Nyff 2015

[Chris Knipp]

ARABIAN NIGHTS: VOLUME 2, THE DESOLATE ONE (Miguel Gomes 2015)

This two-hours-plus segment cuts way back on the preaching anti-austerity and shifts into meandering narrative gear with a strange story about a bad country man who gets rounded up by the police; a lengthy shaggy-dog-style open air courtroom sequence with a female judge who despairs at the assembled townsmen's interconnected malfeasances and stupidities; and another series of interconnected anecdotes concerning the generally downbeat inhabitants of a big block of flats. I compare the mock trial with Sissako's Bamako and the apartment dweller tales to Kieslowski's Decalogue and find Gomes' efforts at storytelling and moralizing, relatively speaking, sadly inadequate. And his music and and sound effects are so damn loud. Either there is a technical glitch or he seems to be trying to impress by sheer noise level.

[Chris Knipp]

DE PALMA (Noah Baumbach, Jake Paltrow 20150

Whether or not Brian De Palma is your favorite director, this is an admirably straightforward document. In one long fluent and articulate interview De Palma clearly and unpretentiously describes his career film by film with the outlines of his bio (education, professional friendships, marriages) when hey are relevant, and the filmmakers edit in illustrative clips to help show how his style and technique play out in the individual works. This is the kind of film you could have on DVD and study in small segments. It's packed with information. Not inappropriately, this doc debuted at Venice, where De Palma has often been better received than Stateside. His little-seen anti-Iraq War screed Redacted (NYFF 2007) won a Silver Lion at Venice.

[Chris Knipp]

LES COWBOYS (Thomas Bidegain 2015)

Interesting French scriptwriter for Audiard (A Prophet, Rust and Bone) and Bonello (Saint Laurent) gets a somewhat uneasy start in the plot-intensive and character-underdeveloped drama about an ersatz hobby cowboy whose daughter runs off with an Arab jihadist prior to 9/11. An indirect homage to John Ford's The Searchers. Script credited to script by Noé Debré, who collaborated on Audiard's new Cannes winner Dheepan.

[Chris Knipp]

Lead of a FSLC press release I'm passing on that arrived yesterday (Mon. 21 Sept. 2015). I missed the Animation and New York Shorts programs and a revival of Lino Broca's Insiang (1976) yesterday, which (the Broca) was part of NYFF 2006 and I reviewed it then.

New York, NY (September 21, 2015) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center announces Ana Vaz as the 2015 Kazuko Trust Award Recipient. The grant is presented by the Kazuko Trust and the Film Society, in recognition of the excellence and innovation of an artist’s moving-image work. Vaz’s latest short film, Occidente, will premiere on Friday, October 2 and Saturday, October 3 in Program 3 of this year’s Projections section, running October 2-4 and sponsored by MUBI. Visit filmlinc.org/nyff for more information

[Chris Knipp]

ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS/ROCCO E I SUOI FRATELLI (Luchino Visconti 1960) -- NYFF Revivals section

This post-neorealist Italian melodramatic epic, in a 4K restoration out of Bologina again, (with some footage added back) deserves re-viewing and a careful reassessment. It's still powerful, but there are various weaknesses that show up now.

[Chris Knipp]

INGRID BERGMAN IN HER OWN WORDS/Jag är Ingrid (Stig Björkman 2015)--NYFF Documentary section

This admiring documentary from Sweden emphasizes the great star's liberated personality and charm and includes a lot of home movies and warmly forgiving testimony by hour four children, who took second place, but found her so charming they could not condemn her. Nothing brilliant here in the filmmaking department, but of interest because -- Ingrid.

[Chris Knipp]

HEAVEN CAN WAIT (Ernst Lubitsch 1943) - Revivals

A restoration by Twentieth Century Fox shows the eye-popping blues and reds of the studio's "candy box" Technicolor and a classic studio film from a play featuring Gene Tierney and an impressive Don Ameche, the latter an aging, now dead, roué who tells his life story to Satan at the elegant gate of Hades to see if he qualifies. He turns out tob 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.