Posts

The Super 8 Years (Annie Ernaux and David Ernaux-Briot, 2022) Annie Ernaux, the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, made a movie with her son. This sentence is technically true, but The Super 8 Years, which received its general release two months after October’s Nobel announcement, feels like a work by Annie Ernaux proper—not a collaboration with others, not an adaptation from one medium to another, but a translation of her writing from text to speech, by way of the author’s voiceover, and (if, like me, you watched the film with English-language subtitles) back to text again....

Stream or download this playlist with Spotify. Eye of the Tiger Survivor, Rocky III, 19822. Call Me Blondie, American Gigolo, 19803. Don’t You (Forget About Me) Simple Minds, The Breakfast Club, 19854. (Flashdance) What a Feeling Irene Cara, Flashdance, 19835. Cat People (Putting Out the Fire) David Bowie, Cat People, 19826. Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do) Christopher Cross, Arthur, 19817. Ghostbusters Ray Parker Jr., Ghostbusters, 19848. (I’ve Had) The Time of My Life Bill Medley & Jennifer Warnes, Dirty Dancing, 19879....

About ten years ago, Manny Farber showed me an article from The Times Literary Supplement that had intrigued him. It was called “Can Novels Think?” or something along those lines, and it posited the following thesis: that The Wings of the Dove was a creation of such complexity and richness that it had gradually “become” smarter than Henry James; and by implication, that works of art in general are organisms as opposed to finite objects and their continual evolution is dependent on new readers with different sets of assumptions and shared beliefs encountering the work at different historical junctures....

It’s been 22 years since Alejandro Jodorowsky directed his last film and now, at 82, his popularity appears to be on the rise. A progenitor of the midnight movie, Jodorowsky continues to be a cult figure at a time when the Internet has leveled the roadblocks to fame and countercultural mouthpieces can happily bottom-feed under the current of the mainstream. Hence Jodo’s growing fan base on Twitter. For him, Twitter signifies the next wave in art, and the 140-character limit an incentive to write what he calls “the haikus of our century....

Forget Shame—if you want a sex-heavy character study, Dutch director Sacha Polak’s 2012 film is the real thing. The eponymous protagonist (Hannah Hoekstra) beds men then discards them, memorably kicking out one conquest after his post-coital attempt at intimacy (she prefers her lovers to pass out like lions). Such is Hemel’s way: she seduces and repels—the film’s viewers as much as her on-screen bedfellows—in rapid succession. The only man she really needs is her father, who looms large in her life....

Lost In Translation Sofia Coppola, U.S. Mystic River Clint Eastwood, U.S. Elephant Gus Van Sant, U.S. Kill Bill Volume One Quentin Tarantino, U.S. American Splendor Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini, U.S. The Fog of War Errol Morris, U.S. Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King Peter Jackson, U.S. Capturing the Friedmans Andrew Jarecki, U.S. The Son Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium The Man Without a Past Aki Kaurismäki, Finland...

Spike Lee attended the world premiere of his BlacKkKlansman at Cannes last night brandishing a pair of brass knuckles—one with the word LOVE and the other HATE—like those worn by the iconic character Radio Raheem in Do the Right Thing, a film that was notoriously snubbed of the Palme d’Or in 1989. Some two hours later, Lee emerged triumphant, receiving a massive standing ovation. Journalists’ reactions to the film have been overwhelmingly positive as well, leading to a jammed press conference this morning, where the director was greeted with extended applause....

Having just turned 70, Michael Haneke appears to be turning a new leaf in his abrasive view of humanity as being, for all its attempts at civilization, barely out of the jungle. This view might in the end be correct, but Haneke’s insistence on it and his habit for mechanistic and even sadistic methods for dramatizing it can be the work of an artist who’s effectively pinning down his characters like a butterfly collector securing his possessions to a board....

For anyone wondering how, in 1967, a film as revolutionary as Bonnie and Clyde managed to sneak past Jack Warner, the then-75-year-old head of Warner Brothers, Camelot provides, if not an answer, at least a partial explanation: he had bigger things to worry about. Long before even a foot of film of this lumbering elephant of a musical had been shot, Warner Brothers had already spent more money on it than on the entirety of Bonnie and Clyde—including $2 million just to buy the rights to the 1960 Broadway show....

Hurry Sundown When you think of Hollywood and race in 1967, what comes to mind? Perhaps it’s that year’s Best Picture winner, In the Heat of the Night, or Jim Brown in The Dirty Dozen, or the box-office run that made Sidney Poitier, for a brief time, the number one draw in the country. But the industry’s attempts to reflect the day’s headlines were not categorized by landmark moments so much as by fits and starts, good intentions, well-meant bungles, compromises, and small steps forward....

Images from Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, 2019) A man stands in the shanty doorway, clapping to the beat of a sex worker moaning in ecstasy. The woman is riding a man in a glowing pink room, exposed to the night by an open window and an open door. Outside, in the dusty Bacurau, a one-street town located in the Brazilian outback, a group of locals sing in unison above the erotic handclap....

Those lines come from the legendary folk singer Dave van Ronk—they open his raspy satire “Gaslight Rag”—but they could just as easily be what’s running through the cold, wet, constantly embittered head of Llewyn Davis, the hero of Joel and Ethan Coen’s new movie. Inside Llewyn Davis takes place in and around Greenwich Village during the thick of the early Sixties folk revival—as Michael Koresky puts it at Reverse Shot, a moment “after the revival of folk music as a mainstream genre, largely for harmonizing groups, like the white-bread, widely accessible Kingston Trio, and before the rise of more idiosyncratic, politically minded solo artists like Dylan and Joan Baez....

Images from Dark Phoenix (Simon Kinberg, 2019) Young Adult fiction elements pop up in X-Men films as regularly as zits. At some point in every X-Men movie, Dark Phoenix included, Professor Charles Xavier, headmaster at his School for Gifted Children, urges both students and mutants at large to embrace their differences from ordinary humans. He wants them to come out, come out, whatever they are. He persuades them to master psychological confusions that arrive with their erupting physical transformations....

Downhill (Jim Rash and Nat Faxon, 2020) Julia Louis-Dreyfus has an ideal toolkit for comedy-drama, including slow and fast burns, crossed tripwire reflexes, and tunnel-vision with a light at the end of the tunnel. As a producer-star she gives herself a chance to showcase all of them in Downhill, the erratically enjoyable Americanization of Ruben Östlund’s Swedish hit, Force Majeure (2014). Playing a wife and mother who sees her husband (Will Ferrell) choose to save himself rather than protect his family during a moment of terror at an Alpine ski resort, Louis-Dreyfus captures the woman’s incredulity, then italicizes it into anger, grief, and a peculiar kind of taut, bleak humor....

Jeff Nichols’s tender, earnest new film Loving follows Mildred and Richard Loving (Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton), an African-American/Native American woman and a white man, from 1958, when they get married (in D.C.) and are tossed into jail in Virginia because of the state’s anti-miscegenation laws, to 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court considered the case of Loving v. Virginia and declared that the state’s ban on interracial marriage was unconstitutional....

Barry Levinson’s The Humbling is frisky and buoyant, with laughs that bubble up unpredictably, often when you least expect them. It’s also improbably moving, especially considering how irreverent it is toward its source book—Philip Roth’s unfairly maligned 2009 novel—and its protagonist, Simon Axler (Al Pacino), a great American actor whose creative well has suddenly gone dry. Levinson’s triumph is to bring the grotesque and satiric humor of Roth’s early books to the somber insights of this late one....