Nyff 2016

[Chris Knipp]

A view across the street to the new Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, which has two smaller auditoriums and a small amphitheater for open events. There is also a restaurant, Indie, and good popcorn

[Chris Knipp]

STAYING VERTICAL/RESTER VERTICAL (Alain Guiraudie 2016)

A refreshingly nutty and unpredictable film and a great palate cleanser after more conventional festival entries like Neruda and Graduation, which seem hopelessly square by comparison. A screenwriter goes haywire, has sex, has a baby. She abandons them, he tries to raise it himself, but is on the skids, while sexual boundaries keep breaking down. But you can't summarize it easily. The value of it is its energy and its sense of freedom. Something of fable and the surreal too, and wolves become a sort of symbol, but also quite dangerous and real.

Guiraudie is the director whose Stranger by the Lake/L'inconnu du lac won the Best Director award in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2013 (and a lot of César nominations and a prize for its main actor), and this one, his fifth feature film, was in Competition there.

[Chris Knipp]

A pair of Isavelle Huppert starrers that highlight her versatility and penchant for roles as women undergoing intense challenges. The two stories are so different, yet have things in common, a cat, a dying mother, becoming a grandmother, marital issues.

THINGS TO COME/L'AVENIR (Mia Hansen-Love 2016)

A Paris philosophy prof whose mother dies, cat runs away, daughter moves out, best student abandons her to live in the country, and academic publisher fires her. She says she's experienced such freedom.

ELLE (Paul Verhoeven 2016)

A lurid French novel adapted by an American for Hollywood, which rejected it. Isabelle Huppert took on the lead role, and it's amazing, and a revival for Verhoeven, who hadn't made a film in ten years, and enjoyed working in France so much he expects to continue directing there. A successful businesswoman with a ghoulish past is raped, and enters a cat-and-mouse game with the rapist, not seeking revenge but connection.

[Chris Knipp]

CERTAIN WOMEN (Kelly Reichardt 2016)

Three stories set in rural Montana involving women, of which only the third becomes briefly, powerfully, involving, of newcomer Lily Gladstone's lonely cowgirl who falls for a Kristen Stewart, who's driving four hours each way to teach a night class in school law. Laura Dern and Michelle Williams are both involved with James Le Gros.

That cowgirl disappointment is powerful, and there is lovely earth-colored cinematography. But Reichardt carries low-key rather far here.

[Chris Knipp]

catching up on some of the Main Slate films in Paris. An arguably great one, Toni Erdmann, and one of the Dardennes' less powerful efforts, The Unknown Girl.

TONI ERDMANN (Maren Ade 2016)

A highly competent but stressed out international corporate lady is pursued to her Bucharest HQ by her goofy schoolteacher father, who's taking a long break after the death of his beloved shaggy dog. And he's a shaggy dog himself, and an inveterate prankster, who can't help himself: he keeps invading his daughter's space at the most serious times and clowning compulsively, like some German contemporary Lord of Misrule. And it winds up humanizing her and making her realize things like, love. A meandering, unexpected masterpiece that looks messier than it really is.

THE UNKNOWN GIRL/LA FILLE INCONNUE (Luc, Jean-ierre Dardennes 2016)

A young woman general practitioner in Liège (Adèle Haenel) doesn't answer banging on the door one night and learns that the women knocking died by the river a little later. Feeling guilty,
she doggedly pursues (Dardennes' habitual mode) details of the woman's identity, while intermittently continuing her practice, and along the way begging a young intern not to give up medicine. Haenel isn't the reason this is rather dry material. Her character does not change, and her pursuit has no personal heft for her. So reaction to the film has been lukewarm. I have to agree. I want to be disturbed by a Dardennes film as I was by La promesse, The Son, THe Child or The Kid with the Bike. Nothing less will do.

[Chris Knipp]

I, DANIEL BLAKE (Ken Loach 2016)

Loach's film shows how a good English carpenter is ground down by the current English welfare system when he takes a break from work after a heart attack. In his kindness, he aids a young single mom with two little kids also down on her luck. Loach, now eighty, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year for this work of touching, angry neorealism. Only the hard hearted can leave it unmoved.

[Chris Knipp]

THINGS TO COME/L'AVENIR (Mia Hansen-Løve 2016)

US limited theatrical release by Sundance Selects begins 2 Dec., 2016, it has been announced.