New York Film Festival 2018 (forum)

[Chris Knipp]

A FAMILY TOUR (Ying Liang 2018)

Things have changed since I watched Ying's mini-budget Taking Father Home with Travis Kirby in 2006 and Travis reviewed it disapprovingly in the Festival Coverage section. The director's subsequent films so angered the repressive Mainland Chinese regime that Ying was forced into exile with his wife and small child in Hong Kong. This film, his first since their exile began sic years ago, depicts with sad precision an experience they had meeting furtively with family members by joining a strict Mainland-run guided tour of Taiwan. Visa problems in Hong Kong prevented him from being present for the small NYFF screening. This was painful and even sometimes boring to watch but also very true and sometimes poetic and delicate, and fans of Chinese cinema need to see Ying's films.

[Chris Knipp]

BURNING / 버닝 (Lee Chang-dong 2018)

Sexual frustration, class, mystery, envy and revenge in a masterful spinoff of a 1992 Haruki Murakami story blended with Faulkner. One of the 2018 NYFF's true masterpieces.

[Chris Knipp]

A traumatic early scene in Never Look Away

Preview: a fine new German film (not in the festival)
Never Look Away (Florian Henckel von Donnersmark)

Another great movie I just saw a couple days ago (Sony Pictures Classics): NEVER LOOK AWAY (written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck of The Lives of Others). Three hours long and starring Tom Schilling of A Coffee in Berlin, it traces the life of an artist in Germany from the Thirties to the Sixties and relates to the careers of a number of artists, particularly to Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter. I have to hold my review for theatrical release, either the end of November or early 2019. It is the German entry for Best Foreign Oscar, and it's flawed in a few ways but still great - a splendid film whose treatment of the life of art and the art of the postwar period is worlds beyond the next tumultuous Van Gogh saga, or story of Picasso's women. It's surprising and gratifying to see the great events of the Twentieth Century drawn from the point of view of an important post-war German artist. It's subject is nothing less than modern art's fractured search for meaning in a world of exhausted ideas and shattered feelings.

[Chris Knipp]

An introduction to the 56th NYFF from A.O. Scott of the New York Times

Read it here: CLICK.

A quote. Why should people attend this festival? he asks. Well, because. . . "We are too easily lulled into complacency by pretentious prestige television, Oscar-thirsty biopics and presold franchises. We need reminders of strangeness and daring, films that don’t just confirm what we already thought we knew. Above all we need to be inoculated against the temptations of nostalgia, to recognize the golden age of right now. . .What I’m saying is that the presence in the New York festival lineup of new work by Claire Denis, Jia Zhangke, Alfonso Cuarón, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Lee Chang-dong and Olivier Assayas is news."

On Olivier Assayas' Non-Fiction/Doubles vies (reviewed in Filmleaf's Festival Coverage already: "Mr. Assayas’s “Non-Fiction” is in effect a series of arguments — lofty debates about the impact of digital technology on French politics and culture conducted by sophisticated Parisians who occasionally pause from their discourses for a nice meal or a bit of adultery. A French movie, in other words, almost to the point of deliberate and sly self-parody."

But Juliette Binoche plays it completely straight and relaxed. What about her Claire Denis' High Life, which Binoche is also prominent in? (and which was also just reviewed on this site? It's "a mind-bending science-fiction allegory elegantly accoutered with sex, violence and metaphysical speculation. Genre movies are something of a rarity in the main slate, but Ms. Denis’s daring, dialectical sensibility, her shrewd fusion of the visceral and the cerebral, transcend genre." Which he more or less says, is what good directors always do. Don't they?

[Chris Knipp]

HIGH LIFE (Claire Denis 2018)

Her first sci-fi film and first in English stars Juliette Binoche and Robert Pattinson, with squalling babies in space,rape and revenge, masturbation of a lady with very long hair, cryogenic bodies tossed away in space. Typically it is earthy sexy and violent and not like any other.

ROMA (Alfonso Cuarón 2018).

Cuarón's brilliant and shattering black and white autobiographical portrait of a well off family and their live-in maids in Mexico City's "Roma" district in 1970-71.

[Chris Knipp]

A FAITHFUL MAN/L'HOMME FIDÈLE (Louis Garrel 2018)

Garrel's second outing as director (and star) throws caution to the winds and freely adopts French New Wave mannerisms, voiceovers, Paris settings, cafes, apartments, love affairs - and it works delightfully, thanks to a kid who manipulates the adults (Joseph Engel), and the appeal of the three adult stars, Laetitia Casta, Lily-Rose Depp, Louis Garrel. This goes forward from the young men fighting over a woman in Garrel's first film The Two Friends and deals with a widow and a disappointed man, and a girl who's become a woman and gives in to a crush. Garrel was on hand for a lively Q&A, talking a blue streak in his somewhat makeshift but highly articulate English. Almost as good as the film, as can happen, but doesn't always.

SHOPLIFTERS (Hirakazu Koreeda 2018).

This relates to NOBODY KNOWS and Kurosawa's DODESKADEN because it's about Tokyo poverty and desperation and kids, but its focus is on an ersatz family of marginal people that grows warm and real, but hangs by a thread. It came from behind to win the top award, the Palme d'Or, at this year's Cannes. Subtle and insinuating. Certainly one of Koreeda's best - and Japan's Best Foreign Oscar entry. No Q&A. Koreeda sent only a brief subtitled video intro from Tokyo.

[Chris Knipp]

ASH IS PUREST WHITE (Jia Zhang-ke 2018)

A very impressive reworking of romantic themes from Jis's earlier Unknown Pleasures and Still Life, always with the upheavals of 21st-century China in the present, with gangsters, and jianghu codes referenced in the Chinese title, and Jia's muse and wife Zhao Tao more central and powerful than ever, notably paired with Liao Fan as her man. One of the director's masterpieces, fusing his many elements with virtuoso skill.