Nyff 2016

[Chris Knipp]

Another surprise NYFF54 addition: "Special Premiere" of Pablo Larraín's Jackie. (US release 2 Dec.)



This portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy around JFK's assassination, starring Natalie Portman, already got raves at Venice, where it debuted, and Toronto. (Its current Metacritic rating based on 11 reviews is 93%). We have followed Larraín assiduously here through Tony Manero (NYFF 2008), Post Mortem (NYFF 20109), No (NYFF 2012) and The Club. Most of Larraín's work (supported by the NYFF early on) has reveled in the creepy world of the 30-year Pinochet dictatorship that began with the assassination of Salvador Allende September 11 (yes, another September 11th) 1973, the world Larraín grew up in. He was born in 1976.

New York, NY (September 27, 2016) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center announces Pablo Larraín’s Jackie as a Special U.S. Premiere Presentation of the 54th New York Film Festival (September 30 – October 16) on Thursday, October 13 at Alice Tully Hall. Jackie is the director’s second film in this year’s festival, with Neruda, his portrait of the great Chilean poet, screening the week prior.

Pablo Larraín’s first English-language film is a bolt from the blue, a fugue-like study of Jackie Kennedy, brilliantly acted by Natalie Portman. Dramatizing events from just before, during, and after JFK’s assassination, this carefully reconstructed, beautifully visualized film is grounded in Jackie’s interactions with her children, her social secretary (Greta Gerwig), LBJ’s special assistant Jack Valenti (Max Casella), her brother-in-law Bobby (Peter Sarsgaard), a priest (John Hurt), a journalist (Billy Crudup), and others. In this emotionally urgent film, from a script by Noah Oppenheim [who co-wrote The Maze Runner and Insurgent], we feel not only Jackie’s tragic solitude but also her precise awareness that every move she makes carries historical ramifications. A Fox Searchlight Pictures release.
-FSLC press release.

[Chris Knipp]

First look:

AQUARIUS (Kleber Mendoça Filho 2016)

Sly, beautiful, and more brightly colored than Neighboring Sounds and yes, perhaps "more conventionally structured" as D'Angelo says, but rich and surprising and close to the first film in theme and idea at many points. Portrait of a stubborn, regal woman holding onto the lone occupied apartment in a Forties building developers want to tear down for a high rise. Starring the magnificent Sônia Braga in one of her greatest performances. She owns the picture, but it's much more than just her.

Click on the title for the CK review of the film in the Filmleaf Festival Coverage section.

[Chris Knipp]

Fri. 30 Sept. NYFF opens with Ava DuVernay's The 13th

Ava DuVernay's documentary, which critics describe as "a film that hits hard, but it also nails its targets with precision" (Alonso Duralde, TheWrap), premieres on opening night of the NYFF. It opens on Netflix Friday. The theme in this, first documentary to open a NYFF, is mass incarceration, and how it is another form of slavery. The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution said "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. . ." DuVernay develops the theme with demonstration of the burgeoning and increasingly privatized prison industry in the US. Metacritic rating of the film is 91%.

[Chris Knipp]

PATERSON (Jim Jarmusch 2016)

Some notes on this new film from Jarmusch starring Adam Driver as the titular character, who also lives in Paterson, New Jersey, drives a bus, and writes poetry - like the major American poet William Carlos Williams, who was a physician who lied in New Jersey and wrote an epic poem called Paterson. This may have most in common among Jarmusch's other films with Broken Flowers.

[Chris Knipp]

THE 13TH (Ava DuVernay 2016)

Opening night film at the NYFF, first time in its history a documentary has held that position. Surprisingly, it's not an original work of investigative filmmaking, more just forceful synthesis of ideas with graphics, archival footage, and well-informed and notable talking heads. Theme: the 13th Amendment that ended slavery provides an exception: prisons. And the thesis is that incarceration has always been and still is a form of slavery that, in the US, disproportionally targets the black man. But though most of the information in itself isn't new, DuVernay's connecting of the dots is enlightening and shocking.

[Chris Knipp]

Glenn Raucher leaving his post as Film Society of Lincoln Center Director of Theater Operations.


Glenn Raucher [CK photo]

October 7, 2016.

For years he has managed the Film Society of Lincoln Center's increasingly complicated cinema complex with superb skill. Encountering Glenn's warmth, wit, and accomplishment has been a highlight of times spent covering Lincoln Center film events for years now. A week from today he departs his post. I am only one of many who will miss him greatly. The Hudson Valley Center, where he will be able to exercise more of his wide-ranging skills, is lucky to get him -- and happily, they seem well aware of that:

From Facebook:

Hudson Valley Writers Center
September 24 at 12:04am ·
Everyone at The Hudson Valley Writers' Center is thrilled to welcome the wonderful Glenn Raucher to our team. HVWC is fortunate that Glenn has decided to leave his job at Lincoln Center as director of Theatre Operations to join us. Glenn has a lot of experience in the arts but he is returning to his first love—writing. He spent many years at The Writers' Voice and he is going to be a tremendous asset to the Center. The Board, the co-editors of Slapering Hol Press, and the Program Director are all very excited to begin our fruitful collaboration. We cannot wait for all of the students, instructors, and readers to meet Glenn.

[Chris Knipp]

FIRE AT SEA/FUOCOAMMARE (Gianfranco Rosi 2016)

Rosi's patiently observational Italian documentary of a one-of-a-kind kid on the eight-mile-square Italian island of Lampedusa and arrivals of some of the hordes of refugees from Africa who wash up there packs a quiet wallop. And in fact it won the top prize Golden Bear at Berlin and other awards and nominations and is Italy's entry in the Best Foreign Oscar competition of 2016.

[oscar jubis]

I did not get to watch the Errol Morris documentary about Elsa Dorfman that you liked when you reviewed it as part of the 2016 NYFF, as I would expect to find very favorable reviews about every single film (or whatever) that Morris has produced/directed (or whatever). He followed this film with a magnificent 45-hour series that premiered on television in 2017 titled WORMWOOD. I found out about it recently when perusing retired Village Voice film pundit j. Doberman's Top 10s and learning this doc is his favorite "movie thing" that year. It's the same year as the David Lynch series that topped my list. Other than Godard, Lynch is the only living filmmaker whose films require me to understand only halfway in order to love them. Morris puts fiction strategies to documentary purposes and the results are exhilarating. This is about the CIA murdering one of their own back in 1953 and the coverup that kept it secret. There's nothing paranoid about this conspiracy thriller.

[Chris Knipp]

i didn't like that Morris doc about Elsa Dorfman that much. (I think I misspoke in my New York movie journal where I wrote about it: I've corrected that.) I wrote in my review that it "is too careless an effort to rank with Morris' best work." You mean Hoberman, not Doberman, I believe. Dobrerman is the dog. Hoberman's trashing of James Gray's films has not endeared me to him. I haven't seen "Wormwood." I like David Lynch too, and also find him engaging as a person. See the doc bio of his early life, David Lynch: The Art Life.

[oscar jubis]

You mean Hoberman, not Doberman, I believe. Dobrerman is the dog.

I also wrote that it's a FORTY FIVE hour series when a mere 4 hours are required to watch WORMWOOD unfold. I make more mistakes now than ever, that's a fact

The word "infotainment" is mostly understood as pejorative and intended to be critical of entertainment attempting to pass for journalism. Morris relates the concepts of information (imparting of) and entertainment in a positive way. His films use stylized dramatizations of events recounted by a documentary character (a person who exists in the world of the audience) to illuminate, define or clarify them and to amplify their emotional impact. Wormwood feels like the best conspiracy thriller and the best film-noir in recent memory. But it also makes as valid a claim to be telling the truth as any old-fashioned piece of journalism.