Argentinian director Matías Piñeiro’s last three films have started from a Shakespearean source text: As You Like It for Rosalinda, Twelfth Night for Viola, Love’s Labour’s Lost in The Princess of France. In all these structurally playful and formally rigorous works, troupes of actors are working on new productions, and the films are given further continuity by a recurring ensemble cast and crew including actress Augustina Muñoz and d.p. Fernando Lockett. In Piñeiro’s newest production, Hermia & Helena, a young woman (Muñoz) comes to New York on a fellowship for a new Spanish translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, though […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 28, 2015Andrew Bujalski’s first three features — Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation and Beeswax — were all more or less of a piece: illusorily casual 16mm portraits of young people in ambiguously comfortable stasis in, respectively, Boston, Brooklyn and Austin. Computer Chess, released in 2013, was a total UFO both in relation to his work and in relation to just about everything else. Film was out, but instead of clean digital, Bujalski shot on three 1969 SONY AVC-3260 cameras, its unfamiliar type of black-and-white grain making even denser a complicated comedy about a computer chess conference happening sometime in the late […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 28, 2015Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s feature debut, 2011’s Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, examined the life and legacy of the legendary fashion photographer. The filmmaker was the granddaughter-in-law of her subject, and the film established Vreeland’s acumen in reconstructing the life stories of complex, powerful women. That applies to her new subject, Peggy Guggenheim, from whose candid memoirs the subtitle Art Addict was drawn. Almost as well known for her numerous relationships, sexual and otherwise, with many of the key creative figures of her time, Guggenheim’s story is reconsidered in this documentary. The film premiered last night at the Tribeca Film Festival; […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 21, 2015It’s here, it’s unavoidable, and it won’t tell you much unless you want to see how Harrison Ford and Chewbacca are looking these days. It’s the second trailer for J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens, which will open December 18, and it’s just fine.
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 16, 2015Below you’ll find the as-of-now lineup for the Cannes Film Festival, which takes this play this year from May 13 to 24. A few notes: there will be more titles added to competition soon (fingers crossed for the new Apichatpong Weerasethakul), and this isn’t the full extent of the festival. Next week will see the announcement of the Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week sections, and there are other less prominent parts of the festival (such as the ACID sidebar) that also have yet to be unveiled. A special shout-out to Roberto Minervini, whose excellent Stop the Pounding Heart debuted at Cannes […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 16, 2015Lincoln Center’s keenly anticipated “Art of the Real” series on boundary-pushing contemporary documentaries kicks off tonight with a shorts program which includes a new short film by Eduardo Williams. To whet your appetite, I highly recommend watching his remarkable 2011 short Could See a Puma, which appears to be his second film. I couldn’t possibly improve on the IMDB synopsis: “The accident leads a group of young boys from the high roofs of their neighborhood, passing through its destruction, to the deepest of the earth.” This is bold, formally adventurous filmmaking that really seems to be something new — if […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 10, 2015Jauja courts enigmatic status, but this much can be safely established: Danish officer Captain Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen) is with his daughter Ingeborg (Viilbjork Mallin Agger) in 19th-century Patagonia for unspecified military purposes. She’s a bit of a mystic, announcing “I love the desert. I love how it fills me.” “I beg your pardon?” sputters nonplussed, over-protective dad, put off both by her love of inhospitable terrain and sexual language. Ingeborg promptly runs off with a young officer and Dinesen follows, his would-be rescue made more dangerous by repeatedly coming close to Zuluaga — once a Danish officer, now something like a Red […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 20, 2015There’s a lengthy sequence, something like the climax of Jacques Rivette’s 1969 L’Amour fou, when increasingly at-odds actress Claire (Bulle Ogier) and theater director boyfriend Sebastien (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) go on a manic destructive binge in their apartment, alternating sex with the decimation of their physical space, at one point tearing off the wallpaper and breaking down the wall to their neighbors’ apartment. This frenzy lasts for a considerable amount of time until Claire announces “That’s enough” — and just like that, a mutually toxic relationship hits its terminus. The delicate walls comprising the sets of Jessica Hausner’s Amour Fou — covered with ornate, thin […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 18, 2015This video by Jacob T. Swinney is exactly what it sounds like: the first and last shots from 55 films paired side by side in splitscreen. There are obviously deliberate parallels (Rosamund Pike, before and after the discovery of Amazing Amy’s true nature in Gone Girl), color scheme parallels indicative of overall palette obsessiveness (Her), and shots which have no real connection but which trigger a lot of memories of the films involved. The music, regrettably, is from Thomas Newman’s American Beauty score.
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 18, 2015For once my favorite movie of True/False 2015 was an honest-to-goodness crowdpleaser, a counterintuitively funny film on a grim topic. Claudine Bories and Patrice Chagnard had the earned gumption to title their film Rules of the Game; in French it’s distinguished from Renoir’s film by the first word being Les rather than La, but that distinction doesn’t translate. It’s not just a cutely attention-getting appropriation: Renoir’s film anatomizes unspoken codes of conduct for French high society which, if observed, should successfully conceal hypocrisies and personal betrayals. Bories and Chagnard’s reworked title refers to clothing, eye contact, portfolio neatness and other job interview variables that — rather than work ethic and qualifications […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 17, 2015