| NYFF: Useless |
Useless, the new documentary by Jia Zhangke, avoids grand statements about fashion or the apparel industry or the rapid changes that are transforming Chinese life, though it is decidedly about all of these things. Clocking in at under 90 minutes, and deploying no voiceover, Useless is actually a deceptively modest piece of work—some may call it "minor"—but its modesty should not be taken for lack of ambition or for a failure on Jia’s part to grapple with his film’s subjects. Instead, Jia has crafted something beautiful, expansive, and deeply philosophical but has left it to his viewers to make their own connections—and to make up their own minds. Useless is really about the idea of clothing—what it means to each of us as individuals, where it comes from, and how that relates to our conceptions of identity and work—though Jia doesn't have the hubris to make these themes overt or impose his attitude towards these subjects on his audience.
Click here to read Chris Wisniewski's review of Jia Zhangke's Useless,
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| NYFF: Persepolis |
In Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's animated adaptation of Satrapi’s graphic-novel autobiography about a young girl growing up in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution and Iran's war with Iraq, episodic stories give Western readers and many others a glimpse into a fascinating world during a tumultuous era, and the author's illustrations express the caricatured, exaggerated impressions of a young child. But being someone who's just never really felt attuned to the art of the graphic novel, throughout I couldn’t help but think that even the best panel of Persepolis might be substituted by a better written description of the same represented event or emotion. Such a suspicion could make me something of a hypocrite, since I obviously have no problems with another image-based form of storytelling, cinema. Maybe, then, it's not any inherent flaws of the form of the graphic novel but Persepolis itself, which, despite its successes, feels ever so slight, the sort of product that, while not unintelligent, flatters its sophisticated but undemanding audience with the constant reassurance of tasteful propriety.
Click here to read Michael Joshua Rowin's review of Persepolis.
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| NYFF: A Girl Cut in Two |
Claude Chabrol again goes about dissecting the vanities and hypocrisies of the rich and/or famous with A Girl Cut in Two, the latest of his nearly annual socially satiric potboilers. The outline, naturally, is familiar: a suspiciously de-eroticized love triangle in which fresh-faced young TV weathergirl Gabrielle (Ludivine Sagnier) finds herself cleaved, as the title would suggest, between the poisonous twin affections of famed aged novelist Charles Saint-Denis (François Berléand) and the arrogant, childish heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, Paul Gaudens (Benoît Magimel), she meets, not fortuitously, at a Saint-Denis book signing. Chabrol keeps the proceedings lively, if not fresh, with his usually effortlessly cynical take, a detached bemusement that precludes true emotional involvement yet engenders a certain self-conscious affection. Not unlike Chabrol’s recent works, Merci pour le chocolat and The Flower of Evil, A Girl Cut in Two takes a pragmatic, almost laidback approach to its sensational narrative, situating scandal as something of a given within such privileged settings. Though superficially similar to his 1994 film L’Enfer, which depicted the unraveling of a untrusting husband’s psyche as a headfirst plunge into fiery, sweaty derangement, the jealousy on display here is naturally dispassionate, a fact of life for those who never felt the need to learn to trust.
Click here to read Michael Koresky's review of Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two.
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| NYFF: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead |
. . . Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead deserves hyperbole—it’s a late-career slam dunk from one of America’s greatest filmmakers that, like the best pulp, has an extraordinary moral weight and a relentless fatalism. Lumet’s critics have pegged his work as phallocentric, and Before the Devil will surely add fuel to their fire. It’s a movie about men in crisis—feckless, hollow, emotionally stunted men who turn to robbery and violence as outs for their middle-class despair. It’s one of his darkest, meanest visions of America, a world of suburban strip malls, joyless sex, and perfect crimes gone miserably awry. The story of Andy and Hank, brothers who conspire to knock off their own parents’ jewelry store, and then deal with the unintended consequences, the film advances tremendously on Lumet’s modest comeback Find Me Guilty and reasserts the director as an indelible American storyteller. Click here to read the Brendon Bouzard's review of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.
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| NYFF: Redacted |
...Redacted has been both overpraised and too easily dismissed—an unsurprising reaction to a film that feels alternately as rushed and angry as this week’s hot Youtube clip and as devilishly calculated as the work of a seasoned master. Unmistakably De Palma, the film initially locates its director in the more freeform mode of his early career, when he appropriated Godardian antics within American social satires, such as Greetings and Hi, Mom!, both of which targeted Vietnam-era ethical dissolution and radical disillusion. With Redacted, though, gone is the forthright humor, as evidenced in its sober opening, in which onscreen text, explaining the film’s content and purpose, is silently erased with digital chalk, as though removed by an invisible authority. Thus, De Palma has set out his case with clean, efficient lines—this will be a film consisting of those horrible “truths” that the American media does not want and will not allow us to view—only to see them washed away in a mess of scribbles. The remainder of the film will then search for the proper means of representing and reframing these stolen images... Click here to read Michael Koresky's review of Redacted.
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| NYFF: No Country for Old Men |
It’s good to have the Coen Brothers back. So good, in fact, that one can now consider the descending quality of their recent output (with the notable exception of 2001’s The Man Who Wasn’t There) an aberration, a temporary artistic malaise—which started with O Brother, Where Art Thou? and culminated in the low point of their career, The Ladykillers—but one that has now come to a thankful halt. Sometimes you’ve got to hit bottom before climbing back on top, as they say, and the transition from that miserable 2004 disaster to No Country for Old Men is such an about-face in the brothers’ filmmaking that the most obvious of phrases can be unashamedly employed to describe their latest venture: an astonishing return to form.
The clearest reason for the rebound is the new film’s source material and, through it, the reestablishment of gravitas in the Coen universe. A minor but assured novel by one of our greatest living novelists, Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men is perfect for a Coen screen adaptation: it’s the sort of macabre/quotidian genre-bender rife with crime, violence, and a kind of everyman pondering that caters to the Coens’ greatest strengths as absurdist chroniclers of the American ethos.
Click here to read the rest of Michael Joshua Rowin's review of No Country for Old Men.
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| NYFF: I'm Not There |
Not being the world’s foremost Bob Dylan expert, but thoroughly loving the films of Todd Haynes, I’m either the best or worst viewer for Haynes’s new Dylan movie I’m Not There. It’s not that I don’t care for Dylan’s music—I actually like what I’ve absorbed through cultural osmosis and some personal investigation a great deal. But given the sheer volume of material and the accompanying mountain of discourse, criticism and myth-mongering surrounding the man and his songs, the biggest question for me has always been: How to possibly begin really learning about Bob Dylan? So, I’ve generally sat on the sidelines. Those hoping that I’m Not There, with its splintered Dylans encompassing different portions of the man’s career, is the ur-text that will provide a greatest hits of a life (like a Ray or Walk the Line) will be sorely disappointed with Haynes’s more ambitious project. I’m Not There tells something like the story of Bob Dylan, but very obliquely—no one here is named Bob Dylan, some characters only bear passing resemblance to him and others adopt the monikers of famous persona who influenced the songwriter (Woody Guthrie, Arthur Rimbaud, Billy the Kid). Yet by so forcefully rejecting standard biographical filmmaking practices, Haynes has exploded the genre entirely and pushed his material into a series of dialectical relationships which finds histories actual and manufactured (and some that fully blend both categories) crossing swords all en route to a far richer and more multifaceted experience than any standard biopic. If one were to posit a simple thesis statement for I’m Not There, it’d read something along the lines of: an honest attempt to reckon with the myriad ways in which Bob Dylan absorbed and was absorbed by American culture. The crux being that absorption process—the moment where the two touch each other is the catalyzing one. That we can speak of these questions at all in relationship to a film genre that’s grown beyond moribund in recent years speaks to merely one of the reasons why I’m Not There is great art.
Click here to read the rest of Jeff Reichert's review.
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| NYFF: The Axe in the Attic |
Self-reflexivity is a funny thing: it can either allow documentary directors to broach their subject from the inside out, casting light on the otherwise concealed process of filmmaking, or it can severely distract by putting the director in the spotlight at the expense of the subject. The Axe in the Attic, Lucia Small and Ed Pincus’s documentary on the repercussions of Hurricane Katrina, unfortunately falls in the latter category. It contains some riveting testimony of New Orleans’s destruction and the aftermath from the storm’s refugees, but it’s also sabotaged by a tone-deaf attempt to hold a mirror up to the directors’ liberal misgivings about undertaking such a project. It’s not the concept that’s inherently flawed—one day when the time is right and the execution works somebody will have created an illuminating portrait of both the legacy of Katrina and the unavoidable difficulties of engaging the issue from across racial and economic divides. But until then we’ll have to learn from the mistakes of others, and that’s probably the most generous way to view The Axe in the Attic.
Click here to read the rest of Michael Joshua Rowin's review.
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| NYFF: The Flight of the Red Balloon |
Albert Lamorisse’s red balloon is still perfectly, lollipop round in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Flight of the Red Balloon, a tribute to (and glorious expansion of) that 1956 children’s classic. Its unassailable roundness isn’t unimportant when discussing Hou’s film, as the sort of visual beauty this director is after has never necessarily been of the symmetrical kind. Instead, Hou revels in complex set-ups that honor the people within them by doting on their movements, mannerisms, withholdings, and revelations. The peripheral presence of the balloon stands in sharp contrast to this film’s gorgeously maintained mess: never has a film felt so spontaneous, slapdash, and utterly controlled all at once. It’s become a cliché to say that a film floats, that it exists in reverie, yet The Flight of the Red Balloon may come closer to embodying an earthbound heavenly state than any film I’ve seen. Its casual bliss is buoyed by a regard for beauty so accessible that, in its self-reflexive final scene, even a group of schoolchildren can notice it.
Click here to read Michael Koresky's review of The Flight of the Red Balloon.
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| NYFF: Secret Sunshine |
Teeming with incident, full of emotions, roiling with anger, Secret Sunshine is nevertheless something like a blank canvas. Director Lee Chang-dong’s protracted yet endlessly involving tale of grief and regeneration is a classically tailored assemblage of small, clipped moments, prizing human behavior but also acknowledging it as remote and difficult to define. Likewise, Cannes Best Actress-winner Do-yeon Jeon, who remains the center of the film for its 142-minute running time, is kept at a curious arm’s length—every time we feel we’re one step closer to her, the film takes two steps back. Though Secret Sunshine’s schizophrenic storytelling ensures that Do-yeon will toggle between hope, desperation, despair, hostility, and peace, the director makes all of these fluctuations as ungraspable as gusts of wind.
Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky's review of Secret Sunshine.
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| NYFF: Silent Light |
Slowly but surely, Carlos Reygadas is becoming one of the great directors of our time. It’s unfortunate that his new Silent Light might disappoint some with its sober spiritualism replacing the bolder experiments of his first two (and better) films, Japón and Battle in Heaven, because to miss out on what Reygadas has attempted and succeeded here is to miss out on Reygadas’s development. It would be further sad if others were to mistake Silent Light as merely a tasteful improvement on the less pleasant content of Reygadas’s previous films. No, Silent Light is something unique, if not before unseen, and it should be recognized for what it is, rather than what others wish it to be.
Click here to read Michael Joshua Rowin's review of Silent Light.
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| NYFF: The Man from London |
Seven years ago Béla Tarr graced movie screens with Werckmeister Harmonies, the last visionary masterpiece of a dying century, or, perhaps more accurately, the first of a new one. The former label has been applied to Tarr’s 1994 epic Sátántangó as well, but where that film is a more specific chronicle of mass uncertainty as experienced from just beyond the edge of Communism’s collapse in Eastern Europe, the anxieties at the core of Werckmeister are less localized and thoroughly amorphous. Even though their roots sprout from the same milieu as Tarr’s prior opus, in Werckmeister they assume a more millennial character. It was a few years into the 21st century before the film approached widespread availability here, but watching Werckmeister then was, and still is, an uneasy if exhilarating prospect, marked as it is by elusive traces of an earlier time. Contrasted against the chaos, madness, and destruction in its narrative, the elegant pairing of Tarr’s phantasmagoric black-and-white imagery and composer Mihály Víg’s plaintive circular odes consistently awes even as the emotions they evoke unsettle. The film reaches masterpiece status because its scenario perfectly balances timeliness with timelessness, resulting in a work that manages a statement about turn of the century angst. And the technical mastery of Werckmeister can’t be overstated—if cinema has offered anything purer and more viscerally overwhelming, then I’m not aware of it.
Tarr’s is a heavy, maximalist vision, as ambitiously difficult as it is endlessly generous to the spectator willing to fully enter its embrace. Grand effect is most often the product of grand effort, and The Man from London, Tarr’s long-awaited follow-up to Werckmeister, arrives laden with a creation story marred by the suicide of a key producer, funding issues, massive investment in production infrastructure, and interminable delays. Click here to read the rest of Jeff Reichert's review of The Man from London.
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| NYFF: 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days |
Many have proclaimed that the only misstep in Cristian Mungiu’s searing, expertly paced Palme d’or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is its deployment of one particularly in-your-face climactic image. The content of the shot shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to those who know the subject matter of the film, yet most viewers I’ve spoken with have nevertheless deemed it an intentional “shock.” While I certainly can’t quibble with anyone’s gut reaction to Mungiu’s decision to finally show and not tell, to me this image is integral not only to the film’s success but also to its nature. Mungiu’s movie may not need more plaudits, yet it might need defending. What we have here is a film in which (with one notable narrative exception) we see all its protagonist sees, hear what she hears, swallow fear, intake images just as she does; that 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, ostensibly the story of an illegal abortion, is greatly privileged to the point of view of a young woman who helps her friend procure the abortion and not the pregnant girl herself illustrates just how trickily experiential the film is. In fact, despite the controversial, long, lingering close-up in question (which, in my opinion, allows the viewer to see what they don’t want to see, as a means to getting over the dread associated with it and moving on), 4 Months is not really an “abortion movie” at all. Rather, it’s unerringly fixated on matters of female self-preservation, survival, togetherness, and alienation.
Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky's review of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days.
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| Opening Night |
Come to glorious Lincoln Center for the 45th annual New York Film Festival!!
Well, we're not as quick on the draw as some of our colleagues, so we dare to begin our New York Film Festival coverage, with in-depth reviews of this year's selected films, on the first day of the festival!
First up, check out our takes on Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited (here's our shot and our reverse shot) and Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Check back throughout the next couple of weeks here and on our main site for continued coverage of our favorite, most streamlined, discriminating festival. Spoilers: we're just WILD about the Hou Hsiao-hsien and the Todd Haynes.....
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| The Greatest Film Ever... |
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