New Directors/New Films and Film Comment Selects 2014 General Forum thread

[Chris Knipp]

The full New Directors/New Films program is up now. You'll find it here.

Or on the Filmlinc (FSLC) website.

[Chris Knipp]

Selects

ME AND YOU/IO E TE (Bernardo Bertolucci 2012)--FILM COMMENT SELECTS

An antisocial 14-year-old holes up secretly in his Rome apartment basement for a week to fool his mother into thinking he's gone on the school ski trip. Later his long estranged older half sister turns up to detox from heroin and as he is forced to help her, they bond. No reason to go beyond Mike D'Angelo's Cannes 2012 report that this film's just "pleasurably inconsequential," but also that it's great Bertolucci has gone back to filmmaking after a decade of serous health problems (he's confined to a wheelchair). The film is enjoyable, and the performances by Jacopo Olmo Antinori as the boy and Tea Falco as his half sister are excellent. This is the filmmaker's first film in his native Italian in thirty years.

The first of three FCS 2014 films I got to see. [Correction: later I got to see a fourth.]

[Chris Knipp]

Selects

I liked all the Film Comment Selects titles I got to see, though I'd have liked to see others, especially ENEMY, FELONY and WE ARE THE BEST. These were the other two, along with Bertolucci's ME AND YOU. [Later I did get to see FELONY.]

CHERCHEZ HORTENSE (Pascal Bonitzer 2012)--FCS

A "comfortable, Parisian, leftist French comedy, Positif called it, the story of a man who gradually regains his self respect, after failing in his attempt to secure an undocumented person from the danger of deportation. Kristen Scott Thomas, Jean-Pierre Bacri, Claude Rich and Isabelle Carré star in this film rescued from obscurity by the Film Comment selection committee.

OUR SUNHI (Hong Sang-soo 2013)--FCS

Hong's usual themes of directors and film students and men pursuing women work unusually well here, again with more focus on the POV of the woman (being sought by three men) as in his last, NOBODY'S DAUGHTER HAEWON.

[Chris Knipp]

First day of press screenings of New Directors/New Films 2014

A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT (Ana Lily Anirpour 2013)

Sundance hit: A hip Iranian-American women's lib, skateboarder, hijab-wearing Nosferata vampire romance, with a vintage Ford Thunderbird and a cat. In Farsi and with Iranian actors but shot in California.

OF HORSES AND MEN (Benedickt Erlingsson 2013)

An Icelandic feature that's essentially a sequence of short films depicting mishaps involving the indigenous short-legged horses in a beautiful Icelandic valley.

WE COME AS FRIENDS (Hupert Sauper 2014)

Another devastating and provocative documentary by Austrian-born, French-resident Sauper (of DARWIN'S NIGHTMARE), this time about the new nation of South Sudan and how it is being exploited and colonized by Chinese and American businessmen, Teas missionaries, superficial UN officials, and others.

[Chris Knipp]

Second day of screenings.


BADADOOK, THE (Jennifer Kent 2014)--ND/NF

An Austrialian horror story about an evil children's book that possesses a young widow with a six-year-old boy.

DEAR WHITE PEOPLE (Justin Simien 2014)--ND/NF

Sundance satire about black students on an Ivy League school. It's not as good as it sounds.

MOUTON/SHEEP (Gilles Deroo, Mariane Pistone 2013)--ND/NF

Oddball storytelling from France using real people in a Norman seaside town.

STORY OF FEAR/HISTORIA DEL MIEDO (2013)--ND/NF

Avant-garde Haneke-esque ronde of uneasy people in Buenos Aires in the summertime somewhat in the vein of Mendoça's NEIGHBORING SOUNDS.

[Chris Knipp]

Third day of screenings.

Japanese Dog, The (Tudor Cristian Jurgiu 2014)

A charming, humanistic departure from the current Romanian cinema of irony and brutality, the story of an older man reunited with his son, who has been living in Japan. Wonderful use of locale, a great actor, and delicate color. Feature debut.

Quot Erat Demonstrandum (Andrei Gruzsnetczki 2014)

Another excellent Romanian film, in beautiful black and white shot on film, about Cold War repression in the mid-Eighties, focused on a brilliant mathematician and his friend's wife, who get entangled in the web of the Securitate, the state spy network. Though this may seem a familiar subject the film has new angles, and its precision in evoking the period is admirable.

Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga, The (Jessica Orneck 2014)

A combination of philosophical proclamations about wilderness and civilization with bits of the Slavic fairy tale about the witch Baba Yaga, who eats children, with 16mm landscapes of cities and forests and some interesting montage. An experimental film of grandiose ambitions.

[Chris Knipp]

Day 4 of ND/NF screenings.

TO KILL A MAN (Alejandro Fernándo Almendras 2013)

This cool observational crime story from Chile has some things in common with the work of fellow countryman Pablo Larraín -- the creepiness and moral ambiguity. But Larraín's vivid characters and pungent mise-en-scene are absent. Almendras prefers drabness, and this ordinary murderer with his drawn out clumsy mop-up is painful to watch.

A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS(Ben Rivers, Ben Russell 2013)

An experimental, art film by two hitherto unconnected artists in three parts, joined only by having one person in all three. Not for most film fans.

STOP THE POUNDING HEART (Robert Minervini 2013)

Is this a docudrama or Christian propaganda? It debuted at Cannes, but the Christian market is its niche. Intimate scenes, nice visuals, but many unanswered questions.

Buzzard (Joel Potrykus 2013)

A slacker scam artist flees from Grand Rapids to Detroit -- madcap, macabre humor by a smooth director-actor team.