Authors — Vadim Rizov
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Order of Operations: Wes Anderson on The Phoenician Scheme
Wes Anderson has retroactively described the over-schedule and over-budget making of his fourth feature, 2004’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, as the kind of production that would never be allowed to happen now. That’s partly because of shifting Hollywood windows of financing possibility, but that’s likely also in part because the writer-director wouldn’t let it happen again. On 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited, Anderson made sure to work in a more sustainable and flexible way. As Jason Schwartzman told Richard Brody in 2009, “Wes not only pitched a rough idea for a movie, he also pitched a rough idea of […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jun 18, 2025 -
Cannes 2025: Entroncamento, The Mastermind
In a piece about the documentaries at this year’s Cannes, Slate’s Sam Adams noted the existence of Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk but declined to name the section it was in, referring to it only as “a low-profile sidebar devoted to independent productions.” That would be ACID, which—with the possible exception of the CINEF section that shows film school shorts—is, yes, probably the lowest-profile of the Cannes premieres sections. To decide ACID isn’t worth naming is a reminder of the infinite proliferation of hierarchies at Cannes; there are dark rumors that even though the press badges are […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 25, 2025 -
Cannes 2025: It Was Just an Accident, The Secret Agent
Sentenced by the Iranian government in 2010 on spurious grounds to six years in prison, a punishment that came with a 20-year ban on making movies, Jafar Panahi immediately set about violating the latter. Title notwithstanding, 2011’s This is Not a Film was what I’d call an “actual movie,” spry and self-reflexive like his first two features, 1995’s The White Balloon and 1997’s The Mirror. The post-Film features that followed—Closed Curtain, Taxi, 3 Faces and No Bears—merited that first post-ban title more. Leaning upon his undeniably courageous status as a (since) multiple-times-jailed dissident filmmaker, those works foregrounded the director as a benign […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 23, 2025 -
Cannes 2025: The Phoenician Scheme, Nouvelle Vague
Though Wes Anderson’s last consensus-acclaimed feature was 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, his subsequent, progressively more divisive films have been profitable enough to emerge at a regular clip. I’m guessing this is thanks to the purchasing power of elder millennials who had Rushmore and Royal Tenenbaums imprinted on them in their teen years and now faithfully show up for each new work. For those unshakeable fans, myself included, the question of whether Anderson’s entered an era of baroque and inadvertent self-parody is a non-issue, and The Phoenician Scheme is unlikely to change anyone’s mind in either direction. Even by his […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 18, 2025 -
Cannes 2025: Sound of Falling, Two Prosecutors
It’s always a dangerous business when entertainment journalists and film critics feel the need to wade into political commentary, but the Trumpian shadow hovering over everything makes people feel like they have to say something even if they don’t want to. At The Hollywood Reporter, a headline captures the exasperated tone: “Cannes Dealmakers Are Already Sick of Talking About Trump’s Tariffs.” Everyone would prefer to gossip and go about their usual routines even as the theoretically imminent global recession seems to already be in effect. Purely based on visual tells—crowd sizes, the increased number of party invites I’ve gotten—attendance is […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 16, 2025 -
Visions du Réel 2025: Choose Your Illusion
In 2002, a George W. Bush aide coined the phrase “reality-based community”—a label meant pejoratively, anticipating the present belligerent moment. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” that (still!) anonymous official ranted. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” This psychotic assertion is paraphrased—nearly word-for-word, surely inadvertently—by the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 25, 2025 -
Escape Routes: Miguel Gomes on Grand Tour
At its core the story of a man taking extreme measures to avoid his fiancée, Grand Tour originated when Portuguese director Miguel Gomes read W. Somerset Maugham’s The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930) just before his marriage to co-screenwriter Maureen Fazendeiro. The cast of their previous collaboration, 2021’s The Tsugua Diaries, included the couple, who played variants of themselves in a meta-comedy about trying to direct a movie under COVID lockdown restrictions; Grand Tour is their second, exponentially more ambitious pandemic production. Grand Tour specifically grew from a story told early in Maugham’s Asia travelogue, as the author recounts meeting […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 18, 2025 -
True/False Film Fest 2025: Excavation, Therapy, Protest
Hu Sanshou’s Resurrection premiered at last year’s Taiwan International Documentary Festival; this year, the director was awarded the annual True Vision award at True/False before the first of two showings of this feature. A classically exemplary slab of rigorously conceived Chinese nonfiction, Hu’s fifth feature was executed under the larger auspices of the Folk Memory Project, a group of Chinese films focusing on the Great Famine of 1959-61. Resurrection’s first 15 minutes are giganticist in the vein of Zhao Liang’s Behemoth minus funky distorting lenses, beginning with an extremely gods-eye perspective of a tractor working cliffside, a tinily perceptible human […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 14, 2025 -
“I Love 16mm”: Deniz Eroglu on The Shipwrecked Triptych
When I emailed gallery artist and filmmaker Deniz Eroglu to set up an interview about what I thought was his first feature film, The Shipwrecked Triptych, I asked what past work I should familiarize myself with to prepare. “I made another triptych in 2013,” he wrote back. “Maybe that will suffice?” 2013’s The Bedridden Triptych does indeed contain the embryonic seeds of Eroglu’s first formal feature film: three episodes in a darkly humorous vein, all shot on different formats, offering a kind of cross-section of Denmark, where the filmmaker was then based. The Shipwrecked Triptych turns Eroglu’s attention to Germany—first […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 13, 2025 -
IFFR 2025: Bright Futures (and Others)
Famously and by historical design, the International Film Festival Rotterdam is over-programmed. This is both exciting—look at the number of people exploring cinema’s possibilities against all financial odds!—and counter-productive: many of these movies will surely be mediocre or worse and, even for the most well-informed viewer, largely unknown quantities, so what to prioritize? Flying directly from Salt Lake City to the Netherlands, I couldn’t shake Sundance’s ghost; much of what I watched in IFFR’s first half came from known-to-me American pockets. But I wanted to attend the fest’s entire duration to also do some more far-fetched guesswork viewing while waiting […]
by Vadim Rizov on Feb 14, 2025
