Wrath is of course the engine that motivates revenge, one of the movies’ favorite subjects—though a subject that the medium tends to have a conflicted relationship with. This ambivalence at the center of Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin, which first played out at the 2013 Cannes, where it won the FIPRESCI critics’ prize, subsequently worked the festival circuit (I saw it on one of these stops), and became a critical cause célèbre since opening stateside a couple of weeks ago....
Billed as “the first book to document the spectacular art of underground film posters,” Matthew Chojnacki’s Alternative Movie Posters: Film Art from the Underground is a fairly comprehensive snapshot (or let’s say family album) of a convergent moment in cinephilia and graphic design. Born out of the gig poster phenomenon of the past decade, and cross-pollinated with the surge of fan-produced fake Criterion covers that sprang up all over the Internet, the alternative movie poster scene has flourished in the past few years, producing a parallel universe of cult-film art, much of which Chojnacki has collected here....
Visages Villages Yes, this year there are more films at Cannes by directors who do not identify as male, most notably in the Competition, which in the past has been ludicrously blind in this area. Still, of the five or six compelling films I’ve seen in the first four days, two were by major French directors, Agnès Varda and Claire Denis, who happen to be women, and neither was in competition....
Claude Lanzmann (left), Thierry Frémaux (center), and László Nemes (right) Of the 19 films chosen to debut in the prestigious competition section at Cannes, two of the films that have screened in the fest’s first half are already standouts: Todd Haynes’s Carol, a tender and touching adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith love story The Price of Salt, from the United States; and from Hungary, László Nemes’s Son of Saul, an up close and brutal look at one man’s quest to protect a young boy’s body from an unceremonious disposal within the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp....
Once upon a time, back in the mid-seventies, Thomson was that rarest of rarities, an intelligent enthusiast, at once better-read and hipper than his auteurist brethren. That early enthusiasm, so different from the highly readable disengagement of his later writing, feels like a burst of sunshine as you come upon the largely unchanged entries on Cary Grant or Howard Hawks or Max Ophüls. But the distanced skepticism that eventually crystallized out of the early rapture is pretty questionable....
De Palma is to director profiles what Brian De Palma films are to conventional thrillers: its brilliance, humor, and humanity put it leagues beyond the usual “making-of” doc or DVD extra. Rarely has a filmmaker so energetically and eloquently revealed the pressures and pleasures of a director’s work. Yet De Palma’s co-directors, Noah Baumbach (When We’re Young, Mistress America) and Jake Paltrow (Young Ones) deserve credit for making all the right moves—and making them seem like no moves at all....
Images from Domino (Brian De Palma, 2019) Brian De Palma’s Domino, reviews to the contrary, is not a white hat/black hat thriller. Unfortunately, it’s old hat. This brutal English-language anti-ISIS suspense film, set mostly in Denmark and Spain, feels very 2015. The screenplay’s reflex plotting and tired terrorist vs. terrorist tropes call out for an international action/horror hack like Alexandre Aja or Fede Alvarez, not the great homegrown auteur behind American milestones like Blow-Out (1981) and Casualties of War (1989) and genre high points as different as Carrie (1976), Dressed to Kill (1980), and Carlito’s Way (1993)....
Over half of Mad Max: Fury Road unfolds in action-spectacle nirvana. Movement, images, and some plucky actors carry all the emotion and humor a movie of this scale needs, and its kinetic force delivers an adrenaline boost to your system. In the years Australian filmmaker George Miller spent reworking the script with comic-book artist Brendan McCarthy and actor-dramaturge Nico Lathouris (who played Grease Rat over 35 years ago in Mad Max) he found ways of plunging into a dystopia that’s at once baroque and bananas, without pausing for exposition or an extraneous gesture or syllable....
If I didn’t know that Triple 9 is named for an actual police code, I’d bet that director John Hillcoat had simply turned the Satanic number 666 upside down. The Australian director’s movies, at least the four that have opened here—The Proposition (05), The Road (09), Lawless (12), and now Triple 9—don’t merely descend into a Dantean inferno. They start in one. It’s too bad he seldom justifies the tour....
The title of Hong Sang-soo’s sixth feature functions like the South Korean director’s film itself: it’s a simple observation—with metaphorical teeth. The woman in question, Moon-sook (Ko Hyeon-geong), has two men vying for her affection: a film director named Joong-rae (Kim Seung-woo) and his production designer Chang-wook (Kim Tae-woo). Chang-wook introduces Moon-sook as his “girlfriend,” a status she denies by claiming “we’ve only kissed once.” Her words clearly sting Chang-wook....
Helluva pelican. Hardcore fans of Oscar-winning Chinatown screenwriter and legendary Hollywood script doctor Robert Towne’s 1982 directorial debut will know exactly what I’m talking about. One of the most erotic jock films ever made, Towne’s transfixed meditation on lithe young Mariel Hemingway (then just 20) seems born under the uncomfortably twinned signs of Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad and David Hamilton’s Bilitis: part slo-mo, art-film muscle pageant, part leering porno gawp. Seduced by real-life Olympic pentathlete Patrice Donnelly in the film’s first act (20 kundalini minutes of sweet, sweaty, libidinally stunning sexual intimacy involving the above-mentioned bird of the sea), rising track star Hemingway eventually clears the hurdles to bedding coach Scott Glenn....
The English subtitles at the end of Christopher Doyle’s Hong Kong Trilogy tell us that the people we’ve just met are real Hong Kong people “sharing their DREAMS” before signing off, “Thanks for taking the time to LISTEN UP.” Wouldn’t it be nice if more films were so charmingly gracious? Doyle’s trilogy certainly has charm, which to a degree makes up for a sometimes frustrating sketchiness in terms of substance....
The proverbial mirror on the proverbial wall in Snow White and the Huntsman looks more like a golden wok, and when the evil queen (Charlize Theron) stands before it, the thing turns into a smoldering mass of anthropomorphic goo, slithering across her chamber floor and reassembling itself into something like humanoid form. The talking goo reminds the queen that she will not remain the fairest in the land so long as her bothersome stepdaughter, Snow White (Kristen Stewart), remains among the living....
The title of the new Judd Apatow production, The Five-Year Engagement, refers to the amount of time two betrothed twentysomethings spend drifting in and out of each other’s lives, struggling with commitment issues and career considerations, trying to figure out if they really are Mr. and Mrs. Right, all the while indefinitely postponing their impending nuptials. Shlubby everydude Tom (Jason Segel) is a San Francisco sous chef with a promising future....
Her Man Turn to director Tay Garnett’s raucous autobiography Light Your Torches and Pull Up Your Tights, and you will find several pages on Her Man, which he made in 1930. There’s an extended description of the movie’s running gag involving James Gleason and a slot machine; a funny story involving why Her Man stars Phillips Holmes and not Dean Jagger; an explanation of why process shots are necessary wherein Garnett also insists that the technical details are too complex for a layman (they’re not, but maybe Garnett was afraid of boring people); and a final anecdote about returning from location with a wisecracker who turned out to be Bob Hope....
Avengers: Endgame (Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, 2019) The idea that a nation represents its history to itself at the movies is an old and familiar one. The work of Steven Spielberg, Errol Morris, Ava DuVernay, Raoul Peck, and Oliver Stone remind those of us in older generations of the things we lived through and forgot in the rush of oncoming news; their pop-cultural function has been to transmute current events into capital-H history, transmit the recent past to those too young to know it firsthand, and bring older historical events back into alignment with troubling aspects of the present moment....
