Authors — Vadim Rizov
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Sundance 2018 Critic’s Notebook, Day 1: Our New President, Three Identical Strangers
Two things shape my Sundance coverage this year — one purely personal, the other macro. The personal was recently reading Christian Metz’s Film Language, the kind of text normally consumed in undergrad cinema studies (not my major) but belatedly a worthwhile book all the same; I wanted some new tools to think about movies, and this fit the bill. The opening essays are recognizably Barthes-ian contemplations of i.e. what makes the moving image more plausible than a still image and the middle gets mired in a lot of precise definitions of paradigmatic vs. syntagmatic, but the finale is a surprisingly fiery, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 19, 2018 -
NYFCC Awards and an Alternate Top 10 of 2017
Attending the New York Film Critics Circle awards dinner when you’re a) not a NYFCC member b) have no interest in awards season is an interesting proposition. Theoretically awards season spans just half a year, kicking off with the Telluride Film Festival and concluding with the Academy Awards, but there’s an argument to be made that it’s now a 14-month affair. Awards season begins in January, with Sundance and attendant coverage with headlines reading “Here’s your first best picture nominee of the year,” temporarily goes into hibernation while the previous year’s awards season wraps up, resumes with fevered speculation at […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 9, 2018 -
Watch: Tiffany Haddish’s 18-Minute NYFCC Acceptance Speech
The incontestable highlight of last night’s NYFCC awards dinner was Tiffany Haddish’s acceptance speech for best supporting actress in Girls Trip. An 18-minute set in all but name, punctuated by strategic refueling sips, it was epically uncontained; the best historical record we have is this video from Buzzfeed’s Alison Willmore.
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 4, 2018 -
A Spoiler-Free Review of Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: Episode VIII — The Last Jedi
When The Force Awakens came out, I was totally fine with it; judging by IRL/online post-screening reactions, Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi is going to be broadly received as definitely better, possibly great. (That’s the “objective” opinion fanboy types say they’re looking for when angrily commenting on reviews disparaging their favorite properties.) Meanwhile, I had a strange experience, asking myself throughout why I wasn’t having a better time. Making a new Star Wars film is both hard (big production, managing continuity within the greater franchise universe, executing coherent and hopefully exciting action sequences) and not: almost everyone showing up will have some […]
by Vadim Rizov on Dec 12, 2017 -
Is Twin Peaks Season Three a Movie or a TV Show? Well…
I’m always up for an endless debate that paralyzes my Twitter feed into repetitive stasis for 12+ hours at a time, and accordingly braced for one last night upon seeing that Twin Peaks: The Return had landed at number two on Sight & Sound‘s annual year-end poll. (Minutes after I published this, it popped up at number one on Cahiers du Cinema‘s list as well.) Pedantic disputes about Category Fraud — i.e., if a performance is lead or supporting for awards purposes — have never been my favorite, and I can’t imagine a topic to get less exercised about than whether a TV […]
by Vadim Rizov on Dec 5, 2017 -
Stephen Cone on Princess Cyd, George Cukor and the Bisexual Cowboys of Brokeback Mountain
In brief—this interview is long as is—Stephen Cone’s new feature Princess Cyd begins with what’s almost a feint: a phone call to 911 reporting trouble next door and a potentially helpless young girl, heard before we actually see now-grown protagonist Cyd (Jessie Pinnick) on the soccer field. 16-year-old Cyd comes to Chicago to spend some time away from her father, crashing with her writer aunt Miranda (Rebecca Spence). They’re opposites: Cyd’s all body and bluntly atheist, Miranda is cerebral and Christian. The question of what happened to Cyd fades away over the course of a seemingly low-key movie in which Cyd […]
by Vadim Rizov on Nov 2, 2017 -
NYFF 2017: Mindhunter (Episodes 1-2), Good Streamable Chronological Narrative Content
The first two episodes of Netflix’s Mindhunter, directed by David Fincher, are slightly stylistically diluted but still distinctively his. Fincher also directed the last two episodes of the ten-episode first season, which has already been renewed for a second prior to dropping this Friday — whether I make it to his bookending episodes I have no idea, but fans should at least take a look at this starting point. “Peak TV,” or at least the limited-run series, has increasingly accommodated one director who wants to do it all: this year has seen airings of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope, Jean-Marc Vallée’s Big Little […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 12, 2017 -
NYFF 2017: Let the Sunshine In
At Cannes, Claire Denis’s Let the Sunshine In (subtitled Bright Sunshine In on the DCP) premiered to many nonplussed reactions. By some considerable measure her talkiest film, Sunshine tracks a painter, Isabelle (Juliette Binoche), as she slams straight from one romantic dalliance into another. That is, effectively, the entire plot: there are a few scenes that do not involve men, but in general the film marches inexorably and restlessly through a series of failed partnerships. The dance and sex scenes are very familiar — Denis still gets defamiliarizingly close to skins and heads — but the rest is not, necessarily. Denis has […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2017 -
NYFF 2017: Hong/Garrel/Hong
NYFF’s second week of press screenings were scheduled in such an apropos way: over 36 hours, you could watch two Hong Sang-soo films sandwiched around Philippe Garrel’s latest. Two of my absolute favorite working filmmakers, they share at least two important traits: creating an illusion of verisimilitude so strong it’s near-impossible to catch anyone onscreen “acting,” and an obsessive return to the same super-straight-male preoccupations, with the Venn diagram decidedly overlapping at infidelity. (Claire Denis is a big fan of both, and her Let the Sunshine In acts as an unexpected companion piece to the films discussed here; more on […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 2, 2017 -
NYFF 2017: Last Flag Flying
Until relatively recently, Richard Linklater’s hopscotching across genres and budgetary tiers had him generally pegged as an unpredictable magpie whose next move would never be clear; now, certain circles of online discourse have him basically pegged as the alpha male celebrator of white patriarchy (I did my song and dance on this a while ago, no reprise necessary). Setting aside those pejoratively-described constants, I think it’s true that starting with Before Midnight (the exact pivot point is arguable) the mandatory elements of A Film By Richard Linklater have become pretty fixed (put another way, I certainly don’t expect faithful filmings of mediocre plays […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 28, 2017
