and Kingpin, the film is based on the experiences of an Italian nightclub bouncer, and later, occasional movie actor, called Frank Vallelonga (aka “Tony Lip”), who in the early ’60s was hired as chauffeur and road manager to jazz pianist Dr....
The ideal viewer of The Future Perfect, best placed to pick up all the nuances of its dialogue, would be a fluent speaker of both Mandarin and Argentinian-accented Spanish. For the rest of us, Nele Wohlatz’s concise but rich comedy is one of those films in which subtitles truly come into their own. In one scene, heroine Xiaobin (Xiaobin Zhang) finally opens up and tells her suitor Vijay exactly what’s on her mind: “I don’t know if you’re the person you say you are....
Llyn Foulkes One Man Band “Artists are all egomaniacs,” comments the subject of Llyn Foulkes One Man Band, a documentary by Tamar Halpern and Chris Quilty. It’s no slur on Foulkes to say that he’s no exception (he certainly comes across as volubly, even morbidly preoccupied with his own life and travails). But all artists? What about the kind that attempt to dissolve or conceal their ego in their art, even detach their self from the finished product altogether?...
(click to enlarge) J-L Godard13 rue NicoloParis 16e Dear Morris Engel, I am very much sorry for not having written to you sooner. Unfortunately, I have been kept busy by the editing of my last movie; and I won’t be able to come to N-York to discuss with you for the camera before two or three months. So I am sending to you Raoul Coutard, my operator, who will, if you agree, just have a look on your camera from his technical point of you....
