Authors — Brandon Harris
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Into the Light
The 2012 Whitney Biennial, on display until May 27, has received a significant amount of attention for being the first in the series’ 80-year history to prominently include large-scale dance, music and theater productions within the museum itself. Artists from these various disciplines are in residence at Whitney’s Madison Avenue digs for shows and performances that will be premiered alongside the art survey’s customary installations and gallery work. But there’s been another change at the Biennial this year. While film has long been part of the show, curators Elizabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders enlarged the program and invited in programmers […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 17, 2012 -
Nanni Moretti, We Have a Pope
Deeply shrouded in mystery, the election of the Pope is a strange amalgam of modern democracy and ancient ritual. It is also a circumstance that seems ripe for farce. At least Nanni Moretti, perhaps Italy’s most revered contemporary filmmaker, seems to think so. His newest film, We Have a Pope, which premiered last year in Cannes as Habemus Papam, is an often funny, sneakily moving investigation of the Vatican’s less-than-infallible process of choosing the divine, and one man’s rejection of his supposedly divine calling. Starring Michel Piccoli as a would-be Pope who disappears after his election and Moretti himself as […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 4, 2012 -
Terence Davies, The Deep Blue Sea
One of the United Kingdom’s most lauded stylists, Terence Davies has carefully crafted a body of work that fits squarely into the class-conscious, post-neorealist tradition of British cinema, working without much fanfare or regard for the exigencies of commercial filmmaking that the age and his stature would seem to demand. Now in his mid-sixties, Davies has in the last 30 years quietly established himself as one of the finest British filmmakers of his generation. He is not a cinephile and his lugubrious, sublimely photographed and insidiously hard-hearted narratives — such as 1988’s Distant Voices, Still Lives, which will screen as […]
by Brandon Harris on Mar 21, 2012 -
David Gelb, Jiro Dreams of Sushi
Jiro Ono, the world’s most acclaimed sushi chef, is not one to rest. As hard working an octogenarian as you’re ever likely to encounter on screen, Jiro is a celebrity in Japan, but little known here in the States. That is likely to change thanks to director David Gelb’s portrait of the man, his two sons and the philosophy of diligence, hard work and perfectionism they demonstrate in Jiro Dreams of Sushi. A hit at last year’s Berlinale and Tribeca Film Festival, it depicts the rigorous work ethic that Jiro, who began making sushi professionally shortly after World War II, […]
by Brandon Harris on Mar 7, 2012 -
Ruaridh Arrow, How to Start a Revolution
Although you’ve probably never heard of him, writer and professor Gene Sharp is one of the foremost scholars on grassroots, non-violent protest movements. The son of an itinerant preacher, the Ohio-born octogenarian, whose writings have informed the tactics of protest movement leaders from Serbia to Iran and the Ukraine to Syria, teaches at UMass Dartmouth. He lives a life of relative quiet and solitude, at least when revolutionaries from around the globe aren’t clamoring for his advice. In Ruaridh Arrow’s documentary How to Start a Revolution we get up close and personal with Sharp, who has drawn the direct ire […]
by Brandon Harris on Feb 23, 2012 -
Liza Johnson, Return
A low-key drama that articulates the ennui of a returning servicewoman after a tour in the Middle East, Liza Johnson’s Return strikes a delicate balance between familial melodrama and suffering vet pic. Light on exposition and heavy on expert thesping, it features a striking performance by Linda Cardellini, once the most sly and attractive of the awkward high schoolers on Freaks and Geeks, and now a fully mature screen actress making the most of her copious talents. We meet her character Kelly at the airport, freshly arrived in Ohio after a stint in an unnamed theater of war, and only […]
by Brandon Harris on Feb 8, 2012 -
Zack Parker, Scalene
Zack Parker’s Scalene is a small midwestern gem of a psychological thriller, with several moments that are as shocking as any that will find their way to commercial movie screens all year. Parker and his co-writer, longtime collaborator Brandon Owens use two storytelling devices that have gone in and out of vogue — out-of-sequence and multiple-perspective recounting of events — to marvelous effect. Shot in the filmmaker’s home state of Indiana, it is a heady and tragic mind bender, one that has been unduly overlooked by the major American fests while having had a long run on the regional circuit. The film opens […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 26, 2012 -
SLAMDANCE 2012: CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK #1
Every year The Slamdance Film Festival is responsible for premiering at least a half dozen films that go on to lengthy fest circuit runs (The Guatamalan Handshake, Without, The New Years Parade, Stranger Things), cult viability (Murder Party, Snow on tha Bluff) and in the case of the 2008 selection Paranormal Activity, massive box office success. This year will likely be no exception. But after surveying a third of the ten narratives and eight documentaries in the always eclectically programmed festival’s 2012 slate, no true standout has emerged, although a number of solid efforts are on display. Before its screening, buzz (at least in […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 24, 2012 -
Robert Greene, Fake It So Real
Big-time professional wrestling has long been a lucrative business, but for the men of Lincolnton, North Carolina’s Millenium Wrestling Federation, the social cohesion and outlet for their imagination the sport provides is their primary compensation. As chronicled in director Robert Greene’s fantastic new documentary Fake It So Real, wrestling has never seemed as intense and physically costly. Yet Greene is not interested in mining the sport for tales of snake-bitten men reaching for a glory that will never come; this isn’t a doc version of The Wrestler. Woebegone men are few and far between in this world, despite the fact […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 11, 2012 -
Abu Dhabi International Film Festival
Taking place in one of the world’s strangest, most transcendently inauthentic cities, the Abu Dhabi Film Festival (Oct. 13-22, 2011), started in 2007 as the Middle East International Film Festival and began to make a name for itself internationally after acquiring former San Francisco and Tribeca festival director Peter Scarlet. As a programmer, Scarlet is know for his strong taste in Middle Eastern selections (perhaps making him a natural for the post) and, as a festival director, someone who never saw a velvet rope he didn’t like, which makes for some hard-to-penetrate party bouncers. In the third year on the […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 10, 2012
