Full disclosure: I consider the industrious Robert Greene a friend, but that makes me no less cautious in deeming his new film Actress a big deal. This collaborative psychodrama follows and subjectively sculpts his friend/neighbor Brandy Burre’s attempt to simultaneously separate from her longtime boyfriend and return to the acting world she left for suburban motherhood. (Greene’s written for Filmmaker about deciding to premiere his fourth feature at this year’s True/False.) Burre is introduced in a bright red dress standing before a kitchen sink, moving in ambiguously charged slow-mo. Is it true that, as she muses, “I tend to break […]

Halfway through, it’s too early to take the overall temperature of True/False 2014 in its 11th year (my fifth attending, each year with the hotel paid; full disclosure). All smooth so far, though it’s early going, so let’s forego atmospherics at this point and jump into one of the festival’s world premieres, Approaching The Elephant. (“Thanks for everyone being here for basically the highlight of my life,” director Amanda Rose Wilder said in her introduction.) The subject is “free schools”: further left on the continuum than Montessori, and (at least as practiced by the subject school’s founder Alex Khost) an […]

Fyodor Bondarchuk’s father Sergei made the 1967 War And Peace, a famously profligate Soviet production with thousands of army soldiers as extras and the biggest budget in the USSR’s history. His son came up through music videos and advertisements, making a splash with 2005’s Afghan War drama The 9th Company. The lavish Stalingrad was shot in two parts, as much as possible in 3D; if nothing else, it’ll go down in a sub-section of film history as Russia’s first IMAX film. It’s a tremendously odd film, the kind of overtly nationalistic take on the WWII battle you’d expect from an […]

A substantial majority of the New York Film Festival slate is traditionally reserved for established auteurs and big-buzz festival titles. It might be better for adventurous film culture if NYFF and Cannes were to ditch the ballast of already established directors in favor of new and uncharted terrain, but that’s simply never going to happen and to protest otherwise is an unrealistic waste of time. (For those in the press corps, it’s also fun to bang through a dozen of the Year’s Most Important Releases in rapid sequence.) The U.S. premiere of Steve McQueen’s much-praised 12 Years A Slave may have […]

The New York Film Festival’s most exciting offerings are often those deemed “undistributable” and unlikely to make a return visit soon, with Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs this year’s standard-bearer. By 2009’s Face, Tsai seemed in an increasingly droll mood, embracing slow-burn physical comedy for its own sake; Stray Dogs — his first feature since — strips out nearly all levity under digital’s harsh glare. An early daylight shot of an isolated rural area is representatively demanding/rewarding, initially nearly swallowed by a dense cluster of skinny trees, whose semi-open circle hedges in a cave-like darkness lit by floating motes slowly identifiable […]

“I really want to say that we are all connected,” Jia Zhangke said Monday night. “This is our issue.” If that makes his latest film, A Touch Of Sin, sound like some sort of Chinese Crash redux, it’s just a quirk of phrasing: the connection Zhangke’s thinking of is an epidemic of violence in China, which he describes as a response of the economically dispossessed trying to reclaim some form of dignity. Viewed as isolated actions, the four violent incidents dramatized in A Touch Of Sin might seem like singular occurrences; stitched together, they’re obviously connected symptoms of Chinese society […]

As the last stop on the fall festival circuit affecting awards season hysteria and odds, the New York Film Festival tends to draw most of its coverage for already-in-discussion main slate titles. This year there were a record 36 films in that section, with the expanded number seemingly designed to include more crowdpleasing filler (Richard Curtis’ About Time) and Hollywood titles that can serve as reliable draws (Nebraska, Inside Llewyn Davis). That’s not to say the festival’s 51st installment doesn’t still serve as a festival-of-festivals cross-section of notable recent titles of the hard sell type, but more of them than […]

There’s no lack of films and TV shows focusing on Mexican-American relationships mediated by the border, their focus most commonly on the never-ending drug wars. On TV, The Bridge and Breaking Bad criss-cross between the two countries, mapping out mayhem and violence, as do recent documentaries like 2010’s El Sicario, Room 164, 2011’s El Velador and this year’s Narco Cultura. 2013 “25 New Face” Rodrigo Reyes’ Purgatorio is a different kind of border movie, beginning with footage of rural Mexico as the director urges us, in voiceover, to “try to imagine what the world was like, many, many years ago. Try to […]

A Hijacking, Tobias Lindholm’s first feature as a solo director (his first film, 2010’s prison drama R, was co-directed with Michael Noer) begins before its title event, with cargo ship cook Mikkel (Pilou Asbæk) calling home to his wife, and it ends after it’s all over. But the bulk of the film is a two-setting procedural, radiating verisimilitude both on-board and in the corporate offices, where a CEO (Søren Malling) personally conducts negotiations with hijackers. During an interview with Filmmaker, Lindholm spoke about the production in all its preparatory and practical aspects. Filmmaker: When I heard the sound of the […]

Ben Wheatley first gained attention with a nine-second video clip that went viral in the pre-YouTube era. In “Cunning Stunt,” a man successfully jumps over a moving car, celebrates, and is instantly wiped out by an unseen oncoming vehicle. It’s a funny, jolting gag restaged in Wheatley’s 2009 feature debut Down Terrace (a sick-funny look at a homicidal low-tier-criminal family bumping off everyone in their immediate circle). Death by vehicular homicide again makes for the first death in his latest film Sightseers. Chris (Steve Oram) just wants to take his girlfriend Tina (Alice Lowe) on a relaxing rural trip through […]