11 articles

1 hour ago

Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan might have claimed Cannes most coveted prize, but the Palme d’Or moment belongs to Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes. Truly a groundbreaking masterpiece that takes the audience into the heart of the darkness of the Holocaust, his Grand Jury Prize winning feature debut immerses the viewer into a visceral, hellish nightmare. Nominated for and tipped as the heavy favorite in the Academy Award’s Best Foreign film category, sturdy and stellar sound and camerawork aided by Géza Röhrig’s praiseworthy performance, Nemes’ Son of Saul is a wallop of a sensorial experience. Here is my brief sit down with the helmer and lead.

Yama Rahimi: How did this project came about?

László Nemes: I read these writings by the Sonderkommando members that were put in the ground before the rebellion that triggered the project. These writings were giving incredible insight into the here and now of the extermination. »

- Yama Rahimi

26 February 2016 12:05 PM, PST

Certain Women: Wasilewski Explores Enlightenment and Despair

It was 1990, and the climate was changing. Or so begins Polish director Tomas Wasilewski’s third feature, United States of Love, which chooses to focus on four somewhat related women from the same apartment complex during significant political changes during the dissolution of the Soviet bloc. Accompanying their growing sense of freedom is a nagging element of dissatisfaction as they attempt to pursue fantasies and desires, often resulting in a disquieting mix of euphoria and despair. Arrestingly photographed in flat, sterile palettes with intermittent splotches of vibrant color, theirs is a universe just experiencing the tingle of life following deadening paralysis, with emotions like reawakened limbs still struggling to obtain an originally appointed purpose. Coldly observational, the film is sometimes curiously unsympathetic in its depiction of women experiencing glancing notions of freedom but hopelessly realized they’re still chained to incredibly limiting options. »

- Nicholas Bell

25 February 2016 10:30 AM, PST

When the Night Has Come: Grandrieux Laments Lost Love

Seven years have passed since provocateur Philippe Grandrieux’s 2008 film Un Lac, and he remains somewhat of an acquired taste, though considering the subject matter, Malgré la nuit (Despite the Night) is surprisingly less galvanizing than his early features. The narrative, should we indeed call it thus, couldn’t be more simple, roughly concerning a British bloke returning to Paris to reconnect with his lost love. His reasons for leaving or returning aren’t apparently of importance once he disappears into a sort of Parisian ether, where passionate memories are pierced by a current state of abject degradation upon reconnecting with his troubled object of affection. The take away is more of a cerebral, extrasensory experience, existing as a diluted nightmare where pleasure and punishment are doled out in equal measure, which is hardly a surprise for those accustomed to Grandrieux’s filmography. »

- Nicholas Bell

25 February 2016 10:00 AM, PST

Grasshopper Film’s Ryan Krivoshey is slowly building his company’s year one slate and has picked up one of the best undistributed films from South Korea’s most prolific auteur filmmaker. The big winner at Locarno this past August, and voted as Film Comment’s Best Undistributed Films of 2015, Hong Sangsoo’s Right Now, Wrong Then will be released theatrically sometime this year.

Gist: This is about an arthouse film director and an aspiring painter meet and spend the same day together, twice. Quite by accident, Chunsu arrives in town a day early. With time to kill before his lecture the next day, Chunsu stops by a restored, old palace and meets a fledgling artist, Yoon Heejung. She’s never seen any of his films, but knows he’s famous. They talk. And together, they go to Heejung’s workshop to look at her paintings, have Sushi and Soju. »

- Eric Lavallee

25 February 2016 7:00 AM, PST

The Russians Are Coming: Hillcoat Juggles Strands in Sprawling Heist Thriller

About half way into John Hillcoat’s impressively staged heist thriller Triple 9, it becomes apparent the audience won’t be allowed to develop any sort of sympathy for any of its various characters, a pity considering the potentially rich subtext. Rather than lob gobs of exposition our way, Matt Cook’s screenplay attempts to streamline characterization into the full-tilt madness of criminal legacies and the corresponding demise gilding the future of the powerful and greedy. At times, this congeals into intoxicatingly energetic and disturbingly violent moments of survival play, but whenever the narrative returns to moments of static calm the film has a nagging sense of perfunctory ornamentation, it’s more important elements given short shrift in an effort to balance a variety of odds and ends.

Five masked men storm an Atlanta bank, successfully removing the contents »

- Nicholas Bell

24 February 2016 11:00 AM, PST

Community Cinema: Verhoeven’s Failed Experiment Confirms Concepts of Authorship

Four years after its premiere in his native Netherlands and a screening at the 2012 Rome Film Festival, Paul Verhoeven’s experimental title Tricked makes its way to Us theaters, available simultaneously streaming exclusively on Fandor. The director playfully refers to the film as 14 ½, referring to Fellini, since ultimately the ambitious endeavor, wherein audience participation was called upon to craft the narrative based on a four page scenario, isn’t quite feature length. Instead, the film includes a behind-the-scenes preface (called Paul’s Experience) documenting the significant pre-production travails, including thousands of scripts sent, none of which were actually used in completion. As such, the project has a rather uneven, cobbled together feel, and seems to prove the concept of the auteur.

Ineke (Ricky Koole) is hosting a birthday bash for her philandering husband Remco (Peter Blok), who has just turned fifty. »

- Nicholas Bell

23 February 2016 1:00 PM, PST

Biopics are best when focused on segmented portions of emotional turmoil, professional escalation or some perfect combination of the two, rather than trying to collapse entire lives into just a couple hours time. Hal Ashby’s 1976 retelling of Woody Guthrie’s popular ascent from dust bowl deadbeat to socially conscious folk music figurehead in Bound For Glory coolly pursues the latter with genuinely endearing, authentic feeling results. With David Carradine aptly filling the role of the humbly charismatic, musically driven drifter and a fully stocked catalog of Guthrie songs adapted for the screen by Leonard Rosenman, Ashby’s oddly conventional mid-period picture was in competition for the Palme d’Or, but ultimately lost to Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Padre Padrone.

The film was shot by the late, great Haskell Wexler the very same year he took over principal photography from Néstor Almendros on Malick’s golden glazed Days of Heaven »

- Jordan M. Smith

23 February 2016 9:30 AM, PST

Love is most definitely not a many splendored thing in the bedazzled artifice of Rome’s swinging 60s, at least as far as the good time gal depicted in Antonio Pietrangeli’s obscure 1965 title I Knew Her Well is concerned. A director lost in the shadows of other 60s Italian auteurs, where names like Antonioni, Fellini, Petri, Pasolini, Risi, or Visconti dominate contemporary conversations of the cinematic period, Criterion enables the resuscitation of Pietrangeli, a director whose filmography, notable for his complex portraits of women (sort of like the Italian version of later period Mizoguchi), is deserving of wider renown.

Adriana (Stefania Sandrelli) is a young, beautiful woman who thrusts herself into the burgeoning social scene of Rome after fleeing her rural roots. A series of random lovers finds her elevating her occupational merits through a variety of professions before she begins to land opportunities as a model and budding actress, »

- Nicholas Bell

23 February 2016 9:00 AM, PST

Shohei Imamura’s brutalist depiction of female resilience in his masterwork of 1963, The Insect Woman, echoes the beloved French filmmaker Marcel L’Herbier‘s monumental silent avant-garde narrative L’inhumaine, which translates to The Inhuman Woman, in both name and loosely, in theme. Centering its Frankensteinian tale of high class love, loss and reanimation around a hardened woman of the world whose apathy toward men of all classes guides her way through parties and performances, L’Herbier’s brilliant collaboration with fellow art deco artists like the painter Fernand Léger, the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens, and soon-to-be-filmmakers themselves, designers Alberto Cavalcanti and Claude Autant-Lara, is nothing short of a cinematic masterpiece of modern invention.

Making use of a beautiful and thrilling combination of highly stylized studio sets and on location shoots on the outskirts of Paris, L’inhumaine trains its often matted eye on the famed singer Claire (real life opera star Georgette Leblanc, »

- Jordan M. Smith

22 February 2016 11:15 AM, PST

Be a Dragon: Haghighi’s Enticing Hodgepodge Defies Categorization

Director Mani Haghighi stakes a claim as one of the most innovative new voices out of Iran with his standout fifth feature, A Dragon Arrives!. Systematically defying easy categorization, the slippery political allegory can just as easily be referenced as noir, horror, mystery and docu-hybrid, utilizing a myriad of hat tricks as its increasingly strange and sometimes hopelessly complicated narrative unspools. Though it may be too baffling to attract casual viewers, those relishing a challenge should delight in this mystifying feature which promises to yield multiple interpretations through extensive viewing. Seemingly entrenched in the past, it is perhaps more of an allegory on the present, a puzzling ghost story spectacularly coated (or coded) in fantastical elements.

In 1964 Iran, cultivated detective Babak Hafizi finds he has been abducted by his own agency, waking up to a menacing interrogation from his boss, Major »

- Nicholas Bell

22 February 2016 10:15 AM, PST

The Berlin International Film Festival continued to challenge expectations in its 66th edition, landing another auteur heavy competition line-up, albeit a slightly less sensational one than the landmark 2015 program. Although an attempt continues to be made to establish grand motifs between films in competition and the more experimental sidebars, topical issues seemed to be the name of the game across the board, particularly immigration. This culminated with this year’s Golden Bear winner, Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea, a documentary which was the clear early favorite and remained so up until the awards ceremony. Rosi has now won two major film festivals with his documentary work (previously taking home the top prize at Venice 2013 for Sacro Gra), and further solidifies an argument for the Cannes Film Festival to follow suit and allow documentary titles to play in the main competition. Berlin notably had two documentaries in the main competition this year, »

- Nicholas Bell

11 articles

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