Authors — Vadim Rizov
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Tokyo International Film Festival 2024: Dementia, Optimism and Béla Tarr
I was delighted to be invited to the Tokyo International Film Festival, which came with the particularly desirable bonus of being elsewhere during the US election cycle’s final days. Taking into account the time difference on my date of return, I hoped an election-night nailbiter would let me fly back in unperturbed ignorance, but… The route back flew over the international date line; the metaphorical obviousness of literally going backwards in time to the States was too hamhanded for my taste, albeit appropriately overstated in keeping with the bludgeoning that’s about to occur. Before that hammer fell, the city more […]
by Vadim Rizov on Nov 15, 2024 -
Tokyo International Film Festival 2024: Tsuta Tetsuichiro on Black Ox
Telling the story of a small, subsistence farming mountain community whose few remaining members keep drifting away to nearby cities, Tsuta Tetsuichiro’s second feature, 2013’s The Tale of Iya, drew upon his background growing up in rural Japan. “I was actually born near there,” he explained. “As I observed the lifestyle of the people of Iya, the idea came to me naturally to make a film set there.” After shooting his first feature on 16mm film in black-and-white, Tetsuichiro upgraded to 35m color for Iya, whose physicality throughout the seasons overwhelms with brutally immersive snowstorms and epic mountain panoramas. For his […]
by Vadim Rizov on Nov 7, 2024 -
NYFF 2024: The Brutalist
Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist took seven years to realize, a process he understandably seems to have found traumatic—both the film and interviews he’s given about it are about how financiers are monsters. Per Corbet, The Brutalist “was made for under $10 million. But I still need millions of dollars. That’s very complicated because it means I often have to interface with people with whom I don’t share the same ethics and morals.” Process is text: Anyone who’s ever worked for an equally oblivious and imperious rich person, one whose underlings can only work out how their near-impossible plan of action […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 27, 2024 -
TIFF 2024: The Gesuidouz, Sad Jokes, The Future
A standard festival story: I had plans to see a particular film at the end of TIFF 2024 day one, but my schedule had to be hastily rearranged, I had time to kill and thought I might as well see a movie I was kind of curious about. So there I sat at the P&I screening of Kenichi Ugana’s Midnight Madness world premiere The Gesuidouz, sandwiched between two independent theater bookers having a catch-up. The man on my left started reeling off every anime he’d programmed for the last two months and would be showing for the foreseeable future; the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 13, 2024 -
TIFF 2024: Cloud, The End
Waiting for Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud to start, I wondered how much time I’d spent over the years watching his signature warehouses, offices and apartments. The man loves a purpose-built soundstage set, the drabber the better but counterintuitively showcased under unrepentantly artificial lighting—one rung down from “Lynchian” in terms of overt ominousness but similarly ready to radiate menace. Those sets’ simplicity offsets his films’ often elevated eccentricity levels, though by Kurosawa’s standards Cloud is comparatively sedate insofar as it has a fully explicable plot: Online reseller Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) offloads one too many shoddy knockoff goods, attracting the ire of […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 11, 2024 -
TIFF 2024: Lázaro at Night, Hard Truths
Bell and Bulgari are gone as sponsors, but Listerine is one of 37 new ones at TIFF 2024. This year, the defining image of the fest’s early days has been the 95-milliliter bottles of Listerine Total Care (Mild Mint) neatly arrayed on mini-shelves next to the sinks in the washrooms of the festival’s Lightbox headquarters. There, the walls are branded with mock-movie poster key art for “Listerine: The Movie,” with a bottle of that pink liquid sandwiched between five-star laurels for “Refreshing Plot Twist” and “Breath of Fresh Air.” An employee stocking those bottles estimated that over a thousand are […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 9, 2024 -
“Cinema Forever” (?): Locarno Film Festival 2024
The biggest headline of the 77th Locarno Film Festival wasn’t a movie but a man: Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Khan, who attended to receive a career achievement award as a reminder (none is needed) of the role red carpet celebrity plays in drawing money and attention to festivals which can then, aspirationally, redirect both towards smaller title. But even as the whole idea of “cinema” requires increasingly vigilant caretaking, those festivals themselves are nearly all in financial trouble. When I got this job at Filmmaker a decade ago, companies who’d invested a lot of time and money in VR were […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 19, 2024 -
“Massive Decisions Can Be Made In the Mix”: Composer Anna Meredith on Her Film Score Career
In 2012, Scottish composer Anna Meredith released her first non-classical-music recording, Black Prince Fury, a four-track EP opening with what immediately became her signature tune: “Nautilus,” a ferociously escalating blast of brass running arpeggios up and down at increasingly overwhelming volume. It’s at once visceral and programmatic, applying classical discipline to an earth-shaking instrumental in a mission statement that also opened Meredith’s first full-length album, 2016’s Varmints. In an interview with The Guardian’s Laura Snapes at the time, Meredith was insightful about the economics of choosing to move from the realm of classical music, where she wrote work paid for […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 9, 2024 -
Cannes 2024: Caught by the Tides, Misericordie, Grand Tour
Like Jia Zhangke’s Ash is Purest White, Caught by the Tides is a multi-decade triptych beginning in the early aughts and ending in the present, its past emerging from a sort of video diary practice he maintained up through 2006’s Still Life. As he explains, “I got my first digital video camera in 2001. I took it to Datong in Shanxi back then and shot tons of material. It was all completely hit-and-miss. I shot people I saw in factories, bus stations, on buses, in ballrooms, saunas, karaoke bars, all kinds of places.” There are numerous other similarities with 2018’s […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 29, 2024 -
Cannes 2024: Oh, Canada and The Shrouds
For decades, Paul Schrader’s taste in cinema has been widely known, particularly the Bressonian proclivities he’s repeatedly worked over—and, especially since becoming a Facebook poster, he’s provided an open invitation to make his problems ours as well. Watching Oh, Canada knowing of his recent health scares, my guess was that the topical draw of Russell Banks’s source novel Foregone was death; indeed, after several hospitalizations for long COVID, Schrader told himself, “If I’m going to make a film about death, I’d better hurry up.” Thus Oh, Canada, which reteams Schrader with his American Gigolo star Richard Gere (the writer-director jokes […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 24, 2024
