This is my third time rounding up the previous year’s US theatrical releases shot in 35mm, and this year’s number is substantively lower than 2014 (39) and 2015 (~64). This seems like an anomaly, not a permanent trend: following the high-profile push by J.J. Abrams et al. to force studios to pony up for a certain amount of Kodak celluloid for the forseeable future, the company seems solvent enough (and they’re bringing back Ektachrome!). Some celluloid regulars (Spielberg, Nolan, Abrams, Tarantino) sat the year out, while Woody Allen jumped to digital, and there are fewer straggler releases that were completed three […]
by Vadim Rizov on Feb 22, 2017The joke between me and my Sundance roommate/colleague was that every review and write-up would contain the phrase “In the age of Trump.” Another phrase to watch out for is “now more than ever,” spoken verbatim twice during this year’s Sundance acceptance speeches. The proposition that independent film will “lead the resistance” against Our 45th President is a dubious one: I don’t remember The Lucky Ones or In the Valley of Elah helping anything in particular. The repeated invocation of certain dead phrases to summon up a spell against the darkness inevitably and a bit boringly brings to mind Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” […]
by Vadim Rizov on Feb 2, 2017Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats is a logical companion piece to It Felt Like Love. The latter focused on a teen girl whose hellbent determination on losing her virginity ASAP placed her at peril amid a world of the worst possible dudes; here, we have a teen guy coming to terms with his probable queerness in an antagonistically heteronormative milieu. The story’s simple enough: already staggering under the weight of his extremely ill father, dying slowly in the living room, Frankie (Harris Dickinson) cruises webcam sites at night, surreptitiously seeking out hook-ups. “I don’t know what I like,” he tells those who ask […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 26, 2017One of my least favorite ways to describe a movie is as a “meditation on” love/time/memory/death/etc. (It’s always some heavy abstract thing, never, say, “a meditation on Doritos.”) I guess Michael Almereyda is on the same page, per his introduction to this morning’s screening of Marjorie Prime. “It’s been described as a meditation,” he cracked. “I hope it’s not. It’s a movie.” Specifically, it’s a heavily modified adaptation of Jordan Harrison’s play, customized to fit the ever-adventurous Almereyda’s tastes and frames of reference. The premise is both simple and tricky: in the future, your deceased loved ones can be brought back […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 24, 2017Columbus certainly doesn’t look like a standard American independent film: even if you didn’t know debuting director kogonada’s background as a video essayist primarily concerned with High Art (Bresson, Tarkovsky et al.), it’s clear this is made by somebody who’s studied the framing of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang et al. quite closely. No matter how mundane the setting — average small downtown streets, a drab university library — kogonada and DP Elisha Christian stick to the visual philosophy espoused by architecture-obsessed protagonist Casey (Haley Lu Richardson) as she annotates one building’s properties, noting how it’s “asymmetrical but also still balanced.” I […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 23, 2017Antonio Santini and Dan Sickles’ Dina is incredibly hard to write about without exposing my underlying biases. Shot by DP Adam Uhl in almost entirely rigorously locked-down static 1.66 (!), Dina tracks the uneasily evolving relationship between its title subject and fiance Scott in the months up to and after their wedding. (She’s the main subject, he the supporting player: the end credits cutely add his name to the title.) Both are, by their own admission and diagnosis, somewhere on the spectrum — where precisely is unclear, as it so often is — and in something like love. The major issue, which becomes increasingly […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 22, 2017For a few weeks now I’ve been preemptively writing bad ledes for Sundance write-ups/reviews in my head. Such as: “In the age of Trump, do independent films matter? Yes — now perhaps more than ever.” “Can independent film lead the resistance? It can, and it must.” “The spectacle of the Sundance Film Festival sits strangely against the much more lavish pageantry of the Trump inauguration, let me frame every single write-up through this lens.” “Can documentaries make an impact in the post-truth era?” And so on and so on, quite satisfactorily, with the illusion of topicality thinly sustained. If you […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 21, 2017In Eduardo Williams’s shorts and, now, his debut feature The Human Surge, packs of young men and women wander without purpose but still with great persistence around the globe. 2012’s The Sound of the Stars Dazes Me and 2011’s Could See a Puma, were shot at home in Buenos Aires, 2013’s That I’m Falling? in Sierra Leone and 2014’s I Forgot! in Vietnam. Logically building on this peripatetic tendency, Surge moves from Argentina to Mozambique to the Philippines in three discrete but linked segments. No matter where the characters are, there’s often a basic MO: young people trekking reluctantly to […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 18, 2017When Steve Cossman founded Mono No Aware 10 years ago, he was literally the entire organization. Operating out of his apartment, Cossman — who’d attended Albright College and had just returned from a two-year program at Prague’s FAMU film school — wanted to engage with and assist the expanded cinema community. “Expanded cinema” goes far beyond traditional notions of the avant-garde: Cossman cites a recent piece by Julie Dumas as a good example of the kind of work his organization supports, in which RGB lasers pointed at a single surface created a piercing white light. “There were two buckets with […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 18, 2017Last week Sundance released its competition, NEXT and New Frontier slates; today, we have the premieres, midnight, kids, spotlight and special events slates. Highlights of what’s below include new films from Miguel Arteta, Andrew Dosunmu, Ry Russo-Young, Luca Guadagnino, Michael Almereyda and Dee Rees, as well the directorial debut of Sicario/Hell or High Water screenwriter Taylor Sheridan. PREMIERES Beatriz at Dinner / U.S.A. (Director: Miguel Arteta, Screenwriter: Mike White) — Beatriz, an immigrant from a poor town in Mexico, has drawn on her innate kindness to build a career as a health practitioner. Doug Strutt is a cutthroat, self-satisfied billionaire. When these […]
by Vadim Rizov on Dec 5, 2016