Authors — Vadim Rizov
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TIFF Critic’s Notebook 2: Nocturama, A Decent Woman, The Red Turtle
When 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, 2016 -
TIFF Critic’s Notebook 1: Neruda, Toni Erdmann, Julieta
Pablo 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, 2016 -
TIFF Critic’s Notebook 0: The Salesman, Aquarius, Things to Come, Elle
This 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, 2016 -
“It’s Quite a Scary Responsibility, Making a Film”: David Mackenzie on Hell or High Water
Hell 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, 2016 -
Susan Seidelman on Smithereens, Fashion Influences and the Early Days of Public Access TV
In 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, 2016 -
Parting Shot: Rebecca Hall
Christine 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, 2016 -
Out of Great Silence
Philippe 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, 2016 -
Watch: The Video Essay to End All Video Essays, On “Excellent Themes” in Pleasantville
If 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 -
Symphonies and Singin’ In the Rain: Terence Davies on Sunset Song
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, 2016 -
Watch: Trump Rally, St. Louis, 3/11/16
With 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, 2016
