2020 was going to be my year of festival-enabled travel. Instead, I went home, the last place I’ve ever wanted to be. This is my year in selected viewing, which begins when my 2020 really did; nothing before March is as vivid or urgent. March A friend generously offers a ride from True/False to Chicago, site of my inadvertently final vacation week; we set out at 7:30 am, breaking for lunch just across the Missouri-Illinois state line at a Steak ’n Shake (good patty melt!). The drive takes slightly over six hours and the conversation will be one of my […]

In his short films, compulsive shooter John Wilson combines a nervous voiceover with impossible amounts of nonfiction footage; the joke often alternates between the unexpected metaphorical/pun juxtaposition of dialogue with shots selected from his vast archives and sometimes nerve-wracking encounters with assorted eccentrics. That seemingly free-form structure, in which Wilson’s voice ties many disparate elements together, was established in shorts with titles like How to Walk to Manhattan and How to Keep Smoking. Now it’s been expanded in the six episodes of the first season of his HBO series, How to With John Wilson. Nathan For You’s Nathan Fielder is an executive producer, and the […]

The original Borat wasn’t really a movie so much as a cultural flashpoint, with Sacha Baron Cohen trolling average Americans into casually revealing their racisms (it doesn’t take much!) in between public provocations, many of which invited the possibility of an ass-beating. Fourteen years later, it’s hard to recapture the charge of that very particular cultural moment and nobody really wants to hear “My wife” ever again, so what are we doing here? Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (full subtitle: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan) is mostly tedious or borderline unwatchable for much of […]

Steve McQueen: now with handheld camera! Lovers Rock is, per its official publicity copy, one of “A Collection of Five Films” about British West Indian life in the ’70s and ’80s drawn from the backgrounds and personal stories of McQueen’s friends and family. This party film is the only one not directly based on a true story but is instead based on collective experience; judging by synopses of the other four, it’s also the lightest thematically. That makes it a good fit for NYFF’s opening night selection (even if no actual opening night party will be following; two of the other films […]

Seven years after Sacro GRA became the first nonfiction feature to win the Golden Lion, Gianfranco Rosi returned to Venice with Notturno. The opening titles succinctly provide context—three years of footage captured adjacent to ISIS-related warfare in Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria and Lebanon—while the first shot immediately re-establishes Rosi’s total ability to sculpt reality: groups of soldiers jogging in laps, separate squads with just enough time between one brigade passing and the next that it’s a visual and sonic surprise every time, the whole unignorably and beautifully color corrected. The shot holds as multiple divisions jog past the camera, their bodies outlining […]

Even without the pandemic, and the attendant pulling of high-market-value films from the festival circuit until it’s over (?), it’s likely Spike Lee’s David Byrne’s American Utopia would have been the opening night film of TIFF 2020. The goal of gala presentations is to sell out expensive seats, and the Q&A combo of Lee and Byrne after a concert movie would have been a surefire bet. A mostly workmanlike rendering of Byrne’s 2019 Broadway show, American Utopia opens with “Here,” one of two songs co-written with Daniel Lopatin from the fairly poky album of the same name—the least familiar selections, five in all, […]

Adapted from Iain Reid’s 2016 novel, Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things returns to familiar preoccupations—solipsistic men and idealized girlfriends, already subjective memory’s decay, aging and death, ambitious futility. From the book Kaufman retains the text of page one (an interior monologue from the unnamed female narrator), some dialogue from the subsequent first chapter and the course of events up to about page 150 (out of 210). Otherwise, the dialogue’s almost entirely been junked before a final act of Kaufman’s own conception, which are both excellent substitutions: the novel has a manifestly underwhelming twist ending and isn’t exactly packed with scintillating exchanges […]

Each FIDMarseille 2020 movie came with a video introduction from the filmmakers, who were given seemingly complete freedom in deciding how, and at what length, to approach this; eschewing the standard-issue speech-to-webcam, Zaho Zay’s had to be the best one. In a living room, a woman (presumably co-director Maéva Ranaïvojaona) paces along to an audio clip from Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? of Jean-Marie Straub ranting about the indissolubility of form and ideology. “Form, form, your infamous form,” he snarls, the woman roughly lip-syncing to a rant she seems to have heard and contemplated many times before. This intro is […]

After Visions du Réel, FIDMarseille is the second festival this year I’ve never had a chance to physically attend that I can now at least virtually explore. Compared with VdR’s capacious slate and wide variety of nonfiction approaches, FIDMarseille (now no longer a strictly nonfiction festival) has a reputation for defaulting on the side of formal severity, with zero time for crowd-pleasing softer fare to balance it out. That reputation is in line with what I’ve sampled so far. (Note, too, that there was a physical, in-person edition of FIDMarseille. The United States could never.) I started with Chilean director […]

Low on the list of “unexpected things in the last two months that wouldn’t have occurred under pre-pandemic circumstances” but still notable: Rachel Handler publishing a long interview on Vulture with Cameron Crowe about Vanilla Sky. This is an infamously unloved movie, the beginning of Crowe’s decadent phase when he (unjustly) became something of a punchline, and regardless any retrospective defense/look back would logically happen next December, in time for the 20th anniversary. The current prompt, of course, is the eerie opening of Tom Cruise running through a totally empty Times Square, which, as they say, hits different now: “We were […]