Either you know the name Ai Weiwei or you are, to some degree, clueless. The Chinese government would prefer the latter. Unfortunately for them, the reputation of the man Time magazine short-listed for 2011’s Person of the Year cover story just seems to grow. That was the same year security forces detained Ai at the Beijing Capital Airport. He “disappeared” for three months. Hillary Clinton, among others, was furious. Ai resurfaced unharmed but clearly shaken....
Five years in the making, Carol Morley’s lyrical documentary is, in effect, the biography of a ghost. The haunting result treads the fine line between memories and dreams, and suggests that a person may ultimately amount to a mere assemblage of conflicting recollections. In 2006, Joyce Carol Vincent, 38, was discovered in her London bedsit, telly on, surrounded by half-wrapped Christmas presents. Expiration dates on food in her fridge and pantry were all stamped 2003....
Deceptively simple—one family, one Santiago flat, one long afternoon—Old Cats takes merciless aim at the illusions of an aging rebel daughter. Filmmakers Pedro Peirano and Sebastián Silva, working from their own script, use domestic claustrophobia and ambivalent parenthood to mordant effect. As in The Maid, they tap into the complexities of female power, traditionally less a matter of what’s expressed than what’s kept in check. Uncluttered by music or expository dialogue, and shot in a real-world apartment, Old Cats feels like a home-made surveillance film....
Paolo Sorrentino’s 2011 novel Everybody’s Right, his first, encompasses virtually all of his films to date. Its main character is a reprise of the depressed middle-aged singer from his debut feature, One Man Up (01), which was the perfect culmination of and swan song for the glorious Nineties Neapolitan New Wave. Less patently, the novel has echoes of The Consequences of Love (04), his curiously revisionist take on the male-friendship-exalting French-style noir or polar, and a morbid fascination with the type of dreary provincial “non-places” featured in The Family Friend (06) and This Must Be the Place (11)....
Well before the success of Games of Love and Chance (L’Esquive, 03), which won four Césars, including Best Film and Best Director, Abdel Kechiche had already caught the attention of critics both for his debut, Blame It on Voltaire (00), and as a supporting actor in a handful of films. In particular, the rage and frustration of his performance in Nouri Bouzid’s Bezness (92), as a jobless Tunisian driven to become a prostitute for Europeans, was unforgettable....
Let’s just get it out of the way: the titular deed referred to in The Unspeakable Act is none other than incest. But it’s the funny kind of incest, or the European kind, or the somehow charming kind, that Dan Sallitt’s improbably touching film takes as its topic. Instead of being creepy, The Unspeakable Act is an affirmation of Sallitt’s originality, bravery, and commitment as a filmmaker. Unlike his previous two films, which mostly take place at the same lakeside cottage in Pennsylvania, The Unspeakable Act is set in a middle-Brooklyn manse where cute-as-a button 17-year-old Jackie Kimball (Tallie Medel, in her first feature) lives with her mother (Aundrea Fares), beloved brother Matthew (Sky Hirschkron), and sister Jeanne (Kati Schwartz)....
Eytan Fox’s new film envisions a second chance for the one-time soldier of the downbeat Yossi & Jagger (02), a much celebrated work among queer-film aficionados. The hopeful sequel finds Yossi, again played by Ohad Knoller, living a closed-off existence some 10 years after the death of his secret lover Jagger. He spends his days working as a cardiologist in a Tel Aviv hospital, filling the sexual gaps in his essentially closeted life with porn and the occasional online hookup....
2014: The Punchline The Interview In fact, the year ended with an urgent reminder that film didn’t exist harmlessly in its own sealed-off sphere, but still had the power to cause repercussions in the real world—a power worth safeguarding. The irony was that it took what few might otherwise have considered an important film to remind us of that. Whether or not it was really the Pyongyang government that took exception to and measures against The Interview—a work by all accounts more farce than sustained political satire—Sony’s decision to pull the film only days before its release confirmed that commentary on the real political world can be a dangerous thing in cinema, and one that must be allowed to speak unhindered (even if it does speak with the voice of Seth Rogen)....
A leisurely yet unusually intelligent portrait of a famous historical figure’s life (or slice thereof), Creation is emphatically not any old Charles Darwin biopic. Avoiding the obvious trappings, there are neither forced introductory scenes from Darwin’s early life nor a weepy deathbed finale. There isn’t even any action from the Galápagos, aboard the HMS Beagle, or beyond—save the occasional tale he relates to his children. Instead, the film settles on an older, beaten-down Darwin (Paul Bettany) as he is writing his masterwork, On the Origin of the Species, while confronted with a number of obstacles: failing health, the opposing views of his faith-based wife (and first cousin), played by Jennifer Connelly, and the knowledge that Alfred Russel Wallace may have beaten him to the punch in publishing similar theories....
Although director Stéphane Brizé won a César for best adapted screenplay, this drama is driven less by dialogue than the longing glances and pained silences of married construction worker Jean (Vincent Lindon) and his young son’s teacher, Véronique (Sandrine Kiberlain). Mademoiselle Chambon may be a small film about inconsequential people, but the situations and emotions it stirs up are universally profound. Instead of recounting yet another tale of male-midlife crisis disrupting stable yet routine family life, the film zeroes in on the subtle effects of unanticipated pheromonal changes....
How bad can a bad hair day get? Let me count the ways. 1) Michael Shannon, playing real-life contract killer Richard Kuklinski, is already well known for exuding a certain stubbly menace. For this particular outing, there’s something about the scenes in which he sports a soul patch that are especially discomfiting. 2) David Schwimmer (unrecognizable), one of the many fascinatingly grotesque supporting cast members (Stephen Dorff, James Franco, and others), sports a truly ridiculous handlebar mustache, replete with an inverted Hitler gap....
Last issue, Site Specifics happily heaped praise upon StarWarsUncut, the crowdsourced feature film that reconstructed its original material 15 seconds at a time through fan submissions. Though interactivity and the occasional communally constituted cyber-corpus have never been strangers to Site Specifics, The Johnny Cash Project encapsulates this tendency in Web-based filmmaking with an elegance that seems to inaugurate a bona fide microgenre. Carving itself into your monitor in stark black, white, and gray tones, this ballet numérique is not so much a motion picture as a machine for generating one....
1910s Eerie Tales Richard Oswald, Germany, 1919 (YouTube, in 10 parts; picture quality: surprisingly good) Less than five years ago this silent film was considered lost, and it presently remains unobtainable in any format, so having to watch it in bits and pieces with an imperfect soundtrack is only a minor irritant. Even in today’s I-must-have-it-now world, there are still cases where beggars can’t be choosers, and even interrupted, this one feels like a real find....
jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy (Clarence “Coodie” Simmons and Chike Ozah, 2022) In recent weeks, Sundance’s documentary programmers have found themselves embroiled in curatorial controversy. The subject of intense debate and speculation is U.S. Documentary Competition selection Jihad Rehab, which follows a group of former Guantanamo Bay detainees, all Yemeni men, as they participate in a yearlong Saudi government program that seeks to deradicalize them. Before anyone had an opportunity to lay eyes on Jihad Rehab, director Meg Smaker raised eyebrows with her film’s flippant title (evoking an Islamophobic TLC reality program) and its anonymous Saudi producer (raising questions about access, funding, and motives)....
Manchester by the Sea The Sundance Film Festival has always existed as a bit of an escape. An escape, for 10 days, from the more traditional, often conventional, movies that draw the majority of moviegoers to multiplexes. Along the road to its prominence as the premier festival for new American film, particularly in the Nineties, films from this casual festival—staged mostly in makeshift movie theaters in Park City, Utah—have punctured the traditional distribution system to find wider audiences....
Raval, best known for directing performance artist CHRISTEENE’s music videos and Before You Know It (a 2013 documentary about gay seniors), handles the conflicting feelings in Come & Take It with style and candor. Film Comment spoke with Raval following the premiere of Come & Take It in the Texas Shorts competition at South by Southwest about the difficulties of addressing gun violence and representing the complexities of Jessica’s story....
Below you’ll find a handful of 2022 premieres under 45 minutes—the arbitrary marker used by most festivals to categorize shorts—that I have seen and think deserve an audience. These selections span narrative, experimental, animation, and documentary modes, and represent a variety of nations. Lest short films still be considered stepping stones to features, this list includes two auteurs already well-established in the latter realm, and one breakout filmmaker who premiered both a feature and a short this year....
