Is anything as improbable as a “feel-good” movie that actually leaves us feeling terrific? How about two of them in the same series? And what if they’re based on a 150-book literary franchise that had already spawned several animated TV series and a popular stuffed toy? That’s what we talk about when we talk about Paul King’s Paddington movies—the live-action comic exploits of a virtuous young bear from Darkest Peru who resettles in London....
Adieu au langage For me, at Cannes 2014, there was Jean-Luc Godard’s Adieu au langage and then there was everything else. Godard didn’t attend, instead sending a video letter to festival toppers Gilles Jacob (who has officially stepped down) and Thierry Frémaux, who now runs the whole shebang. Godard explained that he was in a “different place,” a phrase that should be read, like every minute of Adieu au langage, both literally and metaphorically....
La Drôlesse This is a reflection of a fundamental shift away from the restoration and reintroduction of works that had previously been difficult to see and had therefore fallen out of the conversation in film culture, and toward a focus on the best-known films and filmmakers, and—thanks to the attention promised by the Classics sections at Cannes, Venice, and the other big festivals now—a new “celebrity system” in film heritage....
Warning: viewers of Paul Thomas Anderson’s exacting, faithful, remarkably personalized, and occasionally unbalanced adaptation of Inherent Vice could experience an array of side effects. This rapid-fire yet meditatively paced channeling of Thomas Pynchon’s psychedelic private-eye novel may induce symptoms including but not limited to: acid-wash flashbacks, secondary potheadiness, disconsolate erections, feverish irony, confounded expectations, involuntary double-takes, and euphoric disorientation. (Extreme hairstyles on display may also trigger PTSD episodes.) Consult your local astrologer if symptoms persist… It’s 1970 at Gordita Beach, a fictional SoCal beach town, space-case magnet, and microcosmic petri dish....
Atlas This year, the Venice Film Festival may have changed the equation, if only a little. Even the bourgeois press coverage that lauded the Lido selection seemed to understand that something was missing. At Rome, some of the more senior critics may have had doubts about a program in which Eli Roth’s right-wing anarchist-exploiter The Green Inferno found a place next to Antoine d’Agata’s Atlas, a disturbingly beautiful and monstrously miserabilist trip into the gutter of civilization; Jan Soldat’s The Incomplete, a minimalist portrait of a self-styled slave; and Joaquim Pinto & Nuno Leonel’s staged Bible reading The New Testament of Jesus Christ According to John....
Get Your Man In a summer when Wonder Woman was hailed in some quarters as a milestone for women in cinema, the audience watching Filibus (1915) at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival could be forgiven for wondering sardonically if movies are finally catching up to where they were a century ago. An Italian film serial in the mode of Feuillade’s Fantômas (1913), Filibus stars the charismatic Cristina Ruspoli as the titular “mysterious air pirate....
The Feeling of Being Watched Having failed to complete my coverage of the Tribeca Film Festival (which ran April 18 to 29) before traveling to the Cannes Film Festival, I mulled over the New York event from the shore of the Mediterranean. The two are so different that comparison seems futile, except as a way of clarifying why both are useful at a moment when “the movies” is an endangered species....
The first thing that impressed me in A Most Violent Year, written and directed by J.C. Chandor, was the overcoats worn by Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain—pale, bulky, very sumptuous. Very significant too: the coats represent their characters’ aspirations to affluence, success, and respectability, but while they keep their wearers warm through a New York winter, they also function metaphorically as armor in the battle they’re about to enter in a brutal business world, and armor against painful truth....
Harrison Ford returns again, a ghost out of the past, in Blade Runner 2049, just as he did as Han Solo in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Ford may have become Hollywood’s professional revenant, but it’s in the context of an imaginative climate that’s very much to do with summoning up ghosts, infusing uncanny new life into familiar old shapes (cf. the Twin Peaks revival). Blade Runner 2049 has the authentically eerie feel of a séance, not least in a scene set in a desolate, long-deserted Las Vegas hotel, where the hologram ghosts of Elvis, Marilyn, and Liberace abruptly flicker on and off in the darkness....
The case of Peter Greenaway, which comes round every now and then, invariably proves to be a troubling one—not least for those of us who were once bowled over by the British filmmaker’s inventiveness and sheer individuality. At the peak of his visibility, Greenaway managed to pull off a near-impossible feat, successfully operating as a cerebral conceptualist within the normally conservative waters of British art cinema. Greenaway’s 1980s films were narrative on a relatively accessible level, but they were only incidentally about story: “Cinema is far too rich and capable a medium to be merely left to the storytellers,” he once declared....
There are plenty of Stetsons on view, as you’d expect in a movie named Les Cowboys, the directing debut of screenwriter Thomas Bidegain, and they’re worn by French people. In essence, this is a modern-day revision of John Ford’s The Searchers, updating its quest narrative for contemporary France much as Paul Schrader updated it for late ’70s California in his George C. Scott vehicle Hardcore. However, it’s not just France that interests Bidegain, but an entire changing world....
Poker, as the heroine of Molly’s Game points out, is a game of skill, not of chance; and yet chance plays a key role in Aaron Sorkin’s movie. Impossible odds determined the fact that, in the youth of so-called “Poker Princess” Molly Bloom, this Olympic-level skier took a drastic, career-damaging tumble because she happened to make contact with a rogue piece of pine bough sticking out of the ground. Throughout Sorkin’s gambling story, it’s the fine distinctions, the thinnest lines between winning and losing, that change everything—just as, Molly recounts, in the 1936 Summer Olympics, record-breaking runner Matthew Robinson lost to the history-making Jesse Owens by only four-tenths of a second....
Road movies can be about two things: going somewhere, or going nowhere. The opening of Alexander Payne’s new film tells us right away that Nebraska is in the latter category: the elderly Woody Grant (Bruce Dern in heavy winter flannels) lumbers doggedly towards us in a drab edge-of-town landscape shot in black-and-white and spread out across a wide-screen frame. The location is Billings, Montana, and Woody’s intended destination is Lincoln, Nebraska....
American independent cinema thrives on its legends of risky feats pulled off on the cheap: its history can be written in tales of shopping trolleys used for tracking shots, of avant-gardists briefly finding a new medium in an obsolete toy camera, or of audacious outsiders risking their futures on a bunch of maxed-out credit cards. But even among these stories, Tangerine sounds like a miracle of enterprising economy: the praise it earned at its Sundance premiere this year was almost eclipsed by the excitement about its being shot on an iPhone 5s, using an $8 app called Filmic Pro....
Sieranevada For the last few years, it’s been fairly easy to assume that we all knew what Romanian film was. In Cannes, the new national cinema made its decisive mark in 2005 with Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, followed two years later by the Palme d’Or win for Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. Both films established a particular mode of slow-burning, aesthetically austere, emotionally downbeat realism, and it’s been easy to assume that works by those directors, as well as Radu Muntean, Calin Peter Netzer, Radu Jude, Corneliu Poromboiu et al, were very much of a piece, especially since these filmmakers tended to downplay directorial flourishes of any sort that might overtly denote a strong personal signature....
Lady Snowblood Many titles in the pantheon of cult cinema have been touted as favorites of exploitation film connoisseur Quentin Tarantino, with varying degrees of veracity. In the case of Toshiya Fujita’s Lady Snowblood swordplay revenge films, I can tell you there’s no doubt about it, and not just because of his well-documented borrowings in Kill Bill Vol. 1. Ten years ago, during a midnight screening at the Sitges Film Festival in Spain, I sat behind Tarantino as he live-narrated the plot of Lady Snowblood (73) to a friend sitting next to him....
Old (M. Night Shyamalan, 2021). Photo Courtesy of Phobymo/Universal Pictures I wanted to see Old for the simple, stupid reason that I am also old(ish). If I’m being honest I wanted to see how grotesque things would get. Old, after all, comes from the mind that concocted The Visit, a film whose “scary grandparents” premise involved a not insignificant number of adult diapers. Even though this is incredibly ageist, I’m not complaining....
Taxi (Tim Story, 2004) The “unbankable” label affects a movie’s marketing strategy. Hollywood executives conceive of small, specific audiences for “Black films” and large, general audiences for “white films” that often go racially unmarked. In turn, Hollywood executives envision raced, segmented audiences and thus heavily market Black movies to Black audiences. What transpires is a self-fulfilling prophecy: raced marketing plans reinforce the perception that Black movies are unbankable to non-Black audiences....
