2024 New York Film Festival Roundup

62nd New York Film Festival 

September 27-October 14, 2024

filmlinc.org

At the 62nd annual New York Film Festival, both the opening night selection, RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys, and centerpiece entry, Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door, will open in theaters soon. I caught the closing night film (Steve McQueen’s Blitz) along with a selection of features and documentaries from the Main Slate and Spotlight sections. 

Blitz

Blitz (Apple +, now streaming)

Steve McQueen’s latest is a surprisingly conventional war movie about the travails of George (Elliott Heffernan), a young boy who hops off the train after his mother Rita (Saiorse Ronan) sends him away to keep him safe from the nightly Nazi bombing raids. What begins as an intimate look at a family separated by war soon morphs into a risible journey through the underbelly of a shattered London—the implausibilities begin when George escapes much too easily, and he witnesses far more extreme behavior than any young boy would be able to handle. At least Heffernan and Ronan (an actress incapable of a false note in her performances) give this disjointed and hysterical film a solid center, for what it’s worth.

Anora

Anora (Neon, in theaters)

Sean Baker’s film won the Palme d’or at Cannes, which says more about the Cannes jury than it does about the film, an overlong and cartoonish rom-com about Brighton Beach stripper Anora, who falls for the supposed charms of Vanya, a Russian mobster’s immature son, who—after throwing money at her and giving her satisfying sex—flies her to Vegas for a quickie wedding. Back in his dad’s Brooklyn mansion, their ignorantly blissful life together comes crashing down. Baker plays much of this as a ridiculously vulgar and childish farce, especially when the bumbling gangsters and foul-mouthed Anora fight, then try and track down Vanya after he runs away. An excruciating 135 minutes, Baker’s film thinks it’s smarter than it is—and, even though Mikey Madison makes a lively Anora, even she can’t get this to the finish line, especially after Anora has sex with the only mobster who treats her halfway decently. There are some funny and even touching moments, but these are unfortunately hemmed in by so many less felicitous ones.

Transamazonia

Transamazonia 

The lone survivor of a plane crash in the Amazon rainforest years earlier, teenage Rebecca is a faith healer there under the aegis of her preacher dad Lawrence in Pia Marais’ often startling drama about morality, faith, environmentalism and exploitation. Things come to a head when loggers encroach on Indigenous lands and Rebecca is asked by the logging company manager to use her healing powers on his wife, who is in a coma. Helena Zengel’s mesmerizing portrayal of Rebecca is the complex center of this thought-provoking film, shot with moody chiaroscuro by Mathieu de Montgrand.

Emilia Pérez

Emilia Pérez (Netflix, now streaming)

Director Jacques Audiard has never shied away from overbaked premises: his latest follows a trans woman who was the leader of a Mexican crime cartel and wants to reenter her children’s lives after leaving them behind to explore her new life. It’s filled with typical Audiard flourishes, many of which are borderline risible, like the musical numbers that put a further strain on an already overstuffed film. It’s up to the cast to make something credible out of this, and Zoe Saldana (as Rita, the lawyer who helps Emilia) gives the best performance of her career, showing off a lithe expressiveness during her song and dance routines. Karla Sofía Gascón as Emilia is also quite a powerhouse, and even Selena Gomez—as Juan turned Emilia’s wife Jessi—gives a sympathetic portrayal. Audiard bites off more than he can chew, but despite the transgressions, his film remains a watchable mess.

A Traveler’s Needs 

A Traveler’s Needs (Cinema Guild, in theaters)

Korean director Hong Sangsoo is taste I’ve yet to acquire: his latest meandering, deadpan feature tells a wisp of a story about a middle-aged language tutor (the redoubtable Isabelle Huppert) who lives in a Seoul suburb and crosses paths with a variety of bemused locals. For 90 minutes, that’s pretty much all that happens, all so Sangsoo can make belabored, minor comic points and move on. The final sequence is lovely in its quiet way, but mostly the film wears out its welcome, even with Huppert at her most engaging.

TWST/Things We Said Today

TWST/Things We Said Today 

Romanian director Andrei Ujică transforms documentary footage into this quasi-fictional feature that takes as its starting point the Beatles’ record-breaking concert at Shea Stadium on a hot summer night in 1965. The footage includes the Fab Four giving as good as they get during an airport news conference along with the Watts riots in L.A., which also happened that week. Too bad Ujică can’t leave well enough alone; into this time capsule he inserts a silly story of two young people who fall for each other that fateful weekend. Superimposing these characters on the film frames has a ghost-like charm, yet it also detracts from the archival chronicle by allowing nonentities to elbow their way in.

Suburban Fury 

Suburban Fury 

Director Robinson Devor’s compelling portrait of Sara Jane Moore—who tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975—is an audacious pseudo-documentary centered by an interview with Moore (still vital and outspoken in her 90s), who discusses how her extremist actions led to that horrible moment, for which she spent 32 years in prison. Devor might be too clever for his own good: his film is sometimes nearly as enervating as it is unnerving (especially its reenactments), but the off-kilter, hyper-realistic feel adroitly underscores Moore’s bizarre, uniquely American life. 

Dahomey

Dahomey (MUBI, in theaters)

Mati Diop’s extraordinarily original film follows the artistic treasures from the former West African kingdom of Dahomey (now Benin) being repatriated from the French museum that held them for more than a century. In 67 packed minutes, Diop’s themes of colonization and racism are married to her conceit to have a statue of Dahomey’s King Ghezo narrate with a deep, eerie, electronically enhanced voice, which allows the artifacts to be more than simply objects. Her closely observed study climaxes with a conservation among mostly young Benin natives, who argue whether this is mere tokenism (only 26 objects returned out of thousands?) or whether it’s a real opening to return more cultural treasures. 

Youth (Homecoming) 

Youth (Hard Times) 

Youth (Homecoming) (Icarus Films, in theaters)

Chinese director Wang Bing concludes his monumental documentary trilogy about life among young textile workers with the second and third parts of Youth—the first part, Spring, premiered last year. These perceptive chronicles show these people hard at work in the city of Zhili, far from their hometowns. Like Spring, Hard Times records the backbreaking repetition of their jobs and the casual exploitation by the shop owners. Homecoming records return visits to see family and friends (and even get married and have a baby) during the holidays. The cumulative power of these three vérité films—nearly nine hours in all—immerses viewers in this very specific world.

October '23 Digital Week I

New York Film Festival Spotlight 

Kidnapped (Rapito) 

(Cohen Media)

The latest film by the world’s greatest living director, 83-year-old Italian master Marco Bellocchio, is yet another of his gripping and operatic dissections of historical subjects that touch on politics and religion—this time he tells the horrific but true story of a six-year-old Jewish boy torn from his parents’ grasp because a former housekeeper said she baptized him when she thought he was dying six years earlier. With his usual sweeping flair and acute observation, Bellocchio fills the screen with indelible images that not only cast a wide net on anti-Semitic mid-19th century Italian (read: Catholic) society but also the excruciating pain and loss felt by the Mortara family as their beloved son and brother remains forever out of their reach. Bellocchio builds his film on two towering performances—by Barbara Ronchi as the boy’s mother and by Enea Sala as the six-year-old Edgardo, as strong a child performance I’ve ever seen. There’s also supremely well-chosen music by Rachmaninoff and Pärt to complement a superb original score by Fabio Massimo Capogrosso. Then there’s that haunting but gorgeous final shot of mother and son, as unforgettable as the rest of this masterpiece.

Kidnapped screens at the New York Film Festival on October 8 (FilmLinc.org); Cohen Media will release the film later this year or in 2024. 

In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week

The Royal Hotel 

(Neon) 

As she does in the Netflix series Ozark, Julia Garner acts the hell out of her role as Hannah, one of two young American women who take a backpacking tour of Australia, where they become bartenders in a rundown Outback pub named the Royal Hotel—where they soon discover that the drinking culture down under is not as innocuous as it first seems. Although Jessica Henwick matches Garner scene for scene as her friend Liv, Kitty Green’s thickly atmospheric drama is plenty short on plausible characterization or psychological coherence. When in doubt, blow something up—and Green follows that maxim, ending her film with a fiery inferno that’s a cheap way to satisfy her protagonists—and viewers. 

Borderline 

(Cinema Epoch)

Charli and Zee’s fraught friendship that hangs on other men and—mostly—Charlie’s drug problem, exacerbated by her mental instability, is chronicled by writer-director Rich Mallery in a mainly exploitive manner: it seems as if most of the movie is an excuse to get several young actresses to undress in front of the camera. It’s too bad, for Mallery’s heavy-handed approach hampers whatever credibility the otherwise interesting performers Kate Lý Johnston (Charli) and Kylee Michael (Zee) can invest in their roles. 

Deliver Us 

(Magnet)

In a rural convent, a young nun is about to give birth to twins (she claims it’s by immaculate conception), one of whom will be the Messiah and the other the Antichrist, at least according to an old prophecy. This alternately risible and effective slice of horror by directors Lee Roy Kunz and Cru Ennis has the dark, dank, relentlessly dour atmosphere down pat, but much of the rest is too pat—from the too-clever pun of the title and the wooden acting to silly contrivances like bludgeoning viewers from the start with beheadings and flayings that are too stylishly presented.

Joan Baez—I Am a Noise 

(Magnolia)

Folk legend Joan Baez receives an honest appraisal by directors Miri Navasky, Karen O'Connor and Maeve O'Boyle, who were given access to a storage unit’s worth of material that Baez’ mother had saved for decades, and which the singer herself didn’t even know was so voluminous. Baez tells her own story thanks to diaries she kept and letters she wrote since she was young, and there’s much archival footage (both commercial and home-movie) of Baez with her family and as one of the most celebrated singers and activists of our time. Amid her commentary about everything from her ex Bob Dylan to her role in the civil rights movement, it’s her revelation that she and her late sister Mimi were abused by their father that will unsettle most viewers. 

Uncharitable 

(Abramorama)

How the misperception of non-profits’ spending has caused untold damage to their ability to help those in need is chronicled by Stephen Gyllenhaal in an angry documentary that hopes to correct the unfair media coverage that led to congressional investigations and a massive loss of donations from a skeptical public. Based on the eponymous book by Don Pollatta, who discusses how his own nonprofit became the target of scrutiny due to supposedly too-high salaries and overhead, the film also presents other nonprofit leaders who have felt the sting of public and governmental rebuke that hurt the people these charities try to help. It’s an eye-opening look at how cancel culture can hurt the very ones helping those who need it the most.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

Creepy Crawly 

(Well Go USA)

The perfect adjective for this bloody Thai horror flick is the first word of its title—creepy is the only way to describe the plot, which concerns an ancient, centipede-like monster inhabiting its guests at a hotel where they are quarantining during a pandemic. The creature burrows into its victims and takes over their bodies to gorily spectacular effect. Writers-directors Chalit Krileadmongkon and Pakphum Wongjinda push the envelope with an unblinking emphasis on more blood and guts, and the game cast goes along with it, right up to the finale. There’s a first-rate hi-def transfer.

Ruby Gillman—Teenage Kraken 

(Dreamworks)

In Dreamworks’ latest animated feature, young Ruby has difficulty fitting in among her fellow teens at school once she learns that she’s a sea kraken—and that her best friend is actually a mermaid, the mortal enemy of the kraken. There’s plenty of amusement and sentiment in Ruby’s plight, and it comes with a colorful visual palette overseen by director Kirk DeMicco and codirector Faryn Pearl, along with sparkling voice performances by Lana Condor (Ruby), Toni Collette (her mom) and the redoubtable Jane Fonda (kraken matriarch Grandmamah). It looks eye-poppingly pleasing on Blu; extras include an audio commentary, deleted scenes with Pearl’s intro, interviews and featurettes.

Schreker—Der Schatzgraber/The Treasure Hunter 

(Naxos)

Austrian composer Franz Schreker (1878-1934) wrote many operas, and although none has gained a foothold in the repertory, this convoluted drama concerning magic jewels, murder and redemptive love is about as close as he came to a popular work—at least until his exquisite music was banned by the Nazis. Director Christof Loy’s 2019 Berlin staging leans into the forceful melodrama that Schreker builds through his provocative plot and luminous score as well as the juicy roles for the leads; Daniel Johanson and Michael Laurenz are excellent as the male leads, but it’s Elisabet Strid’s portrayal of the heroine that makes this so tragically memorable. Marc Albrecht persuasively conducts the Berlin Opera Orchestra.

DVD Release of the Week

Slava Ukraini 

(Cohen Media)

French philosopher Jacques Henri-Levy went to Ukraine right after the Russian invasion and spent months visiting several regions affected by Putin’s unprovoked belligerence, speaking with both civilians and soldiers defending their homeland against the onslaught. Henri-Levy’s interactions provide affecting and personal responses and reactions from a population that, even under heavy bombardment, won’t surrender, and the film is a window into and map of how the Ukrainian people are coping with and even returning fire to Putin’s murderous thugs. Lone extra is a post-screening Q&A with Henri-Levy.

2021 New York Film Festival Roundup

59th New York Film Festival 

September 24-October 10, 2021

filmlinc.org

At the 59th annual New York Film Festival, opening night’s The Tragedy of Macbeth by the Coen brothers, Pedro Almodovar’s closing night entry, Parallel Mothers, and the festival centerpiece, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, will be released by year’s end. I did catch several other films in the main slate as well as the “Revivals” and “Currents” sections. 

Petite Maman

Best among the main slate selections was, unsurprisingly, Petit Maman (Neon), French director Celine Sciamma’s emotionally precise and ingenious followup to her brilliant Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the best film of the 2019 festival. In this understated but shattering chamber piece, an eight-year-old girl, whose beloved grandmother has just died, meets and befriends a familiar-looking young girl while accompanying her parents to clean out the grandmother’s house. Sciamma, possibly the most accomplished and confident filmmaker working today, has created a movie that’s almost impossible to describe: The Twilight Zone meets Ponette gives a broad outline, but Sciamma works on such a fragile, delicate canvas that the effect is of a master miniaturist working at the very height of her powers, like Vermeer or Fauré. 

Ahed's Knee

The films Policeman (2011), The Kindergarten Teacher (2014) and Synonyms (2019) consolidated Nadav Lapid’s position as a formally challenging director, and his latest, Ahed’s Knee (Kino Lorber; opens early 2022), follows suit; it’s about an Israeli filmmaker who, while in a village for a screening of his new film, must deal with the usual personal and professional problems in his art. Made while Lapid’s own mother (his editor on his earlier films) was dying, Ahed’s Knee is shot through with scathing anger against a government that its protagonist—and his creator, most likely—considers the height of self-righteous hypocrisy and censorship.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Magnolia Pictures; opens Nov. 19 at Film Forum, NYC), Romanian director Radu Jude’s latest provocation, announces its intentions at the very start: a long sequence in which the female protagonist—or her body double (she’s wearing a mask)—enagages in enthusiastic sex with her husband, which he records. This opening prepares us for the masks to follow (after all, this was shot during the pandemic last year) as well as the in-your-face filmmaking of the director, who delights in showing the hypocritical, self-serving attitudes of nearly everyone in the film; then there’s the tongue-in-cheek documentary-style section, which is as audacious as the opening, in its own way. The endings—all three of them—are not as clever as they could be, which leaves us with a shaggy-dog feeling despite Jude’s and his lead actress Katia Pascariu’s fearlessness.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

In Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Film Movement; now playing), a triptych of stories about women dealing with the shifting dynamics of their relationships, Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi develops, with an almost casual mastery, the perfect form for character studies that are alternatingly amusing and unsettling while shuddering with palpable tension throughout. 

The Velvet Underground

The Velvet Underground (Apple Films; now playing/streaming on Apple TV), director Todd Haynes’ documentary about the seminal ‘60s rock band, is a litmus test: for those who already love or appreciate or are simply familiar with the group, it’s engaging and witty about its genesis, career and legacy. For those unfamiliar, this might not be the place to start, since Haynes takes it for granted that the viewer already knows about Lou Reed, John Cale, et al. There are glorious vintage performances and interviews alongside new comments by Cale, Mary Waronov, Maureen Tucker, and Sterling Morrison, among others, who provide an insider’s look not unlike a longish episode of Behind the Music.

Hit the Road

In Hit the Road (Kino Lorber; opens early 2022)—which is, astonishingly, his debut feature—director Panah Panahi, son of Iranian master Jafar Panahi, takes the familiar road movie and transforms it from diverting amusement into tense drama without telegraphing his intent. The foursome—father, mother and sons (one a mainly silent adult, the other an irrepressible, often irritating, six-year-old)—that we see together for 90 minutes has singalongs, movie discussions, arguments, disagreements, moments of caring and tenderness, and a subtle sense of family dynamics, all subtly managed by Panahi with the same humane warmth and observation of his father, at the same time that he moves off in his own direction.

Chameleon Street

As usual, the "Revivals" section included films ripe for rediscovery in new restorations. Chameleon Street (Arbelos Films; opens Oct. 22), which won the grand prize at the 1990 Sundance Festival, is an alloyed triumph for writer-director-star Wendell B. Harris Jr., who plays William Douglas Street Jr., a real-life con man who took on many roles (rather like Frank Abagnale of Catch Me if You Can fame), thereby lying bare the racism, bias and structural inequalities of our society. Not much has changed in three decades, unfortunately.

The Round-Up

Hungarian master Miklós Jancsó’s 1966 international breakthrough, The Round-Up (Kino Lorber), is still a fresh, invigorating and voluptuous B&W study of a low point in 19th century Hungarian history—the rounding up of suspected rebels into prison camps—that uses Jancsó’s intricately choreographed camera movements (his singular long takes would come later) to bring this sordid episode to expressive and ultra-realistic life.

Hester Street

Hester Street (Cohen Film Collection; now playing) somehow gained Carol Kane a 1975 best actress Oscar nomination as a newly-arrived Jewish immigrant in 1896 Manhattan whose husband, already assimilated, has little patience for what he sees as her inadequacies. Joan Micklin Silver’s amateurish, threadbare drama does well depicting—in evocative black and white—the Eastern European culture of the Lower East Side (with much authentic Yiddish dialogue), but the characters are less than compelling.

Prism

An adjunct festival section, "Currents" comprised new films not included in the more prominent main slate. Prism (Icarus Films; now playing/streaming), directed by Eléonore Yameogo, An van. Dienderen and Rosine Mbakam, dives deeply into the racism inherent in the actual cinematic image, with formidable philosophical arguments concerning the very act of lighting skin on film—it’s whitecentric, and has been for generations. Intelligent discussions about the bias that’s baked into every component of filmmaking (as art, craft and technique) complement the elegant filmmaking that challenges such perceived realities. 

All About My Sisters

Equally shattering is All About My Sisters (Icarus Films; now playing), Wang Qiong’s brutally honest reckoning with China’s “one child” policy which, especially during the 1980s and ’90s, made abortion—even late into the third trimester—a deeply discomfiting fact for many families. Wang records her family for three hours of intimate, emotionally devastating reminiscences and confessions, showing how the thoughtless and irreversible edicts of Communist leadership played havoc with the very definition of family, and how Wang’s siblings, parents, and other relatives have come to terms with what decades of deceits, denials and admissions have wrought.

2019 New York Film Festival Roundup

57th New York Film Festival
Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York, NY
September 27-October 13, 2019
filmlinc.org/nyff

The 57th edition of the New York Film Festival had so many sidebars—including documentaries, revivals and special screenings—that it’s no longer the “boutique” festival that former director Richard Pena used to call it. Here are my impressions on the handful of festival features I saw:

Opening Night Film

The Irishman (now playing in theaters and streaming on Netflix)

Martin Scorsese’s 3-1/2-hour adaptation of the book about Frank Sheehan, a Philly mobster who claimed to murder Jimmy Hoffa in 1975, is a deliberately paced, excruciatingly intimate and controlled study of how violence destroys a man by degrees from within—and could be seen as a corollary to Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, which demonstrated the breakdown of young men by the army from without. Although the CGI used to de-age the actors doesn’t completely work—in a few sequences, the movements of the 70-ish Robert DeNiro don’t match his decades-younger face—the acting is so brilliant throughout that it ultimately doesn’t matter. DeNiro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci are extraordinary—DeNiro’s phone call with Hoffa’s widow is a master class of underacting—and Scorsese makes masterly use of quotidian moments that most other directors would leave out: random, seemingly mundane conversations and situations that make up real lives. The Irishman—whose onscreen title is the book’s title I Heard You Paint Houses—is far more than just another mob movie.

Closing Night Film

Motherless Brooklyn (now playing)

Ed Norton takes on far too much in his triple-threat debut as a writer/director/actor, adapting Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel and setting it in 1950s New York, when the fight over razing lower-class neighborhoods to make way for highways was at the center of city government. But grafting a fictionalized version of the Robert Moses-Jane Jacobs fight onto the plot of an autistic private eye investigating his boss’ murder makes for a fitfully satisfying but uneasy blend of historical fiction and mystery. Period New York looks unerringly right, and Alec Baldwin (as the Moses stand-in, named Moses), Cherry Jones (as the Jane Jacobs stand-in, not named Jacobs) and Gugu Mbatha-Raw (as the hero’s unlikely partner) are excellent. While Norton lacks the writing/directing chops to pull off this gamble, he’s still a formidable actor, and his tic-laden hero is less enervating than charming.

63 Up (now playing)

Michael Apted has been making fascinating documentaries revisiting several people every seven years since 14 Up in 1970 (7 Up was directed by Paul Almond). Seeing them is like running into old friends after too long a time away, and Apted knowingly and cannily edits the film to give us glimpses of them during other times in their lives to comment on or simply show how much they’ve changed—or haven’t. One sad note is that, among 14 original participants, there’s the first death: Lynn died six years ago after a short illness. A couple of others aren’t involved any more, but for the rest, they provide a uniquely illuminating journey into the lives of people just like us.

Oh Mercy 

French director Arnaud Desplechin’s first police procedural is as dense, knotty, intelligent and satisfying as many of his other films. Set in the small town of Roubaix (Desplechin’s own hometown?), Oh Mercy—the French title is the more euphonic Roubaix, une lumière—follows detectives investigating a robbery-murder and how they slowly evolve their theories on who did it and why. The actors are superb: Lea Seydoux and Sara Forestier as the main suspects are complicatedly unsympathetic, while the lead investigator is superbly enacted by Roschdy Zem, and with Desplechin’s exacting direction, this policier is consistently engrossing.

The Whistlers 

In Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu’s latest pseudo-whimsical drama, a shady police inspector travels to a remote island to learn a local whistling language in order to entrap criminals who are doing things even shadier than he is. There’s a lot of chutzpah involved in building a shaggy-dog story around such a ludicrous concept, but Porumboiu runs with it thoroughly and, to a certain extent, admirably, although he takes it only so far before the seams begin to show. Luckily, the pace doesn’t lag, the film is fairly short, and there’s a fine cast committed to bringing it home, especially Romanian model turned actress Catrinel Marlon, who makes a formidable femme fatale named—winkingly, for those who remember Rita Hayworth—Gilda. 

Sibyl (opens early 2020)

For the first hour of Sybil, director Justine Triet is in complete control of this engrossing and often hilarious study of a therapist who gradually and willingly finds herself drawn into the world of moviemaking after neurotic actress Margot demands she become her therapist for her on-set difficulties with her costar and onset lover Igor and their director (who’s Igor’s real-life lover). The cast, which includes Virginie Efira as Sibyl, Gaspard Ulliel as Igor and Sandra Hüller as the director—the latter of whom overdoes it, ruining many would-be funny and piercing sequences—is led by the exquisite Adèle Exarchopoulos as Margot; she breathes such luminous life into what is after all a caricature that she dominates the movie, especially when it takes a bizarre turn into increasingly implausible territory that any therapist worth her salt wouldn’t be dragged into. It’s too bad that such a promising set-up is ruined by such a copout ending.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (now playing)

After several impressive and insightful films about young women, identity and gender—Water Lilies, Tomboy and Girlhood—French director Céline Sciamma has consolidated the many facets of her artistry into a powerful and strikingly original exploration of a relationship between two women, one a painter the other her subject, in the 19th century—which was definitely not a prime time for a same-sex romance. Under Sciamma’s merciless but sympathetic eye, that extraordinary actress Adèle Haenel joins with the equally riveting Noémie Merlant to touchingly dramatize a loving couple discovering that the boxing-in of their relationship by the era’s mores can’t fully erase what they had together. Claire Mathon’s glistening cinematography and Julien Lacheray’s sharp-eyed editing further illuminate Sciamma’s unique development of these ultimately unforgettable women.

Varda by Agnès (now playing)

In her valedictory film, Agnès Varda—who died earlier this year at 90—distills her occasionally bumpy but mostly brilliant career into a lovely, self-effacing cinematic memoir that unfolds like a combined essay and talk, as Varda often speaks to the camera or in front of groups of people about her own history behind and in front of the camera. There are precious moments, visual puns, serious insights and a touch of whimsy in this look at a Jane of all trades—director, writer, cinematographer, photographer, narrator—who shared her beguiling dreams throughout a six-decade career spanning film and new technologies.

A Girl Missing (opens summer 2020)

In Japanese director Koji Fukada’s slowly evolving drama, Mariko Tsutsui gives a performance of supreme restraint as a woman who is tangentially connected to a young man who abducted a young woman (herself related to our protagonist’s employer). Fukada’s film, while makes several pungent observations about media hysteria, spirals slightly into a messy and inelegant conclusion, but much of the time the drama is diverting and at times even spellbinding.

Pain and Glory (now playing)

Pedro Almodovar, now 70, has made his own version of Fellini’s great 8-1/2, which—as truthful and innovative as it was—has had the deleterious effect of allowing other directors to make self-serving autobiographies, of which Bob Fosse’s dazzling All That Jazz and Woody Allen’s downbeat Stardust Memories are the most memorable. Almodovar’s alter ego is a once-fashionable middle-aged director without a hit in decades who latches onto an upcoming screening of his long-ago breakthrough film to reconnect with his estranged lead actor. With body and mind falling apart, he gets a temporary reprieve from said actor’s heroin—smoked, not snorted. From there we get several flashbacks to the director’s boyhood, not particularly well-integrated into the narrative, such as it is. (Almodovar is no Fellini when it comes to narrative sleight-of-hand.) The protagonist’s personal and artistic problems are the usual whiny digressions, for which Antonio Banderas’ laconic performance does no favors. Penelope Cruz is fine as the director’s mother, but Almodovar seems to have saved all his energy for the clever but superficial “reveal” of a final shot.

The Traitor (opens January 31, 2020)

In Marco Bellocchio’s bracing expose of the criminal underworld, the true story of Tommaso Buscetta, a Neapolitan Mafioso who made a great living off drugs until he became a reluctant informer who led the police to 300 arrests of underworld figures, is told with Bellocchio’s usual stylish and exacting eye. Chronicling the twin precepts of loyalty and family—and which is more important—The Traitor delves deeply into the sheer ugliness of an eye-opening lifestyle, as killings and double-crossings come when but sometimes not how we expect them, keeping viewers off-guard during a splendidly paced and often thrilling 145 minutes. Pierfrancesco Favino’s towering portrayal of Buscetta finds the nuances of this beloved Mafioso with a loving family: and don’t forget the subtle contribution of Maria Fernanda Cândido as his loyal third wife. The Traitor is Bellocchio—the master chronicler of Italy’s fraught 20th century—at his considerable best.

The Booksellers

Antiquarian booksellers were once a force in New York City: no matter where you walked, a neighborhood would have one or more such stores for browsing or buying or even just discussing books. Now that the internet and Amazon have destroyed the book business, there are fewer stores left than ever—although there are signs that some booksellers are making a successful last stand. D.W. Young’s documentary serves as a valuable wakeup call about the impending loss of such treasures and a wonderful primer on the people who ran such places amid the money and the personalities. There are delightful interviews with several sellers as well as book lovers like Fran Lebowitz and Gay Talese, both of whom mourn the losses and remember that golden age for book lovers.

Wasp Network 

French director Olivier Assayas once again goes international, as he did with his film about Latin American terrorist Carlos the Jackal (Carlos, part of the 2010 New York Film Festival). This explosive subject has stayed under the radar until now: that pro-Castro spies infiltrated anti-Castro networks among Cuban exiles in 1990s Miami. Despite choppiness—the film was re-edited after its premiere in Toronto—Wasp Network conveys the urgency and excitement of people risking their lives for causes they felt were just, and if there’s too much of a docudrama look to the film, Assayas and his committed cast (including Édgar Ramírez, who played the lead in Carlos, Penelope Cruz, Gael Garcia Bernel, Wagner Moura and Ana de Armas, now getting more justified exposure in Knives Out) get the job done.

Zombi Child (opens January 24, 2020)

Bertrand Bonello’s zombie movie doesn’t comprise repetitive scenes of the undead in a stupor dragging themselves around as they rip apart defenseless humans but instead takes on history and agency by being set in 1962 Haiti and present-day Paris, where a zombie descendent (!) is at a girls’ boarding school. The problem is that, by avoiding Scylla, Bonello has ended up in Charybdis: his moderately interesting film has unusual locations and a lack of hysteria and campiness; but it becomes, for endless stretches, deadly dull, as talk about Rhianna (herself a product of the Caribbean) and white teenage girls taking a page from the colonized to rid themselves of evil spirits aren’t subjects worthy of dramatization, at least in Bonello’s hands.

The Wild Goose Lake (opens March 6, 2020)

Diao Yinan’s convoluted crime drama follows a mobster on the lam after accidentally killing a cop who discovers that even in the underworld there are no safe places to hide—or to not be betrayed. Diao does conjure up some oppressively heady atmosphere, especially in a tangent about a young woman who befriends our anti-hero, a tangent that morphs into the main plot. Still, there’s a feeling that much of The Wild Goose Lake is nothing more than a wild goose chase, however well-made.

Parasite (now playing)

In this heavyhanded and, finally, pointless black comedy/satire/drama/thriller/mystery, Korean director Bong Joon-ho has set up the most obviously allegorical story since Noah’s flood—which also makes an appearance—and tries having it both ways by playing it for laughs and completely straight. Neither approach works because tone and logic are askew: we are meant to believe that members of a rich family which a quartet of poor family members home in on, eventually take jobs in their household and soon run the place is so benighted as to allow such machinations to happen right under their noses. Then, when a disgruntled former employee returns—why would anyone allow her back in the house?—another nonsensical plot starts to play out, which culminates in a fatality after those shenanigans go too far. (But a major character, despite being pounded in the head mercilessly, makes it through to the bitter—definitely not sweet—end.) The whole thing becomes borderline imbecile, but it’s acted forcefully enough and Bong is an impressive enough technician to make this seem more than the sum of its shaky parts.

2018 New York Film Festival and Margarethe von Trotta Retrospective

56th New York Film Festival
Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York, NY
September 28-October 14, 2018
filmlinc.org/nyff

Searching for Ingmar Bergman
Directed by Margarethe von Trotta
Opens November 2, 2018
Margarethe von Trotta: The Political Is Personal
Runs through November 8, 2018
Quad Cinema, 34 W 13th Street, New York, NY
quadcinema.com

The New York Film Festival included several interesting documentaries, although the features in the main slate were for the most part underwhelming. Case in point: Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War (opens Dec. 21). Although his last film, Ida—the Oscar-winning Best Foreign Film which explored the controversial question of how Poland treated Jews during WWII—was an impressively controlled drama, Cold War tries for a similar dynamic but fails. Again shot in exquisite black and white (by Łukasz Żal) and starring an affecting Joanna Kulig, this drama (partly based on the director’s parents’ relationship) about a couple attempting to leave behind the crushing controls of Communism feels like a trailer for a more involving and intimate study.

Happy as Lazzaro

Alice Rohrwacher has been one of the brightest filmmakers around since her unforgettable debut, Corpo Celeste, played the 2011 New York Film Festival. Although her follow-up, The Wonders, relied too heavily on forced Felliniesque whimsy, Happy as Lazzaro (on Netflix and in theaters Nov. 30), gets the balance right. The film follows a good young man who’s part of a village whose inhabitants basically work as slaves for a rich landowner. After a tragic incident, the villagers are moved to civilization, but Lazzaro ends up on his own, and Rohrwacher freely and delightfully exults in him being unmoored from reality. Although at times labored, it’s rarely heavy-handed; even the final sequences, in which the surreal and magical clash with naturalism, have a sense of purposefulness, showing the director at her best.

In Frederick Wiseman’s latest immersive documentary, Monrovia, Indiana (opened Oct. 26), we visit the heart of tRump country, a rural Midwestern town in which people go on with their workaday lives. Long stretches of Wiseman’s consistently watchful gaze are given over to local community board meetings in which increasingly banal arguments are made about mundane matters. Although Wiseman takes no explicit political stances, the film ends with the funeral of one of the town’s elders, and the weight of the sequence makes it feel like an elegy for an America that’s been lost.

Director Christian Petzold—whose collaborations with that extraordinary actress Nina Hoss on films like Barbara and Jerichow are among German cinema’s high points over the past decade—disappoints with his latest, Transit (opens Mar. 1, 2019), which, coincidentally or not, does not feature Hoss. Instead, the camera is trained on Franz Rogowski, an inexpressive actor who sleepwalks through his role as an enigmatic drifter who takes on a dead writer’s identity and becomes embroiled in a convoluted narrative about refugees that belabors its lone point. Although she’s no Hoss, Paula Beer provides a far more sympathetic presence than Rogowski. In the end, sadly, Petzold’s elegant filmmaking skill is all for naught.

The Image Book

In a sense, most Jean-Luc Godard films are essays, collages, the beautiful if sometimes inscrutable symmetry of placing images and sounds side by side, either complementing or pushing back against one another. But The Image Book (opens Jan. 25, 2019) is the closest he’s come in 30 years to something along the lines of his great Histoire(s) du Cinema. Unlike that marathon, multi-episode opus, The Image Book is a mere 90 minutes, but in that short space of time Godard lets fly with startling juxtapositions of old-time movie clips, newly-shot digital footage by his DP/editor Fabrice Aragno, and his own endearingly mumbled grouchy-old-man narration. His foray into politics—he shows Obama at one point, but pointedly doesn’t reference tRump—is as inscrutable as ever, but it’s glorious to see this grand old man of cinema at age 88, still passionately engaged, enraged and enraging.

Made in 1979, The War at Home (now playing)—in a pristine new print—remains a touchstone of documentary reporting on the effects of the Vietnam War on those in America: students on college campuses, families of those who went, and activists at schools and in neighborhoods who clashed with a conservative establishment trying to make an elusive case for the war’s worth. Directors Glenn Silber and Barry Alexander Brown seek out people’s authentic responses and actions to make the point clearer than ever that this unwinnable war needed to be ended, and is valuable viewing four decades on to counteract a prevailing right-wing narrative that liberals lost a war that could have been won had we stayed in it.

Searching for Ingmar Bergman

Searching for Ingmar Bergman, German director Margarethe von Trotta’s intensely personal look at the great director’s art, starts with her remembering seeing The Seventh Seal for the first time while in Paris. That memory triggers her journey to the places where Bergman’s genius was most felt: in Sweden, where she speaks to one of his muses, Liv Ullmann, and his sons—who discuss with candor their volatile and often distant relationship with their father—and von Trotta’s own Germany, where Bergman escaped to Munich in the 70s when he became a tax exile and directed plays and films (The Serpent’s Egg and From the Life of the Marionettes). Among a handful of luminaries (including French directors Olivier Assayas and Mia Hansen-Løve and Spanish master Carlos Saura), von Trotta’s most memorable moments are with German actress Rita Russek, who describes Bergman’s methods as a theater and film director in a foreign language. If Searching for Ingmar Bergman never really finds him, that isn’t von Trotta’s intent: rather, it’s an essay about the impossibility of separating genius from the flawed individual making art.

Von Trotta’s documentary is the centerpiece of Quad Cinema’s week-long retrospective of her films, The Political Is Personal. Too bad it’s very selective, with the emphasis on her earlier work as part of the New German Cinema of the 1970s into the ‘80s, although she made some quite impressive films after that: most recently, there have been two fine bio-pics, Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen and Hannah Arendt, both starring one of her muses, Barbara Sukowa. 

But the films chosen here—except for her weak collaboration with then-husband Volker Schlondorff, 1975’s The Lost Honor of Katerina Blum—are apt reminders of the singular voice and perspective that she brought to German cinema. Von Trotta’s initial solo features frankly explore complicated female relationships:  The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1978), Sisters or the Balance of Happiness (1979), Marianne and Julianne (1981) and Sheer Madness (1983) are fascinating individually and in toto, and the performances by her actresses—Sukowa, Angela Winkler, Tina Engel, Hanna Schygulla and Jutta Lampe—are fierce and formidable. 

There’s also Rosa Luxembourg (1986), von Trotta’s absorbing biopic about the Communist agitator, played brilliantly by Sukowa. It’s too bad that her followup films—Love and Fear, The Long Silence, The Promise and Rosenstrasse—aren’t part of this retrospective, which would have made a more complete, warts-and-all portrait of this still relevant filmmaker.

2017 New York Film Festival Roundup

55^th New York Film Festival

Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York, NY

September 28-October 15, 2017

filmlinc.org/nyff

JR and Agnes Varda in Faces Places

An unusually strong lineup of documentaries was front and center at this year’s New York Film Festival, led by the two-week event’s best film, Faces Places (now playing), which shows that, at age 88, French director Agnes Varda continues to make beautiful, humanistic films that display real people. Varda has been joined by 33-year-old photographer and provocateur JR, who shares her indomitable spirit, and the result is a joyful, lovely valentine to humanity. The movie is funny, thoughtful, touching, and makes viewers yearn for more from these kindred souls.

There were several other notable documentaries, like The Rape of Recy Taylor, about the brutal assault in 1944 Mississippi on a young black mother by several white teenage boys who were never brought to trial. The horrible crime and its aftermath are recounted by director Nancy Buirski in her incisive and non-polemical (but justifiably angry) film that displays an America anything but enlightened, and virulently racist. Stanley Kubrick’s famously obsessive personality dominates Tony Zierra’s Filmworker, an engaging portrait of Leon Vitali, who gave up an acting career—he was in Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon in 1975—to become the director’s closest and most trusted assistant, famously discovering little Danny Lloyd for The Shining. Vitali comes across as ingratiating and unquestionably loyal to Kubrick’s vision for a quarter century—even after his boss’s death, as Vitali ensures how the films look onscreen, on DVD and Blu-ray.

Leon Vitali in Filmworker

In Hall of Mirrors, sister directors Ena Talakic and Ines Talakic have a fascinating subject in legendary reporter Edward Jay Epstein, who has intrepidly worked on a half-century of investigations into such subjects as the Warren Commission and Edward Snowden. Epstein comes off as resolutely non-partisan, and although he might go to extremes, the Talakics definitively show that, more than ever, America needs someone of his fearlessness to dig for dirt others won’t. Myles Kane and Josh Koury’s Voyeur (on Netflix December 1) shows how veteran writer Gay Talese—who wrote a book about a man who spied on his hotel visitors for decades—discovered that his reporting and writing are brought into question when it’s revealed on the eve of the book’s publication that it contains untruths. In recounting the 85-year-old’s storied but checkered career, Voyeur allows Talese to give his side of what’s become an increasingly sordid story.

Cramming the 45-year career of Hollywood’s most successful director into 2-1/2 hours isn’t easy, so credit Susan Lacy—director of Spielberg (on HBO)—for not making a banal overview of the artist who began with Duel and The Sugarland Express and continues today with Bridge of Spies and The BFG. An in-depth interview with the man himself provides pertinent details about how his difficulties growing up informed several of his films. Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (on Netflix) is actor Griffin Dunne’s personal and touching portrait of his aunt, writer Joan Didion, tracking her career as essayist and novelist along with her tragic personal life, which saw the premature deaths of her husband and adopted daughter (which begat her most intimate books, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights). We hear from literary colleagues like the always amusing Calvin Trillin and family members who discuss her personal and professional legacy.

Too bad the features making up the main slate were, with a few exceptions, disappointments. The Other Side of Hope (opening December 1) by Finnish prankster Aki Kaurismaki is—even by his hit-or-miss standards—forgettable fluff. Riffing on the topical theme of refugees flooding Europe, Kaurismaki’s hero, Syrian refugee Khlaed, deals with Finnish bureaucracy and, through a series of extraordinarily lazy coincidences, finds a good job, thanks to an altruistic gambler turned restaurant owner. The director’s usual deadpan comedy fails here, with clunky performances matching the overarching pointlessness. Even the usually reliable Isabelle Huppert can’t save Serge Bozun’s Mrs. Hyde, a ham-fisted update of Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde with Huppert as a mousy teacher who becomes a brand new, (literally) fiery woman. Huppert maintains her usual flair, but Bozun telegraphs everything—she teaches mainly foreign and minority students, helping a handicapped one reach his potential despite his own insults toward her—and the scenes of Mrs. Hyde’s otherworldly powers soon become risible, infecting the entire film.

Juliette Binoche in Let the Sunshine In

Juliette Binoche: that’s all you need to know about Let the Sunshine In, Claire Denis’ thin melodrama masquerading as an incisive character study of a middle-aged woman looking for love in all the wrong places. Denis’ usual cinematographer Agnes Godard shoots with her typical finesse, but the script and characterizations are banal, especially when the camera holds on faces for long, arid stretches. Even so, Binoche holds the screen like the movie star she is. The Square (now playing), Ruben Ostlund’s excruciatingly repetitive and meretricious farrago, somehow won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Ostensibly an assault on political correctness and liberalism’s failure, it’s just a collection of visual, verbal and narrative non-sequiturs piled up as haphazardly as the gravel in one of the film’s trendy modern-art exhibits at a museum which is the film’s main locale. Ludicrous happenings with no rhyme, reason or context are seen and forgotten about as the film stumbles on, singlemindedly trying to be cool and detached simultaneously. The Square is the most obnoxiously self-satisfied film I’ve seen since Toni Erdmann, which is saying a lot.

Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s A Gentle Creature shares a title with Dostoyevsky’s short story but little else in this snail’s-paced, occasionally astonishing but often hellishly tedious account of a young wife—looking for her husband, jailed for a murder he didn’t commit—who finds that corruption taints both government bureaucrats and regular citizens who have become inured to its effects. Nearly 2-1/2 gorgeously directed but meandering hours are climaxed by a colossal miscalculation of a dream sequence that must be seen to be disbelieved. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (on Netflix) is the latest portrait of self-absorbed Manhattan lives from Noah Baumbach, who has parlayed his third-rate Woody Allen forgeries into a career. This is the kind of movie where Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, Elizabeth Marvel and Adam Sandler, as members of the same family, recite their dialogue as if they’ve just met for the first time. Only Grace Van Patten as Sandler’s precocious daughter has the presence and vitality of a real person.

Ravishingly shot in the Polish countryside, Spoor—which veteran Agnieszka Holland co-directed with Kasia Adamik—is an allegorical environmental thriller in which heartless hunters are being offed in the local woods, and the culprits might just be the animals themselves. For much of its two-hour length, the movie is cracklingly good, goofy fun, but by the time of the big reveal, it becomes unfortunately mundane. Holland’s eye never wavers, however; even when the drama is sidetracked, there’s continuous visual ravishment. Thelma (opens Nov. 10), the latest from Danish director Joachim Trier, is an often dazzling dramatization of an ultra-religious family’s bizarre history, following a young woman (a transfixing Eili Harboe) whose seizures are a manifestation of her own supernatural powers which come to the fore when she finds herself attracted to another young woman, which horrifies her sense of morality and of God. Trier’s intelligently realized thriller cruises brilliantly for over an hour until cracks begin to show—when it suddenly lurches and drags itself to an inevitable, if predictable, conclusion.

If it wasn’t for Saoirse Ronan, Greta Gerwig’s lumpy writing-directing debut, Lady Bird (now playing) would seem even more like a barely competent vanity project. Based on Gerwig’s own teenage years in central California, Lady Bird follows a high school senior through the usual travails—teachers, boys, family, herself—with navel-gazing and self-absorption typical of millenial studies. It’s the kind of movie whose references to Sept. 11 and the Iraq War appear shoehorned in, as if someone said to Gerwig, “why doesn’t anyone acknowledge what’s happening outside of their little community?” Ronan, unsurprisingly, is magnificent, investing her underwritten character with the false bravado, massive insecurity and empathy that her writer-director forgot to give her.  

Marion Cotillard and Matthew Amalric in Ismael's Ghosts

I’ve saved the festival’s best features for last. Ismael’s Ghosts (opening in 2018) is the latest from French director Arnaud Desplechin, whose films are so crammed with detail, incident, characterization and location that they resemble cinematic versions of long novels. But they’re not simply visualizations of literature; instead, they are gloriously filmic (his two-plus hour-long films fly by faster than anything by most other directors). Ghosts centers on a director making a film about his estranged—and politically shady—brother, and brilliantly and effortlessly moves along separate but equally absorbing paths, both real or fake. The intrigue is especially delicious, especially when it’s served up by a formidable cast headed by Mathieu Amalric, Marion Cotillard and Charlotte Gainsbourg—who gives what may be her best screen performance.

BPM—Beats Per Minute

Finally, there’s BPM—Beats Per Minute (now playing), a galvanizing, vital docudrama by director Robin Campillo, which explosively re-examines the early days of the French chapter of ACT UP—the AIDS advocacy group whose protests included physical mayhem and disruption—through an unabashedly emotional look at the close relationships among those who made it their life’s work to ensure the future of those suffering from the disease. Sometimes intentionally difficult to watch, BPM is a full-on fuck-off to anyone and any organization that stood in the way. Nearly 2-1/2 hours long, there is not a sequence, line of dialogue or frame that’s superfluous; incendiary performances by a mainly unknown cast contribute to the ultra-realistic atmosphere.