Markus Schleinzer’s directing credits are a mile long. Make that casting director’s credits, and make it some 45 titles (he’s 39). Notice the essential Michael Haneke films. Likewise one by Ulrich Seidl and most of Michael Glawogger. Consider the Austrian’s interest in work by artists who make films (Pipilotti Rist and Shirin Neshat). From these on-paper clues an aesthetic already emerges: coldness and cruelty with bursts of warmth and normalcy....
What made you begin the film as the story of a woman on a mission? I wanted the film to talk to the people I was talking about, and I wanted them to have a simple entrance into the movie in a more economic way: to have a character with a goal and a problem. And then I wanted the film to be about this movement of falling and coming back again....
Voice Over has its U.S. premiere tonight in Film Comment Selects at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, in addition to screening in the Miami International Film Festival. FILM COMMENT spoke with Jiménez, a writer turned filmmaker, last week. This seems like a very personal film. Yes, it’s a world that I know very well. I don’t know what to call it—it’s the small provincial bourgeoisie where there are certain hints of a connection to a global world or cosmopolitanism....
The first volume opens with Johnnie Mae (Grosvenor) in her nurse’s uniform being interviewed by Gunn (off-screen), reflecting on her youth in South Carolina, problems with her mother, and how she’s unhappy in Manhattan. From this meta-textual description of her “personal problems,” we’re haphazardly delivered into them: Johnnie Mae gossiping with her friends at brunch, spending quality time with a man who isn’t her husband, exasperatedly cleaning up after her family, and on her rounds at Harlem Hospital, tending to a young man (also originally from South Carolina) who has been shot....
In your director’s statement, you talk about a childhood memory of an ominous conversation: your great-aunt talking to someone who worked for her who may have killed someone. Does Cocote come out of that experience? There are a lot of violent stories in the Dominican Republic. It was not actually because of the violence in the story… What happened was, I went to a very proper film school in Buenos Aires—one that was not necessarily very interested in this type of film....
Nick Broomfield has come a long way from his first years as a documentary filmmaker in the early 1970s, when he made shorts about British housing projects and borrowed equipment from Frederick Wiseman and D.A. Pennebaker—although his crew is still distinctly small. Accompanied for decades by his former partner, frequent co-director and cinematographer Joan Churchill, Broomfield became infamous for blundering about in front of the camera wearing a pair of giant headphones and wielding a boom mike....
Antonio Banderas and Pedro Almodóvar on the set of Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodóvar, 2019) In his feature in the September-October 2019 issue of Film Comment, Michael Koresky writes: “Pedro Almodóvar leans into the pain with his new film Pain and Glory, his most autobiographical to date. Structurally, the genre is a no-brainer, perhaps, for a writer-director who has long preferred to tell stories centrifugally, spiraling out from a revelatory center rather than having finite beginnings and endings....
The 42-year-old Sydney Film School grad may be the last of the Australian New Wavers of the Seventies to make a big splash in America. Most of his contemporaries from Down Under—Peter Weir (Witness, Dead Poets Society), Fred Schepisi (Roxanne, A Cry in the Dark, The Russia House), George Miller (the Mad Maxes and Witches of Eastwick), Bruce Beresford (Tender Mercies), Gillian Armstrong (Mrs. Soffel)—rode the wave to Hollywood and made pictures for big American studios during the Eighties....
To consider Vittorio Storaro’s work is to journey through the history of modern cinema at its grandest. He has shaped the look of some of the most monumental films of the second half of the 20th century, including The Conformist (1970), Apocalypse Now (1976), Reds (1981), and The Last Emperor (1987). Indissociable from his collaborations with Bertolucci, Coppola, Warren Beatty, and Carlos Saura, Storaro’s vision of cinematography celebrates the union of opposites: day and night, life and death, good and evil....
“I think the movie’s so mysterious, it’s like a dream or something,” Kazan, 35, said in our interview at a Midtown hotel during the 56th New York Film Festival in October. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs—which opens November 9 in select theaters while streaming on Netflix—had its U.S. premiere in the main slate alongside Wildlife, which Kazan co-wrote with partner Paul Dano. Kazan’s comment about dreams (which followed the disarming admission that she had already read Film Comment’s feature on Ballad) led into an analysis of the Coens’ approach that deepened my appreciation for the film and how her own performance works in her story....
Both Sides of the Blade (Claire Denis, 2022) “There’s a breath to sentences,” Sara (Juliette Binoche) explains to her partner Jean (Vincent Lindon) late in Claire Denis’s Both Sides of the Blade. It’s a non sequitur, delivered in the heat of a lovers’ quarrel in which Jean has interrupted the flow of Sara’s exasperated explanations. But it also spells out a fundamental tension in the film and in much of Denis’s work: between language (and its logics) and the body, which is continually and imperfectly subject to language’s attempts to define and describe it....
Lost Souls (Hong Kong, 1980) Filmmaker T.F. Mous grabs your shoulders and screams in your face for 90 minutes in this all-you-can-eat buffet of human atrocities. A bunch of Mainland immigrants sneak into Hong Kong and immediately get abducted by human traffickers, then taken to a rape camp in the country where they are tortured, brutalized, and murdered. Shaw Brothers had no idea what they were getting into when they greenlit this one....
Solomon’s Perjury Part 1: Suspicion Forget splitting the last of the Harry Potter series into two parts, or the four-part Hunger Games trilogy. If you look at what’s coming out of Japan recently you’d think there’s no longer a story that can be contained in a single movie: Gantz (January 2011) and Gantz: Perfect Answer (April 2011); Parasyte: Part 1 (November 2014) and Parasyte: Part 2 (April 2015); Solomon’s Perjury Part 1: Suspicion (March 2015) and Solomon’s Perjury Part 2: Judgement (April 2015); Attack on Titan (August 2015) and Attack on Titan: End of the World (September 2015)....
Now it’s your turn to have a say. Did you think that Inside Llewyn Davis was just another soundtrack passed off as a movie by the Coen Brothers? Were you disturbed by the drugged-out sexploits of former Mouseketeers because Spring Breakers lacked critical distance? Inspired to redecorate your home after watching Stray Dogs? Or maybe you once again believed in the magic of cinema when Joaquin Phoenix fell in love with his phone?...
If familiarity breeds contempt, then it’s no wonder that it takes a Japanese tourist to find the romanticism in a no-bit dusty town like Littlerock, CA. It certainly wasn’t on the destination checklist for Atsuko (Atsuko Okatsuka) and her brother Rintaro (Rintaro Sawamoto), but one broken-down car and accidental party-crashing night later, the siblings find themselves enmeshed in a unique culture of distinctive pursuits. Which is to say: walking on train tracks, drinking in abandoned houses, and doing little else....
It Is Night in America (Ana Vaz, 2022) In a conversation at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, the filmmaker Helena Wittmann told me about a fascinating exchange she’d had with a frustrated audience member at the premiere of her new feature, Human Flowers of Flesh. The film returns to the sea-setting of Wittmann’s debut feature, Drift (2017), with the tale of a ship’s captain, Ida (Angeliki Papoulia), and her crew of five men as they sail across the Mediterranean Sea, loosely tracing the path of the French Foreign Legion....
Tangerine Despite the crowds of stargazing tourists, the swag hangouts, the age of the festival’s founder and elusive preeminence, and the experimental New Frontier section, which this year was almost entirely dedicated to virtual-reality installations, Sundance remains the premier hunting ground for American feature films. Part of the excitement is seeing the possibly next big thing in an actual theater, surrounded by viewers hoping to be not simply thrilled but surprised....
Buzzard, the new feature from Joel Potrykus (Coyote, 10; Ape, 12), follows Marty, a dead-eyed bank temp with a penchant for small-time scams. When he’s not bilking businesses out of their cash, Marty (Joshua Burge, haunting and charismatic) subsists on a diet of pizza, heavy metal music, and retro video games. After one of his schemes backfires, he hightails it to the home of his equally maladjusted co-worker Derek (Potrykus)....
