North Dallas Forty (Ted Kotcheff, 1979) There is nothing comforting about Nick Nolte’s screen presence. He has often played men tormented by regrets, by pain so deep it can’t be acknowledged, by self-loathing. Nolte’s characters are often weighed down by the most horrible kind of self-knowledge. They are men who can’t just casually glance at themselves in the mirror to straighten their tie; no, for them, one glance and they are instantly unmasked....
Since James Marsh’s primate tale opens today at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center we figured it would be apropos to post Chris Norris’s article from Film Comment‘s current issue on our website. See the movie. Read the article. Eat a banana!
Femme Fatale (Brian De Palma, 2002) For a director whose cinema would seem straight as a razor, Brian De Palma’s films radiate an undeniable queer energy. This unrepentant male gazer is perhaps an odd candidate for queer study, yet there are multiple avenues worth exploring that could help explain how De Palma has managed to penetrate the consciousness of many a gay viewer, this one included. I can name at least 10 gay-identifying critics off the top of my head who are entrenched fans, and I would argue that the intense appeal his films hold for us goes beyond visual voluptuousness or camp—though such matters are not incidental—and into a deeper, subconscious realm that rejects fixed identities, embraces marginalization, and acknowledges the integrity, even the necessity of social performance....
For a short moment while watching No Country for Old Men, I thought I was seeing a new classic in the vein of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. However, as it went along, it soon became nothing more than a pretentious version of The Terminator. It’s simply an action movie that stands out from the rest because it’s artistically done. No Country is brilliantly directed, but for my money, I’d take Fargo over it any day....
Evil Dead Rise (Lee Cronin, 2023) The cheeky cutaway to a dog-eared copy of A Farewell to Arms in Evil Dead II (1987) was a perfect emblem for Sam Raimi’s anything-for-a-laugh unpretentiousness in his splatter landmark—less a literary reference than a joke on the very concept of literary references, with Ernest Hemingway’s elegiac title recontextualized into a gory bit of gallows humor. It’s a sight gag worthy of the glory days of The Simpsons, except that Raimi and his trusty leading man Bruce Campbell—the one fated to wave goodbye to a disappeared appendage—got there first....
The pleasures of this coolly controlled, tensely watchable, subtle psychological thriller are many, starting with the perfect sensibility match between director Christian Petzold (Jerichow) and his perennial leading actress, Nina Hoss. There is no getting around the fact that Hoss is amazing, brilliant, dominant in the title role. As Barbara, a physician exiled to an East German provincial town as punishment for having applied for an exit visa from the GDR (the film is set in 1980, almost a decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall), Hoss exudes such fierce wariness and disdain for her colleagues, whom she realistically suspects may be spying on her for the Stasi, that the film’s suspense lies less in whether she’ll be able to smuggle herself out of this country she detests than whether she will exhibit any humanity, any crack in her icy demeanor....
A pair of gray suede gloves abandoned on a department store counter; a small 35mm still camera obscuring a woman’s face except for her eyes; an electric train set; a finger on the disconnect button of a telephone; an ungloved, well-manicured hand resting briefly on another woman’s shoulder: Todd Haynes’s Carol is not a Hitchcockian thriller, although it is adapted from the second novel by Patricia Highsmith, whose first, Strangers on a Train, was the basis for one of the master of suspense’s great movies....
The impressive fluidity of Olivier Assayas’s Clean, which is much indebted to the right-hand-in-glove fit of DP Eric Gautier and how he seems to catch actors on the intimate fly even when they’re sitting still, makes the film appear more naturalistic than it really is. Operating in a strangely agreeable area between highly plot-driven family drama and semi-plotless observation, Clean defamiliarizes a host of contemporary clichés: rock-and-roll lifestyle follies, junkie blues, the uneasy road to recovery, and child-custody issues....
Kevin Smith at Cannes in May, introducing a midnight screening of his belated sequel to the flick that immortalized and ended his stint as a Jersey quickie-mart clerk: “I’m pretty laid back,” he says, proving the point with his wardrobe of knee-length jeans, Jeff Spicoli kicks, and tuxedo top. “But this gets my dick hard.” Lengthening Smith’s good fortune, so to speak, as no other follow-up to Jersey Girl possibly could, Clerks II—even at something like a thousand times the cost of the original—is nonetheless a movie about downward mobility....
Filmmaker David Ayer knows we know these guys and their hill-humping ilk from countless hours spent perusing the late, late show. So in putting together his platoon of tank operators for Fury, the director’s entry into the war-flick genre, he’s happy to play off our collective knowledge of the canon. There’s Wardaddy (Brad Pitt), the natural-born leader of men who’s calling the shots on this two-ton juggernaut. There’s Coon-Ass (Jon Bernthal of The Walking Dead), a Southern swamp-hick who’s one “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” away from telling his mates they sure have a purty mouth....
In an age when identifying, tracking, and profiting from people’s tastes has never been easier, media products that seem a little too neatly tailored to a particular subculture arouse a certain apprehension. Call it the uncanny valley of identity: when you see something that gets a little too close to who you are, you get hostile. The feeling comes into play more and more as even the smallest cultural pleasures get appropriated with increasing speed....
When a movie takes it upon itself to exorcise a society’s moral and sexual hang-ups, the process can be both exhilarating and exhausting to watch. If the filmmaker’s attempt to play cultural crusader elicits something less than the intended shock and awe, we are left wondering what all the fuss is about, and whether the taboos at hand have not already become old news. Following in the footsteps of such recent hot-blooded provocations as the New French Extremity and the marathon sex in Ang Lee’s PRC-censored Lust, Caution, Lou Ye’s Spring Fever opens with two men, Jiang Cheng (Qin Hao) and Wang Ping (Wu Wei), making their way to a secluded shack in the woods for an afternoon fuck....
Sofia Coppola is uncommonly gifted at the articulation of something so fleeting and ephemeral that it seems to be on the verge of evaporating on contact with her hovering, deadpan, infinitely patient camera eye. In her three best films—Lost in Translation (03), the wildly underrated Somewhere (10), and The Bling Ring, based on the true story of a pack of roving Adderalled teenagers who sauntered in and out of the homes of multiple celebrity-culture superstars for a few months in 2011 and made off with millions in cash, jewelry, and haute couture—she has given us rare glimpses of people as they discover, almost by chance, that their existences are utterly absurd....
When the unnamed heroine (Golshifteh Farahani) of Atiq Rahimi’s The Patience Stone asks her comatose husband (Hamid Djavaden) for permission to leave his bedside, she is suddenly hit by the futility of maintaining the pretense of their relationship. Amidst the violence of war-torn Afghanistan, caring for him becomes a life-threatening burden, but it also grants her the cathartic chance to speak freely for the first time in 10 years of marriage....
Trouble With the Curve Trouble With the Curve stars Clint Eastwood as Gus, an old-school and, frankly, just plain old baseball scout for the Atlanta Braves who’s butting his head against the numbers analysis and statistic overrun of the grand old game by the next generation of baseball executives. Gus is the kind of guy still traveling the backwoods amateur and minor league circuits, operating on sight, sound, feel, and what he can pick up from the local newspapers, as opposed to the wealth of statistical information available on that newfangled internet....
