Posts

Parasite (Bong Joon Ho, 2019) People were calling it “Hollywood’s biggest night.” All the stars were there. The Oscars: historically perfect and critically adored. In an award ceremony that lasted just nine hours, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided all the year’s Best films last night. But for as much as we bemoan them, they may have gotten a few things right—foremost, every award won by Parasite, which included Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, and the newly-named “International Film....

Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y Midway through Don DeLillo’s Mao II, a neurotic writer poses a question with no easy answer: “There’s the life and there’s the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film. Two lovers quarrel in the back of a taxi and a question becomes implicit in the event. Who will write the book and who will play the lovers in the movie?...

The five features and nine shorts made by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade constitute one of the major oeuvres of Brazil’s Cinema Novo. Their poetics are a shock to the system: playful, lewd, spontaneous, courting controversy, juggling contradictions, panegyrical even in their condemnations, and entirely political. Brazilian cinema today looks provincial and pallid compared with the exuberance and overabundance of Cinema Novo, which aligned itself with the late-Sixties cultural ferment known as Tropicalism....

Images from Rukus (Brett Hanover, 2019) In 2018, I served on a jury at Indie Memphis in the “Hometowners” category, honoring Memphis-area filmmakers. When the jury—Cinereach’s Leah Giblin, film editor Michael Taylor, and I—sat down to vote, we were in unanimous agreement that Brett Hanover’s Rukus should be awarded Best Feature. We admired the film’s merging of documentary and narrative, its scope and emotional power. Hanover’s involvement in the “furry” subculture, and his friendship with an enigmatic figure named Rukus, well known in the subculture, provides opportunities to examine the intersections of dreams and art, identity and community, love and trauma....

The history of queerness on film is largely a history of exclusion. Gay characters on screen are a relatively recent phenomenon, which leaves about 80 percent of our film heritage a vacuum of representation. Because of this, it’s important to wrestle with those films for which queerness wasn’t even a remote consideration as well as those for which bigotry and self-censorship made it actively impossible to portray. Case in point: Edward Dmytryk’s noirish 1947 murder mystery Crossfire retrospectively functions on two levels at once, as the powerful film that it is and the phantom film that it never could be, the one that exists alongside it only in our imaginations....

Read your comments on the top films below. ROMA Alfonso Cuarón, Mexico Cuarón’s films are always visually impressive and ROMA is no exception, but what makes his most recent feature technically stand out is the sound design, specifically the mixing, even more than in Gravity.—Matthew Tesoro ROMA follows in the tradition of the great neorealists Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, and Satyajit Ray. I add Alfonso Cuarón to that list....

—Georges Bataille, The Language of Flowers (1929) Alain Resnais’s psychologically bruising film maudit is a sci-fi romance that charts a long-term relationship’s evolution from an atypically sullen meet-cute to the bitter resentment only the profound understanding of another human being can breed. It’s also an empathetic, if cool, portrait of the solipsistic tendencies and dithering that a depressive mindset allows for, and the ways two similarly afflicted people accommodate and temporarily alleviate each other’s pain....

The face of a man emerges from darkness, followed by that of a woman. Their eyes are closed, and their bodies lie still in separate beds in what looks like eternal peace. Hooded pallbearers chant a Gregorian theme while carrying the two across a rocky plain. Nearby, soldiers drag another man ahead in chains and throw him into a cage, from which he looks down and sees the march of the mourners’ pageant that bears the lovers’ bodies toward the clouds....

“I’m so fucking tired,” a declaration made by a central character early on in Matthew Porterfield’s third film, could apply to the spiritual exhaustion that all three of his features to date have dealt with in one way or another. Porterfield has proven himself to be uniquely gifted at rendering ineffable feelings and commonplace crises, whether through minimalist atmospherics (Hamilton, his 2006 debut), meticulously composed and static long takes (Putty Hill, 10), or tropes from musicals....

In spite of its implausible premise and Grand Canyon-sized plot holes, John Frankenheimer’s 1966 sci-fi horror classic Seconds is one of the most insightful American films ever made about the 1960s. That’s an unusual thing to say about a film whose main character, Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph), is re-living the nightmares of the Fifties: the successful but unrewarding career, the loveless suburban marriage, the endless, anonymous schlep from train to train....

“I’m not okay. Don’t tell anyone,” Ronnie (John Ortiz) cathartically blurts out to his bipolar best bud, Pat (Bradley Cooper). Fresh off an eight-month court-ordered stint in a mental institution, Pat is paradoxically better equipped to offer life lessons than his ostensibly well-adjusted and well-off friend. Adapted from Matthew Quick’s novel by writer-director David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook unfolds within the same comically cosmic feedback loop as Russell’s I ❤ Huckabees (04), which empirically proved that “everything is the same even if it’s different....

On April 21, 1989, one day after the attack on the woman known ever since as the Central Park Jogger, mayor Ed Koch proclaimed: “I think that everybody here—maybe across the nation—will look at this case to see how the justice system works. This is, I think, putting the criminal justice system on trial.” For many of the people directly involved with the affair, and for anyone paying attention, Koch had thrown down the gauntlet....

Three years into the Civil War, Will (newcomer Ashton Sanders) and his uncle Marcus (Keston John) are indentured to Burrell (Bill Oberst Jr.) and his brigade of itinerant bounty-hunters. Will’s role—established in a tense prologue suffused with titillating uncertainty—is to ingratiate himself with Southerners harboring runaway slaves and then inform Burrell of their whereabouts. In return Will and Marcus receive a meager cut of the bounty and the continued protection of Burrell (which also naturally means protection from Burrell)....

For the past 40 years, Martin Scorsese has been living one of contemporary cinema’s most fruitful and surprising double lives. Alongside the wide-canvas American epics for which he’s best known—stories of men, often working-class, driven to corruption and worse by their monomaniacal desire for wealth, power and fame—there has been a parallel strand of films, from The Last Waltz to Hugo, dedicated to the art of performance, the magic of the movies, and the relationship between artist and audience....