Posts

The film is shaped crucially by the tension between the filmmakers’ dual roles: they are parents armed with a camera, observers yet with the most intense stake in their young son’s success. Because Brewster and Stephenson have had the great courage to expose their own mistakes and excesses along the way, the film is revelatory as an embedded report from the front lines of parenting. Little Idris and Seun are tremendously engaging subjects—bright, funny boys who can hardly contain their excitement as they pass through the imposing doors of Dalton for the first day of kindergarten....

When is a satire not a satire? For many critics responding to Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, the tendency has been to treat the film as if it was never one to begin with, and to excoriate its unrealistic dialogue, hyper-sexualized depiction of black women, and facile solution to urban gun violence. On one hand, it seems strange to take any part of Chi-Raq literally, given that it announces its source (Lysistrata) and it’s narrated in rhyming verse by Dolemedes (an unrepentantly shouty Samuel L....

Writer-director Anne Émond’s film about two strangers who have a one-night stand is a debut feature that punches above its own weight. Clara (Catherine de Léan) and Nikolaï (Dimitri Storoge) meet at a rave—its pulsing rhythms rendered in hypnotic slow-motion—and go back to his apartment, where they tear one another’s clothing off. What begins as a movie in the mold of Michael Winterbottom’s hot-and-heavy 9 Songs metamorphoses into an improbably insightful meditation on the politics of mood, sexuality, and Quebecois national identity....

Once Every Day may be Richard Foreman’s first feature film in 35 years, but the New York experimental theater guru is no stranger to the medium. The productions of Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, founded in 1968, typically incorporate moving images into their live action. Last Friday, the 75-year-old Foreman braved Nor’easter Nemo for a Q&A following his film’s opening at Anthology Film Archives. He spoke about his work with an openness peppered with dry wit and just the right of amount of self-declared pretension....

Photo from Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Twitter page I was invited to follow the shoot of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria in order to collect material for an upcoming book to be published by Fireflies Press. This included writing a daily diary of the production, from which the following passages are excerpted exclusively in Film Comment, in serialized form with a new entry every afternoon for the next week. Read the previous entries here....

Anyone fond of Danish director Susanne Bier’s 2004 original should steer clear of this ill-advised though faithful remake by Jim Sheridan. (His emotionally manipulative In America seems like the epitome of sincerity in comparison.) Natalie Portman attempts the impossible: filling the shoes of Connie Nielsen, who was so real, so heartbreaking, and who grounded a film ostensibly titled after two men (female director, anyone?). But even if Portman did look old enough to be the mother of two, chances are she’d still end up a near-blank working with David Benioff’s script....

Like a lost silent discovered in a trunk purchased at an estate sale, Filth feels like a perfectly preserved late-Nineties film. From the bigoted, corrupt, drug-addicted cop protagonist, the verbose voiceover narration, the stylistic bombast reminiscent of Trainspotting, and the costumes (half Seventies retro suits, half Edinburgh normcore), to the silly final plot twist and supercool nihilism, this one’s sure to delight the Tarantino set. That’s not to say Filth is without merit....

Claudia Llosa’s original Spanish-language title, La teta asustada, literally translates as “the frightened teat”—a poetic allusion to the aftermath of rape, and the way in which that trauma can be passed down to the next generation by mother’s milk. The historical frame of reference is that of the atrocities committed during Peru’s Shining Path insurgency—although Llosa sidesteps the political specifics. Rather, the focus is on Fausta (Magaly Solier), and the psychological damage she has inherited from her mother....

Being a sex addict can be very time-consuming. It can also smother your soul. Just ask Brandon (Michael Fassbender, unconventionally gorgeous), the cipher of an antihero in artist Steve McQueen’s hyped-up sophomore feature. Offered zero backstory, hence very little reason to care, we are dragged into his sordid world. On the surface, he is a put-together corporate type in New York City; underneath he’s a sexual predator, devoid of self-respect and clearly afflicted with deep-rooted psychological problems....

A few requirements for the age-old business of empire-building: money, powerful military and naval forces, medicine, infrastructure projects, and more recently, films to convey how fantastic all of the above are. Offering a kind of Imperial IMDb, Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire features complete credits, detailed synopses (some from the British Film Institute’s Monthly Film Bulletin), and historical and textual analyses for 6,000-plus films—150 of them available to watch online....

The Internet, with its need for speed and appetite for reconstruction, has given movie trailers a venue befitting their fetishizing fine art. Trailers From Hell is an esoteric archive-cum-populist-geekorama—fandom being, of course, the biggest rig on the information superhighway—that collates previews from all across film history and invites fanboy filmfolk (Guillermo del Toro, Edgar Wright, John Landis) to provide commentary. The site sprang from the brain of Joe Dante, one of American cinema’s national treasures....

Age has clenched Clint Eastwood’s face tight as a fist, but he has never been more tender, vulnerable, and heartbroken than in Million Dollar Baby. It’s not surprising that the camera still loves Eastwood’s visage, finding unchanging beauty in the skull beneath the skin. His facial bones, if anything, appear more finely chiseled than in his youth. But the muscles that hold the thinned skin have contracted, pulling brow and eyes down and inward, so that the signature squint is deeper and less yielding, even to laughter....

Let’s start this one off with two films I saw on a screener and a Vimeo link: I USED TO BE DARKER In Matthew Porterfield’s character study, an Irish girl at an early crossroads in life brings her crisis to the doorstep of an aunt and uncle in Baltimore who are already dealing with the end of their marriage. Taryn, the girl, has just discovered she is pregnant by a boy who doesn’t care about her and who lives an ocean away....

In keeping with Sundance 2019’s spotlight on complex and conflicting women-protagonists, Chinonye Chukwu’s Clemency centers on a prison warden, who, at the start of the film, is overseeing her 12th state execution. It’s a scene of calm, clinical horror: the ill-fated prisoner is strapped onto an operating table in a small, fluorescent-lit room, with a pastor standing by at his feet; his family watches from the other side of a window, their sobs muffled by the glass....

The French Connection Fifteen years before achieving bona fide, Oscar-minted stardom as The French Connection’s hard-nosed Popeye Doyle, Gene Hackman and classmate Dustin Hoffman were voted “Least Likely to Succeed” by the Pasadena Playhouse. Flunking out with the lowest grade ever conferred by the faculty, Hackman decamped to New York to prove his detractors wrong, sharing apartments with Hoffman and Robert Duvall and working as a furniture mover and ladies’ shoe salesman....

None but the Lonely Heart When social realist playwright Clifford Odets was tasked with shepherding Richard Llewellyn’s novel None but the Lonely Heart to the screen, he received a crash course in the star system courtesy of RKO. “It was about a 19-year-old boy with pimples whose two desires are to have a girlfriend and to get a new suit of clothes,” he recounted to friends. The 1944 film, which would mark Odets’s directorial debut, would be headlined by a 40-year-old Cary Grant....

On today’s podcast—the second of an epic two-parter—Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute welcomed FC contributing editor Jonathan Romney and critic and programmer Miriam Bale to talk about some of the festival’s biggest films. They dug into Memoria, Annette, Drive My Car, The Souvenir Part II, Bergman Island, Vortex, and more. Don’t miss the first part of the conversation, covering Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or–winner Titane, Bruno Dumont’s France, Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, Sean Baker’s Red Rocket, and more....