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Yann Damange: '71
French-born English TV director's stunningly good debut feature with rising star Jack McConnell as a teenage British private sent to Belfast during the Troubles who gets wounded and accidentally abandoned by his squad in a street clash in a dangerous Catholic district. All the complexity and ambiguity is there of the political situation along with the physical danger of the wounded, disoriented kid on he run for his life.
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NYFF to include world premiere of Laura Poitras’ CITIZENFOUR.
Press release today. The film will be shown to press & industry on its premiere day October 10th also but in the morning. This is a newsworthy item that if really good can add luster to the NYFF 2014 documentary content. Laura Poitras worked directly with Glenn Greenwald in channelling Edward Snowden's NSA revelations so she has an inside channel on this big story.
"New York Film Festival director Kent Jones said today that the Film Society of Lincoln Center has added the world premiere of Laura Poitras’ CITIZENFOUR to its Main Slate lineup. The presentation will run Friday, October 10 at 6 PM at Alice Tully Hall. Poitras will also participate in a free HBO Directors Dialogues the following day at 4 PM, at the Walter Reade Theater. The film, from RADiUS in association with Participant Media and HBO Documentary Films, opens theatrically October 24."
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A screening day of avant-garde, hard-to-follow stuff.
Jean-Luc Godard: Goodbye to Language/Adieu au langage (2014)
Beautiful, more accessible, and containing 3D tricks so neat people fail to note them. But as ever since the Nineties Goadard is a full-on avant-garde filmmaker, and this is like something you would encounter in the darkened room of an art museum, not a cinema.
Martin Rejtman: Two Shots Fired (2014)
A spiraling sequence of deadpan interlocked stories from the absurdist Argentinian director, his first feature in a decade, is not up to the wit or appeal of his bet work.
P&I screenings for Wednesday, September 17 offered three features from Korea, Germany, and Italy:
10AM HILL OF FREEDOM (Hong Sang-soo) (66m)
11:30AM BELOVED SISTERS (Dominik Graf) (170m)
2:45PM THE WONDERS (Alice Rohrwacher) (110m)
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Hong Sang-soo: Hill of Freedom (2014)
This is the eighth Hong film to be included in the Main Slatre of a New York Film Festival and it shows him at his most sweet and accessible. Every Hong film is drenched in love and alcohol and plays with time and narrative through a succession of lively conversations. This time most of them are in English, and the use of this language by a Japanese man (played by Ryo Kase of LETTERS FROM IWA JIMA) and the Koreas he beds and longs for and otherwise meets makes for a slightly gauche directness, truth, and humor.
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Dominik Graf: The Beloved Sisters (2014)
German filmmaker Graf's lush and smart historical film about the dawn of German romanticism depiects a love trio at a turning point in European cultural and political history: key poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller and two sisters, both of whom he was in love with for decades.
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Alice Rohrwacher: The Wonders/Le meraviglie (2014)
Rohrbacher's Cannes Grand Prix-winning sophomore film is a semi-autobiographical depiction of a German-Italian family of impoverished beekeepers in the middle of Italy whose eldest daughter is drawn to a tacky Felliniesque TV contest promoting rural economy and the Etruscans.
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Yesterday was a heck of a good screenings day. Today was interesting and certainly varied but less dazzling, though the following two films had enthusiastic fans.
Eugène Green: La Sapienza (2014)
Despite its erudition and elegant art film style, strong intellectual underpinnings, and handsome architectural images from the Italian baroque era, LA SAPIENZA is pulled down by its lugubrious dialogue and its sub-Oliveira philosophical whimsy.
Josh and Benny Safdie: Heaven Knows What (2014)
The Safdie brothers have made a feature about young heroin addicts living on the streets of the Big Apple. The lead, Arielle Holmes, is playing herself and the action, dominated by a kind of sad doomed romance, is closely based on her own memoirs. But despite intensity and grim docudrama realism to burn, it winds up feeling less distinctive and compelling than the Safdies' semi-autobiographical 2009 DADDY LONGLEGS.
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NYFF SPOTLIGHT ON DOCUMENTARY
Ethan Hawke: Seymur: An Introduction (2014)
A treat for classical piano buffs and portrait of an unusually articulate and wise 85-year-old pianist, teacher, and thinker about life. The subject just fell into Hawke's lap, but he has produced a superior film with exceptional access, editing, camera work, and sound. Seymour (now 87) and Ethan were on hand for a lively Q&A after the screening.
Also shown in press screenings today from the doc sidebar but not reviewed here: THE LOOK OF SILENCE, recent MacArthur award winner Joshua Oppenheimer's sequel to his THE ACT OF KILLING (ND/NF 2013). Both concern Indonesian mass murders.
Terry Gilliam's THE ZERO THEOREM opened in NYC today. I have reviewed it.
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Abel Ferrara: Pasolini (2014)
Tragedy by the beach: Ferrara films the genius, politics, and tragedy of Pasolini, delivering a well-researched and surprisingly classy (but also shocking) non-linear short film about the Italian writer and filmmaker and his brutal death. But the stunt-casting of American Willem Dafoe speaking (mostly) English with a mostly Italian film otherwise will be a stumbling block for many viewers.
Matías Piñeiro: The Princess of France/La Princessa de Francia (20140
Young Argentinian director Piñeiro's fifth feature shows him still playing with young actors mixing Shakespeare and their own romances. He seems to remain in the safe hermetic world of timidly experimental festival fare. His lightweight material could be charming and fun, but it looks like that isn't going to happen.
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Alain Resnais: Life of Riley/Aimer, boire, et chanter (2014)
His swan song is his third and most accessible and witty adaptation of a play buy British dramatist Alan Ayckbourn with a brilliant cast of regulars and two new additions.
Mia Hansen-Løve: Eden (2014)
A decade-plus of her brother (and cowriter) Sven's up and down life as a successful Paris Garage rave DJ is a beautiful gray haze in the talented director's fourth feature.
Jean-Pierre, Luc Dardenne: Two Days, One Night/Deux jours, une nuit (2014)
The Dardennes' profound humanism and understanding of working class hard knocks melds with the sublime emotional authenticity of Marion Cotillard in this moving film from Cannes.
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Press screenings today included an estheticizing of poverty (Pedro Costa), an estheticizing of violence (two Syrians, one Arab and one Kurdish), and a clueless skewering of Hollywood ego and evil (Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars, which is brought down by its pointless and outdated screenplay). Horse Money (Costa) is ravishing but a slog; Silvered Water is brutal and will make you weep; all I can say of Maps is it made no sense to me at all.
Pedro Costa: Horse Money/Cavalo Dinheiro (2014)
Mohammed and Bedirxan: Silvered Water, Syria Self Portrait//ماء الفضة/maa' al-fiḍḍa (2014)
David Cronenberg: Maps to the Stars (2014)
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Wanderings. Oren Moverman depicts Richard Gere, disappeared into the persona of a homeless person, wandering the streets of New York City in search of food and shelter. Lisandro Alonso, in an Un Certain Regard Cannes picture that won the FIPRESCI Prize this year, shows us Viggo Mortensen as a Danish cavalry officer in the 1880's wandering the wilds of Patagonia in search of his 14-year-old daughter, who has run off with a young Argentinian soldier.
Oren Moverman: Time Out of Mind (2014)
Lisandro Alonso: Jauja (2014)
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Friday, September 26, 2014.
The 52nd New York Film Festival officially begins, and the day's big press screening is of the gala opening night film, David Fincher's GONE GIRL. Both these movies are flashy gripping watches about warped people: a sadistic music teacher whose soul-destroying methods may or may not bring out great talents -- are his methods justified, or actionable? -- and a neurotic couple, a crazy, ice-queen wife and husband not good at telling the truth: the wife's disappearance on their fifth wedding anniversary brings suspicion upon her husband.
Damien Chazelle: Whiplash (2014)
Starring J.K. Simmons as the brutal boot-camp-style music teacher and rising star Miles Teller as his ambitious drum student, this was one of the breakout hits of Sundance this January. Chazelle's second film, it's far more structured and emphatic than his first. It hits you like a ton of bricks, sacrificing subtlety to spotlight its moral dilemma in a series of rapid-fire scenes.
David Fincher: Gone Girl (2014)
An amazing twittering machine of a movie, this navigates its narrative complexity, multiple action, and constant shocks and revelations with fine-tuned precision. Destined to be one of the best American movies of the year and probably a prime Oscar contender and popular hit. You may feel overstuffed, but despite the 2 1/2 hour run-time, this is an enjoyable watch.
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Trailer out now of Paul Thomas Anderson's INHERENT VICE (the NYFF Centerpiece film, based on a Thomas Pynchon novel, showing this Saturday) suggests it's a comedy.
INHERENT VICE TRAILER