Authors — Vadim Rizov
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Helicopter Parent: Cristian Mungiu on Graduation
Cristian Mungiu’s feature debut, 2002’s Occident, was an accomplished exercise in the then-fashionable mode of multiple narratives, which slowly overlap and converge, but it wasn’t until 2007’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days that he received significant international attention. Building on the style established by his contemporary, Cristi Puiu, in 2005’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (as well as using Puiu’s DP Oleg Mutu), Mungiu crafted an intense portrait of a woman trying to get a proscribed abortion in the waning days of Ceaușescu’s Romania. The film won the Palme d’Or, solidifying the rise of the Romanian New Wave. […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 13, 2017 -
Four on the Floor: The Quad Cinema Returns
Six years ago or so, when I was still a struggling freelance critic, a trip to NYC’s Quad Cinema was something to anticipate with dread. The theater had recently dipped its toe into four-walled exhibition, and much of what was on tap were films that should not have existed, the results of dumb money being thrown at terrible documentaries and even worse narratives. When the Quad closed in May 2015, it felt more like a mercy killing than anything else; its reopening this April starts a new, brighter chapter. The theater’s history as an institution of NYC filmgoing started in […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 13, 2017 -
Personal Shopper: Assayas, Garrel, Truffaut, Godard, Lagerfeld and the Anxiety of Economic Influence
It only dawned on me last week — midway through four consecutive days spent at Lincoln Center’s Jean-Pierre Léaud retrospective — that Olivier Assayas and Philippe Garrel are essentially contemporaries. This isn’t obvious if you look at their filmographies: Garrel made his first short in 1964 (when he was all of 16!) and his first feature three years later. Assayas didn’t make his first short until 1979 and his first feature until 1986; looking at those dates, they’d appear to be filmmakers from different generations, even if at least somewhat temperamentally aligned in their backgrounds (both began as painters). Garrel was born in 1948, Assayas in 1955, and […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 3, 2017 -
SXSW 2017: Lauren Wolkstein and Christopher Radcliff on The Strange Ones
Expanded from their 2011 short, Lauren Wolkstein and Christopher Radcliff’s The Strange Ones starts with a house fire. A young boy (James Freedson-Jackson) stands paralyzed in front of it, and next we see him on the road with someone (claiming to be?) his older brother (Alex Pettyfer). Over the course of a long, strange road trip, we slowly put together some (but definitely not all) the pieces of a story of sexual assault and two people on the run from the law. Motels, diners and farms are among the upstate New York locations. The impressively assured, enticingly semi-enigmatic film had its premiere Saturday morning […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 14, 2017 -
True/False 2017 Critic’s Notebook 1: Resistance and Futility
This was my eighth (!) year attending the True/False Film Fest, and the first during which I wasn’t in a continuously 100% optimal mood — not the festival’s fault, attributable instead to the foul ambient fug emanating from the White House. I’ve written about my skepticism/aversion towards the “now more than ever art must lead the resistance” school of thought and was in no mood for any such films; instead, I was jolted by a series of works about the frequent futility of such practices. Carmine Grimaldi and Deniz Tortum’s half-hour If Only There Were Peace is a documentary about making a narrative film, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 8, 2017 -
~29 Movies Shot on 35mm Released In 2016
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, 2017 -
Anti-Art Criticism, “In the Age of Trump”
The 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, 2017 -
Sundance Dispatch 5: Beach Rats, Menashe
Eliza 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, 2017 -
Sundance Dispatch 4: Marjorie Prime, The Force, 78/52
One 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, 2017 -
Sundance Dispatch 3: Columbus, Golden Exits
Columbus 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, 2017
