Then Is It the End? The Film Critic Michael Althen For many, the world premiere of Dominik Graf’s essay documentary Then Is It the End? The Film Critic Michael Althen was the 65th Berlinale’s true closing-night celebration. Sure, there was another day of screenings ahead, capped by the awards ceremony, and, yes, it was presented in the International Forum of Young Cinema and not as part of the Official Selection....
After Life Riding in a tram on a hot summer day with the breeze coming in the open window. Playing on a rope swing in a bamboo grove. Dancing in a red dress. Sitting on a park bench on an idle afternoon, talking about going to the movies. These are some of the memories selected by the recently deceased in After Life (1998), Hirokazu Kore-eda’s exquisite second feature. The conceit is simple and irresistible: the movie is set in a bureaucratic way-station where those who have just died spend one week, during which they have to select a single memory from their lives that is most precious or meaningful to them, which will become the only record they carry into the beyond....
Passage to Marseilles Reading the obituaries for Michèle Morgan, who died in December, gave me the same disquiet as watching her opposite Humphrey Bogart in Passage to Marseilles: something wasn’t quite right. She certainly wasn’t ignored, and the tributes were full of respect. But her appeal is often missing—that smoky drift of sex and vulnerability that makes her best performances clutch at your heart. Like many actresses, Morgan had one early role that came to define her: as the waiflike Nelly in Port of Shadows, where she turns up suddenly in a seedy tavern, clad in a transparent raincoat for all the world as though she’s wrapped herself in the fog....
Terry Jones and Imogen Stubbs in Erik The Viking (Terry Jones, 1989) This week has to begin with the awful acknowledgement of Terry Jones’s passing. The legendary Python and founding member of the Hell’s Grannies was 77, and died of a rare form of frontotemporal dementia. “Two down, four to go,” noted John Cleese (a slightly more laconic farewell than his eulogy for Graham Chapman). For Vulture, Mike Sacks has made an interview from 2014 available, previously published in his book, Poking a Dead Frog....
The zombie of the title is of the pre-Romero breed: an American woman honeymooning in Haiti, poisoned by a jealous admirer, and re-animated with a dose of voodoo magic. Certain aspects of Victor Halperin’s 1932 film—the alternately trancelike and hysterical performances, the willful lack of shot-to-shot continuity, the curled eyebrows and forked goatee of Bela Lugosi’s witch doctor—threaten to reduce the film to camp but end up contributing to its dreamlike, dread-soaked atmosphere....
A.O. Scott weighs in on Shrek Forever After in a recent episode of the now-canceled At the Movies: “I thought the story was a little more interesting than Shrek 2 and Shrek 3.” He then elaborates, “It kind of engaged me a little.” Perhaps you’re wondering if Shrek 4 will kind of engage you a little too. Here’s a second opinion from Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum: “Everyone involved fulfills his or her job requirements adequately....
Trances (Ahmed El Maanouni, 1981) / Courtesy of the Criterion Collection Ahmed El Maanouni’s radiant 1981 doc, Trances, opens in media res, as the swirling rhythms and chants of the film’s subject, Moroccan folk group Nass El Ghiwane, drives a surging crowd to hysterics. The words “Brothers, when shall our days brighten?” ring out across the Carthage stadium, as over-enthused fans rush the stage and embrace the band members. Unlike the teen frenzies induced by, say, the Beatles, the effect of Nass El Ghiwane’s performance seems to arise not only from their celebrity, but from the spiritual and political content of their music, a modernization of the Moroccan Gnawa trance-ritual tradition....
Mommie Dearest (Frank Perry, 1981) / Courtesy of Paramount/Kobal/Shutterstock Films of Endearment: A Mother, a Son and the ’80s Films That Defined Us Michael Koresky, Hanover Square Press, $27.99 Movies speak to our anxieties and despair and say the things we don’t,” writes Michael Koresky in his new book. “They keep our secrets.” Such furtive, clandestine sensations—and the large, open-hearted emotions attached to them—are at the heart of the author’s project here....
The socially progressive Austrian journalist and fiction writer Hugo Bettauer—a Jew by birth who had converted to Evangelism at age 18 in order to advance in the military—had forecast the effects of European anti-Semitism in 1922 with his wildly popular literary satire The City Without Jews: A Novel of Our Time. At the time, Vienna contained prominent anti-Semites who used print materials and public demonstrations to blame the Jews for disease, economic stagnation, and other social problems....
The French New Wave is winding down after a long reign. As a character says in Rivette’s late-middle-period masterpiece, La Belle Noiseuse (91), as if addressing the director himself, “I will always admire you, but I feel sorry for you, too . . . I wouldn’t want to finish like you . . . in a comedy.” Whether in fulfillment of a prophecy or a statement of intent, Rivette has now made that comedy—an 85-minute film that sums up cinema from the director for whom a three-hour running time is short....
Like a fitted coat worn by someone it wasn’t tailored for, parts of Cloud Atlas bulge out, overstretched, begging for more material, while other sections hang laughably loose. Adapted from the multiple-award-winning 2004 novel by David Mitchell, the problems of this alternately impoverished and bloated threehour behemoth derive from both its source and its mode of adaptation. The book’s six consecutive storylines form a narrative matryoshka: each protagonist reappears within a story that is being read or watched by the protagonist of the next episode....
Oh, the halcyon days when romantic comedies dealt with dorks-turned-inamoratos and good-natured stalkers. Don Jon joins the ranks of recent films about leading men and ladies whose problem is not finding an eager mate but finding true intimacy when they would rather just hook up. For a New Jersey bartender as desirable as Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in his first attempt as a feature writer and director) not even cavorts with local bombshells are enough to satisfy his sex hunger....
The word “cult” is never once uttered during Martha Marcy May Marlene’s 120 minutes. Like any pathology, it’s a concept that has never crossed the mind of the film’s eponymous protagonist, but to the outside observer its applicability is immediately apparent. Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) doesn’t really know where she’s been for the past three years––on some farm in upstate New York, maybe Connecticut? As a victim of trauma, her ability to distinguish between memories and dreams has eroded....
Those who found Gomorrah embarrassingly overrated can relax. Despite a first half that’s basically a spin-off of the 2008 movie that brought Matteo Garrone international acclaim, Reality turns out to be its veritable refutation. Reality begins in the same key as Gomorrah. The action is primarily descriptive—in this case, we’re situated within the scary outlying neighborhoods of Naples. The aesthetic is the same, an ultimately sterile mix of realism and stylization....
But if that sounds like the acerbic preface to a negative review, let me turn it around. Yes, Don Argott’s The Art of the Steal—a filmic exposé of one of the biggest slow-brewing coup d’états the art world has seen in recent history—suffers from a mild case of Moore syndrome, but the story Argott is telling and the acuity with which he tells it accomplish what any good piece of nonfiction cinema should, trusting that the subject matter is compelling enough to let it organize and lead the form, for editor and audience alike....
