I’m not much for year-end listmaking — the release calendar variables for potential inclusion are pretty limited, so it feels like a pointless exercise in rearranging the same 20 pieces as everybody else, and I’ve probably written about the movies in question enough for the time being by year’s end. It is, nonetheless, the tail end of the season where people put out their lists and justifications, so I’ve laid out ten arbitrary categories that allow me to tout some titles, released in the US in 2014 unless otherwise noted. Best DTV Casualty Few people have reshaped the multiplex landscape as much in […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 12, 2015“Even when you’re falling in love with somebody, even when you’re having a beautiful kiss that you’ll remember for the rest of your life, something could still be terribly wrong.” That’s Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha, Computer Chess) in this brief video teasing his fifth feature Results, which premieres later this month at the Sundance Film Festival. We still don’t have all that much detail on Bujalski’s first film to feature honest to goodness name actors: Guy Pearce and Cobie Smulders topline, with Anthony Michael Hall and Giovanni Ribisi also part of the improbable cast. We know it’s a drama about gyms, working out, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 9, 2015Kicking off with a dose of Skrillex and Spring Breakers, Kevin B. Lee’s latest supercut rounds up the best films of the decade thus far. The ranking was determined on the fairly informal basis of an all-are-welcome Twitter solicitation. I voted and am bitterly disappointed, though I guess not all that surprised, to see Computer Chess didn’t make it into the top 25. The most pleasantly unexpected inclusion is Kenneth Lonergan’s much-postponed, completely wonderful and nearly buried Margaret at #5. The Tree of Life — the closest thing we have this half-complete decade to a consensus milestone in film history — tops the list. For the full of list […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 9, 2015Short and sweet: in this brief clip from a 1983 CBC interview, David Bowie — who turns 68 today — talks about wanting to be an actor and his “pretensions” of wanting to direct. “The inherent problem of being a rock star who wants to be a legitimate act or legitimate anything else, I think, is that the parts are restricted from the beginning,” he said, noting he’d been confined to a run of “green-eyed, out of space, rock-playing freaks.” That year, Bowie had a hit record with Let’s Dance and a very different kind of role in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence; five years […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 8, 2015The emphasis in this edited series of highlights from David Fincher’s recent BFI talk is, refreshingly, more on the actors than on his much-dissected, formidable technical acumen. One key takeaway from this brisk trot through his career is Fincher’s take on his infamous penchant for endless takes. “My philosophy is, you spend $250,000 on a set,” he explains. “Put it on a soundstage, it costs you $5,000 a day. You’re gonna put $8,000 of lights and you’re gonna bring a $150,000 crew in. You’re gonna bring actors in from all over the world, you’re gonna put them up in hotels, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 8, 2015You may remember this one: six years ago, Nailed, David O. Russell’s proposed follow-up to I Heart Huckabees, had massive financing problems. The would-be political satire about a waitress (Jessica Biel) who gets a nail to the head was ultimately scrapped and lain aside. In the meantime, the once-galvanizing director embarked on his Huckabees‘ apology tour, going from the not-bad The Fighter to the increasingly dispiriting (but renumerative) The Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. Now whatever footage was shot (it’s unclear, though the Internet says crucial plot parts were never filmed) has been cobbled into some kind of grotesque thing that walks the earth, with […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 6, 2015When Andrey Zvyagintsev brought Elena — his corrosively apocalyptic attack on the Russian oligarchy— to Cannes in 2011, he was alternately direct and evasive about its pessimistic national diagnosis. One interviewer was informed Zvyagintsev had considered calling the film Invasion of the Barbarians, but was another was told that focusing on class issues was missing the larger moral point. Much has changed in three years, and in interviews Zvyagintsev has been adamant that his fourth feature isn’t exactly what it appears to be — i.e., another head-on broadside against different segments of Russia’s ruling class. Leviathan can be unreductively considered a direct continuation/extension of Elena‘s line of argument, not least in again […]
by Vadim Rizov on Dec 25, 2014As a parable of solidarity, Two Days is programmatic and predictable in a way that’s new to the Dardenne brothers, and not in a good way; as a streamlined narrative, it’s impeccably crafted. The straight-up chase scene dropped into 2005’s L’enfant — a potential audition for a rote action film should they ever feel so inclined — indicated Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne’s handheld, ever-impassioned kineticism was reaching new levels of sheer technical proficiency. Two Days, One Night presents the dilemma of Sandra (Marion Cotillard) — fired from her solar panel factory job, ostensibly so the plant can remain competitive on a playing field leveled by Chinese labor. It’s clear […]
by Vadim Rizov on Dec 22, 2014You may recall that a decade ago, the ever-independent-minded Caveh Zahedi (A Little Stiff, I Am a Sex Addict) tried to launch a series, “Tripping with Caveh,” in which he and a guest would take hallucinogens and enjoy themselves. That didn’t pan out, for reasons Zahedi explains in this essay, so now he’s launched a lower-stakes version. You can get stoned with Caveh or not, and in this first installment Girls regular/Red Flag director Alex Karpovsky chooses to indulge. Not without a little prodding: “OK, so I’m gonna start getting stoned,” Zahedi says up top. “Maybe I’ll just wait a […]
by Vadim Rizov on Dec 22, 2014The trailer for Terrence Malick’s next film, Knight of Cups, is both what you’d expect at this point — musing voiceovers, aggressively prowling cameras in constant motion, people on the beach — and some new developments, like much more flesh on display, aggressively digital cinematography and seemingly way more time spent in urban centers than usual.
by Vadim Rizov on Dec 15, 2014