The English-language debut of the talented Icelander Dagur Kári (Noi the Albino) could pass for a movie made in the Seventies. It’s gritty, washed out, and largely driven by dialogue and character. And what characters! Brian Cox is perfectly cast as Jacques, a crude, hard-drinking, chain-smoking New York City bar owner on heart attack number five. (He too appears to be a relic of the Seventies: check out his car, rotary phone, and cassette player....
“Everyone has their price,” Sir Guy Grand (Peter Sellers) assures Youngman (Ringo Starr), the hirsute vagrant he’s plucked out of a park and made his heir. Establishing an instant rapport, the pair play increasingly complex pranks upon London’s unswinging posh set, culminating with the launch of The Magic Christian (a supposedly transatlantic luxury liner whose sham maiden voyage is afflicted by choppy seas, a drunken captain, and Yul Brynner in drag) and their inviting people to fish pound notes from a vat filled with feces, blood, and vomit....
Yet somehow I have always been open to, even excited by, the idea of streaming films—to my TV, to my laptop only when absolutely necessary, but never to my iPhone (not that I own one; people who “watch” any movie on such miniature screens should also have their gadgets confiscated and burned!)—and I spend a fair amount of time scouring online to see what’s out there. So many Netflix subscribers whine that there’s “nothing” to watch, though what they mean, nine times out of 10, is that there aren’t enough recent mainstream offerings to choose from....
Sidney Flanigan in Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Eliza Hittman, 2020) Eliza Hittman’s first two features, It Felt Like Love and Beach Rats, are evocative coming-of-age tales, attuned to the ways in which the pressures of gender and sexuality encroach, often destructively, upon adolescence. Her new film, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last weekend, starts off in similar territory: Autumn Callahan (Sidney Flanigan), a quiet, guarded high school senior in rural Pennsylvania, discovers that she is unexpectedly pregnant....
Alvarez Kelly opens with images of hieroglyphs conveying the ancient nature of human conflict, over which a narrator informs viewers that “in every war, in every age, the forgotten weapon is food… a herd of cattle is as vital as a herd of cannon.” It’s a slightly insecure way of justifying the ensuing film’s potentially mundane story of beef snatching, no small matter when it concerns 2,500 cattle and the survival of legions of hungry Union and Confederate soldiers in the latter days of the American Civil War....
One Potato, Two Potato The recent film Loving, about a mixed-race couple in 1960s Virginia and the Supreme Court case that ensured their freedom, presents a prime example of the straight-ahead message movie: unequivocal, unassailable, and unambiguous. As my colleague Michael Koresky notes in Film Comment, it belongs to a crop of 2016 movies backhandedly praised for their “old-fashioned storytelling.” Which is really to say that audiences numbed by the spectacular and synthetic soullessness of much current Hollywood product are wearily grateful for any film with its heart in the right place, even if it leaves out distinguishing details that would lend nuance to its characters and complicate its take-home lessons....
“[Sounder’s] was not an ordinary bark. It filled up the night and made music as though the branches of all the trees were being pulled across silver strings.” —William H. Armstrong, Sounder William H. Armstrong’s 1969 Newbery Medal–winning children’s book, Sounder, is only eight chapters long. Told from the perspective of a young boy, it’s written in a pared-down style that sings with a wild country poetry. The story follows a sharecropping family who falls on even harder times when “father” is busted for stealing a pig....
Images from They Were Expendable (John Ford, 1945) Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die. —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” Over and over again in John Ford’s gloomy, beautiful They Were Expendable, characters are told that no help is coming, no one will save them, they are on their own. The gigantic American war machine is in retreat, as one by one the islands of the Philippines are seized by the Japanese, leaving people stranded with no way out....
Coolie I love watching Amitabh Bachchan dance. Which is not to suggest that the most durable star in the history of Hindi cinema is celebrated for his fancy footwork. In fact, apart from his undoubted acting chops and the sheer force of his brooding masculine charisma, he is most fervently admired for his verbal gifts: the sonorous baritone that makes all his setpiece speeches sound like Mosaic proclamations, and the flair for mimicry he exploits as one of the first Bollywood actors to adopt authentic Bombay street slang in his gangster roles....
On today’s episode, our second from Berlin, FC Editor Devika Girish is joined by critics Erika Balsom, Giovanni Marchini Camia, and Beatrice Loayza to talk about the political situation in Germany and how it’s affecting the festival, before digging into films including Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor’s No Other Land, Dimitris Athiridis’s exergue – on documenta 14, Bruno Dumont’s The Empire, Ruth Beckermann’s Favoriten, and Diop’s Dahomey....
Links & Things Irma Vep (1996) on the Criterion Channel Irma Vep (2022) on HBO Max The Rehearsal (2022) on HBO Max Richard Brody on The Rehearsal in the New Yorker Adam Nayman on The Rehearsal in the Toronto Star
We sat down with critics So Mayer and Sarah Fonseca to talk about the ways in which these films reflect on questions of labor, representation, performance, and care. The conversation quickly branched out to many more films, including Leilah Weinraub’s Shakedown, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai, Antonio Pietrangeli’s Adua and Her Friends, Fassbinder’s Querelle, and others. Links & Things: “Working Girls: Have You Ever Heard of Surplus Value?” by So Mayer for The Criterion Collection Tsai Ming-liang on Days in Film Comment “Joy Girls” by Sarah Fonseca and Jillian McManemin in Field Notes Lucid Noon Sunset Blush, a short film by Alli Logout Shakedown (Leilah Weinraub, 2018) Flowers of Shanghai (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1998) Adua and Her Friends (Antonio Pietrangeli, 1960) Querelle (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982) Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972)
For today’s conversation, Film Comment’s Devika Girish and Clinton Krute were joined by two hardened Sundance vets: Alissa Wilkinson, film critic at Vox, and Violet Lucca, web editor at Harper’s Magazine and a longtime friend of the podcast. With Alissa and Violet’s expert guidance, they sifted through some of the festival’s standout fiction features, including Nanny, Master, and The Cathedral, as well as some more under-the-radar fare, including Sirens, The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future, Emily the Criminal, We Met in Virtual Reality, a new short film from Sky Hopinka, and more....
On today’s episode, Film Comment Co-Editor Devika Girish is joined by critic and programmer Monica Castillo (The Jacob Burns Film Center) and critics Robert Daniels (rogerebert.com) and Vadim Rizov (Filmmaker) for a documentary-centric discussion of festival selections including DEVO, Eno, Power, Union, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, along with narrative feature Kneecap. Catch up on all of our Sundance 2024 coverage here.
Berberian Sound Studio A movie that I like to imagine as spun out from the chance glimpse of an Anglo name in an Argento end credit roll, Peter Strickland’s involuted sketch of cine-madness Berberian Sound Studio concerns a British sound engineer who takes a gig on an Italian horror film called, pricelessly, “The Equestrian Complex.” With a name custom-built for bullying, Gilderoy (Toby Jones) meekly goes about his business with watermelon-powered foley effects and sound-level jiggering, leading to easy Italian culture-clash bits with the manipulative mustachioed producer and his bonehead brothers....
