Nyff 2010

[Chris Knipp]

First reviews of THE SOCIAL NETWORK are very enthusiastic. See former chief Variety critic Tood McCarthy's on his IndieWIRE blog "Deep Focus" here. I like the way he opens up the implications in his conclusion:

“The Social Network” is about so many things—the primacy of an idea, the things that define a generation, ambition and drive fomented by rejection and anger, the limitations of orthodoxy versus unbridled imagination, simultaneous creative and destructive impulses, the fluidity of what’s considered an outsider and insider, rebel and establishment—that it provides almost an unlimited number of things to think about, while also providing a viewing experience of continual stimulation. Everything about it is rich.

[Chris Knipp]

Jean-Luc Godard: FILM SOCIALISME (2010)

"The first hour is wonderful," blogs the Voice's J Hoberman. "Unfortunately, as with much Godard, the movie is unsustainable. Film Socialisme goes on the rocks once it lands somewhere in the south of France, where the children of a gas station owner put their parents on trial and advise the world to both liberate and federate."--MUBI.

[Chris Knipp]

Cristi Puiu: Aurora (2010)


Another relentless Romanian exploration of the quotidian, this time in a tale of multiple murder. Puiu's second feature, in which he stars, lacks the moral outrage and black humor of his 2005 debut feature (shown at NYFF 2005), The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.

[Chris Knipp]

Manoel de Oliveira: THE STRANGE CASE OF ANGELICA (2010)

The venerable Portuguese filmmaker returns to his theme of doomed love in this tale he first thought of in the Fifites of a Sephardic Jewish photographer living beside the Douro river who falls under the spell o a beautiful woman who has just died when he is asked to take her picture before burial. The two lovers float into the sky as trasmogrified spirits as in a painting by Chagall. Music; a Chopin sonata. Balm to the spirit after Cristi Puiu.

[Chris Knipp]

Abdellatif Kechiche: BLACK VENUS (2010)

Kechiche dramatizes with painful vividness the story of the woman from South Africa who was humiliated in carnivals in London and Paris as a wild savage and ended life as a prostitute.

Click on the title above for the festival review.

[Chris Knipp]

Pablo Larraín: POST MORTEM (2010)

Larraín's TONY MANERO depicted a creepy hoodlum who exemplified the Pinichet regime in Seventies Chile. Now in a film that's equally haunting and macabre the same actor, Alfredo Castro, embodies a morgue functionary who was present at the autopsy of Salvador Allende a few years earlier.

[Chris Knipp]

Charles Ferguson: INSIDE JOB (2010)

Narrated by Matt Damon, Inside Job is a documentary film that describes and analyzes the world financial crisis. With this film and his 2007 Iraq war and occupation film No End in Sight Ferguson establishes himself, along with Errol Morris of The Fog of War, Alex Gibney of Taxi to the Dark Side, Adam Curtis of The Power of Nightmares, the team of Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott of The Corporation and a very few others, among the best of the new investigative political filmmakers who lay out a large, controversial topic for us in terms so compelling and lucid that the result becomes a definitive film statement.

Click on the title above for the NYFF review.

Screened Sept. 29. Shown in the festival Oct. 1 and 4.