New York Film Festival 2024

[Chris Knipp]

GENERAL FILM FORUM THREAD

New York Film Festival 2024

Opening Night NICKEL BOYS (RaMell Ross 2024)
THE ROOM NEXT DOOR (Pedro Almodóvar 2024)
Closing Night Blitz (Steve McQueen 2024)
Afternoons of Solitude (Albert Serra 2024) - Spotlight Series
All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia 2024)
Anora (Sean Baker 2024)
April (Dea Kulumbegashvili 2024)
The Brutalist (Brady Corbet 2024)
By the Stream (Hong Sangsoo 2024)
Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhangke 2024)
Dahomey (Mati Diop 2024)
The Damned (Roberto Minervini 2024)
Eephus (Carson Lund 2024)
The Friend (Scott McGhee, David Siegel 2024)
Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes 2024)
Happyend (Neo Sora 2024)
Hard Truths (Mike Leigh 2024)
Harvest (Athina Rachel Tsangari 2024)
Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie 2024)
I'm Still Here (Walter Salles 2024) Spotlight Series
My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow (Julia Loktev 2024)
No Other Land (Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor 2024)
Oh, Canada (Paul Schrader 2024)
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni 2024)
Pepe (Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias 2024)
Queer (Luca Guadagnino 2024) Spotlight series
Real Pain, A (Jesse Eisenberg 2024)
The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Mohammad Rasoulof 2024)
The Shrouds(David Cronenberg 2024)
Stranger Eyes (Yeo Siew Hua 2023)
Suburban Fury (Robinson Devor 2024)
Transamazonia (Pia Marais 2019)
A Traveler’s Needs (Hong Sangsoo 2024)
​​Việt and Nam (Trương Minh Quýf 2024)
Who by Fire/Comme le feu (Philippe Lesage 2024)
Youth (Hard Times) (Wang Bing 2024)
Youth (Homecoming)( Wang Bing 2024)

[Chris Knipp]

ETHAN HENRISSE, BRANDON WILSON IN NICKEL BOYS ]

Warm reception at Telluride (Playlist, Gregory Elwood)

RAMELL ROSS: NICKEL BOYS (2024)

A radical reshuffling for POV emphasis

Award winning documentary filmmaker Ramell Ross has chosen to make his feature debut, an A24 film, a stylistically bold film, that radically rearranges Colman Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Nickel Boys on which it is based, using an evocative, poetic method reminiscent of Terrence Malick's Tree of Life. The story is about Elwood (Ethan Henrisse), an intelligent, motivated, college-age black boy inspired by Rev. King living in the Jim Crow South in 1962 who, hitching a ride unknowingly in a stolen car that gets apprehended by cops, gets sent to a brutal reformatory where many have been beaten and died and been buried on the property, disappeared. His best friend there becomes the more experienced boy, Turner (Brandon Wilson). The reformatory has white and black boys, segretated and given different treatment.

This place immediately brought to mind for me Sugarcane, the recent documentary revealing Catholic-run Native residential schools across Canada where native people where brutalized and eliminated also (in the US too). The high profile choice of this film reminds one of two other NYFF films. Two years ago Elegance Bratton's autobiographical The Inspection, of being queer and rejected by his mother and joining the U.S. Marines: it was featured as the Closing Night Film as Nickel Boys is the Opening Night one.

Given the radical-POV-shot nature of most of Nickel Boys leads one to wonder if Ross, whose 2018 doc Hale County This Morning, This Evening was admired in New Directors/New Films, may have attended the 2015 NYFF and saw Lazlo Nemes' ,Son of Saul (presented as a NYFF Special Event), where a brief period at Auschwitz is depicted entirely through the eyes of a prisoner. Is the Nickel Academy and Auschwitz too extreme an equivalency? Maybe; but in both cases the films are shot in a way to make the terrifying experience of brutal incarceration more visceral through shooting from the POV of a prisoner. Perhaps the NYFF jury was drawn to these three films for similar reasons.

The contrast between Whitehead's book and the screenplay by RaMell Ros and, Joslyn Barnes is stark, because the book except for shifting back and forth in time is strighbforward and linear, so deliberately understated and in such surprisingly correct standard English it reads a bit like a Young Adult novel, until thihgs go brutally wrong. Peter Debruge in his Telluride Variety review poses the obvious question; do Ross' radical devices, as he puts it "turning a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel into a minimalist tone poem," not perhaps achieve identificiton at the loss of a plot you can follow - unless you've read the book before hand?

But Ross' super-empathic POV method avoids over-familiarity, because as Debruge points out citing films as diverse as Boy A, Zero for Conduct, Scum and Sleepers, brutality in boys' reformatories has been done so often for the screen it would seem clichéd to transfer Whithead's book literally to the screen, even though in novel form, the details are impactful. In the film, Ross gets around the problem of the invisibility of his main POV protagonist Elwood (Ethan Herisse) when at the Nickel Academy he befriends Turner (Brandon Wilson), and we get Turner's POV too. But whether seeing actor Herisse's face conveys much additional emotional depth is uncertain, and the boy's idealism, made clear in the book's narrative, is lost also. In addition the film, as Debruge puts it, gets "lost in digressions," including flash-forwards, arthival footage of NASA missions, and later forensic excavations at Nickel Academy that revealed the many unmarked graves.

Nickel Boys, based on Colson Whithead's The Nickel Boys, 140 mins., debuted at Telluride Aug. 30, 2024, showing also at the NYFF late Sept. and Loondon BFI mid-Oct. Reviewed here as part of the NYFF, where it is the Opening Night Film, presented Fri., Sept. 27, 2024. US theatrical release Oct 25, 2024 by Amazon MGM Studios. UK Nov. 8. Metacritic rating 86%. (Now 84%.)

[Chris Knipp]

The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Persian: دانه*ی انجیر معابد, romanized: Dane ye Anjir e Maabed; French: Les Graines du figuier sauvage; German: Die Saat des heiligen Feigenbaums)


MOHAMMAD RASOULOF: THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG (2024)

The undoing of an Iranian family

Rasoulof begins wonderfully with a family, whose conflicts reflect neatly enough the turmoil of the brutal Iranian theocratic regime at a real recent moment when the young people are ready to risk evrything to revolt against it, for a while anyway. The father, Iman (Missagh Zareh) is on the way to becoming a judge. His wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), the most interesting character because she changes, is religious, like her husband (who's seen praying at home several times), and very loyal to the machine of the regime in which he is a part as a lawyer who is working his way up to the Revolutionary Court. He becomes an interrogator, and the next step is to be a judge.

Their two young daughters Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki) harbor the critical ideas of Iranian youth, and this causes them to rescue a classmate, Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi), who has been caught in a demonstration and gotten buckshot in the face. Gradually we see the stresses grow, and production values are excellent all down tthe line, with particularly striking use of Iranian music. The torments and conflicts of living under the Iranian regime have never been so closely wedded to the day to day experiences of a family.

Unfortunately, Rasoulof isn't able to work within these limits and instead turns the movie into a mystery and then a thriller, and then almost a series of conceptual games at a historic ruin Iman takes the family to after he has been doxed by anti-regime forces and they are in danger. Something that seemed very real, while it may remain engrossing in its way, seems to go haywire, starting with the theatrical device of a missing pistol.

Nonetheless, students of the Iranian situation and of Iranian film will have to see The Seed of the Sacred Fig. And a lot of it is a pleasure to look at and listen to. The often flat closeup cinematography is subtly striking. There is a scene where tending a bloody wound feels like a sacred rite. The actresses seem very real. The father becomes a bit shrill later on, but he's powerful in the more successful first half. Mohammad Rasoulof fled his home country to avoid an eight-year prison sentence, and so he is another one of the major Iranian filmmakers, with Asghar Farhadi, Jaafar Panahi and the late Abbas Kiarastomi who have memorably depicted their country without being able to be there or, if there, to move about freely.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig, 168 mins., debuted May 24, 2024 at Cannes (Special Jury Prize and FIPRESCI Award), showing at numerous other international festivals including Sydney, Locarno, Melbourne, Telluride, Torontok and the NYFF, where it was screened for this review. Metacritic rating (15 reviews): 84%. A NEON release.

[Chris Knipp]

ADRIEN BRODY INTHE BRUTALIST

BRADY CORBET: THE BRUTALIST (2024)

Brady Corbet's enigmatic portrait of an emigré Jewish architect strives for grandeur

Reviewing actor-turned-director Brady Crobet's second film Vox Lux in 2018, (his first, still the most interesting, was the flawed but haunting 2015 THe Childhood of a Leader), I wrote: "He's already scheduled to shoot a third film, tentatively titled The Brutalist. It is to be the thirty-year saga of a great Hungarian-born Jewish architect struggling for recognition in America. Sounds like Louis Kahn, and his could be a very good story, though his son Nathanial's memorable documentary homage My Architect will be a hard act to follow."

Numerous critics say of The Brutalist "They don't make 'em like this anymore." But one could see that with Childhood of a Leader Corbet was already thinking on a grand scale. The Brutalist, which has met with wide acclaim, dramatically shows the ambition of its maker, who was under thirty when he started work on it. As such, it seems to excite young film fans like the crowd at the NYFF press screening, though even so reaction was mixed. The person sitting next to me, a gradaute of the Yale School of Architecture, declared of the film at the end that it had "lost" him. The fifteen-minte intermission mid-film, contributing to the effect of grandeur perhaps (or of an old fashioned Italin movie showing) gave people a chance at the crowded screening to share views.

Everything rests on the shoulders of Adrien Brody, as László Tóth, the Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor. Brody's tall, angular frame, lined features, and memorably deep, rasping impersonation of a Hungarian accent dominate every scene. His essential foil is Guy Pearce, as Harrison Lee Van Buren, the rich Pennsylvania man who discovers and adopts him working in anonymity at a furniture store run by his American cousin. It is a relationship that is a mix of adversarial and supportive from the start. Hardly anyone knows that in Europe, before Naziism came, Toth was a well known modernist architect and had designed substantial buildings. After designing a surprise birthday-gift library for Van Buren's mansion, a gift of his son, which initially infuriates him, Van Buren hires László to design a whole development, a sort of designer city in suburban Pennsylvania.

This becomes a struggle with lesser talents, such as an American archhitect hired to save money. But also with Laszló's own demons, his inability to connect with his wife and his strange niece and his association with drugs enabled by a poor man he has rescued, Gordon (African-French actor Isaach De Bankolé, underused).

Whether his architecture is "brutalist" or not is one of the lost threads. In fact, the film, in all its three hour and thirty-five minute length, gets rather lost in the relationship of Thoth with local magnate Harrison (a ruddy, somewhat bland Pearce), and how the lives of Thoth's wife Erzsébet (an underwhelming Felicity Jones) and his Sphynx-like niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) eventually are woven in and out of this relationship, which is marked by moments of noisy melodrama, especially in the second half. Perhaps "brutalist" refers to the egocentric Van Buren, or to the sometimes enigmatic Thoth, or to the throbbing drama itself, with its thunderous theme music insisting that it is epic, and a masterpiece. It makes a catchy, memorable title.

The beauty of the film is that it's enigmatic, especially László Tóth. But the weakness of the film is this quality, because there isn't enough about this fictitious but brilliant architect's creations or his genius, until the very end, and not enough about the work of being an architect - and not enough else from the somehow underused and ineffective secondary characters to justify this shortcoming or the claim of significance the movie makes for itself.

Still, they don't make them like this anymore. This film is grand and makes an impression, for sure, and for some its evocation of[i] Citizen Kane and the Paul Thomas Anderson of There Will Be Blood and The Master will be considered positive. It doesn't quite live up to those heroic models. but you can't help admiring Brady Corbet for dreaming big.

The Brutalist, 3 hrs., 35 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 1, 2024, and was snapped up by A24 for distribution. Also shown at Toronto, and at the NYFF, where it was screneed for this review. Metacritic rating: 89% (18 reviews).

[Chris Knipp]

LANG KHÊ TRAN IN GRAND TOUR

MIGUEL GOMES: GRAND TOUR (2024)

A 'dreamy Asian travelogue' is poetic cinema and exoticism

There is almost no fixed pretext for the constant traveling in Gomez's Grand Tour, and that, as it were, is the point. This is a journey whose theme is "Let's get lost." We are immediately plunged into exoticism, or orientalism, but in a gentle sense, plunging into the Far East at its most bizarre, a mondo cane where the cane is a pedigreed shiatsu.

The one dodgy low-level pretext is escape, because Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a frumpily movie star-handsome man with good hair and variable outfits, doesn't want to get married, and he's fleeing his fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), who somehow finds out where he's going and sends a telegram to say she's on the way, whereupon he snaaks off somewhere else. Telegrams, because this is 1918. But Gomez is not too pinned down by that, or by plot developments. There are period images and contemporary ones. He is more interested in providing a living, on-scene cabinet of wonders as Edward flees quietly from Mandalay to Bankok, thence to Shanghai and beyond, with imagery swinging back and forth betwen then and now and from mostly black and white to occasional color. It is sometimes simply documentary, but even then the film's characters appear in the scenes.

Memorable moments: We get a good look behind and in front of the scene of Thai shadow puppets; a sweeping Strauss waltz is played not as in Sokurov's Russian Ark for ballroom dancers at the Hermitage Museum, but for a busy square full of sweeping, undulating motorcycles moving in slow motion. Molly develops an intriguing friendship with the beautiful French-speaking Ngoc (Lang Khê Tran) in South Vietnam, and their traveling together begins as if it were the most natural thing in the world

The limitation, but also the beauty, of Gomes' method is that during the filmmaking process he allowed the locations to determine where things would go as he went along, as Wes Anderson partly did when making The Darjeeling Limited (NYFF 2007) in India. But Gomes, unlike Wes, is traveling through numerous countries. And this is another beauty of the film, its languages, because it constantly shifts from its home tongue of Portuguese within a conversation or from scene to scene, to Thai, Vietnamese, French, Japanese, and Chinese. And the voiceover - and there always is one - in whatever country is spoken in the location language and is constantly shifting. Remember: "Let's get lost" is the organizing principle. All this is very similar to Gomes' 2012 Tabu, in whose second half the director also improvised as he changed from one exotic location to another. But the structure is stronger and the mood more unified here.

As was said in my Tabu review for the 2012 NYFF, Gomes' way of making exotic, romantic, retro fantasies can be a bit shallow, but nonetheless the result is "evocative and very cinematic." Lean back and enjoy the ride. This man is unique, and what he's going for is the world of your dreams.

Grand Tour, 128 mins., debuted at Cannes, receiving the best director award, and showing also at Sydney, Karlovy Vary, New Zealand, Toronto, Vancouver, and other international festivals, including the NYFF, where it was screened for this review. Metacritic rating: 76%. A MUBI release.

[Chris Knipp]

IA SUKHITASHVILI IN GEORGIAN DIRECTOR DEA KULUMBEGASHVILI'S APRIL

DEA KULUMBEGASHVILI: APRIL (2024)

Struggles of a beleaguered OB-GYN

Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili's first film, Beginning, was a memorable part of the 2020 NYFF, and I concluded that despite all my questions throughout it was one of the most remarkable films of the festival and introduced the world to an exciting new filmmaker. Her style is just as harsh and provocative in this, her sophomore film. Beginning focused on a remote Georgian Jehovah's Witnesses congregation despised by the prevailing Eastern Orthodox majority and on the sufferings of the minister's wife. Dea's style and approach haven't changed here, but the focus has shifted to an OB-GYN doctor, Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), who is an outsider in another way. Working in a harsh rural area, she secretly chooses to perform abortions, which are illegal. Her colleagues know this. Furthermore, When a baby is stillborn with her officiating (depicted in an uncompromising early scene), we learn from the angry father that there are rumors of her clandestine activity. If it becomes known to officials, not only her career but those of her closest associates may be finished.

Again as with Beginning Dea uses boxy academy ratio, again there are Carlos Reygadas-style nature visuals dialed up to the max. This time, watching the film in Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater with its remarkable sound system, winds and storms were overwhelming meteorological events: the disarmingly peaceful-sounding April is exhausting as well as disturbing to watch. There is nothing like the fire in Beginning. But just a drive down a country road is harrowing, due to the sound recording, which is emphasized by the complete absence of a score. There is no conventional he-said, she-said editing for conversations. The camera rests on one person for a long eriod, then shifts to another person for an equally long one. Again there are some long silences.

We witness one abortion, shown with a fixed camera a few feet away and as the patient, a deaf mute, softly whimpers, we see only her thigh and an assistent holding her and comforting her. The procedure goes perfectly well, but the later consequences are nonetheless tragic.

Nina is beseiged from several directions. There is pressure from her colleagues to stop performing abortions and the danger of what will happen if she doesn't. The stillborn birth is also leading to investigations. Though a thorough autopsy, read out by a senior colleague in numbing detail, shows the baby had no chance of surviving anyway, Nina is repeatedly accused of being guilty of negligence for avoiding a C-section simply because the mother wanted "a natural birth." So doubt is cast that also might cost Nina her job and her career.

Nina is the portrait of an obsessive. Perhaps such people are opaque; at least she is. One might think a person who devotes her life in more ways than one to a mission to deliver babies and help pregnant young women in trouble would be a warm, caring, sociable type. Nina doesn't seem this way. In a conversation with a man she went to school with, a onetime sweetheart, she declares that she cannot marry because there is no room for anyone else in her life. The actress Ia Sukhitashvili has a severe, almost elegant look, again somewhat against expectations. There is a sexual sequence in a car at night that is utterly cold and unpleasant and leads to violence. Her life outside the work seems empty and awful.

There are also elements of an art film or museum art piece and recurring surreal imagery of a strange naked figure, seen always at some distance, almost like a sepulchral walking corpse. This corpse figure pulls April away from the etreme, punishing naturalism it sometimes has. Again as with Dea's debut film I want to protest and say this is too much and too obviously one-sidedly violent, provocation for its own sake; and again one is convinced that this is too good and has too much conviction not to admire, if grudgingly. More grudgingly this time, though, partly because the protagonist is so unappealing. But aided by Bones and All's dp Arseni Khachaturan, a key source of the blend of long-take realism and nightmarish expressionism, and a powerful sound design, this is another clear demonstration that Dea Kulumbegashvili is a powerful new cinematic voice.

April, 134 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 5, 2024, showing also at Toronto, Donostia-San Sebastian, Hamburg, and at the NYFF, where it was screened for this review. Metacritic rating: 89% (based on 7 reviews).

[Chris Knipp]

BASEL ADRA IN NO OTHER LAND

BASEL ADRA, HAMDAN BALLAL, YUVAL ABRAHAM, RACHEL SZOR: NO OTHER LAND (2024)

Nowhere to go

There have been many films about Israel and Palestine, but this one justifies inclusion in the selective New York Film Festival slate because it was made by a collective including both Palestinians and Israelis, and because it was shot over a period of years. It features the relationship between Palestinian Basel Adra and Israeli Yuval Abraham, two young men aiming to record Israel's constant assault on a patch of land in the West Bank, villages known collectively as Masafer Yatta, occupied by the same Arab families for generations. Again and again Israeli bulldozers come and destroy the Palestinians' modest houses. Finally the ultimate indignity: the big machines tear down a small school. Little by little the locals are forced to take up residence in nerby caves. This film records their steadfast resistence and refusal to leave the land.

Basel Adra has been photographed and recorded since he was five years old, we see. Mostly we see him as a vibrant but also weary young man puffing incessently on a shisha or taking too-deep drags on cigarettes while he sits with Yuval Abrahim, as the two of them contemplate the unchanging nature of things. In between is a lot of footage of the assaults, including the increasingly violent attacks of the Jewish settlers, whose illegal housing and vicious violence are tolerated by the Israeli government and constitute a nasty third arm to the IDF forces who are the ones who carry out the constant periodic destructions of Palestinian housing. The claim is that the land is needed for IDF training activities, but it comes out that this is just a pretext for displacing the inhabitants.

Sometimes I think of my years in Cairo when I learned that a common strong oath was الله يخرب بيتك (Ullah yashrib baytak!) - literally "God destroy your house." In this case God is reaplaced by Israelis. It's a cruel, vengeful, and lawless God.

Basel's uncle Hamdan gets shot when he tris to prevent the IDF from stealing the villagers' generator and becomes paralyzed from the neck down. His mother stays by him in this terrible state but she hopes that God will take him and relieve his sufferings. Hamdan inspires many demonstratons of the locals, which lead to arrests. Basel's father is arrested. And on and on it goes.

Sometimes over the years covered here there is a brief moment of Western awareness, a discomfort, even astonishment or outrage, but it passes. Nobody cares, or rather, nobody can go up against the US government, the perpetual main enabler of Israeli injustice. (This film is not concerned with analysis of these issues, however.)

It is always Yuval who is with Basel. The film informs us that there are two colors of car license plates in here. The yellow ones allow free travel, and the green ones go to Palestinians, whose movement is highly restricted. This is one illustration of why it's Yuval who comes to see Basel. Yuval expresses a dream that one day there will be a just and equal society and they will both be able to travel freely And Basel will come to see him. There's a certain charm and humor to this friendship of Yuval and Basel, who are so close (except for the inexorable separation of privilege) that one jokingly asks when their marriage is coming.

Most of the film and what might further convince the already committed - or inshallah wake up the unenlightened in the English speaking world - are the repeated images, year after year, of the home demolitions, and of the locals rebuilding. The school that gets destroyed was actually constructed clandestinely, partly by night, the only way there could be a school. The Israelis wish to deny Palestinians even literacy. The Palestinians in this patch of land repeatedly declare that they have "no other land" and they will not go away.

Eventually, after November 6, 2023 and what the West calls "the Israel-Hamas war," more properly Israel's war on Gaza, violence against the Palestinians in the West Bank also greatly increases and the population of the namesless village Basel belongs to must flee, as others have done. Basel and Yuval have had to stop filming what's happening or they would die like the 116+ journalists who have been killed in Gaza.

No Other Land, 92 mins., debuted at Berlin Feb. 17, 2024, and included in over 20 international festivals, including the NYFF, where it was sccreened for this review. Showing at the NYFF Sept. 29, Oct. 1, 5, and 6. For details see HERE.
Q&A with Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor in person on Sept. 29 & Oct. 1. Metacritic rating: 91%.

[Chris Knipp]

KIERAN CULKIN, JESSE EISENBERG IN A REAL PAIN

JESSE EISENBERG: A REAL PAIN (2024)

Two Jewish cousins revisit their family origins in Poland

Jesse Eisenberg costars in his sophormore directorial outing here. After playing a great variety of roles and receiving acclaim as an actor, he draws on his own background, playing a man called David Kaplan who is an American Jew with a grandmother who was a Holocaust survivor from Poland, and at her demise has left money to pay for a trip with his cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin) to visit the house where she lived in Lublin, as well as Majdanek, nearby, the concentration camp she survived. We must survive the outlandish performance of Culkin, which ramps up several notches his (justiably) award-winning shtick as Roman Roy on HBO's addictivre series, "Succession."

Most people love Kieran Culkin's work as Benji here, but it's so obtrusive (and borderline offensive, especially for his use of F-words in every line) that it steals the picture, which seems a shame. There was a place for gentle humor here, especially considering the solemn subject matter. Nonetheless it has to be confessed that this movie is vivid and works and is a great improvement over Jesse's directing debut, When You Finish Saving the World.

There is no disputing that Kieran Culkin is a remarkable actor. His Benji, as fluently written by Eisenberg, is a bold, complex character, penetrating and outrageous in his remarks and observations, funny, charming. He frequently undercuts his own charm by causing offense to people the pair encounters. These notably include members ofthe little Polish Holocaust tour David and Benji join, then depart from. It includes a tight-lipped older couple, a recently single woman from California, an even quieter couple, an African-born Jewish convert, and the non-Jewish, occasionally droll British tour guide, James (Will Sharpe).

It's made clear both from things explicitly stated by David and from sad bookending shots of him sitting alone pre and post trip in the New York airort that Benji is in transition, or simply adrift, and things have gone very badly earlier in the year, and he lives in his mom's basement. In contrast David has what appears a very lucrative job selling digital advertising and lives comfortably in New York City with his wife and small child. Benji debunks the job as the lowest thing you could do; David defends it as essential to the very existence of the internet.

Benji may have been fun for Eisenberg to write because he can go anywhere at any time he wants with the character. For instance, when the cousins and the tour members are on a a posh train in Poland, Benji suddenly thinks of how Jews were shipped to their deaths in cattle cars and insists on running out of the first class compartment. Then later when David falls asleep next to Benji (a recurrant theme) in another car and they have to jump another train to get back to their meeting point, Benji insists they do this without paying, and when they sneak into a first class car he says they've "earned it."

Eisenberg is seeking to convince us that a neuro-divergent type like Benji deserves our sympathy and respect and can provide us with insight. David puts up with him, despite apologizing to the tour members. They tolerate, even like him, and James thanks him for his ruthless criticisms of his performance as a guide for being too weighed down by "facts" and not enough "reality," and pledges to reshape his methods accordingly.

This is a movie that amuses, provokes, and teaches, and Eisenberg carries off the teaching part without ever seeming pedantic or stodgy. As wild as some moments get, we are still always firmly in the "reality" of a Polish Holocaust tour. We get to see relevant cities and sites (including the concentration camp) exactly as they look today. What swings my views toward approval of the film are David's speeches, in which Eisenberg unobtrusively provides sane balance so that somehow it all works and you may think maybe Culkin's outrageous turn was after all actually more amusing than offensive.

A Real Pain, 90 mins., debuted at Sundance; shown also at Aspen, Zurich, BFI London, and the NYFF, where it was screened for this review for an Oct. 5, 2024 showing. Release in ten countries scheduled for early 2025; in the US, Nov. 1, 2024. Metacritic rating: 84% (based on 19 reviews).

[Chris Knipp]

PAYAL KAPADIA: ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT (2024)

A dreamlike Indian film that was a first at Cannes

In Competition-Grand Prix at Cannes. India's first Cannes Competition film in 30 years, says S.M Kaufman in INDIEWIRE, 'is a sensual triumph." "Dreamlike and gentle," says Bradshaw in the GUARDIAN, finally giving a film here 5/5 stars. The film is the story of three Mumbai hospital employees in monsoon season, two nurses and a cook, all originally from small towns, two of whom are roommates, the younger one causing scandal by having in ill-concealed Muslim boyfriend, an action on her part in rejection of arranged marriage. The eldest of the women is threatened with eviction due to an oversight of her late husband. Jessica Kiang in VARIETY says with just two features (this is the second, the first fiction) Kapadia "has established her rare talent for finding passages of exquisite poetry within the banal blank verse of everyday Indian life." The eldest decides to quit the hospital and go back to her home village and the other two women accompany her. DP Ranabir Das gives all sorts of light, Kiang says, a "gorgeous glamor." The portrait of the city is "unusually rich," so it's "almost a wrench" when the second half moves to the country but the new setting focuses more on the women's developed "bonds of mutual support" that burn brighter. And the Muslim boyfriend has secretly followed. Kapadia won the documentary award at Cannes in 2021 for her film in Directors' Fortnight, A Night of Knowing Nothing. Fionnuala Halligan of SCREEN DAILY, who also uses the word "gentle" as well as for the latter part "mystical," says there's "a strong romantic streak" in the depiction of Mumbai that "calls to mind Wong Kar-wai's great love affair with the city of Hong Kong." Bradshaw notes up front a "languorous eroticism" and "something epiphanic in the later scenes and mysterious final moments." 114 mins. All We Imagine As Light jumped to the top of the Cannes SCREEN DAILY jury grid with a 3.3 rating, on a par with Sean Baker's Anora.[/B] - From my vicarious remote Cannes coverage.

The film has a cumulative effect. Early on, it may seem like merely an excerpt from a daytime serial, till you notice how compelling the actors are. The deep beauty especially of Kani Kusruti as Prabha, the nurse, grows on you. It is also effective that the film is divided into the city and country segments, which takes you though a whole history of India and whole lifetimes. Through her focus on the three women hospital workers, their dreams and frustrations, young Payal Kapadia, who is still in her thirties, has patiently woven movie magic.

All We Imagine As LIght, 110 mins., debuted at Cannes May 23, 2024, showing afterward at many, many international festivals including the NYFF where it was screened for this review (For an oct. 7, 2024 showing). US theatrical release begins mid-Nov., 2024. Metacritic rating: 93% (based on 12 critic reviews).

[Chris Knipp]

SEAN BAKER: ANORA (2024)

The most fun at Cannes comes to New York

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In Competition at Cannes it won the top award, the Palme d'Or. Remember Baker scored high with his iPhone-shot TANGERINE about two "working girls" in 2015. ANORA could be seen as a much more realistic version of PRETTY WOMAN, spinning out a "whirlwind sex-work romance," says Peter Debruge in his VARIETY review, that "sparkles like the tinsel in its leading lady's hair." She's a New York stripper and he's the "reckless son of a Russian oligarch." The film that has a Safdie brothers flavor Debruge calls "compulsively entertaining, 80-proof emotional ride." Anora or "Ani" (MIkey Madison) is part Russian and speaks a bit of the language learned from her grandma, and shares a small house in Brighton Beach with her sister. It's at the Manhattan strip club, HQ, where she's an escort and lap dancer that she gets sent to the table of young big spender Ivan, aka Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), and Ivan and Ani, close in age, click at once. The next day he brings her to his nearby mansion; she negotiates for $15K up front when he wants her to stay. 138 minutes "race by" (though a few could be lost) in a "full-throttle tragicomedy of romance, denial and betrayal," Peter Bradshaw says in his 4/5 star GUARDIAN review, A "a non-love story which finds its apex in a Las Vegas wedding chapel in the middle of the night, "slaloms downwards into the most extraordinary, cacophonous uproar of recrimination unfolding in what is more or less real time." David Rooney in HOLLYWOOD REPORTER says "Sex workers have been a big part of Baker's gallery of outsiders," and this makes ANORA "a fine addition to his terrific body of work." Ani has "a sweetness that humanizes even the most transactional situations" as well as "a defensiveness that makes her dangerous when threatened" - i.e., like when Ivan's dad sends goons to break up this mismatch, Ivan bolts, and Ani does a stand-off. Vegas is for the wedding, but they spend a lot of time at Brighten Beach-adjacent locales with Vanya and his "retinue of Russian-speaking locals," in Coney Island, "a pool hall, a video game arcade, Tatiana Grill on the boardwalk," etc. shot in 35mm with anamorphic lenses thus a messy but "satisfying watch." The leads are "terrific" (Madison) and "watchable" (Eydelshteyn) and " Baker’s film-making is muscular and fluent" (Bradshaw). In an enthusiastic Oscar Expert YouTube review Brother Bro (Mason Jaeger) calls ANORA, which he gives 9 out of 10 "the best film I've seen at Cannes" and predicts it will go on to collect many laurels in the US awards season with multiple Oscar noms including Best Actor and Best. Actress for the leads. WINNER OF THE PALME D'OR. A Neon release.

[Chris Knipp]

IMAGE FROM MINERVINI'S THE DAMNED

ROBERTO MINERVINI: THE DAMNED (2024)

The documentarian tries his hand at an atmospheric Civil war drama

The Italian has lived in the US for two decades chronicling marginal people. I've reviewed Stop the Pounding Heart (2013) and What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire? (2020). His Cannes release this year continues that process in his first period piece, set in the Civil War period when the U.S. Army sends a volunteer company to patrol the uncharted Western territories. See Peter Debruge's Variety review: he makes the film sound thin in story to put it mildly, but an "atmospheric and unscripted" depiction of young men in the war, mostly not in combat, and a "welcome extension" of the filmmaker's documentary work. Jordan Mintzer in his*Hollywood Reporter review says that in its "aesthetic" here Minervini suggests Terence Malick’s The New World and Alejandro Iñarritu’s The Revenant. Amusingly he suggests this is a low-keyed, laconic version of those movies. In particular this can seem an uninspired version of Malick's spiritual musings when the soldiers talk about whether or not they believe in anything.

When one absolutely doesn't believe, and you notice how much they say words like "OK," if not before, you realize these men are talking in their own modern vernacular. In this, the film is in and out of time, also like Terrence Malick.

They are Union soldiers on the periphery, sent to investigate western lands and seen in Montana. (One is from California and one from Virginia, so they come from afar.) A man brings his two young sons, or the sons rather chose to come with him. Some of them have no experience; one is sixteen and says his facial hair doesn't yet grow and he does not yet know what it is to be a man. His knowledge of riflery is shooting rabbits and a few squirrels.

The interest of this film is also its limitation for some, that it has virtually no plot (not unlike Minervini's documentary films). They are just there. But this is life, and especially military life. At one point there is a skirmish, with shots fired and men endangered. It's not clear what it really comes from. There is a sergeant, but nobody knows what they're doing. At one point the older of the two boys, who expresses religious convictions, says he no longer knows why he is there. "Becoming a hero" no longer seems a likelihood.

The boys and men, the latter longhaired and bearded, talk and these non-actors seem to be improvising on their own. It's pretty dilatory and sometimes empty or repetitious, but that again is the way people are.

I like plot and story as much as anyone. They are the lifeblood of fiction. But we know how much plot and story can run away with a film. We also know that in the hands of Samuel Beckett fiction can compel with minimal plot. Toward the end of the film four of the men go off on their own to scout for a pathway through the mountains in the snow, abandoning the rest of the men. An image of the starting point shows back at base camp many have died.

Horses play an important part in this film with their presence. At one point a dark mare is tethered on a wire line and pulling at it, complaining. Another example of aimlessness and the waiting that is an essential part of army life.

Admire the caps and the big blue capes, and drink in the helplessness of soldiery, Union Army style. This could be a good new direction for Minervini.

The Damned/I dannati, 89 mins., debuted in the 2024 Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in which it won the Best Director award. Also shown at Toronto and the NYFF, screened at the latter for this review. Metacritic rating: 63%.

[Chris Knipp]

MATI DIOP: DAHOMEY (2024)

David Rooney's Hollywood Reporter Berlinale review
(Feb. 18, 2024):

With her mesmerizing 2019 debut feature, the lyrical Senegalese ghost story Atlantics, as well as the nonfiction project that preceded it, A Thousand Suns, Mati Diop jumped to the forefront of diasporic Black European directors reclaiming their ancestral African roots. The director’s own path as a cultural revenant continues to be inextricably woven through her work, alongside a contemplative consideration of repatriation and reparations, in her multifaceted medium-length docu-fictional essay Dahomey.

The film is both a response to Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s 1953 inquiry into African art and colonialism, Statues Also Die, and an ongoing debate on the significance of returned artifacts and the responsibility of new generations to continue the vital work of conservation and cultural reclamation.

[Chris Knipp]

PIA MARAIS: TRANSAMAZONIA (2024)

Guy Lodge (Variety, at Locarno: "'News of the World' star Helena Zengel anchors the first film in over a decade from South African director Pia Marais, which is humidly atmospheric but narratively hard to pin down."

Premiering in Locarno’s main competition, with a New York Film Festival slot to come, this is a formally muscular and typically searching fourth feature from South African-born writer-director Marais: Her last film — 2013’s simmering character study “Layla Fourie” — may have been set in her homeland, but her career has otherwise been built on a thoroughly international perspective. Postcolonial questions of belonging and displacement play heavily into “Transamazonia,” which is at pains to avoid overly exoticizing the little-portrayed region of Brazil in which it unfolds, securing the collaboration of the Assurini people of the country’s Trocará Indigenous Territory. (They are collectively credited as associate producers.) Still, there’s an opacity to this ambitious, conscientious film’s characterization on all fronts that hinders our emotional involvement, even as it holds our interest.

[Chris Knipp]

THANH HAI PHAM, DUY BAO DINH DAO IN VIET AND NAM

TRUONG MINH QUȲ: VIET AND NAM (2024)

Vietnamese gay miners in love make for a "drowsily distinctive" film

So Says Jessica Kiang in herVariety review from Cannes Un Certain Regard. This sensuous slow cinema of two coal miners Kiang thinks the filmmaker may not want us to watch (though "the body-contouring properties of coal dust on sweat-slicked skin [rarely] been more sensuously explored") so much as to "doze and dream our way in and out of it."

Certainly two gay miners who make sensuous love down in the mine is an eye-catching, titillating subject. They are Viet (Duy Bao Dinh Dao) and Nam (Thanh Hai Pham), two decidedly scrawny twenty-somethings, and they are poetically in love. But this Cannes Queer Palm nominee turns out to be a film that's panoramic as well as intimate, and tinged with both collective and personal tragedy. One of the two young men plans to be smuggled out, in some system of plastic bags, and this reference to human trafficking alludes to the 39 Vietnamese refugees found suffocated in an articulated refrigerator lorry in Grays, Essex, UK in 2019. A present-day reference to 9/11 actually sets the action twenty years earlier, to 2001. But talk leads back to the ghosts of Vietnam's past, particularly the American war, as Nam’s mother (Thi Nga Nguyen) leads the young men on a journey to find out where his soldier father, her husband, died and where his body is. And there is a memorable scene of a white-faced medium with a fraudulent air but a forceful manner who channels missing souls for those many still seeking to resolve war losses.

The young lovers and past memories seem moody with anticipated loss, and memories of the war as well as detonations in the coal mine give a pervasive sense of the violent tenor of life. Underground images sometimes are nearly black. But dp Son Doan's imagery shot on 16mm stock includes external scenes that offset the darkness with reminders of the distinctive aesthetics of the Vietnamese landscape. There are light moments too like the one when Viet's ma's elderly friend Ba (Viet Tung Le) asks when the two boys are getting married and one blurts out, "To each other?" - a misunderstanding the audience gets, but not Ba.

The search in the second half takes the trio to the forested Central Highlands from whence director Quy himself hails, where unexploded ordinance remains.

Past trauma and present dissatisfaction swirl around in this moody, poetic film that may leave you almost in a trance. There's a powerful feeling of sensuality and world-weariness that forms a picture of a country whose present is so unsatisfactory Viet may beg Nam to stay, but there can't be much conviction in any argument, and we can see why this film is banned in Vietnam for its "negative view" of the country. One can't exactly contest that.

A subtle, memorable film nonetheless whose stillness, magic, and personal landscapes suggest the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, but also shows the filmmaker himself to have arrived at a distinctive new maturity with this third film. (John Berra in Screen Daily found "discernible echoes" of Bi Gan and Anocha Suwichakornpong here as well.)

The film released in France last Wednesday, September 25, and the and the AlloCiné press rating is 3.4 (68%), only "moyen," but the hard-to-please Cahiers du Cinéma likes it, and passage quoted from the Cahiers critic, Thierry Méranger, is as good a description of this film as you''re likely to find: "From start to finish, the film borrows from queer romance, working-class chronicle, socio-political pamphlet, psychoanalytical quest, historical fable and dreamlike essay, in a series of sequences that are mostly free of any obligation to chronological or stylistic continuity." True: and it all somehow works!

Việt and Nam (Trong lòng đất,"Under the Earth"), 125 mins., debuted at Cannes May 22, 2024 in the Un Certain Regard section. It was also included at nearly a dozen other festivals including New York, where it was screened for this review. To be distributed in the US in early 2025 by Strand Releasing. Metacritic rating; 76%. It released in France Sept. 25 and the AlloCiné press rating is 3.4 (68%).

[Chris Knipp]

SELENA GOMEZ IN EMILIA PÉREZ

JACQUES AUDIARD: EMILIA PÉREZ (2024)

A trans musical in Spanish from Audard, and a big hit at Cannes - now seen at the NYFF

From Hollywood Reporter:

Jacques Audiard returned to Cannes on Saturday night to introduce the world to Emilia Perez, which received a rapturous response from the audience, who gave it a nine-minute standing ovation. After Audiard took the mic to speak in French, the standing ovation resumed for another minute or so.

The 10th film from the French auteur — his sixth film in the main competition — stars Zoe Saldaña as a frustrated lawyer, Selena Gomez as a drug lord’s wife, Édgar Ramírez as a dangerous love interest and Karla Sofía Gascón as the cartel kingpin who longs to escape a life of crime and become the woman he’s always dreamed of becoming. And surprise — it’s a musical.

A number of unfavorable or reserved reviews shows some are not so crazy about such an oddball creation, indicated by the Metacritic rating of 71%.. But the novelty, plus Selena Gomez and Édgar Ramirez make this a unique, and for some desirable bauble. The film won the Cannes Jury Prize, and the Best Actress award went jointly to the four leading ladies, Adriana Paz, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, and Zoe Saldaña.

David Rooney in Hollywood Reporter sums up: "Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and the divine Karla Sofia Gascón light up Jacques Audiard’s fabulous queer crime musical in which a Mexican drug lord enlists the help of a lawyer to undergo gender-affirming surgery in the latest from the French director of The Beat My Heart Skipped, A Prophet, Rust and Bone, and Dheepan."

That was quite a run, and for a few years Audiard was my favorite French director. If that changed, it's because he's so open to change himself, genre change - which, in French, could mean sex change, so the theme of this nutty, raucous, semi-comic, half-sung, Spanish language film is a logical step. I didn't find myself keeping up, even though I could appreciate the audacity and confidence of this production.

See Peter Bradshaw's Cannes vlog where he tosses off a fluent summary of this semi-musical S.A. gangster-family film (he says it's "One of the wackiest films in Cannes," and is "Like a thriller by Amat Escalante, with lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, as if Pedro Almodóvar had made a musical of Mrs. Doubtfire." And then he wonders if its periodic bursts into song aren't maybe designed to mask how far-fetched it all is.

I wasn't at Cannes, and didn't get to see Emilia Perez till now, the end of September, as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, but I remembered Bradshaw's question as I watched. Isn't this all very implausible? Isn't it just a fable, a myth? About what? Isn't it a bit like a surreal Exquisite Corpse, where different people add continuations to a drawing without knowing what came before?

It feels as if Audiard just likes the idea, as well all might, of a super-macho Mexican gangster who wants nothing more than to become a woman; who always felt that way. The delight of the production obviously is not only the trans person (played by an actual one), the gangster transformed into zoftig woman who now wants to do good - as if anybody could undo all the evil, the brutality, the disappeared people of Mexico - but the triumph of these four women leading in dramatically different roles in this ebullient musical, with its moments of love and violent conflict - this is what appealed to people, as signified by the joint Best Actress award at Cannes being given to all four of them. I don't know how much that matters to the home consumer on his/her/their Netflix screen.

But though I was floored by the film, and will have to watch it at least once more to take it all in, there seemed some obvious things lacking. Maybe there was enough about the ardors of body transformation at Cannes already this year with Demi Moore in Coralie Fargeat's Substance. But there isn't much in Emilia Perez about how gangster Manitas Del Monte suffers to be transformed. Indeed the machinations of the plot overwhelm any treatment of inner turmoil or gratification in the film. I refer you to Bradshaw's formal written summary of the plot of Emilia Perez, his Guardian review of it, for the many details. The plot action is fast and exciting, and that speed and excitement take the place of emotional or intellectual gratification. Others may differ on this.

Emilia Perez may provide high octane (or "wacky,"to use Bradshaw's word) entertainment. It's amazing how far in another direction Audiard has gone this time, again. It still feels ever more that he peaked with The Beat My Heart Skipped followed by A Prophet. But he wants to keep changing genres, and this is the genre-changingest of all.

This got a nine-minute standing ovation at Cannes: none of that at the NYFF press screening. Bunbury saw it as "very much a winner," hinting at Palme d'Or possibilities. (Debruge said in this VAIETY review that Karla Sofía Gascón "electrifies" in her lead role.) Indeed everything is bright and sparkling, but perhaps a little crass, perhaps a little lacking in individuality, or delicacy - pushed. For the Cannes red carpet, Gomez wore a beautifully simple YSL gown and a $3.5 million Bulgari diamond necklace. That was the most tastefully crass gesture of all. (Gomez may not have projected quite the sophistication to "rock" such classy "rocks.") Netflix has bought Émilia Perez for $12 million. Netflix has bought Émilia Perez for $12 million.

Emilia Perez, 130, debuted at Cannes, winning the Jury Prize and cOmbined Best Actress award. Also shown at Brussels, Wrocław, Telluride, San Sebastian, Toronto, Hamburg and the NYFF, where it was screened for this review. US release Nov. 1, 2024. Metacritic rating: 7̶1̶%̶ now 69% (10/9/24).


SERENA GOMEZ IN YSL AND BULGARI