Features
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The New Americans
I have found myself disconcerted in writing about James Gray’s The Immigrant. I was immediately moved by the film and couldn’t fail to appreciate its elegantly controlled cinematic style, but I also felt there was something elusive and hard-to-pin-down about the many levels on which it attempts to address the audience. The film is consistently surprising in how traditional it is in some ways, how unabashed it is in its tenderness toward its characters, the milieu and historical period. Yet the film never succumbs to the twin dangers of stereotypical downbeatness or sugar-coated wish-fulfillment; it has an unusually complex level […]
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You Have To Laugh
The first words of Obvious Child are heard over black. Effervescent stand-up comedian Donna Stern (the pitch-perfect Jenny Slate) appears in flashes, lording over her audience as she addresses the myth of clean underwear in graphic detail. If it wasn’t already apparent from the mere premise of her Sundance breakout, director Gillian Robespierre knows how to make a first impression. A romantic comedy that upends all that the genre holds dear, Obvious Child, based on Robespierre’s 2009 short, is an irreverent, hilarious and touching examination of a woman’s brash misstep and her hesitant navigation through its domino-like ramifications. Impregnated during […]
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Gun Crazy
Revenge is a dish best served cold. That famous proverb has provided the template for many a revenge thriller, as steely protagonists emotionlessly hunt and mow down the enemies that have caused them pain and suffering. With a slight eyebrow raise or lip quiver, ’60s and ’70s icons Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin meted out their justice with a hypnotic intensity. Later, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steven Seagal and Robert Englund (as Freddy Krueger) added touches of black humor in the form of sardonic, post-killing one-liners. But by the early aughts, the revenge thriller would seem to have run its […]
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Eyes Wide Shut
French director Alain Guiraudie’s first feature, the 2003 coming-of-age film No Rest for the Brave, opens in a nondescript bar in a sleepy town where Basile, the agitated protagonist, is recounting a strange dream to his friend Igor. The disturbed young man believes the dream carries a fatal warning: if he falls asleep again, he will die. What follows is a Buñuelian picaresque that is shot in the style of social realism but structured as a series of narrative ruptures creating the filmic equivalent of the surrealist game of exquisite corpse. Guiraudie has, over the past decade, continued to probe […]
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Act Break: Director Denis Villeneuve Talks His “Jaw-Droppingly Weird” Enemy
In his newest film Enemy, French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve immediately springs on us an omnipotent sense of dread. The chiaroscuro-tinged opening — a dynamo dream sequence in a film that feels like one long, unending hallucination — takes us inside an invitation-only sex club, populated by hard-looking, well-dressed men, one of whom is Jake Gyllenhaal. What are they watching? Scantily clad women doing seemingly erotic things that involve tarantulas. Bear with me. Soon we meet a pregnant blonde (Sarah Gadon) who’s waiting at home for her husband. Is it Gyllenhaal whom she’s waiting for? The next time he’s glimpsed, he […]
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I Am A Camera
About halfway through the documentary Tim’s Vermeer, the San Antonio-based inventor Tim Jenison is granted a private viewing of Johannes Vermeer’s “The Music Lesson” at its private exhibition site, Buckingham Palace. The Queen had originally denied Jenison’s request, but after a certain amount of cajoling she relented — although cameras weren’t allowed and Jenison’s collaborators, director Teller and producer Penn, of the anarchic stage magic duo Penn & Teller, were asked to stay behind. Jenison spends one half hour with the painting — the Vermeer work he’s been diligently replicating in his Texas studio — and emerges shaken. As Teller […]
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Observe & Report: Godfrey Reggio, Jon Kane and Trish Govoni on “the Perfected Image” of Visitors
Alternately lulling and urgent, otherworldly and deeply intimate, visionary filmmaker Godfrey Reggio’s Visitors is a film like no other. With its 74 shots — most feature films have hundreds if not thousands — and exquisite black-and-white imagery, it is, as Reggio says, “the odd one in” in today’s multiplex environment. And even with its Philip Glass score — mournful, haunting and one of the composer’s best — it still feels radically different than Reggio and Glass’s previous collaborations, the poetic films comprising the “Qatsi Trilogy.” No less visually seductive than those works, the non-narrative Visitors uses its images — which […]
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Mumbai Masala
The way Ritesh Batra tells it, he used to be not very good at his job. The Indian-born writer/director had studied in the U.S. as an undergrad and ended up working at the financial consulting firm Deloitte, but though he “had a business background of sorts, I was a terrible, terrible consultant,” Batra says. “They call it ‘sitting on the bench,’ when you’re a bad consultant and they don’t want to send you to clients. I quit because I didn’t want to do something I was bad at all my life.” Batra, born and raised in India, had always wanted […]
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The Happiest Place on Earth
The memories of our childhood are owned, their copyrights controlled by giant multinational corporations. Whereas the fantasy figures of the 20th century hail from centuries-old sources — the Brothers Grimm, Greek and Norse mythology — their contemporary incarnations, found on T-shirts, lunchboxes, mugs, iPhones and in video games, constitute precious intellectual treasure, their value diligently upheld by World Trade Organization rulings. Or, to phrase things a bit differently: If you’re an independent filmmaker, make sure your lead actor isn’t wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt you haven’t cleared! Despite the forces aligned against pop culture-deploying media artists in our mash-up, remix […]
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History, Continued
Documentaries are supposed to shine a light on the world, but some tackle subjects that are more pressing and timely than others. Over the course of her career, Egyptian-American director Jehane Noujaim has created films that are prescient to the extreme. Her 2001 debut, Startup.com, co-directed with Chris Hegedus, chronicled the genesis of the govWorks website just as the dotcom bubble burst. Noujaim’s 2004 follow-up, Control Room, focused on the way the ongoing Iraq War was being presented by news channels, particularly the Arabic news network Al Jazeera. Both films had their world premieres at the Sundance Film Festival, using […]
