Patrick Wang (a 25 New Face alum) takes a painstakingly nuanced, intimate approach to delicate subjects, specifically the ways in which we deal with — and don’t deal with — loss and the rippling effects in life after a death. His first feature, the breathtaking, Independent Spirit Award-nominated In the Family, and 2015’s Cannes and SXSW-screening The Grief of Others, which will finally be hitting theaters November 2nd, would make for a great marathon viewing alone. (Provided it came with a big box of Kleenex.) And now Wang has created a work that is simultaneously lighter in tone, and his […]
In Lee Chang-dong’s latest masterwork Burning, mystery is everything. The two-and-a-half hour epic lives and breathes the tiniest ambiguities of every waking moment, refusing to come to anything resembling true clarity, but in its way offering as clear a depiction of the stresses and concerns of modern life. The film, Lee’s first as director since 2010’s Poetry, is based on the short story “Barn Burning,” by Haruki Murakami, and tells the story of Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), a young man living without much means close to the border with North Korea. On a visit to Seoul he bumps into a childhood […]
With Sandi Tan’s beautifully cinephilic autobiographical documentary Shirkers arriving in theaters and on Netflix this Friday, October 26, we’re reposting our interview with Tan out of Sundance, 2018. As I wrote earlier in the festival, “Sandi Tan’s debut feature Shirkers is the 26-years-later compromise-of-necessity incarnation of a film that almost was. Shot in 1992, when Tan was in college, from a proudly illogical script of her own devising, Shirkers was meant to be a rare, hopefully transformative Singaporean independent film in a country without much history of those. Directed by Tan’s ambivalently-motivated mentor Georges Cardona — who subsequently absconded with […]
Wobble Palace is a reverse romantic comedy set in relationship hell tinged by the toxicity of Tinder hookups and Trump’s political rise. “One of the early ideas was to make a movie about a happy break up,” explains director Eugene Kotlyarenko. “The formula for a rom com is whatever happens for the first 90 minutes, by the end, the couple gets together.” Flipping this arc, the film climaxes (spoiler alert!) in the couple splitting up instead. “In a relationship that’s really toxic, staying together is really horrible and breaking up is really liberating,” Kotlyarenko continues. The film follows a millennial […]
As a longtime Wim Wenders fan and devoted admirer of his masterpiece Wings of Desire, I would never have thought it possible that the movie could look better than it did when it was released in 1987. Gorgeous in every sense of the word, from the shimmering black-and-white photography of Henri Alekan (the maestro behind Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast who Wenders prodded out of retirement to shoot the film) to the profoundly romantic story of an angel who wants to fall to earth and experience the human condition, Wings of Desire was a stunner when it came out […]
Recently announced Nobel Peace Prize recipient Nadia Murad, a survivor of the Yazidi genocide and a current human rights activist, is the star of On Her Shoulders, Alexandria Bombach’s Sundance-winning (both for Best Documentary and the U.S. Documentary Directing Award) portrait of Murad as she navigates a world that would be overwhelming and intimidating for any 23-year-old, let alone one who has experienced unspeakable crimes at the hands of ISIS. But speak Murad must — to the prying media, to the cold bureaucratic UN, to indistinguishable assorted government officials. And to the refugees at camps who look to her as […]
Alonso Ruizpalacios’ two features to date are both about Mexico City’s recent past. The writer-director first gained international visibility with 2014’s Güeros, a black-and-white road trip movie set in the 1990s using the protests at the National Autonomous University of Mexico as backdrop for an intimate coming-of-age plot. For his sophomore venture, Museo, Ruizpalacios enlisted major star Gael García Bernal and one of Güeros’ cast members, Leonardo Ortizgris, to address a larger than life, yet based on real life, crime story. 1985 was a chaotic year for Mexico City, aside from the devastation left in the wake of a massive earthquake […]
22 July is a difficult film. Any film about the 2011 terror attack and massacre on Utøya island in Norway would have to be. Less expected is the film’s strong political edge. In that sense, 22 July is something of a return to roots for Paul Greengrass. Before taking on the Bourne franchise, the director made a mark with his 2002 docudrama Bloody Sunday, about the Bogside massacre of Northern Irish protesters by British soldiers in 1972. In that film, as in his new one, Greengrass combined his trademark visceral, shaky-cam documentary aesthetic with a strong sense of political urgency. […]
Having now completed the long journey from upstart/wunderkind to venerated elder statesman, Peter Bogdanovich has amassed a lengthy CV that includes a celebrated career directing pictures, an early post programming films at the Museum of Modern Art, teaching, writing and, not unlike his mentor, Orson Welles, taking up the odd acting job. His contribution to the cinema in 2018 was twofold. First, he made the documentary The Great Buster, an interview-heavy appreciation of the pantheon silent filmmaker, Buster Keaton. His other project this year was, by design, one that required vigilant self-effacement—that’s the long-awaited post-production and release of Orson Welles’s The […]
A charcoal-black comedy about the early days of the Argentinean Dirty War, Benjamin Naishtat’s third feature Rojo accumulated a small but devout critical following after its world premiere at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival, then went on to win Best Director, Best Cinematography and Best Actor last week at San Sebastian. Naishtat’s 2014 debut History of Fear questioned the companionability of day-to-day life with lingering, suppressed trauma, while his black-and-white followup The Movement cast a brutally acerbic eye to 19th century nation-building in the Pampas, satirizing the belief (perennial in Latin America and other places) that a strong autocrat can bring order and stability, […]