Authors — Vadim Rizov
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Trailer Watch: Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens
It’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, 2015 -
Cannes Announces 2015 Competition Lineup
Below 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, 2015 -
Watch: Eduardo Williams’ Remarkable Short Could See a Puma
Lincoln 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, 2015 -
Not Without My Daughter: Jauja
Jauja 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, 2015 -
We Won’t Grow Old Together: Amour Fou
There’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, 2015 -
Watch: 55 Films’ First and Final Shots Side by Side
This 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, 2015 -
True/False 2015: Rules of the Game, Spartacus & Cassandra and I Am The People
For 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 -
Wealth and The Game: Five Miscellaneous Observations on The Jinx
Like a lot of people, I’ve been hypnotized the past few weeks by Andrew Jarecki’s six-part HBO miniseries The Jinx. I’m not a TV writer, and I didn’t take notes while watching. These are five stand-alone observations in the interest of sharing in collective fascination with the series. NB: this is nothing but spoilers. 1. It’s completely germane that Andrew Jarecki (Princeton alum, father of a successful businessman, Moviefone co-founder) comes from money — his is surely the only family in America with the means to produce three documentary filmmaker siblings in the same generation. This privileged perspective has bitten […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 16, 2015 -
Watch: Breaking Down A Hard Day’s Night Opening Sequence
Simple and effective: Kevin B. Lee breaks down the opening credits sequence of A Hard Day’s Night into four separate editorial strands. The main two are the “Beatles cam” trained on the running band and the “fan cam” following their screaming admirers; runners up are the “milk cam” (a guy eating in front of a milk ad) and the “Paul cam” (Paul in fake facial hair disguise, sitting out the pursuit). Each segment is timed with stopwatch precision, with all four parts arranged in a quadrant formation reminiscent of a security system, suggesting the surveillance that comes with celebrity. Very neat.
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 16, 2015 -
True/False 2015 Shorts: Former Models, The Woolworths Choir of 1979, My Gal, Rosemarie and Abandoned Goods
Outside the avant-garde world, shorts are rarely granted extended critical writing — it’s hard to justify the expense of covering these hardest-to-see of items, confined as they often are to festivals and specialized screenings, so it’s up to salaried editors like me to step up when possible. (Making this my first piece about True/False 2015 may be straining to make the point, but I can live with that.) Case in point: Benjamin Pearson’s Former Models has been in circuation since 2012, but written information besides the broad outline is hard to find. In part, that’s due to the short’s sheer density: […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 12, 2015
