Authors — Vadim Rizov
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“A real sense of intimacy”: Anthony Chen on Ilo Ilo
Anthony Chen has been promoting Ilo Ilo for 10 months and isn’t finished yet: after the UK release in May, a year’s worth of constant interviews and promotional travel may finally be over. Launched at Cannes, Ilo Ilo garnered the Camera d’Or for best first film; a little over three months later, it opened at home in Singapore and became the country’s highest-grossing film of the year. That’s an unusual feat for an emotionally harsh family drama in the arthouse vein. “In Singapore we make about ten films a year,” Chen explained over Skype. “Nine out of ten are usually […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 4, 2014 -
Short Film: Luiz Stockler’s Montenegro
Meet Luiz Stockler, a promising animator who’s recently graduated from the Royal College of Art. Born in Brazil, raised in Wales and now a London resident, this is his second RCA project; his first, 2012’s Home, played at Slamdance in 2012. Just under 1:30, that was a mildly stroboscopic freakout on the topic of domesticity. You can view it here (NSFW warning: contains line drawing breasts and genitalia). It’s got a definite early Don Hertzfeldt vibe, which is expanded in the much more ambitious Montenegro to include that animator’s increasing melancholy as channeled through a very British sense of humor. […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 27, 2014 -
Rendez-Vous With French Cinema 2014: Age Of Panic and Others
Let’s start with the most urgent recommendation and work down: out of the eight films I sampled from this year’s installment of Lincoln Center’s self-explanatorily-titled annual series “Rendez-vous with French Cinema,” Justine Triet’s currently undistributed Age Of Panic is the big must-see. That (English only) title’s no joke: Triet’s first feature builds on her documentary background, embedding a palpitation-inducing family drama within the real street gatherings and celebrations on the day of François Hollande’s election to presidential office. TV reporter Laetitia (Laetitia Dosch) has to cover the man-on-the-street reactions on Rue de Solférino; babysitter (Marc-Antoine Vaugeois) is forced to join […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 8, 2014 -
True/False Diary 2: Actress, Killing Time, Boyhood
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 […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 5, 2014 -
True/False Diary 1: Approaching The Elephant, Demonstration, Sacro GRA
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 […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 1, 2014 -
“I Wanted to Live in That World From Morning to Evening”: Fyodor Bondarchuk on Stalingrad
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 […]
by Vadim Rizov on Feb 27, 2014 -
NYFF Critic’s Notebook: 12 Years A Slave, Blue Is The Warmest Color, Like Father, Like Son
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 […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 17, 2013 -
NYFF Critics Notebook: Stray Dogs, Bastards, Redemption
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 […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 9, 2013 -
“I Don’t Have to Pick Up a Gun, I Can Just Pick Up a Camera:” Jia Zhangke on A Touch Of Sin
“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 […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 3, 2013 -
NYFF Critics Notebook: Manakamana, What Now? Remind Me, Norte, The End Of History
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 […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 26, 2013
