Posts

Following a four-day test run entirely focused on war-themed cinema in May 2010, the second edition of the Kinoforum branched out in length (now six days), subject matter (anything goes), and glitz (multiple prizes, nightly red carpet events). And considering the festival’s evident battle to choose between spectacle and pure love of movies, opening with a film as divisive as Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In seemed fitting. Harking back to his earlier, more subversive work, the disturbed revenge tale oozes sexual and emotional cruelty—absolutely not for all tastes....

Kurt Russell in Miracle (2004, Gavin O’Connor) “It was a sliver of the Cold War played out on a sheet of ice. The confluence of events was so extraordinary it can never happen again. It was the greatest sports moment of the 20th century.” – Al Michaels, ABC sportscaster The cover of the March 3, 1980 issue of Sports Illustrated shows the jubilant pigpile of American hockey players, celebrating their improbable and historic 4-3 win over the then Soviet Union team at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid....

Ethereal light streaks through the swaying trees of Texas Hill Country in the opening shots of David Lowery’s drama, illuminating the mythic space in which doomed lovers Ruth (Rooney Mara) and Bob (Casey Affleck) share precious moments together before they’re separated by the law and fate. The pair are as tender in love as they are dangerous with guns, their magnetism the driving force behind a scenario defined entirely by the prospect of their eventual reunion—an endeavor which, like the film itself, spans years and yet remains minor in scale....

Designed as one big, sloppy thesp-a-thon, the film adaptation of August: Osage County interprets one of the past decade’s most overly hyped dramas with the conviction usually lavished on top-drawer Eugene O’Neill. Tracy Letts, who adapted his Pulitzer Prize–winning play for the screen, never got Tolstoy’s memo about how “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and as a result we’re treated to a veritable banquet of American-theater tropes sensationalizing intergenerational dysfunction: banshee-like women and taciturn men in the autumn of their years, and progeny who either suffer for their familial devotion or lose their souls to escape the nuthouse....

Appearing on The Daily Show to discuss Red Tails—a war drama based on the exploits of the 332nd pursuit squadron known as the Tuskegee Airmen, the first African Americans to fly combat for the U.S. military—executive producer George Lucas explained: “It’s one of the first all-black action pictures ever made. It’s exactly like Star Wars . . . The story is too fantastic and wonderful to cram into two hours....

A veteran of the tight-knit Austin film scene, Bob Byington specializes in intimate, often tricky portraits of irredeemable pariahs and slackers. Over the course of 70-80 minutes of deadpan humor, he cajoles us into having some affection for them, until by the end we find in their petty existence something essential about life. Since his return to low-budget filmmaking after a fallow decade, the writer-director (and actor) has made vérité-style profiles of an unrepentant convicted perv (RSO: Registered Sex Offender, 08) and a sad-sack troubadour who’ll chew your ear off over his last break-up (Harmony and Me, 09)....

Among the delicious reasons to see Stephen Frears’s Tamara Drewe is the spectacle of the movie’s most mendacious and manipulative character getting his comeuppance—a punishment that has been diligently foreshadowed and yet is so shockingly grotesque when it comes barreling down on him as to have you both gasping and hooting with laughter. Another highlight is Gemma Arterton—every inch of her, but in particular her thighs, which seem to be as much natural wonders as products of hard labor in the gym....

Eleven-year old Nicholas Barclay disappeared during a sleepy San Antonio afternoon in June 1994. Almost four years later, word of the blond-haired, blue-eyed boy’s sudden re-appearance in Spain came as a miracle—and for Frédéric Bourdin, a 23-year-old French con man known as “The Chameleon,” it was. Despite his swarthy complexion and French inflections, Bourdin was able to convince Spanish authorities, FBI agents, and almost the entire Barclay family that he was the missing boy, engineering a web of lies that landed him on U....

Hovering somewhere between ghost story and fairy tale, the 30th feature by the indefatigable Manoel de Oliveira is a beguiling meditation on the ontological and illusionist powers of cinema. The Strange Case of Angelica tells the story of a young Jewish photographer summoned late one stormy night to take a final, postmortem portrait of the eponymous aristocratic maiden whose sudden death has left her lying in mysteriously blissful repose in her ancestral mansion high on a hill outside of town, a knowing Mona Lisa smile suspended enigmatically across her face....

Photo from Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Twitter I was invited to follow the shoot of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria in order to collect material for an upcoming book to be published by Fireflies Press. This included writing a daily diary of the production, from which the following passages are excerpted exclusively in Film Comment, in serialized form with a new entry every afternoon for the next week. This is the final entry. Read the entire series here....

Yann Demange’s gut-wrenchingly tense ’71 provides a snapshot of Northern Ireland’s Troubles that is neither didactic nor exploitative. More impressively, its structure and plot convey the universal aspects of any intractable conflict or prolonged war, particularly the way in which youth take part—or, more accurately, get used. The all-too-familiar dynamic at play is perhaps most explicitly expressed when the British army is described as “rich cunts telling dumb cunts to kill poor cunts....

“I never believed in censorship… until now,” I wrote to a colleague after seeing A Serbian Film, attempting to steer him clear of it. (I failed.) But hearing that a toned-down version is set for release provided occasion for reconsideration. First-time director Srdjan Spasojevic’s horrific little film—made, yes, in Serbia, and subsequently banned there (and elsewhere)—is about a family man (Srdjan Todorovic) lured out of porn-star retirement for one last, hush-hush job....

No Wave, the deformed love child of Jack Smith and Andy Warhol, was an aesthetic movement whose output was perhaps best understood conceptually—rather than actually seen or heard. The music and films that emerged—including the work of Tommy Turner (a personal favorite), Nick Zedd, DNA, Teenage Jesus and Jerks, Lung Leg, Amos Poe, Vivienne Dick, Eric Mitchell, Bette Gordon, the Contortions, et al.—remain to this day anarchic, artless (at times deliberately), and often unnerving....

After cycling through an array of horror subgenres for his first three features—the urban epidemic chiller Mulberry Street (06), apocalyptic vampire film Stake Land (10), and cannibalistic family drama We Are What We Are (13)—Jim Mickle remains firmly ensconced in B territory with this pulp crime thriller. After family man Richard Dane (Michael C. Hall, who subtly rides the line between put-upon patsy and entitled pariah) nervously guns down an unarmed prowler in his East Texas home, he becomes a target for the dead man’s father (Sam Shepard, revitalized), a leathery ex-con....

There’s probably nothing more Borgesian than the Internet. Thanks to Google, everything is Borgesian. Johan Grimonprez, a Belgian multimedia artist, gets a non-redundancy pass: Double Take, his first full-length feature, not only utilizes Borgesian strategies—from magic-realist tropes to labyrinthine webs of self-referential circularity—it’s based on an actual Borges story, “25 August 1983.” The original tale tells of an impossible encounter between the Argentine writer and himself. Double Take updates the get-together: it now involves Alfred Hitchcock’s chance meeting with a doppelgänger on the Universal Studios backlot....