Enjoy the reviews, and watch for some new names. Gerardo Naranjo is one. Probably Alice Rorhrwacher is another, so far.
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Enjoy the reviews, and watch for some new names. Gerardo Naranjo is one. Probably Alice Rorhrwacher is another, so far.
Asghar Farhadi: A Separation (2011)
A tangled web of accusations and lies. Winner of the big prize at Berlin, included in a raft of international film festivals and released in a dozen countries. Perhaps the quintessential Iranian film, and starting with the frustrated desire to leave the country.
Santiago Mitre: The Student (2011)
I don't see this as "dry and inconsequential" as Mike D'Angelo did, writing from Toronto. But I can see his point. Mitre gets deep into the nittty-gritty of student politics in Buenos Aires. A "Latin American Aaron Sorkin," Indiewire says. Again, I see their point, but don't agree. A story of disillusionment.
Ullirch Köhler: Sleeping Sickness (2011)
A black Frenchman out of his depth in Africa, and his opposite number, a European doctor who's practiced so long in Africa he can't go home. Good local color but a film that never comes together or builds this contrast between the two men.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011)
A long and winding road to an autopsy. In Turkey. This shaggy dog auteurist police procedural was co-winner of the Grand Prize at Cannes, with the Dardennes' The Kid with the Bike.
Naranjo is indeed a new name relative to the fillmmakers Johann mentions in the post that preceded the above quote. But I want to point out to readers that Naranjo is not a new name to you. One may say you've championed his work in this forums before, a testament of your dedicated, detailed coverage of festivals and new releases.We thank you.Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris Knipp
That is true. But he is going to be more of an emerging name now internationally. People at the P&I screenings at Lincoln Center remember his I'm Gonna Explode and liked it, generally, but many are more impressed by Miss Bala. Some were saying the other day we'd like to see his first feature, the 2004 Malachance, made in LA, which I didn't know about till recently. I have been championing him at least since I'm Gonna Explode. He is an AFI graduate, which I've never mentioned.
The cinematographer Ed Lachman talked to me a couple of times about Miss Bala and how it was shot. He loves it and has watched it twice here now. It was given a repeat showing so more people could see it, because the first was in one of the new small theaters across the street.
Alice Rohrwacher, of Corpo Celeste, who is Italian (despite the German name) is a completely new name, and the quality of her film was I think surprising to most.
Jaafar Panahi: This Is Not a Film (2011)
For a film about nothing that is not a film, this is pretty lively, and also pretty significant as a protest against the mullahs' repression of one of Iran's leading filmmakers made, with the help of a colleague, by the filmmaker himself while under house arrest at his apartment in Tehran. This is said to have been smuggled out of the country on a USB thumb drive in a loaf of bread to be shown at the Cannes festival in May.
David Cronenberg: A Dangerous Method (2011)
A ceremonial festival gala film. Christopher Hampton's adaptation of his play adaptation of a book about Jung, Freud, and a Russian Jewish woman with daddy issues who somehow crystallized the two men's issues.
Sean Durkin: Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)
A talented newcomer has written and directed a classy horror film, a psychological thriller about a young women who escapes from a cult in the Catskills to the chilly world of her sister and her bourgeois, mercenary husband in Connecticut and in her shattered state, drifts back and forth from present to memories of her experience. The excellent cast is headed by another gifted newbie, Elizabeth Olson.
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne: The Kid with the Bike (2011)
As I noted in the earlier review in my May Paris Movie Report, in The Kid with a Bike/Le gamin au vélo the Dardenne brothers are "on strong familiar ground," "depicting a troubled boy struggling to get attention from his derelict, immature dad and tempted to a life of crime by an older boy who exploits him." And the Dardennes' discovery, 13-year-old Thomas Doret, who plays Cyril, the 11-year-old reject, is "excellent, if quite uncharming and uncute." But what I ought to have noted was not only the incredible drive Doret has but the emotional wallop the film packs. I was more deeply moved this time, viewing the film again at the New York Film Festival -- and struck by the humanistic power of the occasional bursts of classical music, a rare gesture for the Dardennes.
Co-winner of the Grand Prize at Cannes, with Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (also a NYFF 2011 selection).
Steve McQueen: Shame (2011)
Colder and less engaging than the riveting McQueen debut Hunger, (NYFF 2008) but still this shows the Turner Prize-winning British artist McQueen is Scorsese to Michael Fassbender's DeNiro. Despite my quibbles, this is powerful filmmaking. Carey Mulligan is also excellent as Manhattan sex addict Brandon's unhappy sister.
Wim Wenders: Pina (2011)
Wenders' appropriately austere, stylized documentary celebrates the German dance master Pina Bausch, whose surreal style was an international influence. She died in 2009, suddenly after a cancer diagnosis, having collaborated on this film.
Nadav Lapid: Policeman (2011)
A structurally weak but provocatively themed Israeli first film about an macho antiterrorist police unit accustomed to killing Palestinians that is called upon to smash a band of young bourgeois Jewish revolutionaries who kidnap some billionaires at a wedding.
Simon Curtis: My Week with Marilyn (2011)
Adapted memoir of the recollection of Colin Clark, son of famous art historian Sir Kenneth Clark, who had a mini affair with Marilyn Monroe during the 1957 shoot of The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) at Pinewood Studios. Michelle Williams as Marilyn, Eddie Redmayne as Clark, a host of good English actors and authentic production values enliven this entertaining nostalgia piece. It may draw some attention at Oscar time.
World premiere at the NYFF October 9, 2011, opening in US theaters November 4.
Pedro Almodóvar: The Skin I Live In (2011)
From a 1995 French noir novel, the story of a sadomasochisic relationship between a plastic surgeon and his sex-changed victim/patient/lover, bringing back Antionio Banderas after 21 years, with Elena Anaya and Jan Cornet. B-horror made unspeakable beautiful and thematically (but not so emotionally) rich, my favorite since Talk to Me. One of the NYFF's gala presentations along with A Dangerous Method.
The other "events" of the main slate are Carnage, the opening night gala film; My Week With Marilyn, the Centerpiece; and Alesxander Payne's The Descendants, the Closing Night film.
Joseph Cedar: Footnote (2011)
This drama about academic rivalries among Talmudic scholars and between a father and son might seem a brisk change of pace after Cedar's Silve Bear winning Lebanon war drama Beaufort (2007). But there's repressed violence and great suspense here too. Weak ending. But still a most interesting and original film. Winner of the Best Screenplay award at Cannes.
MUBI's 'NOTEBOOK'
MUBI provides an aggregator site on the NYFF that summarizes some critical responses to the main slate and some of the sidebars. Their opening paragraph is below. Click here for the pages.
But there are awards season items that are not at the NYFF -- MONDYBALL, for example, and TREE OF LIFE, and TAKE SHELTER, to name a few recent and past 2011 releases.Quote:
THE AGENDA-SETTING NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
Anyone looking for a sneak peek at the year-end best-of-2011 top tens, and even to some degree the upcoming awards season, would best start with the New York Film Festival, whose lineup distills and extracts the best of Berlin, Cannes and Venice. Besides tracking what the critics have been saying about the main slate, we’ve also been posting our own reviews and interviews from the Views from the Avant-Garde program and the Nikkatsu Centennial retrospective. It’s all here.
Mia Hansen-Love: Goodbye, First Love (2011)
Two passionate young lovers separate when he is 19 and she is 15, and they are not reunited again till eight years later. Hansen-Løve's rather autobiographical third film isn't as complex as her wonderful The Father of My Children, the film based on the life and aftermath of the suicide of Hubert Balsam, but it is nonetheless a beautiful, admirably unsentimental film that further confirms her status as one of today's best young French filmmakers.
Ruben Östlund: Play (2011)
A realistic and" formally interesting but overlong" (Leslie Felperin) recreation of an actual series of incidents in which black youths in Göteborg (Gothenberg), Sweden in their early teens victimized white boys using racial stereotypes to menace their victims without force and deprive them of their cell phones and other valuables, all the while enjoying the "play" of making their victims uneasy and scared.
It am curious about the critical reception Melancholia will get when released in the US. The only von Trier film American critics have liked since the undeniable Breaking the Waves in 1997 is The Boss of it All (metacritic 71). I defended him when both Dogville (meta. 59) and Manderlay (46) were grossly underrated in our country. However, Antichrist was a big disappointment for me and felt it deserved the harsh criticism it received from a number of well-known critics (meta. 49). Trier will always be a "director to follow" for me. He's always...interesting, I'd say. But, after what I consider his second interesting failure in a row, I figure his best period may have passed. Antichrist and Melancholia, which I just watched, are indicative of a filmmaker who has run out of things to say, one shackled by a worldview that is too narrow, schematic and constricting. One major problem for me is that Trier has lost any interest in characterization, seems to have lost interest in human beings in all their nuance and complexity. There are always interesting moments in these films and images of awesome power but not nearly enough to sustain this viewer for the duration of the films. Predicted Metacritic score for Melancholia? 50.
Maybe the answer to your dismissal is that Von Trier has not run out of ideas, but shifted to different ones. And, of course, as is well known, he has had a severe two-year depression. But it''s been a very productive depression and these two beautiful and thought-provoking films came out of it. Some of us feel he is at the top of his game as a filmmaker. As a provocateur, he has toned down this time. I'd like to discuss this further but I have to write reviews of The Artist and The Descendants while I remember them and before I leave New York for Paris again.
Most ratings are pretty arbitrary, and also culture-bound. It's more important just to know what's being done than to rate it.
Michel Hazanavicius: The Artist (2011)
A black and white silent film about a silent film star whose life goes into decline when talkies take over. A new female star whom he got started rescues him. The male star, Jean Dujardin, won the Best Actor award at Cannes. A homage to silent films and to film in general, richly embellished and touching as well as funny, but a rather specialized item, despite its intended mainstream appeal. US release coming.
Alexander Payne: The Descendants (2011)
With George Clooney as the star and Hawaii as the setting, it might seem this, Payne's first since Sideways seven years ago, is an unnecessary item to include in the highly selective main slate of the NYFF, except that it turns out to be one of the best American films of the year. The story of a man from a patrician Hawaii family overburdened with decisions and new responsibilities, The Descendants succeeds on many levels.
This concludes my reviews of NYFF 2011 press screenings. Here is a link index to all my reviews in the Filmleaf Festival Coverage section. These include all the main slate films and Dreileben, a special event of three interrelated New German Cinema films.
INDEX OF LINKS TO REVIEWS
4:44 Last Day on Earth (Abel Ferrara 2011)
Artist, The (Michel Hazanavicius 2011)
Carnage (Roman Polanski 2011)
Corpo Celeste (Alice Rohrwacher 2011)
Dangerous Method, A (David Cronenberg 2011)
Descendants, The (Alexander Payne 2011)
Dreileben (Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, Christoph Hochhäusler 2011) [NYFF Special Events]
Footnote (Joseph Cedar 2011)
George Harrison: Living in the Material World (Martin Scorsese 2011)
Goodbye, First Love (Mia Hansen-Løve 2011)
Kid with the Bike, The (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne 2011)
Le Havre (Aki Kaurasmäki 2011)
Loneliest Planet, The (Julie Loktov 2011)
Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin 2011)
Melancholia (Lars von Trier 2011)
Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo 2011)
My Week with Marilyn (Simon Curtis 2011)
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan 2011)
Pina (Wim Wenders 2011)
Play (Ruben Östlund 2011)
Policeman (Nadav Lapid 2011)
Separation, A (Asghar Farhadi 2011)
Shame (Steve McQueen 2011)
Skin I Live In, The (Pedro Almodóvar 2011)
Sleeping Sickness, The (Ullrich Köhler 2011)
Student, The (Santiago Mitre 2011)
This Is Not a Film (Jaafar Panahi 2011)
Turin Horse, The (Bela Tárr 2011)
We Can't Go Home Again (Nicholas Ray 1972/2011)
"Kaurismäki adheres strictly to his signature style here,... But there's something awry: the gloom is missing."
"For the dyed-in-the-wool Kaurismäki fan there are many little pleasures here but the big pleasure of bathing in a negativism so austere it makes you shiver -- that is totally lacking. "
"Everything he includes in a film becomes Kaurismäki. And there are those that will like the director even more with an ubeat, updated theme. However, it's really not the same without the pessimism. Without it, the drollness loses its edge. "
Quotes from Chris Knipp's review of Le Havre.
Chris, this time I object. I don't have a problem with your not thinking this film was worth including in the fest and your not thinking THIS film is all that good. I disagree but that is perfectly fine. The problem is that, in your review, you totally mischaracterize Aki Kaurismaki's vision as expressed in his long filmography. Negativism and pessimism are NOT characteristic of Aki's films. The Leningrad Cowboys series is full of good cheer. Of course, most of his films are about proletarian loners and oddballs living in lamentable conditions and then bad things happen to them. What happens next is that they find someone to love who loves them back. And music (usually rock 'n roll) or movies serve as sources of joy and inspiration. Towards the end of the typical Aki movie the characters find... happiness. Granted, often the loving couple has to leave Finland to live happily (to a place that is often Estonia, as in Shadows in Paradise, but it can be as far as Mexico, as in Ariel ). The disillusioned, unemployed couple in Drifting Clouds end up realizing their dream of owning their own restaurant with the help of a group of friends and people from the neighborhood. In The Man Without a Past, the homeless, destitute protagonist ends up falling in love with the lonely Salvation Army lady who helps him get on his feet. Proletarian solidarity and warm humanism are characteristic of Kaurismaki, not negativity and pessimism. Kaurismaki's films are about how people overcome, forgo or transcend negativity and pessimism.
*Your characterization of Kaurismaki fits only one Kaurismaki film, Lights in the Dusk (2006). The only other film I can think of that one may interpret as pessimistic would be The Match Factory Girl, although I'd argue that the protagonist ends up realizing her wish: to exact the cold revenge she deserves.
My review expressed my taste and was not meant to be a precise characterization of Kaurismäki 's whole oeuvre. If I implied that and was inaccurate about it, I'm sorry. I see you yourself do find two of his films fit my description, so I'm not wholly off base.
I ought not to have mentioned "selectivity" but I didn't mean to say this film was not worth including, only that I did not see the necessity of including it. I said some very favorable things about it, said it was a pleasure to watch Kaurismäki at work. Other reviews (doubtless by those more familiar with the oeuvre) suggest the positive thrust is greater than usual here.
A greater criticism is the lack of anything new, despite the French overlay. From MUBI an aggregation of comments includes this:
There are compensations. But I felt unsatisfied. There is a patness in the pursuit of the signature style. But this film got raves here. No danger of my view prevailing. Write your own review.Quote:
Fernando F Croce at the House Next Door. "The dangers of auteurs refusing to venture beyond their established styles and worldviews are on full display "
What's new here besides "the French overlay" is the inclusion of Asian and African characters.
Yes, and that is part of the new political element. But there's still the "patness in the pursuit of the signature style" and the pushing toward a positive outcome too early and too completely to fit with the deadpan and the gloom. If in fact Kaurasmäki is as upbeat throughout his oeuvre as you say, I may like him less that I thought.
Filmmaker Magazine:A webiste, Filmophilia:Quote:
But this time, the sadsack aura of the Kaurismäki oeuvre gives way to a cheerier vision
And that's despite the new elements. I suspect that just isn't going to be seen ultimately as one of Kaurismäki's best.Quote:
The problem is mainly that Kaurismaki isn’t really doing anything new here, he’s basically been doing the same movie for nearly 30 years.
Though not one of my personal favorites, Bela Tarr's THE TURIN HORSE was one of the most admired NYFF 2011 offerings. And now as promised the FSLC is presenting a retrospective of Tarr's distinctive and influential work, followed by a theatrical release of THE TURIN HORSE.
http://img812.imageshack.us/img812/2088/veshba.jpg
THE LAST MODERNIST: THE COMPLETE WORKS OF BÉLA TARR
February 3-8 Hungarian maestro Béla Tarr's final film and NYFF hit, The Turin Horse, will open theatrically on Feb 10th immediately following a complete retrospective of the filmmaker's work which includes his career-defining partnership with Satantango novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Read More
THIS IS NOT A FILM
Jafar Panahi's THIS IS NOT A FILM opens for a two-week run at Film Forum in New York on February 29, 2012, the US premiere (it has already shown in France). I should have included it in my2011 Best Lists somewhere but now it can go in this year's.
Quote:
“The plainness of Mr. Panahi’s self-presentation – nothing to see here, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad! – is the source of the film’s sly, subversive power and also of its formal ingenuity. Nobody who holds onto the faith that art can be a weapon against tyranny should miss it – here or anywhere else it turns up.”
– A.O. Scott, The New York Times
“A Kafkaesque comedy of anxiety and a tale of empty spaces gradually filled. A micro-scaled masterpiece.”
– Fernando Croce, Slant
NOTE:
CORPO CELESTE will be shown at the San Francisco Film Society's Cinema on Post Street in San Francisco from June 29 to July 5, 2012.
Detalis here.
1746 Post Street (Webster/Buchanan)
Our theatrical run of Corpo Celeste begins July 6th. Can't wait!
I recommend it highly and I hope you enjoy it as much as I have. Above all I am happy when there is a new talent making good and ambitious films in Italian, which are in too short supply these days. Unfortunately though it's gotten "generally favorable reviews" (Metacritic 66), less ambitious local products have a bit fared better than they seem to deserve, comparatively (Your Sister's Sister 71; Safety Not Guaranteed 72; Prometheus 65). For there to be only one point between Corpo Celeste and Prometheus would seem to show the power of expensive publicity campaigns and famous names.