Co-directed by an Israeli-Palestinian collective of four, No Other Land was filmed in the West Bank, in Masafer Yatta, where Israeli military and increasingly civilians have forced Palestinians out from their villages. Premiered at the 74th Berlinale, the debut feature won both the juried documentary award and the Audience Award in its section, Panorama—amply deserved honors for its adroit, affecting and infuriating portrayal of a tight-knit Palestinian community resisting Israel’s relentless campaign of expulsion. Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham, two of the co-directors, are also extensively on screen. Adra, whose father was also an activist, offers the film’s primary eyes […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Feb 27, 2024It’s the rare three-hour film that has as light a touch as The Delinquents while keeping a deft hold on the audience. That’s partly down to its surefire bank heist plot, borrowed somewhat from Hugo Fregonese’s 1949 Argentine noir Hardly a Criminal: a longtime clerk steals enough money to retire on, stashes it, then goes to jail, planning to recover the loot upon release. Morán (Daniel Elias) is the nebbishy thief in Rodrigo Moreno’s new film, which premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes to general delight. But his accomplice on the outside, Román (Esteban Bigliardi), gets distracted by another […]
by Nicolas Rapold on May 30, 2023Tourists in Amsterdam typically stop at the Anne Frank House, but the ever-moving conga line of visitors tends to work against reflecting on the reality of its rooms. Steve McQueen’s Occupied City opens up a space for contemplation of a hundred-plus houses, buildings, and other sites across Amsterdam that are marked by World War II and the Holocaust in some way, tracing scars and trauma that may no longer be visible, much less widely known. Informed by an illustrated book by McQueen’s partner, Bianca Stigter (who directed Three Minutes: A Lengthening), it’s a living atlas: scenes of pandemic-era Amsterdam, overlaid […]
by Nicolas Rapold on May 25, 2023You might think of Pacifiction as a feature-length version of the shot of the boat in The Parallax View before it explodes—before you know it might explode, before you know anything for sure. A man in a white suit, De Roller (Benoît Magimel), makes his rounds on the Polynesian islands, presiding more like a benevolent impresario at a Euro nightclub than the nebulous political figure that he is (High Commissioner, it turns out). He hears out local power players, consults with Shannah (Pahoa Mahagafanau) and other underlings and associates and grows concerned about nuclear machinations by the French government. “It’s not […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Feb 17, 2023In a year that saw the passing of Jean-Luc Godard, it’s astonishing to see a sometimes overlooked fixture of golden age European art cinema, Jerzy Skolimowski, directing one of his strongest films now—with a donkey for a star, no less. Boxer, poet, actor, painter: the 84-year-old director has brought a restlessness to his career, often expressed on film through a muscularly lyrical approach to mobile camerawork that remains unique in many ways. His classic Deep End (1970) heaves and wheels and gawps alongside its awkward, sexually frustrated teenage protagonist, Mike, who stalks a facsimile of curdled Swingin’ London shot in […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Nov 17, 2022One of the funniest movies of 2022 is Quentin Dupieux’s Incredible But True. On November 8, it’s available on streaming and Blu-ray from Arrow, but as far as I know, it has no American distributor since its world premiere in Berlin last February. One has to wonder whether Dupieux is now only considered to be a French local delicacy, even after the perverse joys and glorious idiocies of Mandibles and Deerskin (starring Academy Award winner Jean Dujardin and Adèle Haenel). Or maybe we’ve all been too cagey in describing Incredible But True and its Philip K. Slapstick premise. So here […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Nov 2, 2022This past spring, Michael Roemer’s 1984 family melodrama Vengeance Is Mine enjoyed a moment in the spotlight thanks to a revival run at Film Forum. But that was only the latest renaissance for the 94-year-old Roemer, who made a number of movies with a delayed reception of one kind or another. Nothing But a Man (1964), a Southern-set story centered on a black railroad worker and his family relationships, received a very limited initial release, and The Plot Against Harry (1969), a deadpan New York comedy about a small-time Jewish gangster, went from seeming a lost cause to playing in […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Aug 16, 2022It was only a matter of time before Sensory Ethnography Lab explorers Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor went inside—deep inside. Shot at eight different French hospitals, De Humani Corporis Fabrica intermingles imagery from within and without the human body, observing patients and listening in on surgeons during operations with special cameras and medical equipment. Immersive in different ways from their masterpiece Leviathan, and even more hypnotic than Caniba in aligning the screen’s surface with the textures of tissue, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s latest film takes its title from Vesalius’s groundbreaking 16th-century anatomy text, de- and re-familiarizing us with the interiors and […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Jun 3, 2022Critics at Cannes were divided over Triangle of Sadness, some happily going along with its soak-the-rich ride on a yacht, others unmoved by a comic setpiece with wealthy passengers throwing up their oysters. The Competition jury, however, was crystal clear on the matter: director Ruben Östlund joined a select group of two-time Palme d’Or winners, adding this laurel to his previous one for The Square. As he did at the 2017 Cannes closing ceremony, after receiving his award, Östlund lead the audience in a primal scream. This time for the 48-year-old Swede it must felt like a relief as much […]
by Nicolas Rapold on May 31, 2022Originally appearing here in July, 2021, Filmmaker‘s interview with Ryusuke Hamaguchi about Drive My Car is being reposted today alongside the film’s Best International Feature win at the 2022 Academy Awards. — Editor It might strike some as sacrilege when I say that the excitement I’ve felt around Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s run of recent work reminds me of watching (and catching up with) the films of Arnaud Desplechin in the 2000s. Drive My Car, which had its world premiere in Competition at Cannes, follows the ecstasies and agonies and everything in-between of Happy Hour, Asako I & II (worth singling out […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Mar 28, 2022