The theme song for Kong: Skull Island should be “If I Only Had a Brain.” A human brain, that is. This film epitomizes artificial intelligence, untouched by inspiration or spontaneous emotion. As a piece of marketing it’s a masterstroke, not only as a reboot of the King Kong mythology, but also as the second chapter in the emerging Warner Bros./Legendary Pictures “MonsterVerse” that will lead, in a couple of installments, to King Kong Vs....
Screened once in the 2007 New York Film Festival, In the City of Sylvia is pure pleasure and pure cinema. Catalan filmmaker José Luis Guerín’s fifth feature puts a dreamily minimalist spin on the Orpheus myth. A sensitive young romantic searches, against all odds, for his lost soul mate—fetish seems too cruel a word. In this case, however, the underworld is a paradise. Has any city on earth ever been as ridiculously ripe with gorgeous women as summery Strasbourg?...
Images from Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000) Edward Yang’s final feature Yi Yi is a multi-generational family drama, a plaintive city symphony, and an epic story of incalculable grief. To watch the film is to observe as the central Jian family move through the familiar rituals of life and death, to get a glimpse of Taipei’s cityscapes before the turn of the millennium, and to see the omega point of Yang’s cinema, which one could trace back through the turmoil of A Confucian Confusion (1994), the mournful anger of A Brighter Summer Day (1991), and the urban grid-like structure of The Terrorizers (1986)....
Swallow The logo for the latest edition of Migrating Forms, which ran this past December, features a thumb resting in a giant nostril. The ubiquitous “thumbs up,” associated with Roger Ebert and Facebook likes, turns into an uncouth intruder (you try shoving your thumb up your nose in public) and a signifier of unhinged digital representations of the body. The perplexing image comes from Even Pricks by Ed Atkins (who also made this year’s official trailer), and somehow it served as an apt emblem for the festival’s offerings at BAMcinématek, a departure from its previous base at Anthology Film Archives....
While it would be foolhardy (even counterproductive) to expect a LGBT film festival to manufacture a sense of we’re-all-in-this-together harmony, the stand-out films at this year’s NewFest nevertheless showcase what art can bring to a disparate-yet-connected group of people: the complication of set assumptions; the expansion of intellectual and emotional possibilities; the richness of experience as filtered through the camera’s gaze. These movies do not offer a solution to the hard questions of contemporary queer existence so much as encourage those within it to approach said issues with revitalized eyes and an empathetic heart....
This was my second year at Sundance and I hit the slopes with high expectations. Documentaries have firmly found their place in the roster of all that is exemplary about this festival. And there was a lot to be excited about. This year the true delights in the documentary slate were not necessarily to be found among the most prominent premieres, the award-winners, or even the topics of wait-line chatter....
TIDF takes place every other year in early May and its venues are in the heart of Taipei abutting Linsen Bei Lu, the city’s red light district. There, in between friendly locals and night markets, KTV parlors and massage girls are losing a turf war to condo developments and hipster bars, erasing what remains of the Japanese occupation of Taiwan during World War II. I couldn’t help but read these changes as a metaphor for the contested history of Taiwan as well as the difficulty of carving out space for the unsavory—the visual evidence of power disputes weighed on my mind during TIDF....
There are few places I feel closer to the visual contours of a film than the Toronto International Film Festival. Here, mammoth multiplexes are taken hostage by the kinds of films one is more accustomed to seeing on modestly sized screens at your local art-house. Sometimes this can feel wildly inappropriate—at the 14-screen Scotiabank Theatre, I’ve seen many international small-scale character studies on screens regularly used for IMAX spectacles, which can sometimes cause an alienating incongruity....
Moonlight Barry Jenkins, USA Manchester by the Sea Kenneth Lonergan, USA Toni Erdmann Maren Ade, Germany Silence Martin Scorsese, USA/Taiwan/Mexico/UK/Italy/Japan Paterson Jim Jarmusch, USA La La Land Damien Chazelle, USA The Lobster Yorgos Lanthimos, France/Netherlands/Greece/UK Certain Women Kelly Reichardt, USA Arrival Denis Villeneuve, USA Hell or High Water David Mackenzie, USA The Handmaiden Park Chan-wook, South Korea Elle Paul Verhoeven, France/Germany Cemetery of Splendor Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/UK/France/Germany/Malaysia Aquarius Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil/France...
Aida Returns (Carol Mansour, 2023) Sometimes, rather than whimsy and irreverence, a cinematic experiment is born of banal, even bleak circumstances, and the ingenuity required to overcome them. Aida Returns, screening on Sunday at Prismatic Ground, is a film whose formal innovations arise from the constraints of imperial borders. The director Carol Mansour’s mother, Aida, was displaced from Yafa in Palestine during the 1948 Nakba. She eventually settled in Canada, but dreamt futilely all her life of returning....
Sunset The Film Society of Lincoln Center announces the lineup for the 19th edition of Film Comment magazine’s annual festival, Film Comment Selects, February 6-10. The cinematic showcase returns with a selection of titles curated by the magazine’s editors, offering strikingly bold visions, mixing North American, U.S., and New York premieres of new films and long-unseen older titles that deserve the big-screen treatment. “We are so delighted with this year’s lineup,” said Nicolas Rapold, Editor-in-Chief of Film Comment....
At the end of Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still, you’ll hear a strange sound that possibly gives the film its ultimate meaning—although what that might be is up to you. Do you hear a cri de coeur of despair? A trumpet call of redemptive defiance? Or perhaps a blast of the proverbial sound and fury signifying nothing—nothing, that is, other than the brute indifference of the universe? How you interpret what you hear may depend on your knowledge of the backstory to this four-hour Chinese drama—the fact that, between the film’s completion and its debut in last year’s Berlin Film Festival, writer-director Hu Bo killed himself....
Ted Fendt’s second feature, the hour-long Classical Period, begins with a man reading out a description of life in Florence in Dante’s day. He describes “one universal bout of uninterrupted anarchy,” scenes of gruesome and relentless violence. And yet the world depicted in Fendt’s film couldn’t be any more bloodless or less anarchic. The descriptions are from a 19th-century book by Henry Napier, Florentine History; it’s being quoted by the leader of a seminar attended by the main characters of Fendt’s film, who are Dante devotees....
There’s a famous black-and-white photo shown toward the end of Griffin Dunne’s documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. It’s a family portrait showing Didion, her writer husband John Gregory Dunne, and their adopted daughter Quintana, then a little girl, at their beachfront home in Malibu. John and Quintana stand together on the left, looking at the camera. On the right, further back and leaning on a balcony railing, is Didion, gazing ruefully, somehow apprehensively, at the two of them....
A few years ago, at the Morelia International Film Festival in Mexico, I attended a joint master class shared by Bertrand Tavernier and Stephen Frears. The former did most of the talking: where the British director is notoriously a man of few words, Tavernier is, unapologetically, a man of many. But one of the things they both discussed is their tendency to diversify, skipping between entirely different topics from film to film, without obvious continuity and without attempting to impose a consistent auteur identity....
Israeli drama The Kindergarten Teacher is a deeply strange film—with the emphasis on “deeply.” Even in these cautious days, there’s no shortage of strangeness in cinema, but it usually comes in the more demonstrative, immediately recognizable variety—the flamboyance of a Paolo Sorrentino, say, or the skewed linguistic conceptualism of a Yorgos Lanthimos… We’re used to seeing strangeness that’s manifest, located right on the surface of a filmmaker’s visual language. But to call a film deeply strange would imply something more elusive that can’t easily be pinned down and explained—something that, even once you’ve got to grips with a film’s apparent meaning, still escapes you, causes you that itch you get from a riddle that remains partially unsolved....
Barrage It’s usually a hard-and-fast rule that any major festival contains at least two new films starring Isabelle Huppert. Berlin this year is an exception. Not that French cinema’s reigning queen of precariously suppressed inner turmoil is resting on her laurels—although, after a year that contained Elle and last year’s Berlinale hit Things to Come, who could blame her? But this year, the heavy lifting is being done instead by her daughter Lolita Chammah, who is in two films in Berlin’s Forum—Laura Schroeder’s Barrage, and next week’s Strange Birds, by Elise Girard....
As memory serves, Matthew McConaughey appears shirtless for no more than two or three minutes of The Lincoln Lawyer’s two-hour running time—decidedly an inverse ratio of shirtlessness to shirt-wearing in comparison with every other McConaughey starring role of the past decade. And along with that newfound sartorial modesty, McConaughey seems to have renewed his commitment to his chosen craft, delivering a real performance instead of looking like he’d rather be off surfing (much as I wished I was during the entirety of Failure to Launch, Fool’s Gold and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past)....
Adapted for the screen by Gillian Flynn from her 2012 bestseller, Gone Girl has engendered much speculation, especially among the novel’s six-million-plus readers. Indeed, no major film since Hitchcock’s Psycho has been such a minefield of spoilers, and for viewers who haven’t read the novel, that minefield begins less than halfway into the narrative. We have tried not to give any of the film’s surprises away. Gone Girl is about Amy and Nick Dunn, two not particularly distinguished journalists who met and married in New York just before the crash of 2008 cost them their jobs....
