Sergei Loznitsa’s Austerlitz, a record of tourists visiting the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, could be loglined as a movie about why it’s a transparently bad idea to take selfies at Holocaust sites, but that would be reductive and far too banal a point to need making at feature length. The film is in low-contrast black-and-white, and how could it be in color? The visual language of extant Holocaust footage is B&W, so Loznitsa maintains visual and historical continuity. The opening movement is not that far off from, of all things, In the City of Sylvia, with long shots of tourists milling about in multiple compressed planes the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 11, 2016Matías Piñeiro has been living in NYC for a few years now, so it’s logical he’d eventually make a film set at least partially there. I can’t pretend to a lack of rooting interest: I know, casually or closely, a semi-significant number of people who worked on or acted in this, did a set report (meaning I spent part of the first viewing waiting to see what was actually being said in the shot I saw filmed) and, if you go to a lot of rep cinema in the city, Piñeiro — a serious, inveterate cinephile — is just kind of generally around. Hermia […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 10, 2016When Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama was conspicuously rejected from Cannes, fest director Thierry Frémaux wouldn’t comment on its absence: was he simply currently leery of any images of mass explosions in Paris, or was there something more offensive to the film? Nocturama is to some (arguable) degree a shallow movie with a flippant/trivializing attitude, rejecting the default gravity granted its subject, which means someone will definitely get upset about the film. It’s also a highly recommended, original and (this may seem like the wrong word, but it’s true) fun work. It’s impossible to discuss Nocturama without getting into the split between its first and second half, which shouldn’t count as […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 9, 2016Pablo Larraín really and seriously screws up for the first time with Neruda. Few saw or recall the existence of his debut, 2006’s Fuga, which received a middling response on the festival circuit; I seem to recall interviews around the time of 2008’s amusingly appalling (and vice-versa) reputation-establisher Tony Manero where Larraín said Fuga‘s indifferent reception prompted him to rethink a rather conventional aesthetic and come up with something inescapably different. Each film since his coming-out has, in variously scabrous ways, dealt with Pinochet’s legacy: Manero and Post Mortem taking place at the moment of his coup, the late-’80s-set No a crowdpleasingly cynical comedy re: the political machinations around the dictator’s removal via referendum. Jumping to the present, The […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 8, 2016This first dispatch cheats a bit, as will the next few: there was an embarrassment of riches this year in NYC as far as pre-TIFF/long-lead screenings go, so I started writing up the festival before actually getting there to give myself a head start — today’s dispatch, hitting before the festival technically kicks off, digs into some of the Cannes/Berlin titles that are crammed into marathon competitive P&I slots on day one proper. This is my first year attending TIFF, and as excited as I am to finally be attending, it’s inevitable that doing daily coverage will take its toll. Local color perhaps […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 7, 2016Hell or High Water is a no-nonsense, confidently executed thriller, operating in the same tone and terrain as Rolling Thunder and No Country for Old Men. Two brothers — Toby (Chris Pine) and Tanner (Ben Foster) — pull off a series of bank robberies across Texas, raising money for a purpose revealed halfway through the film. Even before that disclosure, the subtext is firmly on economic dispossession and the role financial institutions play in suckering the small customers they ostensibly service (this may well be the first film in which a reverse mortgage — pace the late Fred Thompson — serves as a major […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 9, 2016In the opening shot of Smithereens, a pair of checkered black-and-white sunglasses dangle in the frame. Self-starter Wren (Susan Berman) swoops in, grabs them from the owner and keeps pushing through the subway station as if nothing’s happened. Wren wants to be in a band, but she doesn’t have any discernible abilities besides her fabulously on-point New Wave fashion sense. When not working a crappy copy store job, she’s going to shows and plastering up Xeroxes of a black and white still of herself all over the city, trying to drum up some kind of attention for herself. She only has eyes […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 28, 2016Christine certainly isn’t a coming-out performance for Rebecca Hall, a prominent and regular presence at the multiplex since her breakthrough part in 2006’s The Prestige. But her turn as Christine Chubbuck in Antonio Campos’s Christine (out this October from The Orchard) is a devastating assault on a part of unusual complexity. Chubbuck was a Sarasota, Florida, TV journalist who shot herself live and on-camera in July 1974. In the absence of much biographical information, Craig Shilowich’s script portrays Chubbuck as a vector of dueling, uncontrollable contradictions. Hall nails a number of different personality conflicts: she’s a sometimes-beloved colleague with loyal […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 25, 2016Philippe Garrel’s Le Révélateur unfolds in obstinate silence. Shot duration is prolonged beyond the point of narrative or reason, and the narrative is oblique in the extreme. There’s a man, a woman and a child in various configurations: in a house, running through fields, separated and together. In extended tracking shots, the woman runs through a dark forest, illuminated by a relentless light that isolates her in high contrast, as if she were fleeing a prison-yard. The thrust of what’s being seen is unclear, and the silence grows oddly confrontational. Now the hour-long 1968 film has a score. Written and […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 25, 2016If you’ve seen a lot of video essays purportedly analyzing the themes, visual motifs etc. of various films, you’ll know that they are, by and large, not very good, simply latching on to famous film titles for an easy traffic layup. Enter Kentucker Audley: director and actor, proprietor of No Budge and the Movies brand. In this inaugural video essay, Audley takes an analytical look at Pleasantville. “It’s a really cool movie, as you probably remember,” he explains, “with cutting-edge cinematography and excellent themes,” nailing the fatuous tone of many an online underperformer. Bonus points for blithely naming the director as […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 25, 2016