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HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENIng (RaMell Ross 2018)
This is where Walker Evans and James Agee's 1941 dust bowl classic photo essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was set, but it focuses (for 76 minutes) exclusively on African Americans befriended by the photographer during five years where he came to the region to teach photography and coach basketball. The editing is "fractured," the emphasis on kinetic energy. The fractured portraits are vivid and touching. But this made sense to me more as a still photographer's work extended somewhat unnecessarily into motion than as a traditional documentary, which it is not. Let us not think it is a celebration of the short attention span.
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OUR HOUSE わたしたちの家 /(Watashitachi no ie) (Yui Kiyohara 2017)
The young filmmaker is a student of Kiyoshi Kurosawa and it shows. Her Our House is a story of ghosts, because only they could be living simultaneously in the same houseas depicted in this slow-burning drama. A triumph of fine traditional Japanese cinematic style, but a little too low-key to be completely successful.
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NERVOUS TRANSLATION (Shireen Seno 2017)
A painstaking evocation of childhood in the Philippines in the late Eighties. Eight-year-old Yael tries to assuage her longing for her father, largely missing as an overseas worker in the Persian Gulf, by secretly playing over and over cassette tapes he sends to her mother, Kay. Memorably she cooks Filipino specialties her father longs for in her dollhouse kitchen. Distantly adult worlds and the troubles of the Marcos regime are evoked as well. Repetitious, wistful, and sad.
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The four best films of the series, in my view: The Guilty, An Elephant Standing Still, The Great Buddha, Good Manners. There were other good ones. Many liked Makala, which I missed, some liked Closeness, I found Until the Birds Return and Scary Mother interesting. Others show promise or are worth knowing about or, like The Nothing Factory, were interesting failures.
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Good Manners
New Directors/New Films 2018
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March 28-April 8,2018
Links to the reviews
3/4 (Ilian Metev 2017)
Azougue Nazare (Tiago Melo 2017)
Black Mother (Khalik Allah 2018)
Closeness/Tesnota (Kantemir Balagov 2017)
Cocote (Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias 2017)
Djon Africa (Joăo Miller Guerra, Filipa Reis 2018)
Drift (Helena Wittmann 2017)
An Elephant Sitting Still (Hu Bo, China, 2018) 234 mins.
Good Manners/As Boas Maneiras (Marco Dutra, Juliana Rojas 2017)
The Great Buddha + (Huang Hsin-yao 2017)
The Guilty/Den Skydige (Gustav Möller 2017)
Hale County This Morning, This Evening (RaMell Ross 2018)
Makala (Emmanuel Gras 2017)
Milla (Valérie Massadian 2017)
Nervous Translation (Shireen Seno 2018)
Notes on an Appearance (Ricky D’Ambrose 2018)
The Nothing Factory/A Fábrica de Nada (Pedro Pinho 2017)
Our House/Watashitachi no ie (Yui Kiyohara 2017)
Scary Mother/Sashishi Deda (Ana Urushadze 2018)
Those Who Are Fine/Dene wos guet geit (Cyril Schäublin 2017)
Until the Birds Return/En attendant les hirondelles (Karim Moussaoui 2017)
A Violent Life (107m) A Violent Life/Une Vie Violente (Thierry de Peretti 2017)
Winter Brothers/Vinterbrřdre (Hlynur Pálmason 2017)
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New Directors/New Films: the series begins.
ND/NF MAR. 28- APR. 8, 2018
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Hale County This Morning, This Evening
As the series begins to unreel today at MoMA and Lincoln Center, the New York Times' Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott list more films in the series that they believe worth your attention - including Black Mother, Hale County, This Morning, This Evening, and Djon Africa, in addition to ones I recommended and continue to recommend, and not mentioning one of my favorites for sure, the jaw-dropping entertainment from Brazil, Dutra and Rojas' Good Manners. They include 3/4, which I missed. Read the Times piece here.
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Note: Showing in NYC & elsewhere now (20 Sept. 2018) from New Directors:
Hale County This Morning, This Evening
At:
IFC Center
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Metascore: 81%
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AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL (Hu Bo 2018) ND/NF 2018
Limited US theatrical release begins a year later...
Mar. 15 2019: limited theatrical release of the film by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Laudatory essay about it by Richard Brody dated Mar. 6 in The New Yorker. Same day review in NYTimes by A.O. Scott; a Times "Critic's Pick."
Superlatives abound for this masterpiece that's heartbreaking because it's a one-off due to its 29-year-old maker's suicide.
Trailer See what Ang Lee, Bela Tarr, and other greats say about it.