How did you come to collaborate with Céline Sciamma? You have similar sensibilities in many ways—an appreciation of youth, both the pretty sides and the not-so-pretty sides, but without being pessimistic about it. It all started with a book that I found and read thanks to my longtime collaborator Cédric Louis. Together we’ve done short films before, one of which, Banquise [05], was presented here in Cannes 10 years ago....
Ryan Coogler’s take on the mighty African hero is delightfully comic-book-y, in all the best ways. It summons the spirit of 1966, when Marvel Comics guru Stan Lee was still soaking up influences like a super-powered sponge, then carbonating them into fizzy pop elixirs. Coogler, like the Mighty Marvel Bullpen, has guts, flair, and vitality. What his movie lacks in shape and pith it makes up for in gusto and serious make-believe along with some delicious antic interludes....
Hollywood apocrypha has it that W.C. Fields wrote the idea for Never Give a Sucker an Even Break on the back of a grocery bill. Director Jon Watts should float the myth that he and Christopher D. Ford wrote the entire screenplay for Cop Car on the back of the kids’ menu at IHOP. If ever there was a high concept made for a low budget, it’s this one: two runaway boys take off in a sheriff’s cruiser, then learn that the sheriff is one mean hombre—luckily, played by a great and generous performer, Kevin Bacon....
People, Places, Things Perhaps the easiest of this type was James C. Strouse’s People, Places, Things, a palatable trifle starring Jemaine Clement as Will, a graphic novelist and teacher at the School of Visual Arts who has to face reentering New York’s brutal dating pool after his wife leaves him for a schlump (played by Michael Chernus, also an improbable lady-killer in another Sundance standout, Noah Baumbach’s winning screwball comedy Mistress America)....
Even with 40 years to grow numb to the barrage of modish rhetoric about the collective American psyche unleashed in End of the Road, this unruly 1970 portrait of post-counterculture casualties and chaos remains an unsettling and uneven viewing experience. Given its impressive yet aesthetically divergent team of collaborators—screenwriter Terry Southern, director Aram Avakian, cinematographer Gordon Willis, jazz producer George Avakian supervising the score—the natural impulse is to declare the disjointed end product a case of too many cooks....
“Sometimes it’s the people no one imagines anything of who do the things no one imagines.” This sentiment echoes throughout The Imitation Game. It’s risky, perhaps, to rely so heavily on a line—expressed in nearly identical terms on three different occasions by three different characters—that could sound forced and corny coming from the wrong lips. But it’s a testament to this film’s deep intelligence that these reiterations instead not only pack an emotional punch but also connect three periods of one Englishman’s tragedy-infused and too-brief life: his early boarding-school days in the Twenties, his years working obsessively at the Bletchley Park code-breaking center during World War II—the central focus of the film—and his traumatic later life when his homosexuality is exposed, at a time when it was considered not only scandalous but was also a criminal offense, prior to his suicide in 1954 at age 41....
Cruel Story of Youth (1960) An amped-up tear-down of the Fifties “economic miracle,” Oshima’s second feature is as lurid and full-fistedly tabloid as anything by Sam Fuller. A teenaged thug date-rapes his soon-to-be soulmate and soon the pair are running a shakedown scam on horny salarymen. (Available on video from New Yorker.) The Sun’s Burial (1960) A viper-like hooker entreats desperate slum dwellers to sell their blood to a ramshackle clinic, then resells the blood to a cosmetics factory....
If less renowned than South by Southwest, AFF is more welcoming: better organized, less crowded and more representative of Austin’s small-town identity. Also unlike SXSW, it’s walkable. Nearly everything on the schedule can be found in a five-block radius. The center of the festival is Congress Avenue, in the shadow of the salmon-colored State Capitol of Texas. Here are two venues, the 1,200 seat Paramount Theater and the 49-seat Hideout....
Young English recruit Gary Hook (Jack O’Connell), fresh out of training, has just been dispatched to Belfast. On his first day, his unit is sent to search a house for weapons, a mission that quickly spirals out of control as a riot erupts outside. Outnumbered and unprepared, the soldiers are forced to flee and in the commotion Hook gets left behind, finding himself stranded in a de facto war zone where everyone is intent on killing him....
I’m going to lay my cards on the table and say: hell yes, we still need queer film. If the offerings at this year’s NewFest—New York’s largest yearly sampling of LGBT cinema—are any indication, those ringing the death knell to gay-themed movies are missing out on some fantastic stuff. Almost all of the titles are worth checking out, but the five mentioned here most convincingly suggest to audiences of all sexual stripes that there is still some life left in that fabulous old queen known as queer cinema....
Gagarine (Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh, 2022) Sixteen-year-old Youri (Alséni Bathily) arranges the crumbs on his plate, nudging them into the crude outline of a bird. The blink-and-you’ll-miss-it figure has a picture-book quality, not unlike the shapes a child might discern while cloud-watching or stargazing. This image of flight feels appropriate: in Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh’s banlieue drama Gagarine, both their hero and his home are named after a cosmonaut....
Claire Denis’s films tend to be atmospheric, and Bastards is no exception. In its opening, a torrential rain cascades at night under yellow lighting, like a Biblical plague of piss visited on the world. With their astonishing density of mood, Denis’s films often register less as narratives per se than as richly realized environments. They are like dramatic aquariums—with all the enclosure that suggests—in which her characters move, although we can’t always quite tell which direction they’re moving in, or why....
A story can feel entirely different depending on whether you know the ending in advance; that’s implicit in the nature of tragedy, which addresses your awareness of watching the inexorable workings of the “infernal machine,” as Cocteau put it. So Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher felt like an entirely different film to me on my two viewings. The names of John E. du Pont and the Schultz brothers may well ring a bell with you (and if not, here’s a major spoiler from The New York Times)....
John Maclean’s Slow West ends with a visual death toll—a series of shots in which the film tracks back, in reverse order, through all the characters who have been killed in the course of its brutal narrative, right down the line to its backstory. Slow West is a clipped, super-economical neo-Western—or rather a meta-Western musing on certain conventions of the genre that refuses to die but continues to mutate, these days usually into more or less ironic forms....
If I were a lazy, cynical copywriter, I’d announce the release of The House That Jack Built with the blurb “Lars von Trier is back! Prepare to be offended!” There’s certainly plenty here to object to: the consistent graphic violence towards women (plus two children, and eventually some men); the knowing, self-referential allusions to Nazism and the use of newsreel footage of the Holocaust; even the flip and casually incongruous use of David Bowie’s “Fame....
