Posts

When Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff set out to make Los Reyes, it was never meant to be a film about dogs. The plan was to follow the lives of the teenage skaters who populate the skate park at Parque de Los Reyes, the oldest public skate park in Chile. Over time, these teens shifted to the periphery, removed from the visual field but kept on as off-screen commentators, with their stoned musings slowly terraforming Santiago’s sociopolitical landscape....

What makes for a good documentary character? Judging from film festival panels and the avalanche of theories, opinions, instructional videos, and listicles that take up this question online, and the examples helpfully provided—hi Morgan Spurlock, hey there R. Crumb, hello again Bob Dylan—you’d be forgiven for thinking that there’s actually an answer to this question. But why would it be any easier to account for what makes a documentary character good than to reckon what makes a person good?...

“Definitely not the same old song for Cannes was Ali Abbasi’s Border, adapted from a story by Let the Right One In writer John Ajvide Lindqvist. This Un Certain Regard selection (and section award-winner) centers on the mystery of identity as it follows a customs inspector who happens to be non-human . . . Absolutely essential to its story of self-discovery is Eva Melander’s outstanding, minutely sensitive performance as Tina, the troll in question—for such is the Scandinavian mythology tapped by the contemporary-set movie ....

The first time I saw The Revenant, I felt it was the movie of the year, the most beautiful and eloquent, as vital as the desperate breath of characters in the cold clouding the camera lens. I took it for granted as a box-office success and a contender for the Best Picture Oscar. Who had seen such marvels lately in a movie? Perhaps I was living in the past—not just inhabiting frontier existence before 1850, but being reminded of a time when movies put us in the midst of heart-stopping action....

Eighties New Wave: the late Seventies and early Eighties saw a huge influx of talent into Hong Kong from filmmakers who, for the most part, had studied overseas, and then returned to Hong Kong where they all wound up working for Selina Chow at TVB, the television giant, before starting to make socially conscious movies. Among the names that Selina Chow hired were Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, Ann Hui, Patrick Tam, Yim Ho, Kirk Wong, Shu Kei, and Eddie Fong—all of whom would go on to become award-winning filmmakers....

The Cotton Club Encore (Francis Ford Coppola, 1984/2019) House-painting union organizers, metaphorical teenage zombies, goateed jewelers, working-class Italian poets, lonesome bovines, and ladies on fire: the 57th New York Film Festival features a staggering array of fascinating characters, themes, and stories. This year’s selection is also notable for its wealth of music, with films from Scorsese to Sciamma to Lapid to Baumbach all employing pop songs as narrative fulcrums. Our NYFF57 playlist is comprised of these cinematically crucial ditties, along with a handful of tunes by composers whose work otherwise appears in NYFF selections....

Game Change, an HBO movie about the 2008 Republican presidential election campaign, stars Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin, here a self-consumed rube who—in way over her head—cracks under the stress of the national spotlight and turns paranoid. Her running mate John McCain (Ed Harris) may admire Palin’s galvanizing speeches, but ignorant of even basic geography she often flops, causing McCain’s foul-mouthed advisor Steve Schmidt (Woody Harrelson) much grief. Director Jay Roach (Meet the Fockers) avoids easy laughs, and harnesses Moore’s spot-on portrayal to find a balance between outrage and empathy for the pious hockey mom peddling a divisive evangelical version of the American Dream....

Gabriel To an extent, Agnes Martin’s Gabriel (76) is the kind of work you might expect from a great painter making her first and only foray into filmmaking: loose, clumsy, often seemingly incomplete, like an exploratory draft punctuated by moments of sharp, polished clarity. It doesn’t have the tremulous, needle-fine precision of its maker’s famous grid paintings—nor, I think, was it meant to. Despite their apparent order and symmetry, Martin’s canvases tend to be thrillingly unstable, their tight, geometric structures set askance by wobbly, uneven edges, irregular lines, blurred margins, and/or boundaries slightly transgressed....

Diary of a Mad Housewife In Frank Perry’s adaptation of the Kaufman novel, Benjamin plays Jonathan Balser, the lawyer husband who does much to drive Tina (Carrie Snodgress), the housewife of the title, mad. Jonathan is an insensitive, not to mention wholly irritating, man; he repeatedly uses the word “bloody” as an insult, though he’s not British, and the cloying, childlike voice he uses every time he says “roll in the hay” is the opposite of sexy....

Director Phil Morrison has yet to make good on the promise of his 2005 debut feature, Junebug, a movie so charming and balanced that it was an unambitious meal of all the five basic tastes, bitter and sweet in plot, but also with the atmospheric touches of something deeply personal. It’s a shame then that his newest film, All Is Bright, feels totally bland, like the makings of a much better film that has been left unspiced....

Blue Caprice John (Isaiah Washington) is a broad-chested alpha male, emanating a confidence that Lee (Tequan Richmond), an impoverished Caribbean boy who has been abandoned by his mother, can believe in. Lee is silent and watchful, a born sniper, curiously admiring John from afar. The two meet when John saves Lee from a suicide attempt, an act that seems staged to force John’s intervention. Moors’s camera observes from a distance too, peering through windows and past out-of-focus objects in the foreground that obscure part of the frame....

Despite its fraught premise and 3D presentation, Charlie Victor Romeo is far from a disaster movie. There are no stories of heroism or survival, nor is the movie concerned with fetishizing (or even depicting) the spectacle of collisions. Each segment begins the same way, with text giving the date of the crash, a blueprint of the plane, and the flight number. And each segment concludes just before the moment of impact, cutting to details about the cause of the accident and the total number of fatalities and survivors....

As the documentary Room 237 noted, critics and author Stephen King both panned Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, which did poorly at the box office on its initial release. Although there was a lingering distaste for Kubrick’s particular brand of high-modernist auteurism (apparent in the vitriol applied to his previous, universally hated film Barry Lyndon), the most common complaint about The Shining was that Kubrick had taken King’s bittersweet family-focused horror and transformed it into a camp free-for-all, a textbook example of “the book’s better....

More or less stuck in Chile and waiting for funding to come through for another project, director Sebastian Silva and Michael Cera made like overachievers and filmed Crystal Fairy in the meantime. The result unsurprisingly has the distinct tone of a micro-budget movie shot on the fly, incorporating whatever elements must have appeared during production. The first act seems to promise 70 more minutes of rambling episodes, at the overbearing whim of a director toying with an insufferable protagonist....

Three people wake up in a sofa bed—this is one of the first shots in the film, but it’s not the beginning of the story. Christophe Honoré’s Dans Paris is about how they got there. That is explained over the course of a day (December 23) in the life of a broken family living in an apartment on the outskirts of Paris. Two of the people in the sofa bed are brothers: the deeply depressed Paul (Romain Duris) and his younger sib Jonathan (Louis Garrel), who has joie de vivre, or at least appetite, oozing from every strand of his greasy hair....

For Tim Burton’s latest end-of-year family friendly output, Disney has resurrected Burton’s 1984 live action short Frankenweenie, now with an even cuter monster pup at the heart of the action. Said dog goes by Sparky, with physical dimensions improbable and charming, and an expressive jaunt to the animator’s great credit. So when Sparky meets his untimely end, it’s no small loss. Sparky’s boy, Victor Frankenstein, is totally grief-stricken, until he makes like his namesake and brings his little buddy back to living color....

Images from Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019) In the canon of onscreen violence wrought by chillingly malevolent men, two scenes loom large: Malcolm McDowell’s macabre rendition of “Singing in the Rain” in A Clockwork Orange, and Christian Bale’s axe-swinging jive to Huey Lewis and the News in American Psycho. Both graft hallmarks of innocuous spectacle onto violent assault, and as their critics aver, obscure patent immorality with the seductive tempo of fun....

It’s difficult not to get a little irritated by Xavier Dolan. Barely 25, with five films already under his belt and a Cannes Jury Prize last year shared with Godard, the hyperactive, immodest, and prodigiously talented French-Canadian filmmaker can be exasperating. It is even harder, though, not to be dazzled by his precociousness, his ravenous energy, and the emotional intensity of his work. In the five years since he burst onto the scene at Cannes with the angry, semi-autobiographical I Killed My Mother (09), Dolan has worked ceaselessly, sampling and remixing various styles and genres, throwing himself into film with the creative appetite of a child venturing into a vast imaginary playground....