NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2018 (March 28–April 8, 2018)

[Chris Knipp]

GOOD MANNERS (Marco Dutra, Juliana Rojas 2017)

One of the wow movies of the series. On top of being a lesbian vampire-werewolf tale with social overtones, eye-candy Brazilian mise-en-scene and São Paulo locations, it wants to be a musical, and probably would make a darn good full-fledged one, given half a chance. At over two hours, and divided into two halves, it's a bit overlong. But it's all good nonetheless. I'm already looking forward to seeing it again - with friends.

[Chris Knipp]

Today's special Google search logo reminds me of the images in Dura and Rojas' Good Manners:

[Chris Knipp]

NOTES ON AN APPEARANCE (Ricky D'Ambrose 2018)

Middle class white male small cinema from Brooklyn with a hint of the European, W.G. Sebald, perhaps, better at evoking places and things (and invented documents and authors) than the search for a disappeared young man that ends the short film. A connected group is hinted at too, and Bingham Bryant, who plays the gone boy, recently produced one small fim and c-directed another, and there are connections with New York film critics and programmers.

[Chris Knipp]

THOSE WHO ARE FINE (Cyril Schäublin 2017)

The Swiss don't make movies. But this one did. A chilly, pessimistic and assured first feature in Swiss German dialect about scams on old ladies growing out of a calling center selling wire services, and all the disassociated alienation of modern life. In 71 minutes.

[Chris Knipp]

THE NOTHING FACTORY/A FÁBRICA DE NADA (Pedro Pinho 2017)

FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes, the most interesting failure of the year, an overlong improvisational reenactment of the early days of a takeover of the Otis elevator factory in Lisbon, Portugal in 1975, which was run collectively by for forty years. Using workers as the cast. Some of the debates are like plunging into a seminar on marxist economics and though nothing is resolved, it's very thought-provoking. A few personal scenes of a man, his Brazilian partner, and his sprightly adopted son, float like butterflies.

[Chris Knipp]

New Directors/New Films 2018 (early) roundup.

Mike D'Angelo used to attend, and has described New Directors as the "notoriously erratic" but "cleverly timed" series because by early March he is "invariably hungry for anything that doesn't ostentatiously announce itself as clearing-house crap." This is true, but the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema has a similar effect of brightening a dull time - in its case, in a less edgy but more civilized manner.

As for New Directors 2018, there are still a few I've not yet seen but it's already possible to point to the the clearcut keepers and a few honorable mentions.

THE GUILTY (Gustav Möller). The breathlessly entertaining, intense one-man tour de force from Denmark of a disgraced cop on emergency phone duty going into after-hours desperately trying to save a mother abducted by her ex.

AN ELEPHANT STANDING STILL (Hu Bo). The riveting four-hour epic of provincial desperation in a typically urban-rural modern China made more tragic by the gifted young filmmaker's untimely suicide.

GOOD MANNERS/AS BOAS MANEIRAS (Marco Dutra, Juliana Rojas). Lesbian love and a werewolf in middle school and a musical? It's jaw-dropping and beautiful. A really original blend of arthouse and genre. From São Paulo.

THE GREAT BUDDHA + (Huang Hsin-yao 2017). A lot of ingenuity, sympathy and wit go into this tale from Taiwan of a pair of bored loser buddies in a Buddha factory who wind up spying on a boss through stealing the dash cam memory card of his new Mercedes.

Honorable mentions. I also liked: Algerian Karim Moussaoui's Until the Birds Return, a collection of three sophisticated stories, not specifically related but all keenly expressive of what it's like there now. Ana Urushadze's Georgian feature Scary Mother/Sashishi Deda, which keeps us guessing whether its 50-something novelist is bonkers as her husband says or a late-blooming genius. Pedro Pinha's Nothing Factory about a worker takeover of an Otis elevator plant in LIsbon is much, much too long and meandering, but it has moments that teach and inspire.

[Chris Knipp]

HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENIng (RaMell Ross 2018)

This is where Walker Evans and James Agee's 1941 dust bowl classic photo essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was set, but it focuses (for 76 minutes) exclusively on African Americans befriended by the photographer during five years where he came to the region to teach photography and coach basketball. The editing is "fractured," the emphasis on kinetic energy. The fractured portraits are vivid and touching. But this made sense to me more as a still photographer's work extended somewhat unnecessarily into motion than as a traditional documentary, which it is not. Let us not think it is a celebration of the short attention span.

[Chris Knipp]

New Directors/New Films: the series begins.
ND/NF MAR. 28- APR. 8, 2018


Hale County This Morning, This Evening

As the series begins to unreel today at MoMA and Lincoln Center, the New York Times' Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott list more films in the series that they believe worth your attention - including Black Mother, Hale County, This Morning, This Evening, and Djon Africa, in addition to ones I recommended and continue to recommend, and not mentioning one of my favorites for sure, the jaw-dropping entertainment from Brazil, Dutra and Rojas' Good Manners. They include 3/4, which I missed. Read the Times piece here.