I’ve watched a lot of coming-of-age films about young women, and oftentimes they don’t ring true, but Sarah Plays a Werewolf really does. Where did the inspiration for the film come from? When I was a teenager, I went a lot to the movies and saw a lot of films, and there was always this strange feeling that I felt: I always identified with male characters. So where is the film that’s going to show what my experience is as a girl?...
In the aftermath of Chinese New Year, Film Comment took advantage of a break in Stakhanovite director Wang Bing’s busy schedule and reached out over Skype to discuss his filmmaking practices, and especially his latest documentaries Ta’ang and Bitter Money, both of which premiered in festivals in 2016. Ta’ang follows various Myanmarese families of Ta’ang ethnicity as war forces them to leave their native villages and flee to China; Bitter Money follows young people migrating from Yunnan region to the city of Huzhou, determined to make money by working long hours in sewing workshops....
It, Heat, Hit “Wandering Voices” entertains the idea that the moving image should question the boundaries of literal signification. If this is a cherished concept in the art world, it tends to be less so in the world of traditional narrative cinema. At Locarno, a program of five short films suggested a conversation between emergent works and milestones of video art. John Smith’s masterpiece The Girl Chewing Gum (76) was paired with Karolin Meunier’s Anfangsszene, while Melanie Manchot’s Twelve and Shirin Neshat’s Turbulent (98) served as closing pieces....
How to Smell a Rose: A Visit with Ricky Leacock at His Farm in Normandy It’s taken far too long, but the late Les Blank is finally having a bit of a moment. Last fall the Criterion Collection came out with Always For Pleasure, a glorious, 14-film box spanning nearly 30 years of his work, some of which has been showing up on TCM and all of which can be seen on Hulu Plus....
Warren Oates in Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971). Courtesy the Criterion Collection “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” — Samuel Beckett, Vogue magazine interview, 1969 Samuel Beckett’s influence is felt so strongly in Monte Hellman’s films that even if one were not aware of Hellman’s oft-professed love of Beckett, it wouldn’t be all that difficult to guess. Beckett’s most famous work is 1953’s Waiting for Godot, a play where two characters sit under a tree and talk....
Honeyland (Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska, 2019) A woman walks alone across a valley as bare as the moon. Crouching on a windswept, rocky ledge, she pries loose a stone to reveal a warm, humming, dark gold hive, a city of bees in their perfect chambers. This is the first of many surprises in Honeyland (2019), a documentary set in a rugged, barely inhabited region of Macedonia where an extraordinary woman named Hatidze maintains ancient traditions of wild beekeeping....
My Big Fat Greek Wedding The top-grossing independent film of all time marked the latest demonstration of the irrelevance of film critics—like a crowbar to the skull, nobody saw it coming, least of all HBO and IFC. A film about breaking out of the prison house of ethnicity, its scenario is About Schmidt without Schmidt, as crass as anything by Nora Ephron or Barry Levinson. The public gets all the credit for discovering this one: at last, after a deluge of films aimed at dumb teenagers, a film aimed at dumb 50-year-olds....
Of Horses and Men The Icelandic countryside of Benedikt Erlingsson’s Of Horses and Men seems at first too expansive for such concentrated scrutiny. Set against sprawling and sometimes forbidding backdrops of rocky plains, the villagers live close to the land and in harmony with the horses that seem to outnumber them. No one appears eager to embrace the 21st (or even the 20th) century; steeds and tractors comprise the only evident modes of transportation, and fences supply most of the conflict....
The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019) The 57th New York Film Festival kicked off on Friday night with the world premiere of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. “To watch this movie,” writes A. O. Scott, “especially in its long, graceful final movement, is to feel a circle closing.” As much as The Irishman offers a point of reflection for Scorsese completists, so too does the 1970 documentary Street Scenes—an early-days Scorsese film that was for a long time impossible to watch....
Set It Off (F. Gary Gray, 1996) Gestating since the release of A Quiet Passion in 2016, Terence Davies’ next film, Benediction, seems to be coming together at last. The film, a biopic following the life of WWI poet Sigfried Sassoon, has cast Dunkirk’s Jack Lowden in the starring role (Lowden was recently nominated for BAFTA’s Rising Star Award). Further details are scant, though filming is set to begin later this year....
When I got back to New York, I came up with my own scam, writing to the Film Society of Lincoln Center on behalf of a non-existent film magazine (the “Harpur Film Journal” or some such) and securing press credentials to cover the 1968 New York Film Festival. Incredibly, this ruse worked three times, even though I never bothered to furnish the festival press office with anything even resembling clippings....
Alps (Giorgos Lanthimos, Greece) The director of Dogtooth returns. Chicken with Plums (Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi, France/Germany) Cast: Isabella Rossellini, Mathieu Amalric, Maria de Medeiros, and Chiara Mastroianni. A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, Canada/Germany) From a screenplay by Christopher Hampton, featuring Viggo Mortensen as Freud, Michael Fassbender as Jung, and Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein, Jung’s patient turned psychoanalyst. The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, U.K.) An adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play, starring Rachel Weisz and Tim Hiddleston, who, as it happens, plays Loki in Thor....
Kristen Stewart in Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas, 2016) In 2017, I interviewed my old acting teacher, Sam Schacht, about so-called “Method acting.” Schacht studied with Lee Strasberg, is a lifetime member of the Actors Studio, and now teaches at the Stella Adler Studio. At one point during our discussion, he brought up Kristen Stewart: “[She] is extraordinarily authentic… I haven’t been so enthralled by an actor or an actress in a long time....
How is Myra Breckinridge, whose stated goal is “the destruction of the American male in all its particulars,” not more of a contemporary pop icon? Certainly the search-and-destroy protagonist of Gore Vidal’s controversial yet now widely respected 1968 novel Myra Breckinridge and of Michael Sarne’s notorious and still vilified 1970 movie adaptation, would seem to have some serious currency in a culture preoccupied with identifying and condemning toxic masculinity. But even more than that: a transgender woman whose mission is to infiltrate Hollywood and pull back the curtain to reveal that codes of maleness—and gender itself—are long-held social constructs rather than biological imperatives, Myra could rightfully be seen as a trailblazer of a sort....
It’s very clearly faked, but the rainbow that proudly arcs over the sky in the shot behind the opening title card of Beautiful Thing resonates as one of the most encouraging movie images of the 1990s. Any viewers who saw British director Hettie Macdonald’s tender yet gratifyingly rough-edged coming-out film upon its release, or perhaps saw it at a fragile age in their lives, are unlikely to have forgotten its four vividly drawn central characters—not just pubescent boys Jamie and Ste, who gradually reveal their attraction to one another, but the two women who satellite them, Jamie’s mother Sandra, and their neighbor Leah, an older teenager obsessed with Mama Cass....
