Trailer Watch: Tim Sutton’s Memphis
Tim Sutton’s Memphis is a sort of ethnographic rendering of slow cinema, at once alluring and incomplete. The Brooklyn-based director’s second film stars non-actor Willis Earl Beal in a quietly transfixing performance as a mysterious, errant musician, who slinks about the city, with little mind for his work. For its many hypnotic elements (the soundtrack not least among them), Memphis is at its most electrifying when Beal is allowed to lay into some unsuspected sycophant or do-gooder with exacting cool remove. Unfortunately, it’s a remove that often bleeds into the narrative, whose fragments leave the viewer with little to cling to. Kino Lorber will release the film in New York on September 5.