Authors — Blake Williams
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Cannes Dispatch #1: Sieranevada, Staying Vertical, Slack Bay, Toni Erdmann
Cristi Puiu’s enigmatically titled (and spelled) Sieranevada was the first and longest Palme d’Or hopeful to be screened at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for the notoriously impetuous press corps. Puiu, whose The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) is often thought of as the foundational ripple that set off the ongoing so-called Romanian New Wave, has a reputation as being his country’s most uncompromising and rigorous player, and his latest three-hour appointment furthers the trend in an equally pale if far less misanthropic portrait of contemporary Romania. Sieranevada is a self-consciously long, loquacious, and unstructured film, bloated and macho and […]
by Blake Williams on May 16, 2016 -
Berlinale 2016 Dispatch #2: Midnight Special, Creepy, and A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery
The only American narrative in Berlinale’s Competition selection this year was Midnight Special, Jeff Nichols’s cryptic homage to utopian sci-fi and early Spielbergian iconography, and something of a return to the more fantastical genre territory seen in his breakout, Take Shelter. In the film, which reportedly had a budget of $18 million and tends to look like it cost ten times that, Roy (Michael Shannon) and Lucas (Joel Edgerton) are on the lam in Texas following their apparent kidnapping of a young boy named Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), a “special child” coveted by the CIA, cultish rural religious organizations, and other […]
by Blake Williams on Feb 22, 2016 -
Berlinale 2016 Dispatch #1: Homo Sapiens, Eldorado XXI, and Havarie
Away from the spotlight of the Berlinale’s (increasingly arbitrary-looking) pick of films competing for the Goldener Bär, the festival’s Forum section sits pretty as a well-established delivery system for reliably bold films that can range anywhere from quirky American character studies to rigorous, avant-garde documentaries. Many Forum artists and filmmakers are unknown quantities in North America, and walking into most of the screenings is as close I get lately to genuine tabula rasa cinema experiences; you really don’t know what you’re going to get here. Lately, the Teutonic-favored American artist/filmmaker James Benning has been taking his feature-length works to the […]
by Blake Williams on Feb 16, 2016
