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Catch up on all Sundance 2019 episodes of The Film Comment Podcast.

The words stack up page after page after page, often indecipherable, one phrase written over another in crooked, slanting lines. I will never know for sure which is a quotation, which a description, observation, recollection, synopsis, or note to self. However, to quote David Gatten—who is also the cause of this textual muddle—this is as it should be. The notebook is a collection of traces of the extraordinary experience of viewing the 14 films that comprise “Texts of Light,” a retrospective of Gatten’s work, as well as his recently completed three-hour digital-video project, The Extravagant Shadows (12)....

Last month the organization initiated across-the-board salary cuts, furloughs, layoffs of some full-time staff and all part-time theater staff, and other budget and program cuts. Due to the indefinite nature of Film at Lincoln Center’s current closure, all programs of the organization have been suspended, including Film Comment. Even outside the context of the current crisis, the publishing business is challenging. Recently we’ve been exploring various ways to improve the reach and financial viability of our publication....

Black Coal, Thin Ice I had spent much of my time in Berlin thinking things were better than expected, but after the dismal awards, which befitted a mostly unwatchable competition, it took a look through the schedule to summon up memories of the festival’s many worthwhile movies. It’s difficult to push the competition and the awards, the festival’s nominal center, out of mind. When the Golden Bear went to Diao Yinan’s Black Coal, Thin Ice, many were speechless, unable to believe that the jury had fallen for a run-of-the-mill neo-noir with embarrassingly tacky stylization....

But that support didn’t much extend to the film to which jury president Mike Leigh and the jurors awarded the Golden Bear: Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Caesar Must Die, the Italian veterans’ staging of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar with prison inmates. Fliegauf, whose previous film, Womb, marked a distinct slide from his inventive early work, came away with the Silver Bear, while Petzold scored best director for Barbara. In one of those festival award oddities, this marks the second consecutive year that a Silver Bear goes to a Hungarian filmmaker (last year’s winner being Béla Tarr for The Turin Horse) and the second consecutive year the directing prize has gone to a German (in 2011, it went to Petzold’s fellow “Berlin School” filmmaker, Ulrich Köhler, for Sleeping Sickness)....

Mad Max: Fury Road “Mad” Max Rockatansky is best known for his souped-up black 1974 Ford Falcon XB coupe, totaled early on in Mad Max: Fury Road, but we know for a fact that he has his Class A CDLs, or the Australian equivalent thereof. In the all-chase last act of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, Max takes the wheel of a Mack R-600 CoolPower truck pulling a decoy tank trailer, while in Fury Road he switches off with Charlize Theron driving a juggernaut called the War Rig....

Fahrenheit 9/11 Morning on the Croisette. Fahrenheit 9/11 has taken the Palme d’Or, and the beehive of international film criticism is buzzing with indignation. “C’est scandaleuse!” “Mais c’est pas le cinéma, c’est le télé!” Or, in bluntly accented English, “This is a very stupid Palmarès.” If the mythical divide of Cannes ’03 was Europe vs. America, Cannes ’04 will go down as the year of cinema vs…. what? Politics? Reality?...

Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Quentin Tarantino, and Margot Robbie at a press conference for Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood during the 72nd annual Cannes Film Festival on May 22, 2019 When Quentin Tarantino finished the script for his ninth film, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, he decided not to let it out of his sight. Cast and crew had to travel to his house to read the only printed copy....

Nothing says “indie” more than a movie about the travails of twentysomethings, and at first blush, British writer-director Alex Barrett’s feature debut, Life Just Is, would seem to fulfill all of the usual clichés. Two sets of London roommates, almost all of whom are university graduates working well below their skill sets, are observed over a week-long period that involves potentially life-changing choices. If this sounds like a million other micro-budget projects annually unveiled at Sundance, Barrett’s ensemble piece is nevertheless several strata above the sort of material hatched by American festival workshops....

American Honey Somewhere on the road to Kansas City, riding in a van crammed with teenagers and thumping with hip-hop, I began to reflect on my countrymen. Well, it didn’t go quite like that, but travelogue is one important part of Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, which uses the van as a primary setting. Its passengers are a ragtag sales team hawking magazine subs, led by a chief seller (Shia LaBeouf) and overseer (Riley Keough)....

“…wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them.” —2 Nephi 5:21, The Book of Mormon Rufus Jones for President President Barack Obama, by several galaxies the most exotic personage to ever hold that primitive office (at least since Ronald Reagan), provides a test for Mailer’s thesis....

Navroze Contractor and friends. Photo courtesy of Deepa Dhanraj. In January 2023, the Experimenta Film Festival in Bangalore presented two films by the Yugantar Film Collective. Founded in 1980 by Deepa Dhanraj, Abha Bhaiya, Meera Rao, and Navroze Contractor, this short-lived feminist collective made half hour–long documentary-fiction hybrids on issues of domestic violence, grassroots resistance to deforestation, and labor organizing among maids and factory workers. While Dhanraj took questions from the audience after the screening, her husband and cinematographer, Contractor, remained seated at the very back of the auditorium among students and festival volunteers, speaking up only when Dhanraj deferred to him....

“It’s post-good,” one friend said. “The perfect bad movie,” declared another. It’s hard to find an appropriate critical rubric to apply to The Canyons—Paul Schrader’s micro-budget erotic thriller/multi-media performance piece/study in postmodern ennui/Elegy for the Fall of Western Civilization The Canyons—in part because it isn’t exactly, or isn’t only, a movie. That’s not necessarily in the sense of “cinema for the post-theatrical era,” as Schrader puts it in the July/August issue of FILM COMMENT—although the film’s prologue and chapter divisions, set over images of decaying multiplexes, certainly point in that direction....

John Kelly performing “Blue” In his piece on YouTube for the July/August issue of FILM COMMENT, Howard Hampton invokes a key precursor to the site’s democratic, everyone’s-a-star ethos. “Warhol would have adored the concept of YouTube: ‘The Pop idea…was that anybody could do anything,” and YouTube offers a platform to anybody with a video camera and an Internet connection.” Has YouTube lived up to Warhol’s vision of a world where everyone could turn his or her private life into the stuff of public art?...