New York Film Festival 2015

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Click here for Filmleaf NYFF 2015 comments thread. (Opening night now moved to September 26.)

Links to reviews:

Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One/As Mil e Uma Noites: Volume 1, O Inquieto (Miguel Gomes 2015)
Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One/As Mil e Uma Noites: Volume 2, O Desolado (Miguel Gomes 2015)
Arabian Nights: Volume 3, The Enchanted One/As Mil e Uma Noites: Volume 3, O Encantado" (Miguel Gomes 2015)
Assassin/刺客聶隱娘 (Hou Hsiao-hsien 2015)
Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg 2015)
Brooklyn (John Crowley 2015)
Carol (Todd Haynes 2015)
Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethekul 2015)
Cowboys, Les (Thomas Bidegain 2015)
De Palma (Noah Baumbach, Jake Paltrow 2015)
Don't Blink - Robert Frank (Laura Israel 2015)
Experimenter, The (Michael Almereyda 2015)
Forbidden Room, The (Guy Madden, Evan Johnson 2015)
Heart of a Dog (Laurie Anderson 2015)
Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch 1943) - Revivals
In the Shadow of Women/L'Ombre des femmes (Philippe Garrel 2015)
Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words/Jag är Ingrid (Stig Björkman 2015) - Documentary section
Journey to the Shore (Kiyoshi Kurosawa 2015)
Lobster, The (Yorgos Lanthimos 2015)
Maggie's Plan (Rebecca Miller 2015)
Measure of a Man, The/La loi du marché(Stéphane Brizé2015)
Mia Madre/My Mother (Nanni Moretti 2015)
Microbe and Gasoline/Microbe et gasoil (Michel Gondry 2015)
Miles Ahead (Don Cheadle 2015)
Mountains May Depart/山河故人, (Jia Zhangke 2015)
My Golden Days/Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse (Arnaud Desplechin 2015)
No Home Movie (Chantal Ackerman 2015)
Right Then, Wrong Now/지금은맞고그때는틀리다 (Hong Sang-soo 2015)
Rocco and His Brothers/Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Luchino Visconti 1960) - Revivals section
Son of Saul/Saul fia (László Nemes 2015)
Steve Jobs (Danny Boyle 2015)
Treasure, The/Comoara (Cornelieu Porumboliu 2015)
Walk, The (Robert Zemeckis 2015)
Where to Invade Next (Michael Moore 2015)
Witness, The (James Soloman 2015)

Opening, centerpiece, and closing night films.

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Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk will make its World Premiere as the Opening Night selection of the upcoming 53rd New York Film Festival (September 25 – October 11), which will kick off at Alice Tully Hall. A true story, the film is based on Philippe Petit’s memoir To Reach the Clouds and stars Golden Globe nominee Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit, the French high-wire artist who achieved the feat of walking between the Twin Towers in 1974.

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Aaron Sorkin and Danny Boyle's Steve Jobs is this year's centerpiece selection. Steve Jobs stars Michael Fassbender in the title role, Kate Winslet as Joanna Hoffman, Seth Rogen as Steve Wozniak, Jeff Daniels as John Sculley, Michael Stuhlbarg as Andy Hertzfeld, and Katherine Waterston as Chrisann Brennan.

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Don Cheadle's Miles Ahead has been selected for the closing night film.In the film, Cheadle, who also co-wrote the script, stars as the legendary Miles Davis opposite Emayatzy Corinealdi and Ewan McGrego.

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The 53rd New York Film Festival Main Slate

Opening Night
The Walk
Director: Robert Zemeckis

Centerpiece
Steve Jobs
Director: Danny Boyle

Closing Night
Miles Ahead
Director: Don Cheadle

Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One
Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One
Arabian Nights: Volume 3, The Enchanted One
Director: Miguel Gomes

The Assassin
Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien

Bridge of Spies
Director: Steven Spielberg

Brooklyn
Director: John Crowley

Carol
Director: Todd Haynes

Cemetery of Splendour
Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Les Cowboys
Director: Thomas Bidegain

Don’t Blink: Robert Frank
Director: Laura Israel

Experimenter
Director: Michael Almereyda

The Forbidden Room
Directors: Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson

In the Shadow of Women / L’Ombre des femmes
Director: Philippe Garrel

Journey to the Shore / Kishibe no tabi
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

The Lobster
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Maggie’s Plan
Director: Rebecca Miller

The Measure of a Man / La Loi du marché
Stéphane Brizé

Mia Madre
Director: Nanni Moretti

Microbe & Gasoline / Microbe et Gasoil
Director: Michel Gondry

Mountains May Depart
Director: Jia Zhangke

My Golden Days / Trois Souvenirs de ma jeunesse
Director: Arnaud Desplechin

No Home Movie
Director: Chantal Akerman

Right Now, Wrong Then
Director: Hong Sangsoo

The Treasure / Comoara
Director: Corneliu Porumboiu

Where To Invade Next
Director: Michael Moore

Additional NYFF special events, documentary section, and filmmaker conversations and panels, as well as NYFF’s Projections and the full Convergence programs, will be announced in subsequent days and weeks.

The 17-day New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema, featuring top films from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. The selection committee, chaired by Jones, also includes Dennis Lim, FSLC Director of Programming; Marian Masone, FSLC Senior Programming Advisor; Gavin Smith, Editor-in-Chief, Film Comment; and Amy Taubin, Contributing Editor, Film Comment and Sight & Sound.


Films & Descriptions

Opening Night
The Walk
Robert Zemeckis, USA, 2015, 3-D DCP, 100m
Robert Zemeckis’s magical and enthralling new film, the story of Philippe Petit (winningly played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and his walk between the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, plays like a heist movie in the grand tradition of Rififi and Bob le flambeur. Zemeckis takes us through every detail—the stakeouts, the acquisition of equipment, the elaborate planning and rehearsing that it took to get Petit, his crew of raucous cohorts, and hundreds of pounds of rigging to the top of what was then the world’s tallest building. When Petit steps out on his wire, The Walk, a technical marvel and perfect 3-D re-creation of Lower Manhattan in the 1970s, shifts into another heart-stopping gear, and Zemeckis and his hero transport us into pure sublimity. With Ben Kingsley as Petit’s mentor. A Sony Pictures release. World Premiere

Centerpiece
Steve Jobs
Danny Boyle, USA, 2015, DCP, TBC
Anyone going to this provocative and wildly entertaining film expecting a straight biopic of Steve Jobs is in for a shock. Working from Walter Isaacson’s biography, writer Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network, Charlie Wilson’s War) and director Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours) joined forces to create this dynamically character-driven portrait of the brilliant man at the epicenter of the digital revolution, weaving the multiple threads of their protagonist’s life into three daringly extended backstage scenes, as he prepares to launch the first Macintosh, the NeXT work station and the iMac. We get a dazzlingly executed cross-hatched portrait of a complex and contradictory man, set against the changing fortunes and circumstances of the home-computer industry and the ascendancy of branding, of products, and of oneself. The stellar cast includes Michael Fassbender in the title role, Kate Winslet as Joanna Hoffman, Seth Rogen as Steve Wozniak, Jeff Daniels as John Sculley, Katherine Waterston as Chrisann Brennan and Michael Stuhlbarg as Andy Hertzfeld. A Universal Pictures release.

Closing Night
Miles Ahead
Don Cheadle, USA, 2015, DCP, 100m
Miles Davis was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. And how do you make a movie about him? You get to know the man inside and out and then you reveal him in full, which is exactly what Don Cheadle does as a director, a writer, and an actor with this remarkable portrait of Davis, refracted through his crazy days in the late-70s. Holed up in his Manhattan apartment, wracked with pain from a variety of ailments and sweating for the next check from his record company, dodging sycophants and industry executives, he is haunted by memories of old glories and humiliations and of his years with his great love Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi). Every second of Cheadle’s cinematic mosaic is passionately engaged with its subject: this is, truly, one of the finest films ever made about the life of an artist. With Ewan McGregor as Dave Brill, the “reporter” who cons his way into Miles’ apartment. A Sony Pictures Classics release. World Premiere

Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One
Miguel Gomes, Portugal/France/Germany/Switzerland, 2015, DCP, 125m
Portuguese with English subtitles
An up-to-the minute rethinking of what it means to make a political film today, Miguel Gomes’s shape-shifting paean to the art of storytelling strives for what its opening titles call “a fictional form from facts.” Working for a full year with a team of journalists who sent dispatches from all over the country during Portugal’s recent plunge into austerity, Gomes (Tabu, NYFF50) turns actual events into the stuff of fable, and channels it all through the mellifluous voice of Scheherazade (Crista Alfaiate), the mythic queen of the classic folktale. Volume 1 alone tries on more narrative devices than most filmmakers attempt in a lifetime, mingling documentary material about unemployment and local elections with visions of exploding whales and talking cockerels. It is hard to imagine a more generous or radical approach to these troubled times, one that honors its fantasy life as fully as its hard realities. A Kino Lorber release. U.S. Premiere

Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One
Miguel Gomes, Portugal/France/Germany/Switzerland, 2015, DCP, 131m
Portuguese with English subtitles
In keeping with its subtitle, the middle section of Miguel Gomes’s monumental yet light-footed magnum opus shifts into a more subdued and melancholic register. But within each of these three tales, framed as the wild imaginings of the Arabian queen Scheherazade and adapted from recent real-life events in Portugal, there are surprises and digressions aplenty. In the first, a deadpan neo-Western of sorts, an escaped murderer becomes a local hero for dodging the authorities. The second deals with the theft of 13 cows, as told through a Brechtian open-air courtroom drama in which the testimonies become increasingly absurd. Finally, a Maltese poodle shuttles between various owners in a tear-jerking collective portrait of a tower block’s morose residents. Attesting to the power of fiction to generate its own reality, the film treats its fantasy dimension as a license for directness, a path to a more meaningful truth. A Kino Lorber release. U.S. Premiere

Arabian Nights: Volume 3, The Enchanted One
Miguel Gomes, Portugal/France/Germany/Switzerland, 2015, DCP, 125m
Portuguese with English subtitles
Miguel Gomes’s sui generis epic concludes with arguably its most eccentric—and most enthralling—installment. Scheherazade escapes the king for an interlude of freedom in Old Baghdad, envisioned here as a sunny Mediterranean archipelago complete with hippies and break-dancers. After her eventual return to her palatial confines comes the most lovingly protracted of all the stories in Arabian Nights, a documentary chronicle of Lisbon-area bird trappers preparing their prized finches for birdsong competitions. Right to the end, Gomes’s film balances the leisurely art of the tall tale with a sense of deadline urgency—a reminder that for Scheherazade, and perhaps for us all, stories can be a matter of life and death. A Kino Lorber release. U.S. Premiere

The Assassin
Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan/China/Hong Kong, 2015, DCP, 105m
Mandarin with English subtitles
A wuxia like no other, The Assassin is set in the waning years of the Tang Dynasty when provincial rulers are challenging the power of royal court. Nie Yinniang (Shu Qi), who was exiled as a child so that her betrothed could make a more politically advantageous match, has been trained as an assassin for hire. Her mission is to destroy her former financé (Chang Chen). But worry not about the plot, which is as old as the jagged mountains and deep forests that bear witness to the cycles of power and as elusive as the mists that surround them. Hou’s art is in the telling. The film is immersive and ephemeral, sensuous and spare, and as gloriously beautiful in its candle-lit sumptuous red and gold decor as Hou’s 1998 masterpiece, Flowers of Shanghai. As for the fight scenes, they’re over almost before you realize they’ve happened, but they will stay in your mind’s eye forever. A Well Go USA release. U.S. Premiere

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Bridge of Spies
Steven Spielberg, USA, 2015, DCP, 135m
The "bridge of spies" of the title refers to Glienicke Bridge, which crosses what was once the borderline between the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR. In the time from the building of the Berlin Wall to its destruction in 1989, there were three prisoner exchanges between East and West. The first and most famous spy swap occurred on February 10, 1962, when Soviet agent Rudolph Abel was traded for American pilot Francis Gary Powers, captured by the Soviets when his U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down over Sverdlovsk. The exchange was negotiated by Abel’s lawyer, James B. Donovan, who also arranged for the simultaneous release of American student Frederic Pryor at Checkpoint Charlie. Working from a script by Matt Charman and Joel and Ethan Coen, Steven Spielberg has brought every strange turn in this complex Cold War story to vividly tactile life. With a brilliant cast, headed by Tom Hanks as Donovan and Mark Rylance as Abel—two men who strike up an improbable friendship based on a shared belief in public service. A Touchstone Pictures release. World Premiere

Brooklyn
John Crowley, UK/Ireland/Canada, 2015, 35mm/DCP, 112m
In the middle of the last century, Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) takes the boat from Ireland to America in search of a better life. She endures the loneliness of the exile, boarding with an insular and catty collection of Irish girls in Brooklyn. Gradually, her American dream materializes: she studies bookkeeping and meets a handsome, sweet Italian boy (Emory Cohen). But then bad news brings her back home, where she finds a good job and another handsome boy (Domhnall Gleeson), this time from a prosperous family. On which side of the Atlantic does Eilis’s future live, and with whom? Director John Crowley (Boy A) and writer Nick Hornby haven’t just fashioned a great adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s novel, but a beautiful movie, a sensitively textured re-creation of the look and emotional climate of mid-century America and Ireland, with Ronan, as quietly and vibrantly alive as a silent-screen heroine, at its heart. A Fox Searchlight Pictures release.

Carol
Todd Haynes, USA, 2015, DCP, 118m
Todd Haynes’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel stars Cate Blanchett as the titular Carol, a wealthy suburban wife and mother, and Rooney Mara as an aspiring photographer who meet by chance, fall in love almost at first sight, and defy the closet of the early 1950s to be together. Working with his longtime cinematographer Ed Lachman and shooting on the Super-16 film he favors for the way it echoes the movie history of 20th-century America, Haynes charts subtle shifts of power and desire in images that are alternately luminous and oppressive. Blanchett and Mara are both splendid; the erotic connection between their characters is palpable from beginning to end, as much in its repression as in eagerly claimed moments of expressive freedom. Originally published under a pseudonym, Carol is Highsmith’s most affirmative work; Haynes has more than done justice to the multilayered emotions evoked by it source material. A Weinstein Company release.

Cemetery of Splendour
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/UK/France/Germany/Malaysia, 2015, DCP, 122m
Thai with English subtitles
The wondrous new film by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (whose last feature, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, was a Palme d’Or winner and a NYFF48 selection) is set in and around a hospital ward full of comatose soldiers. Attached to glowing dream machines, and tended to by a kindly volunteer (Jenjira Pongpas Widner) and a young clairvoyant (Jarinpattra Rueangram), the men are said to be waging war in their sleep on behalf of long-dead feuding kings, and their mysterious slumber provides the rich central metaphor: sleep as safe haven, as escape mechanism, as ignorance, as bliss. To slyer and sharper effect than ever, Apichatpong merges supernatural phenomena with Thailand’s historical phantoms and national traumas. Even more seamlessly than his previous films, this sun-dappled reverie induces a sensation of lucid dreaming, conjuring a haunted world where memory and myth intrude on physical space. A Strand Releasing release. U.S. Premiere

Les Cowboys
Thomas Bidegain, 2015, France, DCP, 114m
French and English with English subtitles
Country and Western enthusiast Alain (François Damiens) is enjoying an outdoor gathering of fellow devotees with his wife and teenage children when his daughter abruptly vanishes. Learning that she’s eloped with her Muslim boyfriend, he embarks on increasingly obsessive quest to track her down. As the years pass and the trail grows cold, Alain sacrifices everything, while drafting his son into his efforts. The echoes of The Searchers are unmistakable, but the story departs from John Ford’s film in unexpected ways, escaping its confining European milieu as the pursuit assumes near-epic proportions in post-9/11 Afghanistan. This muscular debut, worthy of director Thomas Bidegain’s screenwriting collaborations with Jacques Audiard, yields a sweeping vision of a world in which the codes of the Old West no longer seem to hold. A Cohen Media Group release. U.S. Premiere

Don’t Blink: Robert Frank
Laura Israel, USA/Canada, 2015, DCP, 82m
The life and work of Robert Frank—as a photographer and a filmmaker—are so intertwined that they’re one in the same, and the vast amount of territory he’s covered, from The Americans in 1958 up to the present, is intimately registered in his now-formidable body of artistic gestures. From the early ’90s on, Frank has been making his films and videos with the brilliant editor Laura Israel, who has helped him to keep things homemade and preserve the illuminating spark of first contact between camera and people/places. Don’t Blink is Israel’s like-minded portrait of her friend and collaborator, a lively rummage sale of images and sounds and recollected passages and unfathomable losses and friendships that leaves us a fast and fleeting imprint of the life of the Swiss-born man who reinvented himself the American way, and is still standing on ground of his own making at the age of 90. World Premiere

Experimenter
Michael Almereyda, USA, 2014, DCP, 94m
Michael Almereyda’s brilliant portrait of Stanley Milgram, the social scientist whose 1961, Yale-based “obedience study” reflected back on the Holocaust and anticipated Abu Ghraib and other atrocities carried out by ordinary people who were just following orders, places its subject in an appropriately experimental cinema framework. The proverbial elephant in the room materializes on screen; Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard) sometimes addresses the camera directly as if to implicate us in his studies and the unpleasant truths they reveal. Remarkably, the film evokes great compassion for this uncompromising, difficult man, in part because we often see him through the eyes of his wife (Winona Ryder, in a wonderfully grounded performance), who fully believed in his work and its profoundly moral purpose. Almereyda creates the bohemian-tinged academic world of the 1960s through the 1980s with an economy that Stanley Kubrick might have envied. A Magnolia Pictures release.

The Forbidden Room
Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson, Canada, 2015, DCP, 120m
The four-man crew of a submarine are trapped underwater, running out of air. A classic scenario of claustrophobic suspense—at least until a hatch opens and out steps… a lumberjack? As this newcomer’s backstory unfolds (and unfolds and unfolds in over a dozen outlandish tales), Guy Maddin, cinema’s reigning master of feverish filmic fetishism, embarks on a phantasmagoric narrative adventure of stories within stories within dreams within flashbacks in a delirious globe-trotting mise en abyme the equals of any by the late Raúl Ruiz. Collaborating with poet John Ashbery and featuring sublime contributions from the likes of Jacques Nolot, Charlotte Rampling, Mathieu Amalric, legendary cult electro-pop duo Sparks, and not forgetting muses Louis Negin and Udo Kier, Maddin dives deeper than ever: only the lovechild of Josef von Sternberg and Jack Smith could be responsible for this insane magnum opus. A Kino Lorber release.

In the Shadow of Women / L’Ombre des femmes
Philippe Garrel, France, 2015, DCP, 73m
French with English subtitles
The new film by the great Philippe Garrel (previously seen at the NYFF with Regular Lovers in 2005 and Jealousy in 2013) is a close look at infidelity—not merely the fact of it, but the particular, divergent ways in which it’s experienced and understood by men and women. Stanislas Merhar and Clotilde Courau are Pierre and Manon, a married couple working in fragile harmony on Pierre’s documentary film projects, the latest of which is a portrait of a resistance fighter (Jean Pommier). When Pierre takes a lover (Lena Paugam), he feels entitled to do so, and he treats both wife and mistress with disengagement bordering on disdain; when Manon catches Pierre in the act, her immediate response is to find common ground with her husband. Garrel is an artist of intimacies and emotional ecologies, and with In the Shadow of Women he has added narrative intricacy and intrigue to his toolbox. The result is an exquisite jewel of a film. U.S. Premiere

Journey to the Shore / Kishibe no tabi
Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan/France, 2015, DCP, 127m
Japanese with English subtitles
Based on Kazumi Yumoto’s 2010 novel, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s latest film begins with a young widow named Mizuki (Eri Fukatsu), who has been emotionally flattened and muted by the disappearance of her husband Yusuke (Tadanobu Asano). One day, from out of the blue or the black, Yusuke’s ghost drops in, more like an exhausted and unexpected guest than a wandering spirit. And then Journey to the Shore becomes a road movie: Mizuki and Yusuke pack their bags, leave Tokyo, and travel by train through parts of Japan that we rarely see in movies, acclimating themselves to their new circumstances and stopping for extended stays with friends and fellow pilgrims that Yusuke has met on his way through the afterworld, some living and some dead. The particular beauty of Journey to the Shore lies in its flowing sense of life as balance between work and love, existence and nonexistence, you and me. U.S. Premiere

The Lobster
Yorgos Lanthimos, France/Netherlands/Greece/UK, 2015, DCP, 118m
In the very near future, society demands that we live as couples. Single people are rounded up and sent to a seaside compound—part resort and part minimum-security prison—where they are given a finite number of days to find a match. If they don’t succeed, they will be “altered” and turned into an animal. The recently divorced David (Colin Farrell) arrives at The Hotel with his brother, now a dog; in the event of failure, David has chosen to become a lobster… because they live so long. When David falls in love, he’s up against a new set of rules established by another, rebellious order: for romantics, there’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Welcome to the latest dark, dark comedy from Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth), creator of absurdist societies not so very different from our own. With Léa Seydoux as the leader of the Loners, Rachel Weisz as David’s true love, John C. Reilly, and Ben Whishaw. An Alchemy release.

Maggie’s Plan
Rebecca Miller, USA, 2015, DCP, 92m
Rebecca Miller’s new film is as wise, funny, and suspenseful as a Jane Austen novel. Greta Gerwig shines brightly in the role of Maggie, a New School administrator on the verge of completing her life plan with a donor-fathered baby when she meets John (Ethan Hawke), a soulful but unfulfilled adjunct professor. John is unhappily married to a Columbia-tenured academic superstar wound tighter than a coiled spring (Julianne Moore). Maggie and the professor commiserate, share confidences, and fall in love. And where most contemporary romantic comedies end, Miller’s film is just getting started. In the tradition of Woody Allen and Paul Mazursky, Miller approaches the genre of the New York romantic comedy with relish and loving energy. With Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph as Maggie’s married-with-children friends, drawn to defensive sarcasm like moths to a flame, and Travis Fimmel as Maggie’s donor-in-waiting. U.S. Premiere

The Measure of a Man / La Loi du marché
Stéphane Brizé, France, 2015, DCP, 93m
French with English subtitles
Vincent Lindon gives his finest performance to date as unemployed everyman Thierry, who must submit to a series of quietly humiliating ordeals in his search for work. Futile retraining courses that lead to dead ends, interviews via Skype, an interview-coaching workshop critique of his self-presentation by fellow jobseekers—all are mechanisms that seek to break him down and strip him of identity and self-respect in the name of reengineering of a workforce fit for an neoliberal technocratic system. Nothing if not determinist, Stéphane Brizé’s film dispassionately monitors the progress of its stoic protagonist until at last he lands a job on the front line in the surveillance and control of his fellow man—and finally faces one too many moral dilemmas. A powerful and deeply troubling vision of the realities of our new economic order. A Kino Lorber release. North American Premiere

Mia Madre
Nanni Moretti, Italy/France, 2015, DCP, 106m
Italian and English with English subtitles
Margherita (Margherita Buy) is a middle-aged filmmaker contending with shooting an international co-production with a mercurial American actor (John Turturro) and with the fact that her beloved mother (Giulia Lazzarini) is mortally ill. Underrated as an actor, director Nanni Moretti, offers a fascinating portrayal as Margherita’s brother, a quietly abrasive, intelligent man with a wonderfully tamped-down generosity and warmth. The construction of the film is as simple as it is beautiful: the chaos of the movie within the movie merges with the fear of disorder and feelings of pain and loss brought about by impending death. Mia Madre is a sharp and continually surprising work about the fragility of existence that is by turns moving, hilarious, and subtly disquieting. An Alchemy release. U.S. Premiere

Microbe & Gasoline / Microbe et Gasoil
Michel Gondry, France, 2015, DCP, 103m
French with English subtitles
The new handmade-SFX comedy from Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Be Kind Rewind) is set in an autobiographical key. Teenage misfits Microbe (Ange Dargent) and Gasoline (Théophile Baquet), one nicknamed for his size and the other for his love of all things mechanical and fuel-powered, become fast friends. Unloved in school and misunderstood at home—Microbe is overprotected, Gasoline is by turns ignored and abused—they decide to build a house on wheels (complete with a collapsible flower window box) and sputter, push, and coast their way to the camp where Gasoline went as a child, with a stop along the way to visit Microbe’s crush (Diane Besnier). Gondry’s visual imagination is prodigious, and so is his cultivation of spontaneously generated fun and off-angled lyricism, his absolute irreverence, and his emotional frankness. This is one of his freshest and loveliest films. With Audrey Tatou as Microbe’s mom. U.S. Premiere

Mountains May Depart
Jia Zhangke, China/France/Japan, 2015, DCP, 131m
Mandarin and English with English subtitles
The plot of Jia Zhangke’s new film is simplicity itself. Fenyang 1999, on the cusp of the capitalist explosion in China. Shen Tao (Zhao Tao) has two suitors—Zhang (Zhang Yi), an entrepreneur-to-be, and his best friend Liangzi (Liang Jin Dong), who makes his living in the local coal mine. Shen Tao decides, with a note of regret, to marry Zhang, a man with a future. Flash-forward 15 years: the couple’s son Dollar is paying a visit to his now-estranged mother, and everyone and everything seems to have grown more distant in time and space… and then further ahead in time, to even greater distances. Jia is modern cinema’s greatest poet of drift and the uncanny, slow-motion feeling of massive and inexorable change. Like his 2013 A Touch of Sin, Mountains May Depart is an epically scaled canvas. But where the former was angry and quietly terrifying, the latter is a heartbreaking prayer for the restoration of what has been lost in the name of progress. A Kino Lorber release. U.S. Premiere

My Golden Days / Trois Souvenirs de ma jeunesse
Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2015, DCP, 123m
French with English subtitles
Arnaud Desplechin’s alternately hilarious and heartrending latest work is intimate yet expansive, a true autobiographical epic. Mathieu Amalric—Jean-Pierre Léaud to Desplechin’s François Truffaut—reprises the character of Paul Dédalus from the director’s groundbreaking My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument (NYFF, 1996), now looking back on the mystery of his own identity from the lofty vantage point of middle age. Desplechin visits three varied but interlocking episodes in his hero’s life, each more surprising and richly textured than the next, and at the core of his film is the romance between the adolescent Paul (Quentin Dolmaire) and Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet). Most directors trivialize young love by slotting it into a clichéd category, but here it is ennobled and alive in all of its heartbreak, terror, and beauty. Le Monde recently referred to Desplechin as "the most Shakespearean of filmmakers," and boy, did they ever get that right. My Golden Days is a wonder to behold. A Magnolia Pictures release. North American Premiere

No Home Movie
Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France, 2015, DCP, 115m
French and English with English subtitles
At the center of Chantal Akerman’s enormous body of work is her mother, a Holocaust survivor who married and raised a family in Brussels. In recent years, the filmmaker has explicitly depicted, in videos, books, and installation works, her mother’s life and her own intense connection to her mother, and in turn her mother’s connection to her mother. No Home Movie is a portrait by Akerman, the daughter, of Akerman, the mother, in the last years of her life. It is an extremely intimate film but also one of great formal precision and beauty, one of the rare works of art that is both personal and universal, and as much a masterpiece as her 1975 career-defining Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. U.S. Premiere

Right Now, Wrong Then
Hong Sangsoo, South Korea, 2015, DCP, 121m
Korean with English subtitles
Ham Chunsu (Jung Jaeyoung) is an art-film director who has come to Suwon for a screening of one of his movies. He meets Yoon Heejung (Kim Minhee), a fledgling artist. She’s never seen any of his films but knows he’s famous; he’d like to see her paintings and then go for sushi and soju. Every word, every pause, every facial expression and every movement, is a negotiation between revelation and concealment: too far over the line for Chunsu and he’s suddenly a middle-aged man on the prowl who uses insights as tools of seduction; too far for Heejung and she’s suddenly acquiescing to a man who’s leaving the next day. So they walk the fine line all the way to a tough and mordantly funny end point, at which time… we begin again, but now with different emotional dynamics. Hong Sangsoo, represented many times in the NYFF, achieves a maximum of layered nuance with a minimum of people, places, and incidents. He is, truly, a master. U.S. Premiere

The Treasure / Comoara
Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania, 2015, DCP, 89m
Romanian with English subtitles
Costi (Cuzin Toma) leads a fairly quiet, unremarkable life with his wife and son. He’s a good provider, but he struggles to make ends meet. One evening there’s a knock at the door. It’s a stranger, a neighbor named Adrian (Adrian Purcarescu), with a business proposal: lend him some money to find a buried treasure in his grandparents’ backyard and they’ll split the proceeds. Is it a scam or a real treasure hunt? Corneliu Porumboiu’s (When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism, NYFF 2013) modern-day fable starts like an old Honeymooners episode with a get-rich-quick premise, gradually develops into a shaggy slapstick comedy, shifts gears into a hilariously dry delineation of the multiple layers of pure bureaucracy and paperwork drudgery, and ends in a new and altogether surprising key. Porumboiu is one of the subtlest artists in movies, and this is one of his wryest films, and his most magical.

Where To Invade Next
Michael Moore, USA, 2015, DCP, 110m
Where are we, as Americans? Where are we going as a country? And is it where we want to go, or where we think we have to go? Since Roger & Me in 1989, Michael Moore has been examining these questions and coming up with answers that are several worlds away from the ones we are used to seeing and hearing and reading in mainstream media, or from our elected officials. In his previous films, Moore has taken on one issue at a time, from the hemorrhaging of American jobs to the response to 9/11 to the precariousness of our healthcare system. In his new film, he shifts his focus to the whole shebang and ponders the current state of the nation from a very different perspective: that is, from the outside looking in. Where To Invade Next is provocative, very funny, and impassioned—just like all of Moore’s work. But it’s also pretty surprising. U.S. Premiere

NOTE: Sidebar series and features are listed in the Filmleaf 2015 NYFF Comments thread, links to each below:
Projections Series and Convergence Series
Special events and revivals series
Spotlight on Documentary series
2015 NYFF Filmmakers talks and new extended shorts programs
Finalists For the Fourth Annual New York Film Festival Critics Academy

THE NYFF IS PRESENTED BY THE FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER


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REVIEWS BEGIN BELOW:

KIYOSHI KUROSAWA: JOURNEY TO THE SHORE (2015)

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TADANOBU ASANO AND ERI FUKATSU IN JOURNEY TO THE SHORE

Death and romance confusingly treated

Journey to the Shore is a new film by the prolific and uneven but sometimes wonderful Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to the supremely great Akira Kurosawa). It is the story of a woman in love with the ghost of her dead husband. Kurosawa excels at creepiness and horror and ghosts should be right up his alley; moreover he dealt richly with contemporary family life in his atypical but excellent 2008 Tokyo Sonata . But this is a confusing mess. It is adapted from a novel, and one may assume that it's such a failure because of a clumsy adaptation that may be trying to deliver too many elements from the book without convincingly integrating them or maintaining a consistent tone. The narrative is choppy and confusing. It is hard to tell who new characters are and why new settings arise.

The premise is that a widow, Mizuki (Eri Fukatsu), is revisited by her dead husband Yusuke (Tadanobu Asano), and he takes her on a series of adventures while they live in some kind of limbo between life and death. Mizuki a Tokyo resident, is a piano teacher deemed mediocre by the mother of one of her child students but perhaps a fine pianist herself. But this is unclear, and like a lot of the film seems irrelevant to the whole. Yusuke drowned at sea three years ago and eventually we learn he had worked as a dentist.

After Yusuke casually reappears to Mizuki, they live together for some time and travel around to different places where he has lived and worked and has connections from his previous three-years as a spirit making his way to the spirit world, or to Mizuki. Yusuke has worked delivering circulars, in a restaurant making gyozas, and out in the country with a rural family. Some of the people, Yusuke tells Mizuki, are "like me," others not, among these families. Two ghosts appear to Mizuki, one of them a young girl who plays the piano, another a boy by a waterfall he says is the way to the other world. She also encounters her father, who died when she was 16 and says he has been watching her. He urges her to leave Yusuke. The finale shows Yusuke about to depart, to celebrate which, he and Mizuki can finally make love.

Each of these segments is like a short story, with the two protagonists in new settings, but they're not presented clearly or engagingly enough and don't add up to a unified whole. Derek Elley of Film Business Asia, an Asian film expert who used to be a principal writer for Variety, thinks that with this film, after his recent flop, Real, Kurosawa "bounces back with one of the strongest films in his up-and-down 30-year-long career." I don't think so. I think Kurosawa's stylish recent TV horror miniseries Penance, a series of separate tales that were nicely unified by a repeated core source-story, was a success, for those who got to see it. But the failed storytelling of Journey to the Shore means he still hasn't made a successful feature since 2008. Journey to the Shore has moments where its attempt to merge everyday and spirit worlds suddenly clicks, and it incidentally provides rarely seen glimpses of contemporary Japanese life. But as a film it never finds its way. All but extreme Kiyoshi Kurosowa fans should avoid.

Journey to the Shore/Kishibe no tabi/岸辺の旅, 127 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2015; also Munich, Toronto, Melbourne. Screened for this review as part of the 2015 New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.

APITCHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL: CEMETERY OF SPLENDOR (2015)

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The director's first solid feature in four years revisits themes, quietly

Justin Chang's description of Cemetery of Splendor in Variety as "eerily becalmed" might go for most of the former Cannes darling's work, but it seems to have less going on in it than previous outings such as his 2004 Tropical Malady, 2006 Syndromes and a Century (2006 NYFF) and 2010 Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010 NYFF), though viewers of these earlier films will get a sense of déjà vu. Events this time center around a rural hospital (converted from an old school) filled with patients, former soldiers, afflicted with their own "tropical malady," a mysterious sleeping sickness; Syndromes was set at several hospitals (a reference to the filmmaker's own "past lives," since his parents were doctors working in hospitals at his home town). Syndromes ended with a large outdoor aerobics class; such a class is featured again here. In all these films, there are visits to spirits and nether worlds; Uncle Boonmee is the most spectacular of those, which helps explain why the director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (nickname "Joe") won the top prize at Cannes that year.

This time, as Mike D'Angelo said in his Cannes report for The Dissolve, there is more for fans who like Joe's penchant for dwelling on the past and less for those, like himself, who like him for his ability to create moments that are "mysterious and enchanting." Here, D'Angelo says, there are a couple of visually magical things -- he notes the colored lights used to attempt to cure the patients of their sleeping sickness and a cloud-filled sky slowly invaded by a giant paramecium -- but for the most part the film focuses on "the glories that once existed in what’s now a drab location," which people sort of sit around and talk about.

The main actors here are Joe regulars. Jenjira Pongpas Widner is Jenjira, a version of herself, a woman with a leg-length differential and crutches who's a volunteer at the sleeping soldier's hospital, located in the country near Joe's hometown, Khon Kaen. She tends to a young soldier called Itt (Banlop Lomnoi, of Tropical Malady), who becomes a sort of pet and protégé when he begins waking up in he afternoon and going out with her. She tells Richard about Itt. Richard (Richard Abramson), who appears in person only once, is an American former military man who has met Jenjira online and has come to Thailand to live with her. Itt seems to be inhabited by the spirits of kings who once roamed the region around the hospital, now drab and being bulldozed, perhaps for a fiber optic network. So Itt, who also speaks to Jenjira through a young mind-reader called Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram), can recall past lives, like Uncle Boonmee.

True, Joe has "still got it": he pursues his predilections with the conviction and style of an auteur. Even as his slow-moving style and penchant for the long-held static shot make for frequent longeurs, I feel curiously at home with his relaxed, light-hearted characters and their high-pitched Thai voices, and with his instantly recognizable way of framing exterior shots, his delicate sense of color and light, and his offbeat, slightly crazy passion for the folklore and spiritualism of his country and his willingness to use all his considerable cinematic gifts to depict and embody them. But this film, compared to Joe's other ones, has more telling than showing. As Justin Chang puts it, Cemetery of Splendor lacks "the jungle-feverish exhilaration of the filmmaker’s greatest work."

Cemetery of Splendor, 127 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2015 with French theatrical release 2 Sept. An AlloCiné press rating of 4.3, amounting to a rave, notably from Cahiers du Cinéma and Les Inrockuptibles along with Le Nouvel Observateur, Libération, and L'Express, shows that the French critics remain the most faithful of fans, though Le Monde found Cemetery less involving than previous works. Festivals where it's shown or will show (as of Sept. 2015) number a dozen or so, including Toronto and the New York Film Festival, which will be its US premiere. It was screened for this review as part of the latter. It has been picked up for US distribution by Strand Releasing.

Strand's theatrical release date has been announced now: 4 March 2016. OPENING MARCH 4, 2016
NY: IFC CENTER* & FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER.

*In addition to CEMETERY OF SPLENDOR, Apichatpong's previously unreleased 2012 feature MEKONG HOTEL will also open at IFC Center on March 4 for an exclusive theatrical premiere engagement, with a retrospective of the filmmaker's earlier work preceding the openings of the new films.
For more details on MEKONG HOTEL and the retrospective, please visit:
http://www.ifccenter.com/series/myst...weerasethakul/

Limited US theatrical release 14 Mar. 2016. DVD and Blu-ray 28 Jun. 2016.

MIGUEL GOMES: ARABIAN NIGHTS: VOLUME 1, THE RESTLESS ONE (2015)

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Gomes rails against austerity in a wildly ambitious compendium of genres

In his previous (2012 NYFF) appearance, his third feature actually, the remembered colonial adultery tale, Tabu, the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes showed himself to be an uneven but original and imaginative filmmaker. With his massive three-feature, six-hour "Arabian Nights" sequence, introduced in Directors Fortnight at Cannes, he reveals even more energy, ambition, and experimentalism. From the first frames of an over-long prelude, he exhibits a sure touch. But as time went on in Volume 1, which blends lengthy footage about Portugal's economic woes brought about by austerity policies with folkloric and documentary elements loosely tied together (rather arbitrarily) through an externally imposed 1001 Nights narrative structure, the combination seemed increasingly uneasy and unconvincing. What have an exploding beached whale, ruminations about massive shipyard layoffs, a fantasy about officials magically given perpetual erections, men narrating their unemployment experiences, a satirical political fairy tale about a cockerel, and documentary footage of a war on wasps to save bee colonies got to do with each other, or with the Arabian Nights? One is impressed, but one has doubts.It's a lot to swallow, and final assessment must await a viewing of all three parts.

We're told Gomes worked for a year (2013-2014) with journalists recording the devastation caused in Portugal by austerity programs; that this is linked together by a local Scheherazade (Crista Alfaiate). But despite a bold (and loud) style, this seems, in its first part, more a matter of ambition than actual accomplishment or coherence. Above all it is coherence that is lacking. Gomes announces (in his free use of big inter-titles) that he is not adapting the Arabian Nights, merely using its structure. But this is simply a way of saying that his use of the classic Arabic folktale framework is superficial, and tacked on in an effort to hold together unrelated material whose combination he himself admits at the outset was foolish.

Variety's Jay Weissberg points out that Gomes has hired Apichatpong Werrasethakul's usual dp Sayombhu Mukdeeprom here, but this hasn't the magical glow of a "Joe" film. Gomes achieves an amusing self-reflectiveness at the outset by showing himself running away from his own film crew, depressed at economic and social events in the country and overwhelmed by the absurdity of his own hubris in planning to depict them in a way that blends the folkloric and the epic. But this only illustrates the film's tendency, and ability, to incorporate all elements that arise, including the director's self-doubts. Whether anyone other than Gomes's most devoted fans will want to stick around remains uncertain, but the flashy series, enlivened (however artificially) by the use of fire, fireworks, and the aforementioned exploding beached whale and by an effective, and loud, use of music ranging from Rimsky Korsakoff to Aarvo Pärt, shot in brightly colored widescreen 16mm., is ideally suited for the more dedicated festival goers, especially those opposed to the right's ill-fated Great Recession austerity measures. The Volumes will be reviewed one by one.

Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless one/As Mil e Uma Noites: Volume 1, O Inquieto, 125 mins., debuted in Directors Fortnight at Cannes, May 2015. Many other festivals, including the New York Film Festival, in connection with which it was screened for this review. Released 24 June in Paris, it received excellent reviews (AlloCiné press rating 4.2). The French critics admired Volume 1's blending of poetry and politics.

MIGUEL GOMES: ARABIAN NIGHTS: VOLUME 2, THE DESOLATE ONE (2015)

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More meandering narrative from Gomes fails to deliver his message

Guy Lodge in Variety: "Only three tales are told here by the project’s wily mythical narrator Scheherazade, though one in particular sprawls and subdivides itself in such alluringly vine-like fashion that viewers will hardly notice 133 minutes ticking by." That is debatable. However, that long open air "trial" session, held under cover of darkness seemingly with a whole community presided over by a female judge, reminded me of both the actual Arabic 1001Nights, with its succession of sometimes outrageously fanciful and interrelated folkloric tales, and Abderrahmane Sissako's (incomparably superior) open air trial in his Bamako by representatives of the African people of the IMF and the World Bank in a public square where villagers go on pursuing their normal lives. There is an example of a brilliant wedding of politics, philosophy, and everyday life, which may be what Miguel Gomes is striving for. But while he becomes more involved in narrative and less preachy in Volume 2, he also rambles, his film as much of a messy hodge podge as Volume 1.

Gomes has fun with a classic storytelling tone with this summary: "In which Scheherazade tells of how desolation invaded men: 'It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that a Judge will cry instead of giving out her sentence. A runaway murderer will wander through the land for over forty days and will teletransport himself to escape the Guard while dreaming of prostitutes and partridges. A wounded cow will reminisce about a thousand-year-old olive tree while saying what she must say, which will sound none less than sad! The residents of a tower block in the suburbs will save parrots and piss inside lifts while surrounded by dead people and ghosts; including in fact a dog that…'. And seeing the morning break, Scheherazade fell silent." There is a hint of self-satisfaction here,though, at the sheer richness of his own invention.

This is not all of it. The concluding section is a series of stories that take place in a poor housing development, which concludes with an old couple who give their found dog, Dixie (a Maltese poodle whose photogenic friskiness helps enliven things for a while) to an impoverished younger couple, and then commit suicide. Here Gomes comes back more clearly to his initial concern with Portugal's state of economic crisis and the failure of the austerity policy to address it -- though the woes of these people could exist in any economy. This segment made me think of Krzysztof Kieślowski's Decalogue -- another comparison that, like the Sissako one, leaves Gomes in the dust, sputtering for air, signifying little.

[I]Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One/As Mil e Uma Noites: Volume 2, O Desolad 131 mins., debuted, like Volumes 1 and 3, at Directors Fortnight at Cannes, and shown at over a dozen other international festivals, including the New York Film Festival 1 October. Screened for the latter for this review. A Kino Lorber release. U.S. Premiere.

MIGUEL GOMES: ARABIAN NIGHTS: VOLUME 3, THE ENCHANTED ONE (2015)

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AN IMAGE FROM MIGUEL GOMES' ARABIAN NIGHTS, VOLUME 3

Gomes dives deeper into documentary territory with two hours about chaffinch fanciers

After watching Volume 3, we can sum up what each of the three films is like. Volume 1 is at once self-referential (the director running away from his crew); playful about its frame-tale; and observational-documentary. It's overtly -- and somewhat repetitiously and annoyingly -- self-conscious and doctrinaire in its protest against Portugal's destructive period of economic austerity. Volume 2 does something of an about-face and stops preaching to the viewer. Instead it delves into narrative with a vengeance, imitating the original 1001 Nights tales' far-fetched and intertwined incidents, though still blending fantastic and documentary elements, since it relies largely on non-actors. Volume 3, in effect, narrows the focus further, playing around with the Arabian frame-tale idea eccentrically for a bit in a Mediterranean setting at the outset, but then hunkering down into a single narrow focus: a lengthy, rambling documentary on a Portuguese passion we didn't know about and maybe didn't need to: catching, breeding, and training chaffinches and entering them in competitions where they are judged for the richness and complexity of their vocalizing.

There is a vague tie-in to the trilogy's economic theme in that the chaffinch-enthusiasts seem often to come from the working class housing blocks Gomes referred to in Volume 2 -- blocks he explains here were built where formerly there were shanty towns -- though how poor Portugal has long been as a country isn't gone into. It isn't made clear, but some of these men may get so involved in their hobby because they're unemployed. Be that as it may, what we get is just one observed scene after another in a long ramble quite artificially broken up by announcing that Sheherezade has ended one night's storytelling and begun another.

Perhaps to break the monotony, but not successfully, this Volume is exceptionally replete with yellow on-screen texts constantly adding notes and jottings about history, the birds, and this and that. Some may see these excessive texts as amiable eccentricity; others may call it reckless self-indulgence. Either way it is tedious, and Volume 3 emphatically confirms the impression that Miguel Gomes has put one over on the festival juries with this attention-getting, loud, colorful, eccentric, but ultimately unrewarding set of films.

Arabian Nights won the top prize at the June 2015 Sydney Festival, so Guardian's Australian correspondent Luke Backmaster was obliged to write about it, though he is less than enthusiastic. He begins by describing it by its length: "The first and most predictable adjective that comes to mind when describing Miguel Gomes’ surreal, colorful, funny, poignant and at times befuddling Portuguese comedy-drama Arabian Nights is 'long'." He notes that at "some 338 minutes" it's "a thoroughly butt-crunching affair, one part cinematic endurance test and two parts intellectual exercise, more likely to induce back pain or deep vein thrombosis than any other film you’ll see this year or, probably, ever." He's not far wrong (though there are other endurance tests in the festival world). But I would add one other detail. Not only is this marathon a butt-cruncher, it's also frequently ear-splitting. Gomes has the sound ramped up to blockbuster actioner level or beyond. He seems bent on periodically turning festival halls or art house cinemas into discos during those six-plus hours he has taken out of our lives.

Buckmaster appears mistaken in calling the chaffinch segment faux documentary. I don't think the men are playing anybody, just doing their hobby thing. The only question is why this obscure activity should be deemed worthy to take up most of the last third of such an ambitious and flashy trilogy. But the Aussie is right again in his conclusion: Gomes' thingie "is everything a brave cinephile broaching a six-hour hit of Portuguese cinema feared Arabian Nights would be: dull, exhausting and seemingly endless, with symbolic significance only for those willing to make loose and creative connections."

Arabian Nights: Volume 3 - The Enchanted One/As Mil e Uma Noites: Volume 3, O Encantad, 125 mins, debuted with Volumes 1 and 2 in Directors Fortnight at Cannes May 2015, thereafter at fifteen other festivals. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival. US premiere. A coming Kino Lorber US release set for 18 December 2015.

NOAH BAUMBACH, JAKE PALTROW: DE PALMA (2015)

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BRIAN DE PALMA

A New York Film Festival Special Event film celebrates director Brian De Palma

This affectionate but also relentless film portrait features the American director Brian De Palma talking to young directors Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow about his films, his filmmaking style, and his life. In his Variety review Guy Lodge describes De Palma as "New Hollywood’s foremost Grand Guignol artist." That is how he is seen: gloriously over-the-top. And he did begin with and often go back to lurid horror. Perhaps because of his loud popular style, he was championed by Pauline Kael, which he says meant he was always debated. Given the right material, like the surreal tabloid world of James Ellroy, De Palma could be precise and just. I found his version of The Black Dahlia closer to Ellroy than the celebrated L.A. Confidential. But De Palma's luridness is not to everyone's taste.

De Palma's career is varied, ranging from his blockbuster bid with Carrie, wich won him studio clout, to the violence and depravity of Scarface, to the more sensitive gangster picture Carlito's Way. And ranging, Baumbach noted in a post-screening Q&A, over most of the things that can happen to a director working with and without studio support. His notorious, grand failure is The Bonfire of the Vanities, an adaptation of Tom Wolfe's perhaps un-adaptable novel in which he says he failed because he gave in too much to pressure from studio executives to make alterations.. Another big failure was Mission to Mars. Perhaps because he's Italian-American, he has been a darling of the Venice Film Festival. Even his Redacted (NYFF 2007), a fairly crude indictment of the US Iraq war, won the Silver Lion at Venice.

As De Palma talks, apparently in a single long interview, Baumbach and Paltrow, who claim a decade-long friendship with him, edit in clips to illustrate the movies and their influences. De Palma is very specific and not very theoretical, but makes several key general remarks along the way. The rest we have to deduce by ourselves. First he says he doesn't work from character as they (Baumbach and Paltrow) do, but starts with "structure" and lets the film develop from there. He also says that everybody remarks on the genius of Hitchcock, but he is the only director to follow Hitchcock's methods extensively. De Palma indeed has constantly used Hitchcock films as a source, starting from his early admiration of Psycho and Vertigo. It's well known how otherwise frankly derivative De Palma's work has been. Obviously his Blow Out grows directly out of Antonioni's Blowup, with Coppola's The Conversation as a kind of catalyst. He explains how The Untouchables' finale in the train station is has a direct borrowing from the famous Odessa steps sequence from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. Hitchcock's Rear Window and elements of Vertigo were the basis for Body Double, and Vertigo was also the inspiration for his Obsession. Dressed to Kill is a homage to Psycho, including the similar early killing off of lead actress and the concluding exposition delivered by a psychiatrist.

De Palms explains that because of the long silences and long tracking shots in his films he had much need of a score and so had strong relationships composers, notably Bernard Hermann (six films), Pino Donnaggio (seven films), and Ennio Morricone (for The Untouchables, another of his notable later successes, as was the first Mission: Impossible ). De Palma has some interesting stories to tell about these composers and his use of their music. He comments that contemporary films too often allow sound effects and dialogue to spoil the effect of the score.

The one long interview that seems to provide the material for this film includes De Palma's description of his dysfunctional family, his Quaker education, his undergraduate studies at Columbia and graduate work at Sarah Lawrence, and his various marriages and divorces, but personal details are firmly subordinated to the 28-film oeuvre, but he does describe his early and in some cases long-term relationships with major film figures who were contemporaries: Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola, Scorsese, De Niro. Baumbach and Paltrow's illustrative material is invaluable. Clips showing long tracking shots (Pacino, Nick Cage), of chases and shootouts, help give just a glimpse of De Palma's technical gift for storytelling with motion.

The chronological approach means De Palma can describe developments in the film industry, his role in the New Hollywood when briefly directors could be independent and creative in a studio setting, followed by the takeover of the bottom-line obsessed aesthetically challenged producers of the Eighties and onward. As he comes to the end of his of a nearly fifty-year career, De Palma says a director's best work is usually done in his twenties and thirties and forties, and suggests that he may not be up to the physical demands of the job now as he nears seventy: so he takes us from the beginning to the end. He may not be the most profound or uplifting filmmaker, but he must be one of the frankest, humblest, and clearest. This is a highly informative film about De Palma's work; it's actually the kind of film one should have on DVD and watch over and over to focus on and cull out elements.

De Palma, 107 mins., debuted at Venice 9 September 2015; also 30 September at the New York Film Festival, as part of which it was screened for this review. US theatrical release 10 June 201 (limited, Angelika Film Center NYC).

Video of the Baumbach-Paltrow post screening press conference.
Guy Lodge review for Variety.

THOMAS BIDEGAIN: LES COWBOYS (2015)

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FRANÇOIS DAMIENS IN LES COWBOYS

Overambitious and under-involving directorial debut for Audiard scriptwriter

Thomas Bidegain, who has written for director Jacques Audiard (his 2009 A Prophet and 2012 Rust and Bone), turns to directing for Les Cowboys with a script by Noé Debré. Unfortunately, it's a disaster, tendentious and overwritten. It begins with an interesting milieu, French people who adore the American West and like to gather in cowboy clothes, ride horses, and sing western songs. The time is 1995. There, a man called Alain (François Damiens) sings a verse of "Tennessee Waltz" to warm applause and shares a waltz with his daughter Kelly, and then, as the evening wears on, gradually realizes Kelly has disappeared. Events follow hard -- too hard and fast -- upon one another as it turns out she has a secret Arab boyfriend who's a jihadist, and she's run off with him.

Alain gets fed up with the police and tries to intimidate the boyfriend's family, then launches his own search for Kelly, even though she has sent a letter saying she has run off voluntarily with her Muslim boyfriend and not to look for her. He traces Kelly to gypsies, then to Belgium, then farther afield, going on a rampage of angry searching, bent on revenge like some John Ford hero, meeting a sudden end after being seen in Syria and apparently having been in Yemen; the plot skips ahead, difficult to follow, as 9/11 and the emergence of Al Qaeda deepen motivations. The usually sympathetic Damiens never seems to find a rhythm of his own either here. In a Variety review Peter Debruge points out a relationship to Ford's The Searchers, and thinks Bidegain is carrying further the explorations of machismo he pursued in his scripts for Audiard. (That may be, but less plausibly; and Rust and Bone already strained the limits; but Audiard seems capable of making anything come to life, and is brilliant with actors, a quality Bidegain may not share.)

As abruptly as the father's search is forcibly ended by his accidental death his son takes over. Georges, or "Kid," his cowboy nickname (Finnegan Oldfield), hitherto passive and silent, but who had stubbornly refused to go with his father on his last search, drop his job as a short order cook and sets out with his own kind of fervor on his own dogged search, losing himself in faraway countries, more flexible and changeable than his father, following hints and traces of his sister. He runs into John C. Reilly in Pakistan, of all places, where Reilly's character, of all things, is a human trafficker. Reilly seems to play it for laughs, which won't wash, and his presence stands out by a mile. The script is heavy on events and local atmosphere, with the ersatz French cowboys ironically the most authentic -- and weak on characterization. Characters have little depth and behave implausibly.

With Kid as the new protagonist in countries where French isn't known, English takes over. Though Kelly's boyfriend/abductor was Maghrebi, Arabic is not heard from, nor, despite references to 9/11, Madrid, and the London bombings, is there any exploration of the origins and nature of jihadist thinking or of how Europeans, particularly women, can be drawn into it. (A late scene does briefly show a mainstream French dislike of hijab-wearing.) In Pakistan, Kid suddenly has a European charitable organization girlfriend (Antonia Campbell-Hughes), randomly thrown in and later as quickly dropped. Movement from one situation to the next tends to be jerky throughout the film, which isn't always easy to follow.

Thanks to some astonishing coincidences, Kid's search turns out more successful than his father's, and he ends up involved in a relationship more surprising than anything hitherto in this too arbitrary-feeling tale. The film's attempt to be topical and important and the absurdity of the overplotting suggest Bidegain, who certainly has much talent as a screenwriter, could still use a strong sure hand like Audiard's -- a collaborator more aware than he seems to be of how things play on screen and what moves audiences. Let's hope he has a stronger collaborator for his next directorial outing. Debruge calls Les Cowboys "an elliptical art film that’s tough to watch, yet continues to haunt in the weeks that follow." True, there are several memorable scenes. But the opacity of the characters and the crudeness of the transitions between plot developments mar these memories, and in some ways Les Cowboys echoes the worst mainstream "topical" conventions.

Les Cowboys, 114 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2015 in Directors Fortnight; also in other festivals, including Toronto, Busan, and London. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival. French theatrical release scheduled for 25 November 2015.

STIG BJÖRKMAN: INGRID BERGMAN IN HER OWN WORDS/JAG ÄR INGRID (2015)

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Ingrid Bergman's life reviewed in interviews and pictures

Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words/Jag är Ingrid is a Swedish documentary that was screened in the Cannes Classics section at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival -- where it received a special mention for L'Œil d'or award.

This is a warm picture of a great actress who had a complicated life with three husbands, and lived in Sweden, the US, Italy, France, and London. It is not just in Swedish. There are interviews in English, French, and Italian as well. Ingrid's loss of her parents when she was young may have contributed to her intentional rootlessness. And she compensated for this by scrupulously preserving her old photographs, journals, school papers, and other memorabilia, always carrying them from one new life to the next. We hear from the journals. We also get more than our fair share of what the Italians call "filmini" -- home movies, mostly showing Ingrid's young children. If you don't want to see a famous star's home movies, avoid this film.

"In Her Own Words" is not entirely entirely a good description of the documentary. In fact, Ingrid Bergman's children appear and speak very frequently, in various languages. Pia and Isabella speak only English. Roberto (the son, not the husband) speaks frequently in English, and occasionally in Italian. The gist is that while Ingrid's career and her love affairs came first and she was not a mother figure to her children, she played the role of friend to them as they grew up, and however imperfect she was as a parent, she was so charming and such fun to be with that they never felt any resentment.

New to some viewers is the fact that Ingrid had a significant affair with Robert Capa, the great photojournalist. (He died in 1954 in Vietnam, but this isn't mentioned, nor how the affair ended.)

There is some treatment of the scandal aroused, especially in the US, by Ingrid's abandonment of her marriage to Dr. Peter Lindström and taking up with Roberto Rossellini, which led to her being condemned in the US Congress and effectively banned from the US for years. But she was able to make a big comeback with the movie Anastasia in 1956, for which she won her second Academy Award, of three. Ingrid's Hollywood career with David O. Selznick, later with Hitchcock, was an immediate and great success. She was a glowing beauty and a natural on camera: she was a star. Yet her restlessness and desire for change led her to abandon Hollywood. She loved Rossellini ore than his filmmaking method; neorealism and improvisation were not her style, though she made one film with him that is mentioned, Stromboli. Mention is omitted of the four other films Rossellini made with Bergman in them: Europa '51, Viaggio in Italia, Giovanna d'Arco al rogo, and La Paura (Fear). The first Italian film is covered in the film, and also Casablanca; but all Ingrid's Hollywood career isn't covered, nor is there much detail about her life in Hollywood. The home movies only show the Benedict canyon house and the family cavorting around the pool. The limitation of home movies is so much happens away from home, if you're a big star.

The documentary goes into some detail about Ingrid's her 1978 final screen appearance, when she was seriously ill with cancer, in Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata.

The kids don't want to speak ill of their mother (who played Joan of Arc so often they had to see her bur a lot), and another limitation of this film is that it offers no criticism of a life and lifestyle that must have produced enemies as well as detractors. All in all this is only a middling documentary with a preponderance of talking heads and archival footage. But its subject is too remarkable and beloved for this not to be a must-see for fans of film history.

Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words/Jag är Ingrid, 114 mins., debuted at Cannes; other film festivals followed. Screened for this review as one of the Documentary section films of the 2015 New York Film Festival. Showed on French TV in Aug. 2015. US theatrical release scheduled for 13 November 2015.

LUCHINO VISCONTI: ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS/ROCCO E I SUOI FRATELLI - Revivals (1960)

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ALAIN DELON IN ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS

Visconti's operatic epic of a southern family disintegrating in Milan arouses mixed feelings today

There are five Parondi brothers, and the film is divided into five chapters moving from eldest Vincenzo (Spiros Focás) through the lazy, badly flawed Simone (Renato Salvatori) to the saintly, self-destructively innocent Rocco (Alain Delon), to the hard working young Ciro (Max Cartier), who goes to work at the Alfa Romeo factory, to the child Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi), who gets only a brief coda. After a difficult arrival from Lucania, four of the brothers and their traditional earthy southern Italian "mamma" (the great Katina Paxinou) settle into public housing and the eldest, Vincenzo, who was already in Milan with a job and fiancee, fades from the picture: the main focus for most of the film is on the tragic conflict between Simone and Rocco which turns on their love of the prostitute, Nadia (Annie Giraudot).

Another 4K restoration from Bologna, with a couple of pieces of previously excised footage restored, this most populist, Italian, and emotional of Visconti's films is certainly worthy of a reexamination and a reassessment, which turns out to be problematic. There's no question about the scope of Visconti's vision signaled by the immersive 3-hour run-time. This was the heyday of International productions combining actors from different nations dubbed into the same language, a speciality of the Italians. Spiros Focás and Katina Paxinou were notable Greek actors; Alain Delon and Annie Giraudot, French ones. Some fine Italian thespians include Renato Salvatori and the veteran Paolo Stoppo (who plays a boxing impresario). The blending in works well, with only Giraudot never quite seeming Italian. Delon, whose skill at mime can be seen in Melville's Le Samuraï, was in his prime, and starring in an important Italian movie added to his luster; in this role he runs the whole gamut of emotions.

But the artificiality of dubbing seem more obvious today, and sometimes the lip-synching doesn't convince. Sometimes Visconti's blending of neorealism and baroque melodrama is jarring, and the whole film doesn't entirely gel. Certain scenes seem excruciatingly drawn-out, such as the long fistfight between Simone and Rocco outside the housing project, and the sordid murder by the canal. The conflict between Simone and Rocco hijacks the film. This is meant to be like a Greek tragedy, with a touch of Dostoyevsky, not to mention Vasco Pratolini and several other inspirations and sources; but that's one of the troubles -- too many sources. The narrative hardly adds up to a convincing or informative picture of the life of southern Italians who migrate north. What once was overwhelming and irresistibly moving now seems impressive, but overblown and lacking in unity.

Rocco and His Brothers/Rocco e i suoi fratelli, 180 mins., is now being released by Milestone in the US (and in Blu-ray) in a new 4K restoration on DCP by Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in association with Titanus, TF1 Droits Audiovisuels and Martin Scorsese's The Film Foundation with restoration funding provided by Gucci and The Film Foundation. It is included in the Revivals section of the 2015 New York Film Festival, and its US theatrical release begins 9-29 October at Film Forum, New York.

ERNST LUBITSCH: HEAVEN CAN WAIT (1943) - Revivals

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DON AMECHE AND GENE TIERNEY ABOUT TO MEET IN HEAVEN CAN WAIT

A roué on the brink of Hades reviews his life in a minor film that shows Lutitsch's light touch and charm

This is not one of Lubitsch's best films, but still shows his charm and light touch in a remastered version that does full justice to its "glorious, candy-box Technicolor. . . beautifully restored by Schawn Belston and his team at 20th Century Fox." It's a wartime triumph of the Hollywood dream machine. It's a historical fantasy about a time when the richest people in New York lived in big greystone mansions on Fifth Avenue. The framework is a consideration of whether the protagonist, the recently deceased Henry Van Cleve (an excellent Don Ameche), warrants admission to Hell by a courtly Satan (Laird Cregar). The interview leads Henry to recall his past life. There are just a few scenes at different stages, when Henry was a cocky teenager, as a young man who steals Gene Tierney from his boring cousin when they are about to get married; winning her back when after a decade she runs to her rich, boring, squabbling parents in Kansas; and Henry's attempts to remain a "player" when a (by Forties standards) superannuated sixty-year-old; and ready for extinction at seventy.

There is sharp verbal promised in the frame tale exchanges like Satan: "I presume your funeral was satisfactory." Henry: "Well, there was a lot of crying, so I believe everybody had a good time." The body of the action co-scripted by Samson Raphaelson is more romantic and kind-hearted. Also with Louis Calhern, Eugene Pallette, Marjorie Main, and Charles Coburn as Henry’s grandfather and fellow black sheep. Gloriously cinematic in an old-fashioned Hollywood studio way, this is a succession of grand interior sets created to expand the original play by Lazlo Bus-Fekete.

Henry tells his life story to Satan at the elegant gate of Hades to see if he qualifies. He turns out to have been a better guy than he realized, despite a bit of womanizing. No connection to the 1978 Warren Beatty/Buck Henry movie; no traipsing back and forth between earth and the beyond in this one. It's more a sequence of scenes that dramatize a romanticized rich class of naive Midwestern beef moguls and Fifth Avenue millionaires for whom work was a choice, not a necessity. I'm not so keen on this kind of fantasy -- there's not enough of an edge in this rote Hollywood version of it -- but I can appreciate the polished studio work and the beautifully artificial Technicolor.

Heaven Can Wait, mins., 112 mins., was originally released in the US 11 August 1943. Restored and rereleased by Twentieth Century Fox in collaboration with the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation. Screened for this review as part of the 2015 New York Film Festival where it was presented as part of the Revivals section.

MICHEL GONDRY: MICROBE AND GASOLINE (2015)

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THÉOPHILE PAQUET AND ANGE DARGENT IN MICROBE AND GASOLINE

French teen boy road trip à la Gondry

Burned by the disaster of his over-produced Boris Vian adaptation Mood Indigo/L'Écume des jours (R-V 2014), or just wanting a change of pace, the DIY-gadget-mad French filmmaker Michel Gondry turns in his new film, Microbe et Gasoil,to a simple and intimate tale of two outcast, creative lyçée boys in Versailles who go on a highly original summer road trip. They're Danièl (Ange Dargent), whose over-loving eco-nut mom (Audrey Tautou) is a bit depressive, and Théo (Théophile Baquet), with a mean, unlikeable junk/antique dealer dad and an overweight mom whose health is precarious. Danièl is called "Microbe" because he's slight, and his long blond hair gets him mistaken for a girl. Théo is called "Gasoil" because his tinkering leads him to have a smell of gasoline about him. Danièl is an excellent artist who's so good he gets a gallery show (nobody comes, though, except Théo). He has painted many impressions of his brother, who sleeps in the same room and is a would-be punk musician. Théo has an older brother who's in the military.

You can see where things are going when Danièl sees his bike, equipped with a variety of sound effect gadgets. Théo finds an outboard motor and supervises their building of a strange auto run by it. They can't get a license for it, so they build a wood shack on top of it so it can pass as a cabin by the road if authorities come by. They don't tell their parents where they're going, of course.

This setup allows Gondry to lightheartedly indulge his penchant for handmade gadgetry (Les Inrocks calls the film "bricoludique"). But if for a while their makeshift vehicle is at the center of the boy's lives, the main focus is their rapid-fire, slangy conversation and the "ado" things they talk about -- girls, masturbation, courage, and philosophical issues Théo's isolation has caused him to ponder. There is something wackily analytical and French about these sometimes searching and witty chats. There is the girl called Laura (Diane Besnier) who Danièl falls for, who seems unattainable, but in the end turns out to be pining for him.

Along the way they have several adventures. They're kidnapped by a lonely couple "abandoned" by their own kids. Danièl has a tricky encounter with an oriental massage parlor where he tries to get his girly hair cut off. The boys' vehicle is seriously damaged when it's mistaken for part of a gypsy encampment that's raided in the Morvan. They lose all of it when Théo "speed tunes" the engine and it can't be stopped. When they're back in Versailles they're separated: Théo's mom has died and his dad sends him off to boarding school in Vincennes, where his older brother lives.

All this is merely a rough structure to make possible the dialogue between the two boys. The chemistry between the two young actors is palpable. This return to simplicity for Gondry is akin to his earlier straightforward films, the family portrait The Thorn in the Heart and his Bronx bus ride -- another example of his ability to tune in to young people, The We and the I. It may be true that this very French, very low-keyed road trip coming-of-ager will be a hard sell in the Anglophone world, as Peter Debruge says in his sympathetic Variety review. But it deserves a special place in the genre for its charm and specificity. This is a movie full of little offhand details so it would reveal another layer on further viewings. Gondry who rarely (well, never) has found a perfect collaborator for his surreal fantasies like Charlie Kaufman in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, here with his own personal invention quietly achieves one of his best and most intimate works.

Microbe and Gasoline/Microbe et Gasoil, 103 mins., "Quietly released in France after being slighted by the festival circuit" (Debruge) 8 July 2015, it received raves from French critics (AlloCiné press rating 4.0). Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival, where the film's US premiere was set for 4 October 2015. US theatrical release begins 1 July 2016. (Northern Califoronia 15 July.)

PHILIPPE GARREL: IN THE SHADOW OF WOMEN/L'OMBRE DES FEMMES (2015)

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STANISLAS MERHAR AND LENA PAUGAM IN L'OMBRE DES FEMMES

Garrel offers a new twist on his favorite theme, but with what seems a flat follow-up

A memorable experience of my first New York Film Festival, in 2005, was Philippe Garrel's dreamy black and white almost three-hour epic about the aftermath of 1968, Les amants réguliers, Regular Lovers, starring his glamorous son Louis, Clotilde Hesme, and others. There is magic in this long, meandering film, which is a far more authentic picture of those days than Bertolucci's glamorous candy-box depiction of it in The Dreamers (2003), which first brought Louis (then 19) to wide attention. You either love Louis or hate him, it seems; I've chosen to love him, and I've pursued the dream his father offers in Regular Lovers ever since. In 2008, also at Lincoln Center, as part of Film Comment Selects I saw Garrel's 1991 J'entends plus la guitare (I no longer hear the guitar), which takes us back closer to the autobiographical material that feeds all his work. Louis was just a boy of eight then, though his father filmed him as a boy. The next year FCS showed the 2008 Garrel film, starring Louis, as another suicidal artist (in Regular Lovers he committed suicide as a poet abandoned by his girlfriend). It's called La frontière de l'aube (The Frontier of Dawn), and typically it's in gorgeous rich black and white, but it's unmemorable. I had to see the 2011 Un été brûlant (A Burning Hot Summer) on my own in Paris, in an obscure cinema, for obvious reasons. In color, set partly in Italy, inexplicably costarring Monica Bellucci with Louis, suicidal as usual, this time a bad painter.

Hope was provided by the 2013 La jalousie (Jealousy), starring Louis, included not without reason in that year's New York Film Festival. It's a modest and concisely edited treatment of the named theme. Philippe Garrel returns to it and to the same economical style (and usual lush black and white) in this year's L'ombre des femmes, a third Garrel père main selection of the New York Film Festival, and a worthy one, but also a bit of a disappointment -- or is it just so concise it requires re-watching? The justification of returning to the theme and the method (with son Louis present only as a Nouvelle Vague-style voice-over narrator, which he does in an elegantly detached manner) is that it does offer a sharp new twist in a screenplay written by the great Jean-Claude Carrière, who collaborated notably with Buñuel. Pierre (Stanislas Merhar)and Manon (Clotilde Courau) are a married couple, working together on a documentary about a French resistance fighter (Jean Pommier). Pierre starts an affair with a PhD candidate he meets at a film library, Elizabeth (Lena Paugam) without Manon's knowing it; Elizabeth is curious and spies on the couple to see what her lover's wife looks like -- he has confessed right off that he's married.

Then, by sheer chance, Pierre's masculine superiority is neatly undercut when Elizabeth later spots Manon in a café near the Grands Boulevards métro -- with another man (Mounir Margoum). Eventually what goes around comes around, and the fascination of In the Shadow of Women (odd title, come to think of it) is that while it focuses on Pierre's disdainful, inconsiderate behavior toward both women, the overall effect of the story is to shift from Garrel's usual male-centric point of view. No cell phones or internet or other modern trash here, and no subplots or secondary characters, other than a somewhat annoying - but not funny -- mother (Antoinette Moya), who turns up in cafés and offers advice. And somehow this simplicity makes Garrle's sensiblity seem feminine. When the second revelation comes, there's a bat-squeak of classic French cynicism and farce and female revenge à la {Les Liaisons dengereuses[/i] -- which, however, gets lost in the absurdly feel-good ending. I'm still sorting this out; it may be quite as good as Jealousy; but at the moment it feels like a film that promises more than it delivers. But the same economy has been maintained; in fact this is four minutes shorter than La jalousie. Festival reviews have been good (Metacritic 75%); the French critics loved it (AlloCiné press rating 4.1--a level rarely achieved by a film d'auteur).

In the Shadow of Women/L'Ombre des femmes, 73 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2015 with a quick, well-received French theatrical release (27 May 2015; AlloCiné press rating 4.0); eight festivals are listed on IMDb, including New York, where it was screened for this review. US theatrical release 15 Jan. 2016 Lincoln Center and IFC Center NYC.

MICHAEL ALMEREYDA: EXPERIMENTER (2015)

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PETER SARSGAARD IN THE EXPERIMENTER

Almereyda's stylized presentation of Milgrim seems inevitable, but not brilliant

Michael Almereyda’s portrait of Stanley Milgram and his "obedience" tests invites immediate comparison with Kyle Patrick Alvarez's similarly themed recent movie Stanford Prison Experiment. Everyone prefers Almereyda's film, it would seem, because it's more stylish. I was disappointed in Experimenter and suggest rethinking this judgment. Both Milgrim and Dr. Philip Zimbardo carried out experiments, or simulations, that were clearly abusive to the volunteers and arguably unethical, and both remained lastingly famous and included in psychology textbooks for their landmark efforts. Both troublingly reflect how group psychology can bring ordinary people to do Eichmann-like or Abu Ghraib-like things.

The difference between the two films comes from the nature of the two experiments. Milgrim's isn't very interesting, and calls for jazzing up. He induced volunteer "teachers" to think they were applying progressively more severe and painful electric shocks to a heard but unseen "student." This behavior is compared to Eichmann in the film -- tried in Israel during Milgrim's time. The "obedience study" was repeated over and over with simple variations. It's shocking in its implications, but there's not much to watch. Though Almereyda might have examined it more minutely, he perhaps wisely chooses not to.
The Stanford study involved two teams of young male volunteers thrown together in a mock-up "prison" location, separately assigned the roles of "prisoners" and "guards." This was meant to go on for several weeks but was ended in a few days because it turned so nasty. The Stanford film simply recreates this event and the experimenters' reaction to it -- because it's an event rich in a variety of incidents that makes good theater. There's more to it as an event than Milgrim's setup. Alvarez assembled some of the more interesting young male movie actors of the moment for his recreation, plus Billy Crudup as the somewhat creepy and dishonest Zimbardo.

Almereyda is dealing with a deceptively simple fake setup. The "victim," the "student," is someone Milgrim has hired (the actor looks like Philip Seymour Hoffman: what if there had been more interesting actors besides Sarsgaard involved?). The real victim is the volunteer "teacher" who is induced to violate his or her own morality in giving, they think, electric shocks to someone they hear protesting and crying out in pain. But this volunteer just sits there. It's not very cinematic. Hence, Almeyreda's movie, which ingeniously treats everything from the outset as make-believe, and gives that quality troublingly pervasive. Backgrounds of interiors and exteriors are just giant black-and-grey photographs. Unlike the overwrought Zimbardo-Crudup, Milgrim-Sarsgaard seems more like an articulate blank, whose detachment is further enacted by having him frequently address the camera. This self-reflective approach still seems original, fifty years after the time when it seemed so in fiction.

Milgrim's career was more tricky, because he was banished from the Ivy League to CUNY, while Zimbardo got to stay at Stanford for life. But the trouble with making Experimenter into a biopic is that Milgrim, like Zimbardo, essentially lived off his one landmark experiment for the rest of his (less long) life. It is not clear to me how we are meant to take his relationship with his doggedly supportive wife (a colorless Winona Ryder). Experimenter skates along, taking Milgrim from one place and career situation to another, embroidering with information about the implications of the "obedience studies." Despite its review of Milgrim's post-obedience career and life, the rest of a movie is essentially just a review of the implications of what happens in the first few minutes. The one ironic moment comes when Milgrim's study is dramatized and distorted for television. What we can say is that the 90-minute Experimenter is more economical than the 122-minute Prison Experiment. Perhaps Milgrim's basic work has more scientific clarity than Zimbardo's setup. Sarsgaard is an interesting actor, who's suitably enigmatic here. His enunciation at times seemed unclear.

Perhaps I'm missing something in failing to see the festival blurb's claim that Experimenter depicts "the bohemian-tinged academic world of the 1960s through the 1980s with an economy that Stanley Kubrick might have envied." Experimenter may be clever, but Stanford Prison Experiment is a more involving watch. Both are disturbing, interesting, and instructive. Neither is a great movie.

Experimenter, 90 mins., debuted at Sundance; over a dozen other festivals. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival. US theatrical release 16 October 2015. (Metacritic rating 81%/)

CHANTAL ACKERMAN: NO HOME MOVIE (2015)

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CHANTAL ACKERMAN'S MOTHER NATALIA IN NO HOME MOVIE

Economy or emptiness?

When one considers that the topic of this film, Chantal Ackerman's mother Natalia, nearing the end of her life, is at the center of her large multi-media body of work, it is disappointing to find ourselves spending most of nearly two hours looking at the interior of a comfortable Brussels apartment. Occasionally here are brief conversations between Chantal and her mother, in person and by Skype. The Skype ones are the worst, but also are a touching indication of how interactions with the elderly can be reduced to repetitious platitudes when both speakers would rather be saying important, significant things.

Ackerman's mother was a Polish survivor of Auschwitz who married and started a family in Brussels. The filmmaker follows her usual observational style, which means that the camera sits there. Sometimes people move, and sometimes they don't. Several long interludes of the camera sitting there watching a windy desert landscape are not explained. They may be taken as an objective correlative of her mother's hard early life. What we learn explicitly from conversation about Ackerman's mother is basic.

Taking a hint from Peter Debruge's Locarno review for Variety, we can say this film makes frequent references to her, Chantal's, own rootlessness, while at the same time reaffirming her closeness to her mother, and incidentally Natalia's closeness to her own mother. Debruge says (but this film does not explicitly state) that Chantal no longer considers Brussels her home; and at one point she is Skyping Natalia from Oklahoma.

It reminds me of my other father in his last days that Natalia at one point says Chantal never talks to her about the interesting things she is doing. Indeed Chantal seems confined to simplistic "interview" type questions and affectionate banalities. This, the material of family footage everywhere, is touching but not interesting.

What of the title? It may be in a similar category with Panahi's This Is Not a Film. This film may be "formally demanding" (Debruge), but it is pretty much a home movie, if by a famous avant-gardist filmmaker studiously eschewing charm or conventional polish. But Debruge reports that this film "was booed by some at its press screening in Locarno, where critics fully expect the lineup to test their limits."

No Home Movie, 115 mins., debuted 10 August 2015 at Locarno; also shown at Toronto, and at the New York Film Festival; it was screened as part of the latter for this review.

LAURA ISRAEL: DON’T BLINK - ROBERT FRANK (2015)

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ROBERT FRANK IN DON'T BLINK - ROBERT FRANK

A worthy and vibrant tribute, if not a full portrait

An entertaining tribute, more than a documentary, by someone who for the past 25 years has worked for Robert Frank on his films, but decided to turn the camera on him. The center of the film is a running recent interview with Frank himself, today, shot by cinematographer Ed Lachman, who also occasionally appears. At 90, the man clearly still has the vigor and iconoclasm.

The anchor and establishment of his career is Frank's seminal collection of 35 mm. black and white photos of America published as the book Les Américains/The Americans 1958. The photos were shot on a nine-month, 10,000-mile trip around the country by the Zurich-born Frank while on a Guggenheim Foundation grant. He chose 83 out of 28,000 shots he made. The book, whose importance is hard to overstate, forever changed the way we see the country and the way photographers framed its people and places. But originally it was badly received, seen as negative, ugly, and over-critical. In fact Frank says he loved America. And this Swiss-born artist stayed and became his own kind of emphatic American. The film shows a vintage print of one of the most famous photos from The Americans, of people in the windows of a bus, being sold at auction for $500,000. This remains probably the most influential photography book of the twentieth century.

Frank's book had an introduction by Jack Kerouac, and he associated with the Beats, and led a bohemian life. Though he was hired by Vanity Fair, Frank ultimately chose not to continue working primarily as a still photographer as did other similar influential practitioners of the art, like Cartier Bresson, Lee Friedlander, or Gary Winogrand, instead turning to short films that have not been much seen, though the names of some, like Pull My Daisy and the never released Cocksucker Blues, are famous. He also went to live with his long-time second wife in a primitive house in Nova Scotia.

Frank lived in a messy, wild, bohemian style all his life, and Israel captures the messy, wild, bohemian quality of that life and the work in this film, which is loud, fast moving, and a compendium of many of the enormous number of things that Frank has done and lived through, including the sad early deaths of his two children by his first wife, Mary Frank. An anchor to the film consists of moments from an earlier interview (from the Eighties?) by someone not very perceptive, whose conventional questions Frank scorns. This marks him as not only an iconoclast but one who despite his geniality does not suffer fools gladly.

In a Q&A for Don't Blink's 2015 New York Film Festival premiere, director Israel admitted she made some of that interviewer's mistakes at first while working on this editing-intensive film -- whose black and white images, fortunately, have a voluptuous richness starting with those wonderful The Americans photos. She thought after so many years of working with Robert Frank that she she knew enough about him, but realized in time that there were many subjects she needed to brush up on. (Naturally, since his life spanned so many more years than hers.) This film, which amounts to a whirlwind tour of Frank's life and work, is strong in its depiction of short films on which she has collaborated with him.

You could do a documentary just on The Americans. And it's always debatable, despite the richness of Robert Frank's life, whether anything else he has done matters by comparison. Ever since I saw Frank's rough-hewn 37-minute film The Sin of Jesus at a Cinema 16 presentation in New York in 1961 I have wished he'd stuck to still photography and felt in some sense that he has thrown his life away. He has certainly done so with vigor, and while involved with a great many interesting and famous people. Israel's film captures the style of the man with appropriate images, sound, and editing rhythms, but at the cost of not filling us in on all the facts.

Don't Blink, 80 mins., is a new film making its debut at the 53rd New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was screened 23 Sept. 2015 for this review.

GUY MADDEN, EVAN JOHNSON: THE FORBIDDEN ROOM (2015)

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STILL FROM THE FORBIDDEN ROOM

An impressive display for its own sake of what Madden does best, rich and idiosyncratic pastiches on silent film

It begins with a submarine crew trapped under water, then shifts to a a lumberjack looking for companionship and a lost lady. Then scenes and characters multiply with jaw-dropping frequency for the rest of over two hours. According to Madden in the 2015 NYFF P&I Q&A, there are 17 story lines explored (or initiated) in his new film, The Forbidden Room. These are not simply "the entirety of Maddin’s oeuvre collapsing in on itself," as Jordan Hoffman said in the Guardian's Sundance review, but evocations of Saturday short serial films of the early days of movies. As the Winnepeg, Ontario native and art film celebrity's Wikipedia bio points out at its outset, his "most distinctive quality is his penchant for recreating the look and style of silent or early-sound-era films." The Forbidden Room, however virtuoso it may be in new digital processing and editing techniques (in part due no doubt to Madden's young collaborator Evan Johnson), is above all a triumph of silent film pastiche, with color (in lurid tints) and sound (in booming rich musical rumble) added in the Canadian's inexhaustible sui generis manner. Part of this is flickering image, shifting light, a crafted, distressed-film texture to every shot. Despite constant shifts of narrative and introduction of new characters (with relentless, but structurally helpful, silent-film-style on-screen titles giving their name and the actor's), The Forbidden Room is above all wonderfully unified in look and style. Madden may have only a small coterie of true fans, but it has grown to fit an international celebrity, and the work, even to a jaundiced eye, is that of a master of what he does at the top of his form.

Madden explained in that Q&A that the majority of the initial work on the film was done in Paris on small artificial and claustrophobic sets at two locations, including the Musée Ponpidou, where ostensibly he was presenting installations, but he was also shooting digital film. (The Wikipedia bio also notes, "A number of Maddin's recent films began as or developed from installation art projects.") The French locale explains some of the cameos, like Adèle Haenel, Charlotte Rampling, Jacques Nolot, Matthieu Almaric, Jean-François Stévenin, Marie Brassard, Geraldine Chaplin, Maria de Medeiros, Victor Andres Turgeon-Trelles, et al. -- though there are native English speakers as well, and legendary cult electro-pop duo Sparks, and muses Louis Negin and Udo Kier, and more. Each cast member, whether cameo celebrity or beautiful unknown (and there is no shortage of attractive young men) has a role to play and and often a new narrative to introduce. The collection of stories-within-stories is bookended with a boisterous disquisition on "the bath" drawn from a poem by John Ashbery.

The NYFF press screening was populated with its share of fans: giggles and whoops of glee could be heart at the film's humorous bits. Non-fans like myself, less charmed by the quirky humor, could find the footage hard going at times. The rule for the performances seemed to be simply: whatever you do, overact. And the imagination, like the humor, seemed to be that of an imaginative and bookish (in old-fashioned child lit) small boy. I wish the magnificent "look" could have been put to the service of a single involving, coherent action, like a regular feature film. How silly I am. But Madden has done that more in some other films, though none perhaps has looked so colorful and flickeringly rich-textured as this one. An admirer in the screening audience expressed surprise to me that a filmmaker as offbeat and limited appeal as Madden had now become so famous. But he is a virtuoso. (My least favorite Madden film: The Saddest Music in the World. My favorite, to me the most accessible: My Winnepeg.)

The Forbidden Room, 120 mins, debuted at Sundance Jan. 2015; nearly two dozen festival showings, US premiere 28 September 2015, at the NYFF, where it was screened for this review. A Kino Lorber release. US theatrical release begins 17 October NYC (Film Forum).

NANNI MORETTI: MIA MADRE (2015)

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NANNI MORETTI AND MARGHERITA BUY IN MIA MADRE

'Son's Room' director Nanni Moretti approaches death in the family again, with more mixed results

Moretti dealt with the loss of a son in the gut-wrenching 2001 film The Son's Room/La stanza del figlio, which was showered with awards, including the Palme d'Or and FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes. Inspired by the loss of his own mother, a Latin teacher like Ada here, mortally ill in hospital, affectingly played by stage actress Giulia Lazzarini, Moretti has approached the death of a mother in a more crabwise fashion, though Brechtian effects do not keep out the sentimentality, for this would seem an exercise in what Manohla Dargis in a Times NYFF preview calls "tear-soaked comedy." As Dargis also says, Moretti has (always had) "a habit of crossing the line from pathos to bathos." Distractions are provided in the form of a pair of quite different adult siblings, with Margherita Buy as Margherita, Giovanni's (Moretti's) film-director sister, and with the film she's making, on an unrelated subject, a factory strike -- and above all with the major distraction, which arguably may bring down the movie or pull it out of whack -- an uncontrollable, badly miscast American actor played by John Turturro brought in to play a new factory administrator in the strike movie.

Make no mistake, Mia madre/My Mother (nothing indirect about the title, either) has its share of sentimental moments eventually, like the scene where Margherita's teenage daughter Livia (Beatrice Mancini) sobs uncontrollably and pulls the covers over her head in bed, or (most touching to me) the former student who turns up unknowing when Ada has just died at home and recounts how she was a touchstone and inspiration to him and someone he visited whenever he was in town -- and so on: the tributes and memories are economically and touchingly sketched in at the end.

How death derails a family -- the focus of the whole second half of The Son's Room -- is depicted here before it happens, while Ada lies in hospital and Margherita and Giovanni are still struggling to get their heads around the fact that she is not long for this world. Giovanni gets it, or would appear to: he's the one who points out the hard facts to Margherita. But on the other hand, it also derails Giovanni: he can't cope with his job, at least, has taken a leave of absence, and tells his boss (the nature of the work left vague) that he is resigning for good. As for Margherita, her behavior on set is consistently peculiar.

I have a couple of reservations about this film. Margherita's derailment is indicated by not only her odd manner while working with cast and crew, but also by a series of real-seeming nightmares she has. The trouble with them is that it becomes hard to separate reality from confused daymare -- which blends with Ada's growing confusion, the latter not necessarily senility. She has at least one sane Latin lesson with Livia after she returns home. It's just what being in a hospital does to an older person (and I saw this in my own very sane mother).

But the derailment of the film and film-within-film is Barry Huggins (John Turturro). True, this is intended. And Turturro (but why should this obviously Italian-American actor be given an Anglo name?) performs his function as disruptor of the film with panache. Though he understands and speaks Italian, he has enormous trouble remembering his lines of Italian dialogue for the film. Every time he has a scene to do he comically, but also annoyingly, makes a complete mess of things. And he is arrogant, ultimately declaring his lines shit, the screenplay shit, and the movie shit (after declaring Margherita "a great director"). Barry is a disaster. And meant to be. But the absurdity of this character walks away with the film and sits ill with its topic of adjusting to the decline and death of a parent. I was never sure if Turturro was playing a bad actor or just is one, and by the end I leaned toward the latter. There is no subtlety in his performance.

Furthermore, let us note that although Lazzarini is fine and the most real person in Mia Madre and her scenes are affecting, the film slights Ada's point of view. You may want to shake Margherita and tell her to get over herself. Her confusion and daymares are also a kind of self-dramatization that seems unbecoming. When interviewed Moretti has said that he's more Margherita than her brother; that Giovanni is the wise and grownup person he'd like to be but is not.

The greatest contrast one could think of is Michael Haneke's Amour. Doesn't Haneke play it more or less straight? And could any film about the death of an elderly loved one be more real, true, and tough-minded? Mia Madre is an interesting film in its way, but however original and inventive can't touch Amour or the authentic feeling of The Son's Room. As Jay Weissberg says in his Variety review, "Moretti’s exploration of loss is unquestionably affecting, and My Mother has powerful moments, yet they’re not always well integrated with the broadly pitched moviemaking scenes, featuring a caricaturish John Turturro."

Mia Madre, (My Mother), 106 mins., debuted in Italy 16 April 2015, and at Cannes 16 May, winning the prize of the Ecumenical Jury and subsequently a raft of Davide di Donatello awards in Italy. Showing 27 Sept. in the NYFF, where it was screened for this review. An Alchemy release. U.S. Premiere. French release set for 2 December 2015. (It received raves, AlloCiné press rating 4.4.)

US theatrical release by Music Box Films was 19 August 2016, now NY and LA 26 Aug.

ROBERT ZEMECKIS: THE WALK (2015)

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Image from The Walk

High above Seventies NYC on a wire -- a time when CGI and 3D make perfect sense

It happened early in the morning of 7 August 1974. Philippe Petit, the French high wire performer, then just short of his twenty-fifth birthday, appearing out of nowhere in lower Manhattan atop the highest buildings in the city of New York, carried out the greatest exploit of his career. Working with accomplices, he secretly strung a wire between corners of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, then barely completed, and astonished the world by walking back and forth gently and playfully between them, eight passes, in the stratosphere, an act of sublime beauty and insane boldness. This was done illegally. He did not have a permit, and had he applied he wold never have got one. It was a bold and secret operation. It was also a dazzling performance, a work of art, a reaching for the infinite and the void and a defiance of death.

It is astonishing and thrilling to contemplate this exploit. James Marsh's wonderful 2008 documentary Man on Wire allows us to do that and explores how Petit did it in the greatest detail, filling us in on his life, his training, the long planning and practice, his collaborators, and his loves and the materials used, how they were spirited into the building and up to the rooftops -- all of that is in Marsh's film. Why should Zemeckis want to make a feature film about it? Two reasons, basically: Joseph Gordon-Levitt and 3D (plus CGI). Joe is a bold and confident young actor (not as young as Petit was, but that's okay) -- bold enough to speak French convincingly in the film and narrate it all through standing on the Statue of Liberty's torch (working from Petit's memoir, To Reach the Clouds) with a plausible fake French accent, which is pretty much a tightrope act in itself. He carries it off. He looks and sounds convincing. And he does the high wire walking, or a lot of it, himself, and beautifully.

The thing that Marsh's fine documentary could not do is show "The Walk" in motion from above. There is no actual film footage of Petit's "coup," only stills. Zemeckis provides us with a dazzling bird's eye view of Petit walking on the wire with the city below -- in 3D. I've never been a fan of 3D. But when we get to the spectacular shots of the wire, the man, the Towers, and the city below recreated in CGI, this format makes sense and greatly enhances what is most essential, the sense of space the breathtaking, scrotum- tightening excitement of The Walk -- or as Petit calls it, "the coup," as elegantly depicted in the film. This is a movie making a wild dream come true, and Zemeckis' use of current film technology simply realizes the dream.

Along the way, there are good performances and much Seventies atmosphere through recreated New York cityscape, men's hairstyles and clothes. Notable among the subsidiary performances are Ben Kingsley as Papa Rudy, the tight-rope mentor, and Charlotte Le Bon as Annie, Petit's girlfriend and collaborator of the time who, however, went back to France when the exploit was over and Petit decided to remain in New York. Gordon-Levitt begins the film (after a sequence of young Philippe played by Soleyman Pierini) showing Petit's life as a juggler and street performer in Paris who made international news by tightrope-walking across the towers of Notre Dame. But the overriding topic is the Twin Towers walk. Don't expect more. It should be enough. (See Debruge's Variety review for details of the accomplices and the actors who play them. Debruge feels the iMax film slights details in the wire-to-ground shots. I was looking at the space, and did not care.)

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who is now thirty-four, looks like a little guy, not a leading man, but since his childhood in Los Angeles he has had an astonishing and slowly growing career that exhibits originality, taste and panache, running from TV and A River Runs Through It as a child actor, Angels in the Outfield and 10 Things I Hate About You, playing Tommy in the TV series "3rd Rock from the Sun" and taking a break to attend Columbia University (when he went up in the Twin Towers). Joe's been one to watch, always with interesting choices and various films like 500 Days of Summer, Inception, Hesher, 50/50, Premium Rush, The Dark Knight Rises, Brick, Looper, The Lookout, Manic, Lincoln, Mysterious Skin and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra -- roles notable for boldness and variety. And a couple years ago, Joe wrote, directed, and starred in his own first film, Don Jon. Next he will be seen as the star of a film about Edward Snowden -- another kind of rule-breaking maverick -- by Oliver Stone. Joe has earned the right to play a true original like Philippe Petit and he owns this role.

The Walk, 124 mins., 3D, premiered at the New York Film Festival, where it was screened for this review. It was the festival's opening night film, presented Saturday, 26 Sept. 2015 (delayed by one day from the original starting date of the 25th due to Pope Francis' New York visit). Also in Rome and Tokyo festivals according to Debruge. It opens in NYC theaters at three locations beginning Wed., 30 Sept. A Sony Pictures release. See P&I Q&I here.

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YORGOS LANTHIMOS: THE LOBSTER(2015)

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COLIN FARRELL AND RACHEL WEISZ IN THE LOBSTER

Hell is being forced to mate, say they

Greek cinematic provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos delivers his third collaboration with friend and co-writer Efthymis Filippou in The Lobster. It is a funny but also very, very cruel satire on the way society puts pressure on people to live in couples. But does it? Don't they want to live in couples? What's the point, really? Anyway, Lanthemos and Filippou take a premise and then play with it. In their future world those who lack or have lost a mate are sent by The City to The Hotel, really a kind of minimum security prison, where they live under strict rules. Above all they have 45 days to find a mate, and if they fail, are turned into the animal of their choice and cast out into The Woods to survive or be killed. Protagonist David (a paunchy Colin Farrell), sent to The Hotel to find a new mate as a result of a recent divorce, chooses that if he must be turned he will be a lobster because they live 100 years and remain fertile life-long.

From the beginning, when we follow a lady we never see again on a car ride to a field where she shoots a horse, The Lobster is strange, disquieting, and chillingly sure of itself. Somehow Lanthimos seems working with a broader palette here than in Dogtooth or Alps (also done with Filippou), and due, some think, to acquire a wider audience as his austere festival rep grows, and given that this time he's working in English (with a bit of French) and has gathered a name-actor cast (including Léa Seydoux and Rachel Weisz).

Because it's a Hotel whose rules are enigmatic and a film that is artificial I was reminded of Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad. The Lobster is similarly arid -- but without the haunting, rhythmic elegance, of course. In fact this comparison was grasping at straws, because Marienbad is a dreamlike Neverland one might in some fantasy like being lost in, but The City, The Hotel, and The Wood are Orwellian Hells. Or, as Guy Lodge more positively puts it in his Variety review, Lanthimos "takes his ongoing fascination with artificially constructed community to its dizziest, most Buñuelian extreme to date" with The Lobster. Ah yes, Buñuel.

Coupling doesn't seem to happen very often at The Hotel and in two examples we see, they're on desperate false pretenses. Ben Whishaw tries to fake habitual nosebleeds to connect with a young woman with this ailment. David pretends to be completely without emotion to link up with a woman who's utterly cold, but she uncovers his pretense through a deeply nasty gesture. Don't critics who praise this film's sardonic wit not see how profoundly repellent it is?

This is a conceptual game whose crude absurdities indeed are, at first, amusing -- the fact that most people chose to be turned into dogs, for instance. David has arrived with one, which turns out to be his (former) brother. Likewise oddly droll is the fact that couples can only pair off if they share a common fault, like a limp (Ben Whishaw) or a lisp (John C. Reilly), or a lack of any feeling, or a tendency to nosebleeds. Sex is referred to crudely, masturbation forbidden. Preposterously, female Hotel employes come to rooms to fellate "guests" like David with their buttocks.

"Guests" are sent out every day to The Wood with rifles to kill escapees from this system who're called Loners and are led by a stony-faced Léa Seydoux. Loners can't mate or love, but they can have conversations. Living as a Loner in The Wood is the only alternative to coupling or being turned to an animal. David winds up out there and falls in love with Rachel Weisz. The ending is, after all, an abandonment of cold-hearted rule-making in favor of desperate love, and perhaps a last-minute effort to make up for all the preceding nastiness.

I found the world of The Lobster even more off-putting than those of Lanthimos' two previous films. But devotees of puzzle-pictures may enjoy re-watching and pondering the film's many enigmatic incidents whose meanings may grow in retrospect. My feeling is that Filippou and Lanthimos' construction is something they made up as they went along, and internal consistency and overall logic take second place to playful provocation.

The Lobster, 118 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes May 2015 and included in many other international festivals since. Screened for this review as part of the 2015 New York Film Festival. Coming to US theaters as an Alchemy release.

A24 is releasing the film in the US starting May 13, 2016.

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ZHANG YI AND SHAO TAO IN MOUNTAINS MAY DEPART

Lost generation - or lost touch?

Continuing his preoccupation with changes in modern China, which he delineated so richly in Platform, Unknown Pleasures, The World and Still Life, Jia Zhangke divides his new feature Mountains May Depart into segments set in 1999, 2014, and 2025, advancing toward a dystopian future where spoiled Chinese sons (represented in (represented in Dollar, played by the interesting but somewhat marooned Dong Zijian) can only communicate with their fathers through an interpreter and electronic devices have alienated people who once were alive to each other in the old fashioned ways before the Internet and cell phones came. A long-contemplated project (like other Jia works) this contains saved video footage of discos leading to three different, progressively larger but more alienating, aspect ratios.

The idea of it is fascinating and the explanation given by Jia in interviews (at the New York Film Festival Q&A's, with an superb interpreter who never dropped a nuance) absolutely clear. But the fact of the film itself is less exciting filmmaking than his individually rich and dense, if overall patchy, previous film A Touch of Sin (NYFF 2013)

To begin with it is obviously schematic to give Shen Tao (Zhao Tao) two contrasting suitors, a rich entrepreneur (Zhang - Zhang Yi) and an honest man of the people (doomed Liangzi - Liang Jin Dong, who goes far away and gets lung disease working in deplorable conditions). The segment about Liangzi seems tacked on and sentimental, everything about Zhang overblown and crude. Then, what can he be getting at in giving the grown up son of divorced Zhang and Shen Tao, Dollar (Dong Ziian, an interesting actor but marooned here) a lover old enough to be his mother? And can we really believe that in the fifteen years from age seven to age twenty-two, living in Australia, he could have completely forgotten how to speak Mandarin, and require Mia (Sylvia Chang), his teacher-girlfriend, as interpreter to communicate with his own father? For that matter what has his father been doing in Australia all this time if he has not learned the basics of English? The final Dollar sequence seems like a bold and crude B-picture.

The early scenes between Shen Tao, Zhang and Lianzi, in square format and bright color to signify a simpler, pre-Internet pre-handheld device, pre-mega-capitalist China and to fit with Jia's earliest saved disco videos, read like silent film, but without any real beauty. Jia appears to have forgotten how to convey the rich kitsch of transitional China as he did in Pickpocket, Platform, and Unknown Pleasures and, as perhaps The World showed, his concept of how things are now may be a bit artificial -- because different eras coexist in "real life," and things aren't so schematic as he now wants to make them. Highly developed concepts and ideas are getting in the way of the the filmmaker's native instincts.

In the interesting Q&A at Lincoln Center after the press screening, Jia explained that he did a lot of interviews in different countries as a basis for this film. But can life be made up out of interviews?

Mountains May Depart/Shan he gu ren/山河故人, 131 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2015. Screened for this review as part of the 2015 New York Film Festival.

TODD HAYNES: CAROL (2015)

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ROONEY MARA IN CAROL

Glamorous prison of conventionality

Carol, Todd Haynes' adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's early novel The Price of Salt, is a swoon. Despite its edge of late Forties-early Fifties homophobia and otherwise rigid convention, the movie is rapturously beautiful, beginning with Highsmiith's declared inspiration, a glamorous blonde lady in a fur coat appearing in a department store just before Christmas who meets a young clerk and they fall in love. Cate Blanchett appears to Rooney Mara like a dream. She has a slightly fuzzy glow about her like old Hollywood publicity portraits. Haynes revels in period costume, set, and those invaluable vintage cars. (It looks as if everybody drives a Packard, a Cadillac, or a Hudson.) You need to fall right away under the aesthetic spell of the movie's lovely images (they are a combination of splendid mise-en-scène and the Super-16 film magic of Ed Lachman). If you don't, watching Carol will be no fun at all. It will be like plodding through marshmallow, or honey. It is appropriate that in the story Carol's young beloved is an aspiring photographer. We are aware of photographic images from first to last. There are some hazy street images that could have been the early color work of Saul Leiter.

When Carol and Therese run away together to motels like Lolita and Humbert Humbert one is reminded of the Italian countess cited by Salvador Dalí in his Secret Life eating ice cream, when it had first been invented, who declared that if only it were a sin it would be perfect. Carol (Blanchett) loses custody of her little girl because Harge (Kyle Chandler) proves she is involved in unnatural behavior. This is a time when same-sex relations were shrouded in mystery and unknowing and also had the dangerous excitement of being forbidden. Gay artists may be occasionally allowed the wicked nostalgia of reveling in that lost naughtiness. This is not the dangerous transgression of Brokeback Mountain but a rich lady and an essentially unattached young woman (her tie to boyfriend Jake Lacy is frangible) in the sophisticated world of New York city.

Let us qualify the statement that Carol was Highsmith's first novel by pointing out that it was published at first under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. It is also not like most of her other fiction, which generally concerns evildoing. But then, remember the countess. At this time, the love of Carol and Therese could be seen as a crime, and they are being followed by a detective, from whom they escape after he catches up with them, like something Tom Ripley would do. But it's not easy or necessary to connect this novel to Highsmith's other work. The connection is that Highsmith herself was a lesbian, and she was working in a department store like Therese when a woman in a fur coat came in, and she ran home and wrote out the scheme of the novel. For the way the rich lady's husband uses her lesbianism to skew the divorce in his favor Highsmoth drew on the experiences of her own former love, a Philadelphia socialite.

And voilà! You have the very simple setup on which an elaborate and wonderful edifice of teasing and expectation is built. The devil is in the details, the delays, as Therese and Carol navigate their way toward each other past convention, prohibition, and inexperience. Blanchett and Mara work wonders together. Both are terrific, though only Mara got the acting prize at Cannes. This is a wold of underplaying, where atmosphere allows period to bloom so the touch of a hand brings a frisson and Carol rushes to put on her shoes when Harge appears and finds her with Therese -- because removed shoes with a guest is négligé. It is nearly an hour of unhurried screen time before that first kiss. This too like the beauty of Ed Lachman's images you must tune into, or you are lost and instead of swooning, will yawn.

As for the images, Mike D'Angelo declares in his Dissolve Cannes review that the "vivid retro look" can be clearly distinguished from both the "Technicolor lushness" of his other period same sex study Far From Heaven, and the "drab claustrophobia" of his Mildred Pierce miniseries, all shot by Ed Lachman. The Carol images are the most unabashedly exquisite as the film is the most celebratory. Carol doesn't really suffer. Though "just when things couldnt be worse" she runs out of cigarettes. That's as bad as it gets. She adores her daughter, and yet she is willing to give her up if necessary. This may be essentially a "problem" picture like Far from Heaven, but I don't have the same problems this time. Carol is unquestionably one of the best and most unique American films of the year and one of the most enjoyable. Its images, its lead performances, and the Carter Burwell music are to be savored.

Carol, 118 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2015; about a dozen festival showings including Telluride and London. Screened for this review as part of the 2015 New York Film Festival. US theatrical release date 20 Nov. 2015; UK, 27 Nov., France, 13 Jan. 2016. Weinstein Company release.

JAMES SOLOMAN: THE WITNESS (2015)

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KITTY GENOVESE

Spotlight on Documentary

Obsessive investigation of a sister's death falls short of a sense of closure

Bill, younger brother of Kitty Genovese, a favorite of hers and sixteen when she died, is filmed in this documentary by writer-producer James Solomon, who covers Bill's tireless effort fifty years later to investigate the famous case of his sister's murder. On 13 March 1964 in Kew Gardens, Queens, below the Mowbray apartments, Kitty was robbed, raped, and stabbed to death with many watching and doing nothing, so a New York Times story said. The case became universal symbol of modern urban anomie, human coldness and indifference. Bill investigates this legend and exhaustively ferrets out details about the crime and Kitty herself in search of closure that proves elusive.

Solomon stays out of the picture, with Bill Genovese the narrator and protagonist, missing both legs (lost as a Marine in Vietnam) but vigorously active, contacting sources and visiting them. Bill's first question is whether the Times story was true. Were there really 38 witnesses who did nothing? Yes and no, and maybe not. It is not clear that it happened that way. Very few saw anything, others only heard, and some may not have understood what the sounds meant. Some apparently did do something, called the police, more than one, at least according to one interviewed witness. But if so, why was she not saved? The auditory witnesses seem to ahve been confused by the the fact that the perpetrator, Winston Moseley, fled the scene for twenty minutes or so and then returned to finish off his victim.

A surprise discovery is that Kitty did not die alone: a woman friend (heard from near the end) rushed down to her and Kitty died in her arms. There was nothing of this in news stories or police reports.

Next comes the investigation of Kitty herself. Her death had clouded a sense of her life. It's said that she was not a barmaid as first reported, but a bar manager. She sometimes handled illegal betting in the bar, and it turns out the photo shown above was a police mug shot from a time when she was arrested for this activity. She was smart, a maverick who often cut class in high school, yet popular and a leader of the pack. We see numerous film clips of her, a lean, lively life of the party who drove a red FIAT. Bright though she was she chose not to go to college. When the family moved to Connecticut to be in a safer place she chose to stay in NYC. Perhaps an explanation is that -- a surprise to Bill Genovese, perhaps to all her family -- it turns out that though briefly married, Kitty was a lesbian. Her supposed roommate in the Mowbray apartment was her lover (also heard from). Her sexuality may have had much to do with her choosing to remain in the freer atmosphere of the big city where she could live with her girlfriend.

Later Bill/Solomon delve deeply into press coverage as well as later TV reexaminations of the murder case, revealing that author of the original front page Times story consciously overstated the indifference of witnesses to make a better story. The film is excellent in the thoroughness of its investigation of this, with numerous interviews, including one with the late Mike Wallace.

Finally we learn about Winston Moseley, the diminutive light-skinned black man who confessed to this and another murder, and also later escaped from prison, committed more crimes, and was caught. He was bright, with an IQ of 130, and eventually got a correspondence degree in sociology. Prosecutors and lawmen are interviewed. The word for Moseley's personality is "ice." He is clearly a sociopath who might, if he'd remained at large, have turned into a serial killer. Apart from his escape he has remained in prison for fifty years and every parole application has been denied. Bill meets with one of his sons, a man of the cloth, in compensation, perhaps, who nonetheless appears to believe false justifications for his father's crime. The rapist-murderer himself unfortunately refuses to meet with Bill. But later he sends him a preposterous letter inventing a story according to which a mafia gangster perpetrated the crime in his presence. It's a sad way for things to end, with lying and delusion, and at this point I began to wonder if The Witness provides enlightenment or only confusion.

All this aside, the Kitty Genovese story remains a tenacious modern myth of human indifference, even if it's a distortion of the facts it was originally based on. James Solomon and Bill Genovese's film represents an impressively thorough investigation. Alas, it does not leave one feeling enlightened about the crime or the legend it credated. There are many versions of the Kitty Genovese story in fiction, film and TV, and some are alluded to in this film. One I recently reviewed was Lucas Belvaux's 2012 feature film 38 Témoins ("38 Witnesses"), from a French novel, starring Yvan Attal, and focused on the subsequent tormenting sense of guilt felt by one of the witnesses to a parallel scene of murder and indifference set in Le Havre. This film is not satisfying either, but it represents an important topic that The Witness, despite its title, doesn't provide access to: the guilt the witnesses may have felt in Kew Gardens when they learned a horrible crime had happened that they might have stopped.

Solomon's film is an interesting portrait of a family member's tireless investigation of his sister's legendary death. At one point I was thinking it might turn out to be one of the best documentaries of the year, perhaps even comparable to Nathaniel Kahn's extraordinary investigation of his father, the great architect but very flawed father Louis Kahn in the 2003 film My Architect. But The Witness, though about a worthy topic, leaves us, like Bill Genovese, without ultimate closure. Its over-thoroughness becomes under-revealing. It lacks My Architect's emotional rewards and beautiful shape. The investigation itself is at fault, but also the vagueness of Solomon's role.

The Witness, 96 mins., debuted at the 2015 New York Film Festival (6 Oct.) as part of the sidebar Spotlight on Documentary series. A Submarine release. It is to open in NYC 3 June 2016. At Roxie Center, San Francisco 29 July 2016.

LAURIE ANDERSON: HEART OF A DOG (2015)

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LOLABELLE IN HEART OF A DOG

Special Events

A good-natured mélange of thoughts, anecdotes and whimsy

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Dogs have clearly become an avant-gardist’s best friend. First Jean-Luc Godard delivered a funny 3D valentine to a pooch named Roxy Mieville in Goodbye to Language, and now the New York-based musician/performance artist Laurie Anderson has woven a tide of personal stories, insights and visual-musical riffs into a more accessible but no less singular consideration of the species in Heart of a Dog. While this alternately goofy, serious, lyrical and beguiling cine-essay serves primarily as a loving tribute to the memory of Anderson’s rat terrier, Lolabelle, its roving, free-associative structure brings together all manner of richly eccentric musings on the evasions of memory, the limitations of language and storytelling, the strangeness of life in a post-9/11 surveillance state, and the difficulty and necessity of coming to terms with death.--Justin Chang, Variety

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I can't add much to what Justin Chang said about this genial, meandering film. It partakes of the spirit of Laurie Anderson's performances that go back to the early Seventies. This one is dedicated to the memory of her husband Lou Reed who died in October 2013 at the age of 71 -- though there is not much of or about Lou Reed in Heart of a Dog. Most of this film is in the first person, and dominated by Anderson's voice, which almost never lets up. An interlude of silence, a grove of winter trees with light snow falling, is one of the most memorable parts of the film.

From her photos and citations of neighbors we learn Anderson lived on West Eleventh Street, in the same block as Julian Schnabel's pink "Palazzo del Popolo" -- within breathing distance of the World Trade Center and, she tells, confronted with a roadway and land along the West River near her street covered with white dust. The two overriding themes of Heart of a Dog are 9/11 (and its aftermath) and her dog, with some philosophizing and several digressions to talk about major events in her early life. Notable among these is a long period spent in hospital with a broken back after jumping off a diving board and hitting the pool's cement edge, and the time when when she took two little brothers out on a lake in winter and they fell through the ice and she saved them.

Lolabelle, Laurie's rat terrier, turns out, pushed by the artist-filmmaker's whimsy, to have surprising talents. Though she may have been pushed to reveal them, the dog learns to "make art" and "play" the piano. Seeking to escape 9/11 paranoia, Anderson took Lolabella on a trip to Northern California. She tells us rat terriers are said to be capable of mastering 500 words, and she aimed to discover "which words they were." But this project she abandoned in favor of simply enjoying the beauties of the hills and coast.

The music is powerful, though for complexity and richness of images Godard's Goodbye to Language has the edge. Anderson's film is "more accessible" but also less complex, less intellectually challenging. Her observations, sometimes relying on her Buddhist teacher, are on the obvious slide. There is a reminiscence of the unique, short-lived artist Gordon Matta-Clark, who was a friend, and died at only 35. She tells how he invited his friends to the hospital in his last days and read to them. This is a good-natured work that it's impossible to dislike.

Heart of a Dog, 75 mins., debuted at Telluride. Screened for this review as part of the 2015 New York Film Festival where it was presented as a Special Event. Anderson designed this year's New York Film Festival poster. A US theatrical release of the film begins in NYC 19 Oct. 2015 (Film Forum).

REBECCA MILER: MAGGIE'S PLAN (2015)

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GRETA GERWIG AND ETHAN HAWKE IN MAGGIE'S PLAN

The independent doormat

Rebecca Miller's sort-of rom-com Maggie's Plan is a bit too into itself and its Manhattan settings, but it has some new things to offer. Miller's turning from drama to comedy. "Vikings" star and former Calvin Klein underwear god Travis Fimmel as a pickle entrepreneur sperm donor (to Grata Gerwig's character). Tragic drama queen Julianne Moore showing how ridiculous and funny she can be as a Danish professor married to Ethan Hawke. (She could as well be Icelandic, with her weird accent and her outfits that might have be on loan from Björk, but that's the point: she's from outer space.) Ethan Hawke for the first time working with a woman director -- and with three women, essentially, since Maggie's Plan is dominated by Georgette (Moore) and Maggie (Gerwig), whom his character, John, gets tossed back and forth between.

The tossing is what bothers me, because Maggie's Plan -- which is as intentionally messy in plot as Maggie herself, a self-reliant, centered young woman with a Quaker background, is organized -- does what too many American rom-coms do today. It loses all sense of narrative structure. And then again, that it winds up where it started out is quite intentional too.

The premise is simple and clear enough. Maggie, wanting to have a child but aware she can't seem to stay with one man more than six months (which, by the way, doesn't quite fit the stable, organized Quaker), looks for a sperm donor (the long-bearded Fimmel). And it's good she calls on a Viking, because all this happens in New York in wintertime -- with a side trip to Quebec for an academic conference. But then she meets John in Washington Square and winds up agreeing to read the manuscript of his novel. She is an administrator at the New School where he is a hottie new teacher. And one thing leads to another, with John's iffy marriage to Georgette derailed by his love affair with Maggie, who falls in love with him as well.

Georgette is an absurdly self-centered academic star herself. The arcane academic specialties of this couple are tossed out for laughs, but they went over my head. ( Something about anthorpology and commodities, for John.) John and Georgette have a couple of noisy, bratty little darlings and an older, grown-up girl who can talk. Wallace Shawn has a one-line appearance, and Bill Hader, who's in touch with his feminine side and delivers lines well, is that rom-com staple, Maggie's longtime pal, with advice.

Jump ahead three years. John and Maggie are married and have their own little girl (what happened to the pickle entrepreneur's Viking's sperm? It got dumped for an early meeting with John). Maggie is so good at organizing things and caring for the three kids, both Georgette and John can pursue their academic work and John can continue with his novel -- except that the novel isn't getting anywhere. And life with Maggie is too perfect. Maggie realizes that John needed to deal with the craziness and self-absorption of Georgette. It kept him from being too absorbed in his work or his novel. We can't really believe in the brilliance of Georgette (only her oddity) or of John, they're just givens. John doesn't sound bright to me. He uses "fuck" a lot, like any ordinary dude.

So Maggie's Plan, the main one, is to get John back with Georgette. And so it turns out that the independent young woman played by Gerwig here is the perfect doormat. As the only stable, responsible partner, that's the role she winds up playing.

I did not find any of this believable, or engaging. Julianne Moore is droll, and Greta Gerwig is, as usual, smooth and natural. Ethan Hawke is glib, but one feels no emotion. I thought of that famous early scene for Hawke in Dead Poets Society where Robin Williams struggles to make his young preppie character learn to emote. It seems he has lost the shyness of that young Hawke but still can't emote. Well over half the movie is devoted to talking about getting Georgette and John back together again. It gets beyond tiresome. But the Lower Manhattan atmosphere and in-jokey stuff about academe make this an original treatment of the kind of confusion of relationships that might be dealt with in a more conventional, less into-itself comedy, like the current Sleeping with Other People. This may be, as they're saying, Rebecca Miller's most successful, widely appealing film, but I liked her less successful ones. This is based on an unpublished novel. Hmmm. . .

Maggie's Plan a longish 96 mins., debuted at Toronto, where Miller apologized for its appearing without a distributor (but isn't that what festivals are for, to find them?). It was also part of the 2015 New York Film Festival, where it was screened for this review. The inclusion in the NYFF Main Slate is explicable given its family resemblance to Noah Baumbach's work and inclusion of Baumbach's girlfriend, together with lots of very natural photography of New York whose realistic color contrasted, not unappealingly, with the gloriously dreamlike Ed Lachman Gotham images of another, much better NYFF 2015 film, Todd Haynes's Carol. Maggie has been picked up by Sony Pictures Classics.

(Release date 20 May 2016. Metacritic rating a fawning, deluded 75%.)

CORNELIU PORUMBOIU: THE TREASURE/COMOARA (2015)

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TOMA CUZIN, CORNELIU COZMEI AND ADRIAN PURCARESCU IN THE TREASURE

Digging, finally finding and then (partly) giving away

In the Romanian director Cornelieu Porumboiu's deadpan new film, Adrian (Adrian Purcarescu), who's lost his publishing business and is badly behind in his mortgage payments, lures his neighbor Costi (Toma Cuzin), a real estate worker who's having trouble paying his bills too, into a venture to find treasure he suspects is hidden on inherited property. At first Adrian just says he is strapped for cash and asks to borrow 800 euros. When Costi says no, Adrian explains about the treasure and offers to go halves on whatever they find if he'll put up the money. It's needed for a metal detector. Apparently you can't just buy one in Romania; you have to hire a specialist. To round up the cash, Costi must persuade his wife (Cristina Toma).

"This idea might have made for an amusing half-hour short," Mike D'Anelo commented from Cannes, where The Treasure debuted; " at 89 minutes, it feels extremely shaggy-dog." Indeed, a lot of screen time is devoted to watching two men dig a hole in a garden, with a pretty anticlimactic result. The ending, a sort of punchline, like the finale of Porumboiu's Police, Adjective (NYFF 2009), is perhaps just more peculiar (and vaguely symbolic) than shaggy-dog, but indeed the film feels dragged-out, a long trek to a small payoff.

Like Police, Adjective this new effort from Porumboiu, who made the more self-consciously modernistic When Evening Falls on Bucharest two years ago (NYFF 2013), is a curious combination of the doggedly realistic and the didactic. This time, Porumboliu chooses to scrub out the local color of Police, Adjective, posing characters in front of blank walls or bare ground for his Asian-style static middle-distance shots. The men do dig in real dirt, though, and they have to go pretty deep. As it dragged on, I wondered if the actors were actually doing this digging.

One fellow viewer thought the whole film was a joke; I could not see that, but there is some humor about a boss who insists Cristi must be cheating on his wife because he lies about his arrangements for the metal detector. After the treasure is found -- its exact nature a bit of a surprise, its cashing in full of bureaucratic detail, Costi, who's been reading Robin Hood to his little boy (Nicodim Toma), gives some of his cut away to children in the form of handfuls of valuable jewelry. This odd behavior seems inspired by his son's expectations from Robin Hood and the word "treasure." Much is made of the fact that under remnants of communist law, any valuables found must be shown to police and if determined to be part of the "national heritage," only a third goes to the finders.

When it gets late and the digging goes deeper and deeper with no results and Adrian and Costi doubt that Cornel, the metal detector specialist, knows what he's doing, the three start to quarrel. It's beginning to look as if things might turn homicidal, as in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. No such luck. Porumboliu is too humorless and deadpan for that -- and he is moving on, laboriously, to his Robin Hood finale. What it means is anyone's guess. A viewer of Serbo-Croatian origin with whom I spoke after the screening thought it too was a reference to communism -- a longing, perhaps, for less selfish days. The film's obviously opens with a focus on today's economic woes.

There are some ideas hovering around here somewhere, but The Treasure winds up as yet another variation on the minimalist current Romanian filmmaking style, short on entertainment and not long on sense.

The Treasure/Comoara, 89 mins., debuted in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes May 2015, winning the Certain Talent prize; also shown at well over a dozen other international festivals. Screened for this review as part of the Main Slate of the 2015 New York Film Festival.

HONG SANG-SOO: RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN (2015)

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KIM MINHEE AND JUNG JAEYOUNG IN RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN (FIRST MEETING)

He said, she said? Or she said, he said?

Right Now, Wrong Then, simpler in plot than some of Hong Sang-soo's earlier films, begins with his standard situation of an art film director, an ironic version of himself, not making movies but on a professional jaunt and doing some drinking and womanizing (or flirting, anyway). Ham Chunsu (Jung Jaeyoung, of Hong's 2013 Our Sunhi) has come to Suwon, south of Seoul, to attend a special screening of one of his films and answer questions afterwards. He's a day early. Flirtation and drinking take precedence; the film screening comes in second.

Going to a peaceful pavilion , the historic "Blessing Hall" palace, Ham spots a beautiful young woman, Yoon Heejung (Kim Minhee), sipping banana water. He is immediately attracted and invites her for coffee. She appreciates his attention, thrilled to learn who he is, even though she's never actually seen any of his movies. She's a fledgling artist, and invites Ham to her studio, and then to a cafe where they both get drunk. She remembers she's got a date to spend the evening with a woman she knows who runs a restaurant. They both go there, and get drunker. The next day, the hungover Ham meets the audience at the screening.

More and more Hong is into rhythmic repetition, sometimes to surreal effect, but he varies the forms this repetition takes every time. In his 2011 The Day He Arrives, for instance, which has similar bar scenes, the director protagonist, Seong-jun (Yu Jun-sang), keeps running into the same situations and the same people. In that film, the parallelisms are overlapping. In the 2009 Like You Know It All (FCS 2010) the film is divided into two parts twelve days apart, where similar things happen.

Right Now, Wrong Then resembles Like You Know It All in being divided into equal two halves, with the movie titles coming in the middle to divide them. But this time they are flat-out alternative versions of the same sequence of events I've outlined above. Both versions begin very similarly in the pavilion where Ham and Heejung first meet; then things develop differently. In the first version, Han praises Heejung's painting, but in the second he is more critical. In the first version there is a man at the restaurant who is only seen outside in the second version. In the second version, the drunken Ham takes all his clothes off for two socked strangers at the restaurant; Heejung only learns of this when Ham is with her near her house. She laughs and excuses it and kisses him, saying she will go home and greet her mother and let her go to sleep, then sneak out to spend more time with him, though she never does, and it's cold so he leaves. In the first version, hardly anyone turns up for the next day's screening, and the moderator is, in Ham's vehemently expressed view later, a conceited creep (an idea that has come in earlier films). Ham, still drunk from the night before, gives a wild speech and stomps out. In the second version, the screening is well attended and goes well and people express admiration and gratitude to him outside afterward.

With Nobody's Daughter Haewon (NYFF 2013) Hong presented his story from a woman's point of view. In Right Now, Wrong Then, he may be presenting first the man's then the woman's memory of events -- though which one is which may be debatable, and an irate young French woman with a feminist bent after the NYFF screening complained that this new film is just the celebration of a womanizer. Well, that Han has the repetition of a womanizer is brought up in both the first and second versions of events; on the other hand, unlike some of Hong's films, no sex takes place and Ham's relationship with Heejung seems quite chaste, his declaration that he would like to marry her rather sweet.

Mike D'Angelo says in his review of Hong's 2012 Another Country that "Hong tends to make the same movie over and over." True indeed, but always with variations, naturally. To compare and classify these repetitions with variation would require the kind of careful study an academic researcher might do, and a more precise memory than I can muster now. On Letterboxd D'Angelo calls this new film the "Hong diptych" he's "been waiting for," and calls it "Mulholland Dr. in reverse: grim reality first, wish-fulfillment fantasy second" -- but then he admits he doesn't quite know for sure if the two halves are her memory, and then his; or the reverse. Either way, he finds this one of Hong's most enjoyable films. He's right to want to see it again. There is much to puzzle over this time, though since this is the ninth Hong film in a New York Film Festival and I've seen one or two of his films elsewhere, it's getting harder for me to remember all the different parallel and overlapping story lines. Last year's NYFF Hong film, Hill of Freedom, includes (as I recall) recurrent sequences in a guest house with Ryô Kase that parallel the ones in the pavilion this time. There was a haunting sense of déjà vu even though what happens in the two spaces is quite different. A jaundiced viewer may say the director didn't have enough material and filled up two hours by running the same story twice. But I am a Hongista and am happy to observe the nuances. (See my Hill of Freedom review for links to all my other Hong Sang-soo reviews. Boyd Van Hoeij's enthusiastic review of the new film for Hollywood Reporter provides insights.)

Right Now, Wrong Then / 지금은맞고그때는틀리다, 121 mins., debuted at Locarno Aug. 2015, where it won three prizes, including the Golden Leopard (best picture) and Best Actor. Other festivals, including Vancouver, London and Toronto. It was screened for this review as part of the 2015 New York Film Festival (US premiere, Oct. 9 & 10). US theatrical release beginning 24 June 2016.

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KIM MINHEE AND JUNG JAEYOUNG IN RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN (IN THE RESTAURANT)

STEPHANE BRIZÉ: THE MEASURE OF A MAN/LA LOI DU MARCHÉ (2015)

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VINCENT LINDON IN THE MEASURE OF A MAN

How much must one compromise to have a job?

This is an issue film and a character study that treads Dardenne brothers territory but without the final uplift. Judging by the other two Stéphane Brizé films I've seen, Not Here to be Loved, about an ultra-dour bailiff (Patrick Chesnais), and Mademoiselle Chambon (with Vincent Lindon and Sandrine Kiberlain), concerning a lonely schoolteacher's brief romance with a married man, Brizé likes his stories a bit down at the mouth. And this is the flaw of his new film, with its rock-solid performance by the always impeccable Lindon that won him the best acting award at Cannes. The film is so unrelentingly grim it leaves you feeling more worn down than enlightened. But its lesson about the moral limits of compromise for a man seeking employment in a down economy is a dose of medicine that can't be pushed aside or forgotten.

Thierry (Vincent Lindon)is a laid off factory heavy equipment operator who's wasted 20 months taking training courses that turn out not to qualify him for a new job. And we see him being advised to take out life insurance; unable to get even near the market rate for his mobile home; informed in a Skype interview that his chances of being hired for a job like his old one are very slim, though not zero. The first part of the film shows us a series of bureaucratic humiliations patiently endured by Thierry, and we're introduced to his wife and son Matthieu, who has cerebral palsy (requiring expensive special care). After all the grim lessons of the heartless "Law of the market" (the French title) of the depressed economy, we suddenly see Thierry in a job unworthy of him -- suited up as a security guy in a big box store. Here the title's second meaning is applied: he must now impose the ruthless law of this market, an internal one, both cruel and kind, based on a surveillance-state system using dozens of cameras to monitor every inch of the store.

Except the first, a cocky young Arab guy who steals a charger for his smart phone, the shoplifters are poor and unfortunate, the climactic one an old man who has pocketed two pieces of red meat to add to his small bag of groceries. By store policy he goes free if he can pay for the meat, but he's spent the last centimes of his monthly dole on the small bag of groceries. But the unkindest cut is what follows: the store spies on its own employees, especially the cashiers, and one of them, a hard working 20-year employee with a drug addict son caught out for hoarding store coupons, commits suicide.

This movie not only lacks final uplift; it contains nothing that's remotely fun. Even dancing lessons Thierry takes are somehow mechanical and sad. But Vincent Lindon embodies his character so well we strongly feel his feelings in the scenes with shoplifters even though he's barely saying anything because another security staff person does most of the talking.

Most of the scenes throughout are improvised, and many feel like simulations, which give a somewhat artificial sense of realism. That's except for Lindon. He owns and fully inhabits every role he plays, even when cast wildly against type in Benoît Jacquot's 1998 School of Flesh as a prissy transvestite. I like what Mike D'Angelo said in his Cannes report on this film for The Dissolve, that Lindon "fairly oozes rugged masculinity." (Except maybe as a transvestite.). And to do that and seem authentic isn't so easy. So three cheers for Lindon's Cannes award . I'll go with Scott Foundas' Variety review: Lindon as Thierry gives us "a veritable master class in understated humanism." This performance is a nice parallel, as others have also said, for Marion Cotillard's in Two Days, One Night. But I'm reserving judgment on this film.

The Measure of a Man/La loi du marché, 93 mins., debuted at Cannes in Competition, wining for Vincent Lindon the Best Actor award, arguably long overdo given the depth of Lindon's many performances. French release AlloCiné pres rating 3.8. A Kino Lorber release. North American Premiere. US theatrical release begins 15 Apr. 2016 NYC (Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, Metrograph).

ARNAUD DESPLECHIN: MY GOLDEN DAYS/TROIS SOUVENIRS DE MA JEUNESSE (2015)

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QUENTIN DOLMAIRE AND LOU ROY-LECOLLINET IN MY GOLDEN DAYS

A first love, in its elaborate setting

Though he has reported being energized in making this new film by the idea that it might be considered a "prequel" to his most notable early one, My Sex Life. . . or How I Got into an Argument (1997), it turns out he only keeps a few characters and makes up the rest. The main one is still Paul Dédalus, now an anthropologist, still played, now as a middle aged man, by Matthieu Amalric, who appears relatively briefly as the subject of the frame sequences and narration. Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse (given the saccharine new title My Golden Days in English) doesn't strictly adhere otherwise to its "source." Desplechin is telling a typically elaborate story here with plenty of characters and three stages of Paul's early life: as a young boy, in early adolescence, and as a lyçée student (Quentin Dolmaire) pursuing a long-lived if fruitless affair (it goes on for years, well beyond the lyçcee into Paul's time at university) with the love of his life, Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet). (Esther appears in My Sex Life... embodied by Emmanuelle Devos; neither of the older actors particularly resembles their younger versions.) It's that third (and surely most important?) "souvenir" that we care about. The rest seems elaborate filler. Trois souvenirs, then, goes from complicated and unsatisfying early segments to the simpler and more successful last part -- the latter a classic, if nicely detailed, story of young love.

But we begin with the middle-aged Paul (Amalric), a world-traveller returning to work in France after years abroad, called in for questioning by a venerable French government official (André Dussollier), just as he is about to take up a post at the Quay d'Orsay (the French foreign ministry). There's a problem: that Paul appears to have loaned his identity to someone living in another hemisphere. He has also lived in several far-flung, almost unknown, hence vaguely suspicious places (though they turn out to be explained by his researches as an anthropologist).

The double identity turns out to go back to Paul's early teen years, and an elaborate deal arranged by his father for a brief school trip to Russia, to help Jewish "refuseniks" wanting to get out of the country. I'm not convinced it was worthwhile to enact this episode in so much loving detail.

In a press interview Desplechin describes Ether as "eating up" the film once she arrives on the scene. As a character (and perhaps this is true of the 17-year-old actress, who plays her, Lou Roy-Lecollinet) she is an intriguing combination of timid on the one hand and theatrical and egocentric on the other. She strikes poses, looks into space, showing off her big eyes and pouty lips. (Roy-Lecollinet is striking looking, but Quentin Dolomaire as young Paul, with his porcelain skin and his cheekbones, is prettier.) The best part of the film is the way the Esther-Paul relationship is handled, through its various stages. Once they meet, it is so clear that they are going to be a couple (despite the fact that all the boys desire her and Paul is a lousy "dragueur," date-maker) that it doesn't matter what either of them says or does. And yet for that very reason, what they say an do can be unconventional.

This is early enough in time so that no one has a phone and there is no email. This may not be Desplechin's life, but it's the time when he was this age. They communicate, constantly, by letter, and at one dramatic point Esther, who's several years younger, sends Paul a telegram. It's delivered to him while he's at a university lecture and everybody thinks it's bad news, but it's good news from Esther that she's passed her "bac" exam and gotten her lyçée diploma.

It's true that the on and off love of Paul and Esther isn't treated condescendingly at all, and this seriousness and respect are partly French and partly Desplechin who, no mater how elaborately he handles his storytelling, generally manages to maintain a light touch too.

The subplots work well in the latter parts, notably Paul's relation to a Sorbonne professor of Benin culture (Eve Doe-Bruce), whom he charms into taking him on by saying the other students need a dumb guy like him to feel smart. Esther is wildly unpredictable. Desplechin engagingly depicts their years together, D'Angelo puts it, "as a series of gorgeous fragments, employing his usual arsenal of meta-cinematic gimmicks (split screen, silent-era irises, characters reciting letters directly to the camera) to convey the sense that everything shown is being freshly remembered." She betrays him more than once but it is he who leaves her. I end watching this somewhat over-complex but frequently engaging film wishing somehow it had been framed in a less distracting and irrelevant-seeming way. It's nonetheless a worthy and not untypical panel in the director's oeuvre. His repetition of the Paul character naturally invites comparison with Truffaut, and Amalric/Bonaire with Jean-Pierre Léaud. A typical French review ends by saying "a new Desplechin film is always an event."

My Golden Days/Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse, 123 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2015 in the Directors Fortnight section, it opened theatrically in France to enthusiastic reviews 20 May (AlloCiné 4.1); included in eight other international film festials. Screened for this review as part of the 2015 New York Film Festival (2 Oct.).

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THE YOUNG ACTORS HAVE SOME VIVIS SEX SCENES

MICHAEL MOORE: WHERE TO INVADE NEXT (2015)

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MICHAEL MOORE PLANTS HIS "INVASION" FLAG IN WHERE TO INVADE NEXT

Michael Moore goes on a world tour, seeking better ways of doing things than America's

For his first new film in six years Michael Moore, some think, has mellowed, and brought up his ever-present humorous side to greater prominence than previously. And this time he's not attacking the US, not exactly anyway. He's taking a more positive tack, going to other countries -- Italy, France, Finland, Slovenia, Germany, Portugal, Tunisia, Norway and Iceland -- focusing on particular ways of doing things in each country that America might do well to emulate. The concept is simple. When you travel, haven't you found in other countries certain things that were clearly done better there than at home? What if these superior features or places could be "invaded" and "stolen" to be brought back for home use?

Actually Moore does attack the US, right off, by describing an alleged meeting with top US military leaders and hearing them declare they've failed miserably. Later he points out the enormous percentage of our tax dollar that goes to "defense." But then, we go on a quirky world tour and see what Moor comes up with. This approach clearly goes back to the passages in Sicko where Moore discovered other nations -- most notably France --where health care is unmistakably more accessible and kinder than America's. This time, he frequently points out that the great situations abroad are recently achieved, and often hard-won.

In Italy he finds such kindness granted to workers. He interviews a cheerful middle class couple, and the managers of several factories, including the Ducati motorcycle company's. The information they give shows Italians get much more time off, including seven weeks of paid vacation, lengthy paid maternity leave, and a couple hours every working day to go home and have a full sit-down lunch with their families. The company owners are fully in favor of these conditions and they lead to employee satisfaction and more productivity.

In France Moore visits several (public) schools, showing how magnificently kids eat. They are served at table -- no plastic -- and the chef keeps dozens of different cheeses on hand. The menus are decided upon every month at a meeting of the chef and town officials. When Moore brings a can of Coca Cola to the table, the children decline to try it. The luncheon is looked upon as a class in nutrition and manners, and is not rushed. For older kids, Moore finds a humane and honest sex education program that means far fewer teenage pregnancies than Stateside.

In Finland they have abolished homework and avoid standardized, multiple-choice tests, resulting recently in having the best educational system in the world. In Slovenia, there's no college tuition -- and, as in a number of other countries, therefore no school loan debts carried on into one's thirties or forties. In Germany, Moore focuses on how students are taught the truth about their nation's terrible Nazi past, and speculates what it might be like if we in America taught and openly memorialized our nation's foundation on genocide and slavery. Throughout the film Moore shows videos illustrating how recent cruel abuse of black people still is here.

In subsequent country stops Moore finds far kinder prisons (a maximum sentence of 20 years even for the mass murderer) in Norway with a far lower recidivism rate; sentences to far-away jails for delinquent bankers in Iceland resulting in a quick recovery of the economy; and an awareness that women, lacking the selfishness caused by testosterone, may be more reliable leaders; legalization of drugs in Portugal avoiding the ravages of America's "war on drugs"; and a Tunisian woman who points out that there, and elsewhere, American cultural products are eagerly consumed, but Americans seem to have very little knowledge of other cultures.

One of Moore's most arresting assertions is that, given how the heavy and selective criminalization of drugs in America has led to the huge black criminal population used as a factory work force (for such as Victoria's Secret), in effect America's former enslavement of black people has been recreated in the modern era.

There is no overriding theme here, just a lot of enlightening details and the thesis that America needs to be able to adopt better ways that obviously work elsewhere. As with similar coverage in Sicko, Moore paints a simplistically positive picture of each country, eschewing contradictions and complexities. This is his way. And it works. Of course he is cherry-picking, but why not? Amid the frequent laughs, there is much that is moving and hopeful. We leave with the conviction that things can, indeed, get better.

Where to Invade Next, 110 mins., debuted at Toronto, and it was screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival. Bought for distribution by a new label formed by two Weinstein defectors.

Watch NYFF press conference with Michael Moore here.

DANNY BOYLE: STEVE JOBS (2015)

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MICHAEL FASSBENDER IN STEVE JOBS


Jobs in pieces: a bold structure, but not the acid bath one had hoped for

Sorkin’s script for Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs organizes all the action around three moments in the Apple mastermind's life. They are semi-realtime forty-minute segments before three of those big public presentations of products that were the arena in which Jobs honed his fame and, not always successfully, promoted products. They're at the Cupertino performing arts center, before the introduction of the Macintosh computer in 1984; at the San Francisco opera house before the introduction of the non-Apple NeXT black cube when Jobs had been expelled from Apple; and at Davies Symphony Hall in 1998 just before the launch of the iMac. Two non-successes, then the beginning of the Jobs triumphs when he returned to the company. Nothing is included about the later, greater triumphs or the the pancreatic cancer that took Jobs away at the height of his fame in his fifties.

Those expecting Sorkin's script to be a worthy followup to the dazzling displays of verbal sparring he's produced elsewhere, notably in David Fincher’s The Social Network, will be a bit disappointed -- though Jobs makes just as steely, mean, and brilliant a subject as Mark Zuckerberg, if not more so. Do Sorkin, Boyle, and the lead Michael Fassbender really give Jobs the "brilliant, maddening, ingeniously designed and monstrously self-aggrandizing movie he deserves," as Justin Chang wrote in Variety at the film's Telluride debut? That's nice rhetoric from Chang, but not quite lived up to.

We do get ample illustration of Jobs’ meanness toward his chief working partner and the original Apple presiding genius, Steve Wozniak (a warm and appealing Seth Rogan) and see how Jobs mistreated his ex-girlfriend Chrisann (a mousy Katherine Waterston) and long unacknowledged daughter, Lisa (played by two actresses, Mackenzie Moss and Perla Haney-Jardine). But the film chooses to end on an up note — a reconciliation between Jobs and his now nineteen-year-old daughter. It’s an awfully positive way to conclude the portrait of a cruel egomaniac. Oddly, it's the heartfelt emotional outbursts that dominate in Steve Jobs over the withering, mean putdowns.

True, Sorkin does (to quote Chang again) "blow away traditional storytelling conventions" (thankfully, for those of us suffering from advanced biopic fatigue) in the highly schematic way he presents the man, his talents, and his failures as a human. The screenplay is broken down into a stark, highly theatrical (and Birdman- like) framework that mixes the public and private personas, the business “genius” and the deeply flawed and chilly private person. Sorkin has brilliantly composed the backstage interactions, often involving his trademark walk-and-talk dialogues — so as to pack in a great deal of Jobs and Apple history in highly dramatic form. This is Sorkin’s forte: his dialogue is lively, idiomatic, idiosyncratic, but never fails in its aim to function as detailed exposition.

The way Jobs orders people around in the first segment amply shows off his imperiousness, and the fact that he was introducing the NeXT black Cube when it was not even yet functional shows his typical emphasis on façade over function. I was pleasantly surprised that Seth Rogan doesn't make his performance as Wozniak too jokey or cuddly. Rogen gets the most emotionally solid speeches, particularly one in which he points out Jobs could not even write code. How do you show an absent father? Apparently in enacting the rare times when he is present, because we see Jobs trying to show an interest in Lisa, saving her drawing on the Macintosh when she was six, and finally coming close to a hug, promising that he will certainly pay her Harvard tuition.

As John Scully, the former Pepsi honcho who was Apple CEO and got pushed out later, Jeff Daniels may be playing a role written expressly for him (he dominated the recent Sorkin TV series “The Newsroom”), and he arguably makes a warmer, more interesting character than the dull real-life Scully. It’s a somewhat odd choice to cut off each segment before Jobs’ onstage launch appearances, since those were the iconic Steve Jobs moments.

Things get pretty technical at times in the arguments about operating systems and computer adaptability: it’s likely older audience members may be lost at such times; but then, The Social Network didn't appeal to everybody either.

Fassbender, a brilliant actor, ably dominates the proceedings, his lack of resemblance to the real Jobs soon forgotten; but he needs a constant foil, and that is provided in each segment by Kate Winslet (doing an understated Eastern European accent) as Jobs’ continual sidekick and head of marketing Joanna Hoffman. Almost unrecognizable, Winslet is impressively fluid.

Chang is not wrong when he speaks of this film as "Straining like mad to be the Citizen Kane (or at least the Birdman) of larger-than-life techno-prophet biopics." There are touches of Kane and of Birdman; but "straining" is the operative word. True, this is a more stylish and interesting movie than Joshua Michael Stern's conventional biopic Jobs, starring Ashton Kutcher — though that film shows more vividly how nasty Jobs could be to Apple staff. A perusal of Jobs, Alex Gibney’s recent documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, and the Walter Issacson biography will show you that, despite the somewhat chaotic collection of information Sorkin weaves into his script (and Boyle over-kinetically directs), a lot of the story is left out here. Most of all, after The Social Network -- and all the damning things I've recently learned about the man-- I was disappointed that Steve Jobs was not more of a portrait dipped in acid.

Previous Danny Boyle films include Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, The Beach, 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Slumdog Millionaire, and 127 hours. Steve Jobs includes Michael Stuhlbarg as Andy Hertzfeld. Writer Aaron Sorkin scripted the TV shows "The West Wing" and "The Newsroom" and the films A Few Good Men, The American President, Charlie Wilson's War, The Social Network, and Moneyball. Steve Jobs is based on the official biography by Walter Isaacson, which presents negative aspects of the man without ever ceasing to assume him to be a god of modern times. Sorkin selects for some of the key negative aspects, but with his kind ending, still winds up, as A.O. Scott put it in his NY Times review, "burnishing the reputation" of the man. When will we get the truly clear-eyed portrait that will show Mr. Jobs was not only not a nice man, but also not a god, even of cyberworld? But as long as the films are based on Isaacson's official biography, that's not going to happen.

Steve Jobs., 122 mins., debuted at Telluride; also at the London and New York Festivals. Reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival, where it was presented as the centerpiece film. Limited US theatrical release began 9 Oct. 2015.

Watch the NYFF post-screening press conference here.

STEVEN SPIELBERG: BRIDGE OF SPIES (2015)

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TOM HANKS IN BRIDGE OF SPIES

Hanks shines as the stolid American Cold War hero of the Abel-Powers exchange

Spielberg's foray into Cold War espionage lore is a showcase for Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance. Most of the other roles are just walk-ons -- a weakness in the Coen brothers-Matt Charman script; but otherwise Spielberg delivers. It's an interesting story, presented with superbly atmospheric, and old-fashioned, mise-en-scène, handsomely lensed by dp Janusz Kamiński, that is both fun to follow and a joy to the eye. The film's complex back-and-forth in the second half has some of the excitement of a John Le Carré spy novel. Hanks dominates as Jim Donovan, the rather heroic New York insurance lawyer who negotiated the Rudolf Abel-Gary Powers exchange in East Germany in the cold February of 1962 (and went on to be a negotiator in Cuba for Kennedy). (Hanks doesn't do bad guys these days -- if he ever did; he's currently shooting Miracle on the Hudson, a biopic directed by Clint Eastwood where he plays the heroic pilot Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger.)

Bride of Spies is a richly achieved, well-written Cold War story but it departs sharply from Le Carré territory is the way it's dominated by a lineup of good guy-bad guy Americans. It also never delves into the gray-shaded, often seedy details of espionage, and lacks the betrayals and the pessimism the secret world involves. Early on when Abel is captured the film shows America to be a world of simplistic hate and "us" vs. "them" thinking. Abel remains mysterious, however. He was a Soviet spy (even if the Soviets never acknowledged it), but how he spent his time other than drawing and painting, we never learn. Gary Powers was only an unheroic drone in a new kind of techno-spying Le Carré might shake his head at. He got shot down on his first big aerial reconnaissance mission, a rookie in a small elite group of young pilots told to fly the U2 planes, work the cameras, and keep their mouths shut.

Mark Rylance is swell as Abel, presented as a tough, dry, basically decent man doing his job. The movie comes down to a portrait of Hanks and we identify with his solid adherence to values like the Constitution against both mass extremism and cold-blooded, amoral CIA practicality -- particularly the willingness of the CIA mission boss (Jon Donahue) to forget about the recently detained Yale graduate student Frederic Pryer (Will Rogers) whom Donovan insists on getting freed along with Powers. The plot revives its faltering suspense in the last quarter by keeping it uncertain till the last minute whether Pryer will appear at Checkpoint Charlie as Powers and Abel are swapped at the Glienicke Bridge.

Though he has worked at the Nuremberg trials, Donovan has long been a specialist in insurance, not criminal matters. He simply takes on the unglamorous but altruistic job of defending an arch enemy of the US, a Soviet spy, because he is asked to. He faces intense public prejudice, and stands strong against an unscrupulous judge (Dakin Matthews) and does everything he can to defend his client. Essential to Donovan's value to his country and the world, he is not just a forthright man of principle but also wily and pragmatic. Thus he foresees the value of not executing Abel so he can be available for a possible a spy exchange. He appeals Abel's case to the Supreme Court on civil rights and procedural grounds, but without success. The U2 missions are a thread that has been interwoven with the Donovan-Abel story. When we see a vivid depiction of Gary Powers being shot down and captured, we have the spy to to exchange for Abel.

In Hanks' excellent performance, Donovan continually grows in our sympathy. When he is sent as the unofficial negotiator in East Germany, we sympathize and admire as he allows his overcoat to be stolen and battles a cold. And we savor the gemütlichkeit of his Nescafés with two sugars, his unfinished double breakfast at the Berlin Hilton, his frequent indulgence in whiskies and cordials.

This is a film of impressive skill, Spielberg working near the top of his game, but in its somewhat retro, morally upright manner it lacks some of the complexity and cynicism its subject calls out for. Hanks' Donovan is as solid as a rock. The only trouble is that as with other good guys, he's not finally very interesting. Being good doesn't even seem hard for him; he never falters. There's something unquestioned and sweet about his friendship with his client, Rudolf Abel. There could be other ways of looking at Abel, whose history is along and complicated one. But for this movie, Abel has to be seen simply as a loyal servant of his country. As Donovan points out, there are Americans doing the same for their country too. There goes all the complexity of a good spy novel, where hiding and stealing secrets are things that are morally dubious and mess majorly with a person's head.

Bridge of Spies, 135 mins., debuted 4 Oct. 2015 at the New York Film Festival, where is was screened for this review. US theatrical release begins 16 Oct. (Metacritic rating 81%); UK 27 Nov.; France 2 Dec.

LÁSZLÓ NEMES: SON OF SAUL/SAUL FIA (2015)

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GÉZA RÖHRIG IN SON OF SAUL

Special Events - Film Comment Selects

An obsessive Sonderkommando's view of Auschwitz

It grew out of 38-year-old Hungarian director László Nemes's years of studying documents on the Sonderkommandos, the Nazi concentration camp prisoners forced to do most of the work of the killing. Son of Saul impresses but also troubles. To begin with it has been regarded as taboo to show the actual extermination process, which it does. It does it indirectly, showing all only dimly behind Saul (Géza Röhrig), the central character, a Sonderkommando at the Auschwitz-Birkenwald death camps who becomes obsessed with an effort to give a boy who has been murdered -- his illegitimate son, or one he designates thus -- a proper Jewish burial. That is the fanciful part; what's realistic is the planning and execution of the October 7, 1944 Sonderkommando uprising that simultaneously takes place around Saul, and eventually sweeps him up despite his efforts to ignore it.

Nemes is a pupil of Béla Tarr and like Tarr uses long takes, though no scene lasts long. They're shot in richly textured handheld 35mm color in Academy ratio, the square format the better to focus on the head of Saul, with everything around him often distant or blurred. To fill in detail of the unseen periphery there is a terrifying, often mysterious but still realistic sound track, which took five months of editing to produce.

Son of Saul has the kind of spectacular opening sequence that can overwhelm a picture. It depicts one full iteration of the chaotic but relentless process from arrival of a group of prisoners to their extermination to when the same Sonderkommandos (including Saul, always in the foreground) who have herded the prisoners to their deaths and dragged out the "pieces" to be cremated, scrub the gas chamber floor. (Later we see great piles of ashes being shoveled into the river).

The glimpses we get of the boy's body show him to have been beautiful and healthy. Saul notices him because, almost uniquely, he has been found still alive after the gassing, gasping for breath. In the distance Saul sees the "doctor" go and finish off the boy.

This opening is the last thing that's clearly sequential and organized. From then Saul seems to be wandering around on his own. Though they still were executed like the others, after about four months, the Sonderkommandos were given special treatment. They were fed and housed separately. They could move freely among units of the camp. Thus Auschwitz from the Soderkommando point of view is more frangible than we might expect. And also more confusing and chaotic. The prisoners speak among themselves in a koiné of primitive Yiddish so they could understand each other whether Hungarian, Polish, German, etc. The dialogue is laconic, monosyllabic. This too is confusing.

So, Hell barely seems organized, though the killing machine that is the camp's purpose moves on relentlessly. Nemes maintains the intensity, even if the chaos becomes overwhelming. He includes key details from his research, such as the use of flamethrowers and open fires to execute and cremate prisoners when the crematoria became overloaded with incoming victims. This we see in the distance, like the stacked naked bodies, and other horrors. Always there are shots, screams, and shouts of abuse in the air.

Saul's frantic, obsessive quest to give the boy a proper burial is also, of course, an effort to save his own soul in a world God seems to have abandoned. Though Saul and the other Sonderkommandos, he knows, are dead, he seeks moral survival. The artificiality of this certainly is no worse than the jarringly lighthearted treatment of death camps in Benigni's Life Is Beautiful. But in time I began to find the chaos disorienting, Saul's mission to respect one corpse a little hard to care abut when more important things, like the deaths of thousands, were happening around him. Mike D'Angelo made a similar observation. Nonetheless Nemes has made a "terrifyingly accomplished" film and "a masterful exercise in narrative deprivation and sensory overload," as Justin Chang wrote in his admiring and detailed Variety review. The Cannes jury clearly also thought so. Also true what Boyd van Hoeij said in Hollywood Reporter, that this is "a powerful aural and visual experience that doesn’t quite manage to sustain itself over the course of its running time, but is a remarkable — and remarkably intense — experience nonetheless." At the New York Film Festival press and industry screening Q&A, Géza Röhrig, the star, who identifies more as a poet than as an actor, was as articulate in his answers as the filmmaker, if not more so. Nemes consciously eschewed prettiness, unlike Koltai whose 2005 Fateless sought it.

Son of Saul/Saul fia, 107 mins., co-written by László Nemes and Clara Royer, debuted at Cannes in Competition in May 2015 and won the Grand Prix. Screened for this review as part of "Film Comment Selects" presented as a Special Event sidebar of the New York Film Festival. Included in a dozen festivals, with theatrical release in France (to raves, AlloCiné press rating 4.2) 4 Nov. 2015; US 18 Dec. A Sony Pictures Classics release. Metacritic rating 87%.

JOHN CROWLEY: BROOKLYN (2015)

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EMORY COHEN AND SAOIRSE RONAN IN BROOKLYN

An Irish lass pulled back and forth

On the one hand Brooklyn is a beautiful and touching film. But at least in the way Nick Hornby has adapted Colm Tóibín's novel, the outlines of the story are so clear and in such well-set grooves it seems artificial, its heroine's path made unusually easy so her emotional transformations can be the more clearly outlined.

Along with this, the film, despite a fine cast and a production that makes best use of a limited budget with shooting mostly in Montreal, seems somehow generic. The events are set in the early Fifties but might have occurred a century earlier (and indeed Ireland in the Fifties was in many respects more like elsewhere in the Thirties). Well, the subject is a pretty universal one: adapting to a new place and then being troublingly drawn back to an easier life at home. But the universal needs to be communicated through the particular.

Everything is so low-keyed it makes John Crowley's film almost radical. Here is a film where nobody raises his or her voice. To go with this, as seen here Saoirse Ronan is a very understated actress, allowing the big moments to speak for themselves, relying often on a small smile or a twinkle in the eye, the rare flow of tears. Eilis is an unexciting character, a drab, mousy wallflower in County Wexford forced to work part time at the small grocery shop of an annoying woman. He sister Rose has the good position -- doing the accounting for a business. But a deus ex machina in the form of one Father Flood (Jim Broadbent), an Irish priest in Brooklyn, arranges a more productive life for Eilis in America. She will not have it easy, because she must go alone, leaving her sister and widowed mother behind. But she won't have it hard, because the essentials have been set up for her.

The sea voyage over is routine but with some telling details. As Eilis descends into the ship the loud hum of the engine vividly conveys how strange and frightening everything is to her. She must contend with locked-off shared bathrooms and learning to fast to cope with seasickness. The scenes that follow oscillate between the two settings Father Flood has arranged for Eilis' life -- the Irish rooming house for young ladies presided over by bossy, acerbic landlady Mrs. Kehoe (the excellent Julie Waters), and the posh department store where it's arranged for her to work, again with a presiding spirit, the firm but helpful supervisor Miss Fortini ("Mad Men's" Jessica Paré). And Eilis continues drab and wall-flowery, outshone by her livelier housemates.

Transformation begins after Eilis goes to a dance and meets Tony (Emory Cohen of The Place Beyond the Pines), a young Italian-American plumber who likes Irish girls. Tony falls for Eilis at once. After all she is pretty; she just needs some sprucing up, a touch of rouge, lipstick, a bit of eyeliner. Most of all, she needs a boyfriend; boyfriends have been a major topic of conversation ever since her arrival at the boarding house.

Thanks to Tony, who starts taking Eilis to movies every midweek and soon invites her to meet his family and to Coney Island (two big sequences) she finally begins to bloom, becomes confident and relaxed at work, passes the accounting course at Brooklyn College Father Flood arranges for her (and pays for), and goes from like to love with Tony. Ronan and Cohen both deserve credit for making their little love scenes delicate and magical.

Then comes deus ex machina number two: the sudden, inexplicable death of Rose. Eilis must go home to comfort her devastated mother, already a widow, now all alone. Pressured by Tony, but not unwilling -- she may have bloomed, but she's still a passive heroine all the way -- Eilis secretly marries Tony in the city hall, thus committing herself morally and legally to return, if she wasn't emotionally.

It may seem somewhat gratuitous ad sudden that back in Ireland, Eilis is immediately, before she can put away the groceries, packed off to take Rose's place at the firm, where holiday bonuses have to be figured out; and quite routinely, starts being escorted around by slick-haired blazer-wearing rugby-clubber Jim Farrell (Domhnall Gleeson), who's not as young and attractive as Tony, but has security and a big house to offer. The main thing is, the beach isn't crowded like at Coney Island, and Eilis falls too easily into the security of the old country and its gentle, quiet ways. She's so conflicted, she puts Tony's letters, painstakingly scribed with the help of his obnoxious but more grammatically informed eight-year-old brother, in a drawer unopened. Only the fact that her marriage is secret makes Eilis's hesitation plausible and not reprehensible.

Point of view triumphs here, because despite her limp-rag lack of appeal, Eilis, from whom the story rarely departs, gradually grows on us as she blooms; and our sympathy peaks with her dilemma back in Ireland. Her push-pull of conflicting attractions between a dynamic new world painstakingly adjusted to and an easy, familiar and safe home is one familiar to many. But real life lacks this kind of schematic, fairytale simplicity. For some, perhaps more those of the female gender, Crowley's film may be experienced as magical. For others like myself it seems too artificial to commit to fully. The scenes with the engaging Emory Cohen are the only ones that have real emotional traction. (Irishman John Crowley, primarily a theatrical director, helmed Andrew Garfield's award-winning 2007 feature-film debut Boy A.)

Brooklyn, 112 mins., shot in 35mm., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2015; scheduled at nine other festivals including Toronto and London. Reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival Oct. 2015. Theatrical release by Fox Seachlight in the US 4 Nov., UK release 6 Nov.; France 9 Mar. 2016.

HOU HSIAO-HSIEN: THE ASSASSIN (2015)

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SHI QI IN THE ASSASSIN

Hou's exquisitely leaden refinement of a truncated martial arts epic

You may not grasp the plot in watching (nothing new in a fancy wu xia film, though Hou Hsi-hsien is seeking to redefine it). It's the end of the Tang Dynasty and provincial lords challenge the royal court. An exile, Nie Yinning (Shi Qi), has grown up into an invincible female assassin charged with destroying her former fianceé (Chang Chen). Some of our time is spent watching Yinning at work tearing people up. More of it is spent in royal interiors watching palace denizens talk about her and other matters. Sit tight. It's a slow ride. In between, there are some really nice landscape shots.

When D'Angelo says in his Cannes bulletin for The Dissolve about Hou Hsio-hsien's exquisite but leaden version of a wu xia movie, The Assassin, that his favorite Hou so far "is the first segment of Three Times, mostly because it feels more like Wong Kar-wai than like Hou," I absolutely know what he means. I have tried hard to appreciate if not like Hou, even though it was completely no-go at first. What he has now done with the most vigorous and popular Chinese movie genre with this seven-year project can't be liked, only appreciated, along with the uneasy feeling that in watching it one may have become permanently molded to one's cinema seat -- even though The Assassin is actually less than two hours long. This film is gorgeous and sui generis, but it's a stinker.

It's easy to ooh and ah over its elaborate costumes in lovely color combinations, its stream of razor-sharp landscape images that evoke the aesthetics of antique scroll paintings. But there is nothing here to be enjoyed as an old-fashioned, wildly energetic, borderline nutty movie experience -- the very thing that wu xia has always reliably provided. The story is curiously truncated, robbed of both the logic and the climaxes of the usual wu xia film. Hou has taken a lot out, and put nothing else in. In a majority of scenes we are with a royal family that the female assassin is, or is not, out to get. Deliciously dressed Tang dynasty aristocrats, the ruling women with the most elaborate hairdos you've ver seen outside Louis XIV Versailles, they all talk very very slowly, and in very, very low Quaalude-calm voices to each other, or perhaps to nobody in particular. This is a kind of epic effect -- to slow things down -- but true epic requires excitement, heightened tone, a sense of grandeur, and that is lacking.

What of the fights -- the core of the genre? In the abrupt stop-start of the film structure, they turn out to be barely a blip on one's mental screen. Hou himself (in the NYFF press screening Q&A) has explained that his female protagonist's choice of a short blade for her fighting, determined the speeded up nature of the battles. Her opponents have long blades so she has to get in very close, attack fast, get out very fast. So the fights must take place at breakneck speed. He eschews the flying-through-the-air stuff using wires and trampolines or CGI because, well, in real life things didn't happen that way. Wait a minute: "real life"? It's curious that Hou sees this film as in some way more "realistic." It is as elaborately artificial as any other examples of the genre, just more pared down, slowed down, and "tasteful." The speeded up combat bears an unfortunate resemblance to those current films of various kinds in which fighting is fudged, where you can't see the arms and the follow-throughs, and the whole value is lost.

The fighting, done by non-pros, is a misfire; so is the playing around with format. Hou opens in black and white Academy ratio, switches to color in the same ratio, opens up wider, then shrinks back some. One expects there to be some meaningful resolution of these format-shifts, but none arrives.

Justin Chang says in his reservedly admiring Cannes review for Variety that in The Assassin Hou "boldly merges stasis and kinesis." Yes, there are odd jumps back and forth between the two, for sure; but it's always the stasis that wins out.

Hou has injected great gobs of good taste, but taste in a genre film a sort of oxymoron -- though at the same time beauty in popular Chinese cinema -- beauty of actors, costumes, landscapes, cinematography -- has become such a staple it's kitsch.

In The Assassin Hou delivers something very pretty, very elegant, but drained of life. His film is seriously unfun -- but by the same token, perfect for his most adoring fans, the cultish festival cinephiles who want nothing more than to be shown a movie no mainstream audience member would understand or tolerate.

If, as Justin Chang thinks, this will bring Hou a wider audience in the West, this is a hollow achievement,like, indeed, the perhaps wider audiences for Wong Kar-wai's last couple of films. Both have sunk deeper into decadence and drifted away from the impulses that first made their work personal and unique. The blurb calls The Assassin "gloriously beautiful in its candle-lit sumptuous red and gold decor as Hou’s 1998 masterpiece, Flowers of Shanghai. True, and with more refined technique. But due to the intervention of Hou's stilted effort to redefine a genre that is foreign to him, this decor no longer had the uniquely personal feel it had in the 1998 film. Needless to say, though, Hou's and Wong's ever-more-elaborate failures are still more interesting than most directors' successes, and must be experienced, however dispiriting that may be.

The Assassin/刺客聶隱娘, 105 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes May 2015, where it won Hou Hsio-hsien the Best Director award, and was included in 18 or so other international film festivals. It was screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival, Oct. 2015. Limited US release (Well Go) 16 Oct. (Metacritic rating 86%); France 9 Mar. 2016.

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SHI QI IN THE ASSASSIN

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[B]LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES FROM THE ASSASSIN[/B

DON CHEADLE: MILES AHEAD (2015)

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DON CHEADLE AS MILES DAVIS IN MILES AHEAD

New twists

Don Cheadle's Miles Ahead is fractured and crazy. There is no easy way of summarizing it. It leaves you dazed. Wait, did that happen? Or what part of it did happen? The best parts are the incomprehensible transitions. Miles exits an elevator and instantly enters another decade of his life. He is in some kind of gunfight, and at the same time we are following a boxing match. These confusions could be an intelligent outsider's version of the deranged mind of a genius in disarray. Because Miles, the great Picasso of modern jazz history, is in disarray: that much is clear. He is toward the end of a six-year period from 1975 to 1981 in which he dropped out, stayed in, did drugs, and stopped playing music. Cheadle, as Miles, directing himself, and writing the script with help from Steven Baigelman (who helped write Get on Up), has chosen to deliver his subject in the form of a loud, rude confusion. It's a bold venture and he pretty nearly carries it off. One walks out of the theater with much more the feeling of having entered into a life than having been delivered the story of one. If you don't mind a jazz great's biopic delivered in the form of an acid trip gangster picture, Miles Ahead is a pretty fun movie. If it doesn't totally avoid biopic conventions (drug problems, wife problems, the manipulative record company executives), at least for good stretches it seems to.

One convention, much relied on here, is the biographer or journalist who comes along and ferrets out the life story and the rambling musings of the star. This comes in the form of an aggressive, dissolute Rolling Stone writer (so he says) called Dave Brill who forces his way into Miles' spacious, disordered Manhattan hideaway to do, he claims, a comeback story for Columbia Records, and winds up being for a while the musician's factotum, companion, and chauffeur of his Jaguar sedan. Fears that blandness would wash over events through Ewan McGregor's taking on the mantle of the journalist prove unwarranted. This McGregor is a wild, rude fellow in a floppy wig, looking like he's already been short of a decent meal for a few days and gotten in a fight even before Davis punches him in the face.

Then there is the MacGuffin. This comes in the form of a reel-to-reel tape supposedly of long awaited new Miles Davis music, that gets considerable mileage and leads to gunplay, even though there may be little actually on it. Unless you are on drugs. And then there are the drugs. Much of the foreground action is devoted to a drug run to feed Miles' cocaine habit. But there's a young saxophone player too, also an addict, called Junior. Is he a loser or a brilliant new talent? It wasn't clear. This is one trouble with the original, acid-trip style of presentation -- it's not ideal for presenting information.

Very fractured snapshot-like depictions of their wedding; his demands that she curtail her dancing career; his adultery, her departure; do not keep the story of Miles Davis' relations with his first wife (1958-68), Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi), from being the thread of the film closest to the stuff of conventional biopics. So, to a degree, is the confrontation with the record company executives. But the fact that Miles is high on coke and pointing a loaded pistol at them adds a novel touch. Miles' behavior throughout is provocative, dangerous, and rather funny. Only a little of Miles' sense of humor comes through, though, and it might have sent the tone out of whack if it had. But Miles' direct, profane language delivered in his famous whispery voice by Cheadle is a constant reality check that tells us that the man may be high, drunk, mean, dangerous, and in the middle of a long period of throwing his life away but is in fact not crazy in the least. Miles Davis' laconic way of expressing himself always had a kind of brilliant clarity about it, a feature the film captures nicely. Cheadle's performance is finely tuned: it's energetic, yet has a sly, restrained side, as if we're looking at Miles looking at himself doing these things, both in present time and in flashback.

If the movie provides an explanation of what led Miles back to making music, I missed it. But the answer is as easy as when Brill asks Miles if he plays the piano and he says "No, I just woke up black." There's the humor, by the way.

There are many stories about how badly, in the depths of his addictions, Miles Davis behaved, his domestic violence, his shortchanging of fellow musicians. We may choose to forgive because he was so clearly a great and endlessly self-regenerating musical talent (the latter an aspect Cheadle's film repeatedly honors). But the bad behavior remains and the car chase and fights and pistol shooting don't really reveal that truthfully. Perhaps this is because of Cheadle's alliance with Miles Davis' family in the form of his musician nephew, Vince Wilburn, Jr.? But I'm reluctant to criticize Cheadle for leaving things out: that he leaves a lot out is one of the film's best features. It's good to see a movie about an artist where he is crazy, drug-addled, wracked with pain and lying fallow, but not depressed, suicidal, or doomed. It sounds funny to say that's an improvement, but it is. And in the contrived scene of Miles playing again, it's lovely to see and hear two of his greatest living former band members playing live on screen, Herbie Hancock, whose assistance with the score provides a tremendous imprimatur, and Wayne Shorter.

Miles Ahead, 100 mins, debuted at the New York Film Festival as the Closing Night film, 10 Oct. 2015, when it was screened for this review. Sony Pictures will release it; no release dates yet.

Feb. 3: now to open in US theaters April 1, 2016.