A long-in-the-works passion project, Terence Davies’ adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel Sunset Song follows Chris (Agyness Deyn), a Scottish farmer’s daughter whose marriage to Ewen Tavendale (Kevin Guthrie) collides straight into the early days of World War I. There are familiar Davies visual and thematic motifs throughout — the film’s first part tracks Chris’ hellish family life under the tyrannical reign of another bad father (Peter Mullan), a wedding sequence has group sing-alongs, and a sweeping crane shot of a muddy WWI battlefield is a textbook example of his penchant for camera movement as primary narrative propellant. In the days before […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 12, 2016With Donald Trump’s path to the Republican presidential nomination cleared, it’s a good time to take a look at this short documentary of a Trump rally. The place is St. Louis, MO, the date was March 11, and everybody on the ground got profane and (rhetorically) punchy very fast; it’s bracingly bleak stuff. Director Alexandra Watkins is one of Robert Greene’s students at the University of Missouri’s documentary journalism program.
by Vadim Rizov on May 4, 2016To lean on my Sundance write-up to summarize Kate Plays Christine: “Sarasota TV journalist Christine Chubbuck shot herself live on-air in 1974 and died 14 hours later. The suicide footage exists on one two-inch tape, which is inaccessibly locked up in the vault of the former president of the Florida station (now part of ABC) Chubbuck worked at, so there are shades of Grizzly Man in Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine. The premise is that Kate Lyn Sheil’s preparing to play Chubbuck in a movie that will conclude with a recreation of the suicide, and the climactic question is whether the actress can go through with it. Scenes from this ostensible […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 26, 2016In several ways, Love & Friendship has Whit Stillman coming full circle to his 1990 debut Metropolitan, which includes a heated discussion of Jane Austen’s merits. “I love anachronism, and this was the chance to film, essentially, a costume picture set in the present day or recent past,” he told Betsy Sussler in a 1991 BOMB interview. With this Ireland-shot adaptation of Jane Austen’s comparatively obscure epistolary novella Lady Susan, he finally discards the husk of the present, indulging his sentiment expressed on Twitter last summer that “The 18th century just keeps getting better & better.” The puckish opening introduces […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 21, 2016Before going to meet Ryan Krivoshey — the founder and, for the moment, sole employee of new distributor Grasshopper Film — I emailed a friend who works in distribution to ask what questions he would ask if he were picking Krivoshey’s brain. “HOW DOES HE MAKE MONEY?” he wrote back in emphatic all-caps. A fair question when you look at Grasshopper’s ambitious slate of first releases, which kicked off with Asghar Farhadi’s previously unreleased 2006 film Fireworks Wednesday. That’s a comparatively viable commercial proposition, given Farhadi’s high profile as the director of A Separation and relative audience friendliness. What’s coming […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 21, 2016In their impressively fleet debut All This Panic, the personal/professional partnership of Jenny Gage (director) and Tom Betterton (DP) train their gaze on a group of teenage girls growing up in Brooklyn. Tracking Lina, Ginger, Dusty and Delia as they transition from 16 to 19 (with older and younger outliers), the film unfolds in a 79-minute blast, articulately speeding through years of teen not-quite-turmoil. Impressively locked in, edited for speed and emotional impact, and exponentially more complex than most depictions of contemporary teen girls in either fiction or non-fiction filmmaking, All This Panic is an empathetic rush translating their experiences into something […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 18, 2016Last year, David Byrne — capable of developing a deep enthusiasm for and knowledge of seemingly anything — held four concerts at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. Ten color guard troops from across the country performed routines to songs written just for them by ten artists; performance highlights include Byrne himself, St. Vincent and Tuneyards. The Ross brothers’ Contemporary Color is a documentary of this unusual performance that refuses to just be a concert movie. The film regularly skips away from the arena altogether, lurking backstage with waiting performers or cutting back to individual performers seen, in dreamy almost-flashbacks, in their hometowns. Performances themselves are […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 14, 2016Announced this morning, this year’s Cannes slate brings forth the expected pack of established masters in Competition, with some unexpected outliers sprinkled in per usual (Brillante Mendoza!). You’ll want to turn to David Hudson for a thorough annotation of everything known about these films to date. (Annual gender equity note: three out of 20 films in competition are directed by women.) A special congratulations to overachiever Jim Jarmusch for having two titles at Cannes: the Adam Driver drama (?) Paterson in Competition, and Gimme Anger, a documentary on The Stooges. Opener Cafe Society (Woody Allen) Competition Aquarius (Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil) American Honey (Andrea […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 14, 2016Robert Johnson, Jr. and Diane Carson’s Other People’s Footage: Copyright & Fair Use is a documentary about exactly what its title says it’s about. Per the film’s website, the doc features “illustrative examples from nonfiction, fiction, and experimental films that use pre-existing footage, music and sound from other individuals’ creations,” while drawing upon a solid roster of lawyers, archival producers and other specialists in this often-muddy field. In this clip, the late Haskell Wexler discusses his strategy in using a Coors commercial in his documentary Who Needs Sleep?, followed by some interesting insights on the strategies used by 20 Feet from Stardom and Bowling for Columbine. […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 13, 2016Bad news first: Happy Hour is pretty much a must-see. Given the option of watching 5+ hours on a weekend afternoon, I suspect most of us would rather not, but there are things it’s worth blowing your day up for. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s 317-minute drama is a mysterious movie that begins as one kind of straightforward film before mutating into something much stranger — discussing it thoroughly without spoiling it is tough. I’ll try. Happy Hour initially presents itself as something like a shomin-geki, a term Wikipedia snippily notes is a “pseudo-Japanese word invented by Western film scholars”; Donald Richie defined it as “the drama about common people […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 25, 2016