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    New York Film Festival 2014




    Click here for Filmleaf NYFF 2014 comments thread.


    NYFF signage outside Alice Tully Hall, September 2014 [Photo: Chris Knipp]

    Links to reviews:

    '71 (Jann Demange 2014)
    Beloved Sisters/Die geliebten Schwestern (Dominik Graf 2014)
    Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtues of Ignorance) (Alejandro G. Iñárritu 2014)
    Blue Room, The/La Chambre bleue (Mathieu Amalric 2014)
    Citizenfour (Laura Poitras 2014)
    Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas 2014)
    Eden (Mia Hansen-Løve 2014)
    Foxcatcher (Bennett Miller 2014)
    Gone Girl (David Fincher 2014)
    Goodbye to Language/Adieu au langage (Jean-Luc Godard 2014)
    Heaven Knows What (Josh & Benny Safdie 2014)
    Hill of Freedom 자유의 언덕/Jayuui Eondeok (Hong Sang-soo 2014)
    Horse Money/Cavalo Dinheiro (Pedro Costa 2014)
    Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson 2014)
    Iris (Albert Maysles 2014)--Spotlight on Documentary
    Jauja (Lisandro Alonso 2014)
    Life of Riley/Aimer, boire et chanter (Alain Resnais 2014)
    Listen Up Philip (Alex Ross Perry 2014)
    Maps to the Stars (David Cronenberg 2014)
    Merchants of Doubt (Robert Kenner-Spotlight on Documentary
    Misunderstood/Incompresa (Asia Argento 2014)
    Mr. Turner (Mike Leigh 2014)
    National Gallery (Frederick Wiseman 2014)--Spotlight on Documentary
    Pasolini (Abel Ferrara 2014)
    Princess of France, The/La principessa de Francia (Matías Piñeiro 2014)
    Red Army (Gabe Polsky 2014)--Spotlight on Documentary
    Saint Laurent (Bertrand Bonello 2014)
    La Sapienza (Eugène Green 2014)
    Seymour: An Introduction (Ethan Hawke 2014)--Spotlight on Documentary
    Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait/ماء الفضة/maa' al-fiḍḍa (Ossama Mohammed, Wiam Simav Bedirxan 2014)
    Tales of the Grim Sleeper (Nick Broomfield 2014)
    Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako 2014)
    Time Out of Mind (Owen Moverman 2014)
    Two Days, One Night/Deux jours, une nuit (Jean-Pierre, Luc Dardenne 2014)
    Two Shots Fired/Dos disparos (Martin Rejtman 2014)
    Whiplash (Damien Chazelle 2014)
    Wonders, The/Le meraviglie (Alice Rohrwacher 2014)



    GONE GIRL: ROSAMUND PIKE, BEN AFFLECK

    The opening, closing, and centerpiece films for the fall festival:

    OPENING NIGHT: Gone Girl (David Fincher)
    CENTERPIECE: Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson)
    CLOSING NIGHT: Birdman or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance (Alejandro G. Iñárritu)



    JOAQUIN PHOENIX IN INHERENT VICE
    (NYFF 2014 CENTERPIECE FILM)


    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 08-04-2015 at 11:02 PM.

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    All of the 2014 NYFF Main Slate list has now been announced. See below; with the FSLC's blurbs. For the FSLC's filmlinc
    site for further info on NYFF52 click on the image above.


    The 52nd New York Film Festival (2014) Main Slate.

    (See also Noel Murray's fuller, richer individual summaries of the films for The Dissolve.)

    GONE GIRL
    Director: David Fincher
    Opening Night - 145 mins.
    World Premiere
    David Fincher’s film version of Gillian Flynn’s best seller (adapted by the author) is one wild cinematic ride, an intensely compressed portrait of a recession-era marriage contained within a depiction of celebrity/media culture.

    INHERENT VICE
    Centerpiece
    World Premiere 148 mins.
    Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
    The first adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel, is a time machine placing viewers in the world of the paranoid, hazy L.A. dope culture of the early ’70s.

    Closing Night Gala Selection
    BIRDMAN OR THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE
    Director: Alejandro G. Iñarritu
    Closing Night 119 mins.
    One-time action hero Riggan Thomson (a jaw-dropping Michael Keaton) stages his own adaptation of Raymond Carver’s "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" while contending with a scene-hogging narcissist, a vulnerable actress, and an unhinged girlfriend for co-stars; a resentful daughter; a manager who’s about to come undone... and his ego, the inner demon of the superhero that made him famous, Birdman.

    BELOVED SISTERS (Die geliebten Schwestern)
    Director: Dominik Graf
    North Armerican Premiere 170 mins.
    Romantic sentiment runs high but aristocratic decorum holds sway in this beautiful and thoroughly modern rendering of the real-life 18th-century love triangle involving German poet Friedrich Schiller and two sisters of noble birth, Charlotte and Caroline, whose strikingly intense relationship and profound mutual devotion verge on symbiosis.


    Amalric shows Georges Simenon crime novel La Chambre bleue

    THE BLUE ROOM (La chambre bleue)
    Director: Mathieu Amalric
    North American Premiere 76 mins.
    A perfectly twisted, timeless adaptation of a Georges Simenon domestic crime novel in which an adulterous man (Mathieu Amalric) and woman (Stéphanie Cléau) meet in a country hotel’s blue room... but have very different visions of their future.

    CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA
    Director: Olivier Assayas
    U.S. Premiere 124 mins.
    Juliette Binoche plays an aging actress and Kristen Stewart her personal assistant in Olivier Assayas’s brilliant new film, a close meditation on the passage of time.

    EDEN
    Director: Mia Hansen-Løve
    U.S. Premiere 131 mins.
    Mia Hansen-Løve’s fourth feature is based on the experiences of her brother (and co-writer) Sven—one of the pioneering DJs of the French rave scene in the early 1990s—and plays in the mind as a swirl of beautiful faces and bodies, impulsive movements, rushes of cascading light and color, and music, music, and more music.

    FOXCATCHER
    Director: Bennett Miller 133 mins.
    'A vivid portrait of a side of American life that has never been touched in movies, Bennett Miller’s meticulously crafted new film deals with the tragic story of the the fatally dissociated billionaire John E. du Pont (Steve Carell) and the brothers and championship wrestlers (played by Mark Ruffalo and Channing Tatum) recruited by du Pont to create a national wrestling team on his family’s sprawling property in Pennsylvania.

    GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE (Adieu au langage)
    Director: Jean-Luc Godard 70 ins.
    Jean-Luc Godard’s 43rd feature, shot in 3-D and "starring" his beloved dog Roxy, is a work of the greatest freedom and joy, as impossible to summarize as a poem by Wallace Stevens or a Messiaen quartet.

    HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT
    Directors: Josh & Benny Safdie
    U.S. Premiere 94 mins.
    Harley is madly in love with Ilya. She’s sure he loves her just as much, if only he could express it. Both of them are heroin addicts, kids who wander around New York trying to scare up money for a fix. The Safdie Brothers’ toughest movie, it’s not romantic but it will break your heart.

    HILL OF FREEDOM (Jayuui Eondeok)
    Director: Hong Sang-soo
    U.S. Premiere 66 mins.
    Kwon is given a packet of undated letters from Mori, who has come to Seoul to propose to her. As she walks down a flight of stairs, they are dropped and scattered. While reading them, she must make sense of the chronology… and so must we, in Hong Sang-soo’s daring new film, made up of a series of disordered scenes based on the letters.

    HORSE MONEY (Cavalo Dinheiro)
    Director: Pedro Costa
    U.S. Premiere 103 mins.
    Pedro Costa’s astonishing new film, which "takes place" in the soul-space of Costa regular Ventura, is a self-reckoning, a moving memorialization of lives in danger of being forgotten, and a great and piercingly beautiful work of cinema.


    Lisandro Alonso at Cannes

    JUAJA
    Director: Lisandro Alonso
    U.S. Premiere 108 mins.
    A work of tremendous beauty and a source of continual surprise, Alonso’s first period piece stars Viggo Mortensen as a Danish military engineer who traverses a visually stunning variety of Patagonian shrub, rock, grass, and desert on horseback and on foot in search of his teenage daughter.

    LIFE OF RILEY(Aimer, boire et chanter)
    Director: Alain Resnais
    U.S. Premiere 108 mins.
    The final work from Alain Resnais, based on British playwright Alan Ayckbourn’s Relatively Speaking, is a moving, graceful, and surprisingly affirmative farewell to life from a truly great artist.

    LISTEN UP PHILIP
    Director: Alex Ross Perry 108 mins.
    For his sly, very funny portrait of artistic egomania, Alex Ross Perry draws on literary models (mainly Philip Roth and William Gaddis) to achieve a brazen mixture of bitter humor and unexpected pathos.

    MAPS TO THE STARS
    Director: David Cronenberg
    U.S. Premiere 111 mins.
    Cronenberg takes Bruce Wagner’s script—a pitch-black Hollywood satire—chills it down, and gives it a near-tragic spin. The terrible loneliness of narcissism afflicts every character from the fading star Havana (Julianne Moore) to the available-for-anything chauffeur (Robert Pattinson) to the entire Weiss family, played by John Cusack, Olivia Williams, Evan Bird, and Mia Wasikowska.


    Asia Argento at Cannes

    MISUNDERSTOOD (Incompresa)
    Director: Asia Argento
    North American Premiere 103 mins.
    As preteen Aria shuttles between the well-appointed homes of her divorced showbiz parents, a large affectionate cat her only companion, she elaborates her walks into sometimes life-threatening adventures. Blurring the line between imagination and actuality, Asia Argento’s irrepressible projection of young female subjectivity is ingenious, direct, and utterly real

    MR. TURNER
    Director: Mike Leigh 149 mins.
    A portrait of the great painter J.M.W. Turner and his time, but also an extremely clear-eyed film about art and its creation, and the great human problem of sharing a life with other people. Featuring a remarkable performance from director Mike Leigh’s frequent collaborator, Timothy Spall.
    Read more

    PASOLINI
    Director: Abel Ferrara 87 mins.
    U.S. Premiere 87 mins
    Abel Ferrara’s new film compresses the many contradictory aspects of his subject’s life and work into a distilled, prismatic portrait, with a brilliant Willem Dafoe in the title role.

    THE PRINCESS OF FRANCE (La Princesa de Francia)
    Director: Matías Piñeiro
    U.S. Premiere 70 mins.
    Matías Piñeiro’s dazzling fifth feature, which follows a group of young people involved in a radio production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, doesn’t transplant Shakespeare to the present day so much as summon the spirit of his polymorphous comedies.

    SAINT LAURENT
    Director: Bertrand Bonello
    North American Premiere 146 mins.
    Focusing on a dark, hedonistic, wildly creative decade in Yves Saint Laurent’s life and career, Bertrand Bonello toys deliriously with biopic rules and limitations.

    LA SAPIENZA
    Director: Eugène Green
    U.S. Premiere 100 mins.
    In Eugène Green’s exquisite new film, an unhappy married couple travel to Italy so that the husband can research the Baroque architect Francesco Borromini. There they encounter a brother and sister, whose friendship helps to restore their own sense of inner balance.

    '71
    Director: Yann Demange
    A riveting thriller set in the mean streets of Belfast over the course of 24 hours, ’71 brings the grim reality of the Troubles to vivid, shocking life as a squaddie (Jack O’Connell) finds himself trapped and unarmed in hostile territory and the lines between friend and foe become increasingly blurred.

    TALES OF THE GRIM SLEEPER
    Director: Nick Broomfield 105 mins.
    Four years after the arrest of the Grim Sleeper serial killer in South Central Los Angeles, filmmaker Nick Broomfield interviews friends, neighbors, and community activists to unravel the chilling story, while giving voice to his victims and illuminating the racial divide that still exists.

    TIMBUKTU
    Director: Abderrahmane Sissako
    U.S. Premiere 97 mins.
    A serenely composed vision of the humiliation and terror wrought by foreign Islamic jihadists who occupy the ancient Malian city of Timbuktu. A film by turns wondrous and terrifying.


    Richard Gere playing a homeless person

    TIME OUT OF MIND
    Director: Oren Moverman
    U.S. Premiere 117 mins.
    As George, a man forced onto the streets, Richard Gere may be the "star" of Oren Moverman’s haunting new film, but he allows the world around him to take center stage, and himself to simply be.

    TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT (Deux jours, une nuit)
    Directors: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne 95 mins.
    A factory worker on the verge of being laid off (Marion Cotillard) has 48 hours to convince her co-workers to forego their bonuses so that she might keep her job. At once an unforgettable drama and a tough ethical inquiry, from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.

    TWO SHOTS FIRED (Dos Disparos)
    Director: Martn Rejtman
    U.S. Premiere 105 mins.
    Martín Rejtman’s seventh feature, about a family’s curious methods of coping with their 16-year-old son’s inexplicable suicide attempt, is an engrossing, digressive comedy with the weight of an existentialist novel.

    WHIPLASH
    Director: Damien Chazelle 106 mins.
    A pedagogical thriller and an emotional S&M two-hander, Whiplash is brilliantly acted by Miles Teller as an eager jazz drummer at an unnamed New York music academy and J.K. Simmons as the teacher whose method of terrorizing his students is beyond questionable, even when it gets results.

    THE WONDERS (Le meraviglie)
    Director: Alice Rohrwacher
    North American Premiere 110 mins.
    Alice Rohrwacher’s sophomore feature, a vivid yet mysterious story of teenage yearning and confusion, conjures a richly concrete world that is subject to the magical thinking of adolescence


    52nd NYFF SELECTION COMMITTEE: Kent Jones, chair, with Dennis Lim (FSLC Director of Programming), Marian Masone (FSLC Senior Programming Advisor), Gavin Smith (Film Comment Editor), and Amy Taubin (Film Comment and Sight & Sound Contributing Editor).

    PRESS & INDUSTRY SCREENINGS. These run from September 15th through October 11trh 2014. Reviews will be appearing in this thread regularly during this time.


    NYFF52 REVIVALS « Main Series Listings


    Burroughs: The Movie
    HOWARD BROOKNER | 1983 | 86 MINS
    An evocative and one-of-a-kind portrait of William Burroughs, built around a series of encounters with the great American writer himself and interviews with many friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Terry Southern, John Giorno. and Brion Gysin. A true New York movie.

    The Color of Pomegranates
    SERGEI PARAJANOV | 1968 | 88 MINS
    A cine-poem of the life of the 18th-century Armenian/Georgian poet and singer Sayat-Nova by Sergei Parajanov, which Michelangelo Antonioni once called a film of “stunningly perfect beauty,” now impeccably restored.

    Hiroshima Mon Amour
    ALAIN RESNAIS | 1959 | 90 MINS
    This debut feature from Alain Resnais, written by Marguerite Duras, a story told in two tenses about the aftereffect of the atomic bomb as experienced by two lovers in Hiroshima, is one of the great masterworks of modernist cinema, now fully restored.

    Once Upon a Time in America
    SERGIO LEONE | 1984 | 251 MINS
    Sergio Leone’s final and perhaps greatest film, a New York gangster saga housed within an intricate construction that shuttles through time, with Robert De Niro, James Woods leading a remarkable cast. This restoration, including material previously unseen in the U.S., preserves the director’s original structure.

    Click here for festival news.

    REVIEWS BEGIN BELOW.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 10-06-2014 at 07:29 PM.

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    Asia Argento: MISUNDERSTOOD (2014)

    ASIA ARGENTO: MISUNDERSTOOD/INCOMPRESA (2014)


    Charlotte Gainsbourg, Giulia Salerno in Misunderstood

    Growing up ignored and mistreated, with rich and famous parents: Asia Argento's boisterous, loud, semi-autobiographical effort is endlessly vivid but lacks real substance

    Asia Argento, daughter of Dario, was seen on the screen in person in the 2007 New York Film Festival's colorful and amusing Main Slate selection, Catherine Breillat's costume drama The Last Mistress, where she played the lead role. This is a semi-autobiographical piece by Asia (the lead character, a young girl, only has one letter different in her name), where she has only a brief cameo. It's a more convincing directorial effort than her first two pictures, which have been characterized as "punk melodrama" (Lee Marshall, Screen Daily). Actually, though Misunderstood certainly has trappings unique to itself, in doing a tumultuous Italian language period coming-of-ager (set in the early 1980's), Asia Argento is competing with an entertaining and accomplished, if not radically original, spate of such films in recent Italian cinema including Giovanni Veronesi's The Fifth Wheel (starting in the Sixties), Daniele Lucchetti's Those Happy Years (about the Seventies), and Pierfrancesco Diliberto's The Mafia Only Killes in Summer, about growing up on Sicily in the past few decades. These films included in the FSLC Open Roads: New Italian Cinema series of June 2014, are just as entertaining and contain more historical context.

    But the choice of Misunderstood as a New York Film Festival Main Slate film has the logic of a pedigree in cinematic history. Dario Argento, Asia's father, is the master of the Seventies horror film subgenre known as giallo, and she is his colorful offspring. Perhaps it's not any one thing Asia does, but how all her efforts, as actress, personality, model, singer, director, feed into a vivid and defiant life, fulfilling the supposed Italian renaissance concept of la vita come opera d'arte, of life itself as a work of art. Misunderstood is a vivid gesture, even if as autobiography or as cinema it may be a little more gesture than substance.

    After seeing the film one wants to suggest Abused and Neglected as a better title than Misunderstood. The spectacularly egocentric and dysfunctional father and mother played by mostly-TV-actor and "heartthrob" Gabriel Garko and French icon (and herself daughter of a dysfunctional famous artistic person) Charlotte Gainsbourg take time out from their self-absorption mostly only to be mean to sweet, durable young Aria (Giulia Salerno) to the extent of frequently kicking her out or forcing her to leave their very soon separate households. The signature image this loud, punk, boisterous and colorful (but also sometimes underlit) movie leaves you with is the often-seen one of nine-year-old Aria dragging suitcase and cat-carrying cage as she tramps from one household to the other, or is temporarily homeless, hanging out with druggie street people and learning to smoke.

    As Aria, Giulia Salerno is appealing enough, making for a lonely center of humanity amid the parents, their hangers-on, and Aria's unhelpful sisters, notably the chubby pink-obsessed Lucrezia (Carolina Poccioni), who goes to live with daddy when the parents split and lounges endlessly in her pink bedroom like an odalisque. Salerno's stand-in for Asia herself however lacks more emphatic qualities she has exhibited in real life as a feisty jack-of-all-trades with tons of attitude. Acquisition of that attitude is something that apparently hasn't happened yet; or maybe Asia has simply chosen the somewhat confused aim in this movie of choosing to make rejection and lovelessness cute. This girl may have a childhood like the director's was, but she's not the same person. The director posed at Cannes just recently defiantly flexing her biceps and showing off unusual tattoos. Nine-year-old Aria is a long way from such gestures.

    These unappealing parents are a bit one-note, to say the least. Daddy, with his bleach-highlighted hair and fancy outfits, is merely an actor, not a notorious director, and we rarely hear anything about his work. Mommy is confusingly conceived. She is a classical pianist who annoys the neighbors with Rachmaninoff (you'd think the neighbors would be used to that, if she ever practices); later, she consorts with riotous punk musicians (a step too far from Rachmaninoff). Asia Argento's real life mother, Daria Nicolodi, was an actress.

    This beleaguered girl in the film is skinny, short-haired, noncommittal, and always bounces back, sort of like the little boy in The Mafia Only Kills in Summer. The filmmaker's legendary feistiness and ambition lie on the cutting room floor. The "miserablism" of Asia's first two directorial efforts may have been turned to comedy here, but this ain't no bildingsroman. The young protagonist has survived, but you don't know where she is going. All we're left with is those dreadful parents, those useless sisters, and mom's fun and simpatico American punk boyfriend, the too-soon-discarded Ricky (Justin Pearson). Much better biopic: Joann Sfar's rolicking, phantasmagoric 2010 Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life. Eric Elmosnino is a perfect adult Serge Gainsbourg; Kacey Motet Klein is a hilarious boy Serge. Why didn't Asia try to be more accurate? But while Sfar might not have been a filmmaker, he's more of one than Asia.

    Misunderstood/Incompresa, 103 mins., debuted at Cannes in May 2014, and was screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 11-19-2014 at 11:42 PM.

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    Yann Demange: '71

    YANN DEMANGE: '71



    Demange's incredible Irish Troubles film gives new meaning to the phrase, "caught in the crossfire"

    Yann Demange's incredibly intense Troubles film gives us twenty-four hours in the life of English squad member Gary Hook (Jack O'Connell), suddenly stationed in Belfast (he thought he was going to be sent to Germany) and thrown into a violet, Intifada-like fray his green, patrician commanding officer and sergeant are not prepared for. A teenaged orphan with a kid brother (Harry Verity) whom we meet at the outset, Hook finds himself on the run and wounded after a comrade is killed by his side in a street clash and his unit bolts, accidentally abandoning him. He is rescued and treated by Irish allies. But he's in hostile territory -- everyone is. This non-stop historical action movie is an authentic recreation of a hot, lethal slice of the Troubles. It doesn't break things down or make them easy for us (some subtitles might have helped). From the Ulster Protestant side are the Unionists and loyalists, and on the mostly Catholic side are the Irish nationalists and republicans, and there are the Privisional IRA, and those originally on their side who have turned against them because of their brutality. And to complicate matters there are the undercover Brits of the MRF, whose officers regard themselves as outranking the English soldiers. Caught in between, Hook is told he is "just meat" -- to his government, to the Army, and to his Irish enemies.

    An initial chase scene with Hook running break-neck along back alleys and in tiny spaces behind tight houses pursued by two enemies is breathtaking, intense filmmaking. The sense of Hook's abandonment as he sits panting in a tiny space is real and vivid. From there on the film settles down into some of the machinations and mood of James Marsh's 2012 Shadow Dancer, which deals with the Troubles but in the Nineties. Except where Marsh's film stagnates at times, Damange's maintains a world-class actioner clip that never cease to impress you, grip you, and horrify you as you watch, always with the spotlight on Gary Hook to keep the action centered, despite its constant ambiguity and danger. No film has better shown how dangerous Northern Ireland at this period was or how bitter and lethal the hostilities among people were.

    And the hostility even includes those ostensibly setting out to save Hook, because there is dissension between the regular army and the intelligence officers who consider themselves and their undefined mission more important than Hook or his comrades. And what betrayals lie in wait on the Irish side? In fact while the physical suffering and danger are clearly defined, the politics and the loyalties remain lurking and ambiguous, all this amplified for an American viewer by the sometimes hard-to-decipher accents. For its sense of everything gone wrong, of war as no good for anybody (a point written into the dialogue but succinctly enough to avoid didacticism), the succinctly named '71 almost deserves comparison with a stunning anti-war film like Bernhard Wicki's 1959 The Bridge/Die Brücke ("In 1945, Germany is being overrun, and nobody is left to fight but teenagers"), which also has a long devastating action sequence.

    Yann Damange is a French-born filmaker in England who has worked largely in TV, gaining admiration and awards. In 2011 he was directing the flavorful BBC drama miniseries "Top Boy" about inner-city London estate teenagers involved in risky drug dealing. '71, his first feature, has mostly gotten deserved raves; it establishes its director as a master of understated technique and muscular, riveting action. He falters in a few lesser respects. Some might think a final shootout far-fetched or overly drawn-out; and the concluding moments are a nice enough calm-down but fairly routine. But these are minor quibbles. In his Variety review Guy Lodge describes Jack McConnell as a "rapidly rising star," and indeed intense as his role is here, one easily imagines him capable of more. He is also seen in the much-talked-about new prison drama Starred Up (which I have not seen). Guy Lodge compares this film with Paul Greengrass' benchmark 2002 docudrama of the Troubles set in '72, Bloody Sunday, which indeed it brings to mind. Tat Radcliffe’s fine widescreen cinematography shifts from 16mm. for daytime and digital for razor sharp night images. All the tech aspects are aces as are all the performances. See for yourself; this is a film not to be missed.

    '71 debuted at Berlin, and showed at Telluride and Toronto. It was screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival, where its excellence clearly merited its inclusion in the Main Slate. It opens theatrically in the UK 10 October and in France 5 November 2014. Roadside Attractions owns its US distribution rights.

    US theatrical release begins 27 February 2015. Metacritic rating now 80% (26 Feb.).
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 02-26-2015 at 06:48 AM.

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    Jean-Luc Godard: GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE (2014)

    JEAN-LUC GODARD: GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE (2014)


    "ROXY" IN GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE

    Godard touches on old themes and does some neat tricks with 3D

    To call a post-Nineties Jean-Luc Godard's film "accessible" would be a stretch. But his new one, Goodbye to Language, is discernibly more appealing and less of a slog (70 minuets instead of 104) than his Film Socialisme (NYFF 2010). The latter occasioned Todd McCarthy's angry-sounding assertion that Godard is mean-spirited and exhibits "the most spurious sort of anti-Americanism or genuinely profound anti-humanism, something that puts Godard in the same misguided camp as those errant geniuses of an earlier era, Pound and Céline." This is less visible in Goodbye to Language, which spends a lot of time with a naked middle-class white couple in an apartment, and with Godard's own dog, Roxy, and is playful enough to be shot in 3D, of which it makes some good use. I do not see that use as "revolutionary," as Mike D'Angelo did in a Cannes bulletin for The Dissolve. I think in the face of a rote-acknowledged "master" (and Godard really did seem exciting and revolutionary back in the days of Breathless and La Chinoise) whom one can't make head nor tail of, it's natural to pick out elements one enjoys and blow them up into something important. Thus one notes that the distorted color in Goodbye to Language is sometimes gorgeous. And one wishes that more mainstream films dared to do such things more often, with one excuse or another.

    Goodbye to Language, like Film Socialisme, is divided up into parts with portentous titles, which one would remember if they seemed to illustrate their titles in any relatable way. The NYFF festival blurb calls this "a work of the greatest freedom and joy," but it's not. It's didactic, full of general nouns (like "freedom" and "joy") thrown out with the verve of a French university student. It cites fifteen or twenty famous authors whose names were dropped or lines quoted; and ten or twelve classical composers, snippets of whose compositions are folded in to add flavor and importance. But when Mike D'Angelo says "it doesn’t constantly seem as if he’s primarily interested in demonstrating his own erudition," he's saying this because other Godard films have constantly seemed to be primarily interested in that, and this one just barely avoids it.

    Here's what D'Angelo observes in the film's 3D that he thinks revolutionary (and this one moment is indeed remarkable): "Turns out he’d had the camera pan to follow an actor walking away from another actor, then superimposed the pan onto the stationary shot, creating (via 3-D) a surreal loop that, when completed, inspired the audience to burst into spontaneous applause. " It's hard to describe, and strange, and indeed original. I'd very much like to have watched this sequence -- which you do have to take off your 3D glasses to appreciate the transformative nature of -- with an audience keen enough to have noted its cleverness and applauded it. The audience I was with applauded at the end, but that just felt like an obligatory gesture, not the "olé" of connoisseurs noting a visual coup.

    As D'Angelo says, since the Nineties Godard has been "a full-bore avant-garde filmmaker." This means his films are the kind of thing you might see showing in a loop in a darkened room of a museum. When any film makes no rational sense I remember my museum experiences of that kind of art film and am calmed. Such films have their place. They are like complex decorative objects. Yes, and Godard's references to Nietzsche (pronounced "NEETCH" by French-speakers) or Solzenitzen are like gilding on a frame. And offhand gibes like the man in the hat who says Solzenitzen didn't need Google (which also sounds funny in French) to make up the subtitle for a book, as D'Angelo puts it, "ranks high among the dumbest things a smart person has ever said." Godard is a smart person who in a long career has said plenty of dumb things. He would have been a lot better as a filmmaker if he'd done more showing and less telling, from a long way back.

    But parts of Farewell to Language are bold and visually stimulating, and ought to be studied by conventional filmmakers, editors, or cinematographers to get some more original visual ideas. I also like another D'Angelo's Dissolve note (and he himself says this is his favorite Godard film since Weekend): "According to my Twitter feed, Goodbye To Language has reinvented cinema again—one dude went full Pauline Kael and compared it to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon." Unfortunately, some after the screening I saw, with bunch of ostensible film writers, out in the lobby some were pronouncing that this was "the future of cinema." Not Marvel Comics?

    Goodbye to Language/Adieu au langage, 70 mins., debuted at Cannes, where Godard was given a special prize. It's his 43rd feature. And he's 83.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 11-19-2014 at 11:45 PM.

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    Martin Rejtman: TWO SHOTS FIRED (2014)

    MARTIN REJTMAN: TWO SHOTS FIRED (2014)


    Still from an early sigment of Two Shots Fired

    One inexplicable thing after another, in and around Buenos Aires

    In his recent Toronto coverage for The Dissolve, "Day 3: Men, Women, Children," Mike D'Angelo lists the Frenchman Laurent Cantet and the Argentinian Martin Rejtman as "two auteurist favorites" who "haven't done their best work this year." He describes Cantet's Return to Ithica (which I haven't seen) as " a laborious Havana-set Big Chill" he sees as a string of repetitious conversations dwelling on good old days. He goes on: "Rejtman’s Two Shots Fired, by contrast, serves up a placid series of largely unrelated vignettes, indulging in drollery for drollery’s sake. Two shots do in fact get fired, into a head and a stomach at point-blank range; it’s typical of the film’s ultra-low-key approach that the bullets do no real damage." In his running Twitter "reviews" D'Angelo gave the film a 48 rating, ranking it 23rd out of the 36 he saw at Toronto. Even so, his description seems kindly, but this may be explained by the fact he gives in his Tweet that he previously "really liked" Rejtman's The Magic Gloves.

    Without any prior experience of Rejtman's apparently admired previous work, Two Shots Fired seems first flat, then absurdist, finally simply pointless in its succession of one studiously bland narrative moment after another. Rejtman, as Jay Weissberg puts it in Variety, "picks up on various family members and their extended circles, dropping storylines and characters with studied disregard for narrative arcs," but "doesn’t really go anywhere with the concept, yet there’s enough skill and amusement to hold fest audiences." This conclusion of festival-friendliness seems a little generous: the "skill and amusement" are difficult to discern.

    Festival-friendly, no; auteurist-friendly, perhaps. It's often the case that one work by a filmmaker makes much more sense within his or her whole oeuvre; even unsuccessful efforts may be an interesting variation or shed light on other work that's more worth our attention. This makes the interest of Two Shots Fired restricted to those who know -- and like -- its maker's work. Weissberg also points out that Two Shots Fired is a return to feature filmmaking after a ten-year hiatus. Perhaps Rejman is having trouble getting back up to speed.

    For a while the conversations in Two Shots Fired have the bright, neutral banality and lack of affect of Fifties absurdist drama, a touch of the idiotic logic Eugene Ionesco discovered in English language textbooks and translated into his play La Cantatrice Chauve. But nothing Rejtman provides here has the brilliance or ringing absurdity of Ionesco. Instead, his movie begins to feel like some inexplicable instructional film or the work of a deranged amateur. One can see from Leslie Felperin's review for Variety of Rejtman's 2003 The Magic Gloves that the director employed a similar series of interlocking absurd plots, but they seem to have gained unity and point in the earlier film from a focus on economic problems. Felperin describes Rejtman as "Laconic and deadpan in the tradition of Aki Kaurismaki or early Jim Jarmusch." That quality is lacking here, but one might also note Felperin's warning, "Some of the patter will play better to auds fluent in Spanish." And Argentinian Spanish, to boot.

    Two Shots Fired/Dos disparos, 104 min., debuted at Lucarno. It was screened for this review as part of the Main Slate of the 52nd New York Film Festival, 2014. US theatrical release Wed. 13 May 2015.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 05-14-2015 at 04:18 PM.

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