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Defending Your Life, The Producers and Spaceballs: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
The best film by America’s greatest comic filmmaker arrives on Blu-ray this week in the form of Criterion’s release of Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life. Some Brooks partisans might argue on behalf of the more acidic and self-flagellating Modern Romance or the more influential Real Life (and if you caught me on certain days I could probably be convinced that Mother is as great a movie as anyone has ever made), but Defending Your Life is the director’s most philosophically dense, emotionally satisfying, and conceptually ambitious comedy, an inquiry into the meaning of existence as serious as Tree of Life […]
by Jim Hemphill on Apr 2, 2021 -
“The Script Had to be Drunk — Drunk Alongside the Characters”: Director Thomas Vinterberg on Balancing Humor and Sadness In His Unexpectedly Life-Affirming Another Round
A besotted cinematic sub-genre consists of films about drinking — liquor, bars and the imbiber’s life. Whether the lives portrayed are rowdy and boisterous ones, or, as is often the case, destructively out-of-control, these films — ranging from Days of Wine and Roses and The Lost Weekend to Leaving Las Vegas — usually map their character arcs alongside their characters’ physical and social deterioration; they wind up as cautionary tales. A recent film that took a different approach is the Ross Brothers’s hybrid documentary, Bloody Noses Empty Pockets, which captured the woozy exuberance of one intoxicated day/night while not eliding […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 31, 2021 -
“I’ve Always Been Very Frustrated with Sports Films”: Julien Faraut on The Witches of the Orient, Learning from Chris Marker and Volleyball Anime
In his extraordinary portrait of American tennis champ John McEnroe, In the Realm of Perfection (2018), French filmmaker Julien Faraut engineered a hypnotizing meditation on the intersection between sports, performance and the creation of images—not at all the conventional retread of history one might expect from anything with the “sports movie” label. In his latest, The Witches of the Orient, Faraut returns to the arena of athletic competition in similarly idiosyncratic fashion, profiling the women of Japan’s most famous volleyball team. Made up of former textile workers, team “Nichibo Kaizuka” nabbed gold at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and inspired a […]
by Beatrice Loayza on Mar 31, 2021 -
True/False Film Fest Announces 2021 Lineup
True/False Film Fest has announced its 2021 lineup. On the programming side, this year’s edition is notable for the return of festival co-founder David Wilson in an interim director position, as well as the addition of new programmer Angela Catalano, joining returning programmer Amir George. The festival will take place in two different parts from May 5 to 9. For those in Columbia, Missouri, all the features listed below will be screening outside, in four outdoor amphitheaters well as at a drive-in; those who sign up for the festival’s new, virtual “Teleported” option have access to seven features, designated with […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Mar 30, 2021 -
Back to One, Episode 148: Billy Magnussen
Billy Magnussen is a Tony nominated actor who you know from Game Night, Into The Woods, Ingrid Goes West and Maniac. On this episode, he talks about the foundational benefits of his early stint on a soap opera, the importance of showing up for your career, his fondness for Cristin Milioti, his co-star on the wonderful new HBO Max series Made for Love (with stories of pestering her mercilessly when they both performed on Broadway in theaters next door to each other), and he makes an impassioned plea for the celebration of NEW works in the theater. Plus much more! […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Mar 30, 2021 -
SXSW Critic’s Notebook: The Feast, Gaia, The Spine of Night, Swan Song
William Burroughs’ explained the title of his 1959 masterpiece Naked Lunch as “a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” Director Lee Haven Jones appears to share the Beat novelist’s intention in his feature film debut (after a decade of UK television), The Feast. The Welsh-language shocker serves up a stomach-churning bounty of visceral delights and/or dread in its deliberate 90 minutes, as it builds to a jaw-dropping third act – steadily foreshadowed throughout the preceding course (er, courses) of events. Yet another entry in the resurgence of the folk horror genre, the film […]
by Steve Dollar on Mar 26, 2021 -
“The Only Similarity Between My Film and Brecht’s Play Lies in the Title”: Sabrina Zhao on The Good Woman of Sichuan
“This is neither an adaptation nor a work of fiction,” an intertitle informs the viewers after five minutes of uninterrupted observation of the rural landscape through the window of a passing train. “Only the quoted lines from The Good Person of Szechwan are supposed to be fictitious.” Sabrina Zhao’s directorial debut The Good Woman of Sichuan is upfront when it comes to disclosing its hybrid nature—between documentary and fiction, the film borrows the little plot there is from Bertolt Brecht’s play The Good Person of Szechwan. Or does it really? After the first disorienting encounter with the film’s seemingly disjointed […]
by Ren Scateni on Mar 26, 2021 -
World of Wong Kar Wai, The Ten Commandments, Southland Tales and More: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
The Criterion Collection adds another indispensable boxed set to its library with this month’s release of World of Wong Kar Wai, a package of seven essential features, all restored and remastered and accompanied by an abundance of interviews, deleted scenes, and alternate endings. Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love have been released by Criterion before, but the remaining five films – As Tears Go By, Days of Being Wild, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, and 2046 – are new to the label and presented here in vastly superior presentations to prior U.S. home video releases. The early films are […]
by Jim Hemphill on Mar 26, 2021 -
SXSW Critic’s Notebook: Poly Styrene: I am a Cliché, Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes, Disintegration Loops, J’ai Été Au Bal
I’ll never forget the first time I heard Poly Styrene. I was in college, hanging out at a buddy’s one evening. We were drinking beer, smoking pot and playing records. One of them was something new, a document of the current London punk-rock scene: Live at the Roxy London WC2, featuring now-legendary acts like Wire and the Buzzcocks. The songs were by turns arty or aggro, surging out of a mix that felt submerged in an ambient murk. And then this teenager’s voice cut through. Over the curdled notes of Lora Logic’s saxophone, drums clamor and the song explodes. “Bind […]
by Steve Dollar on Mar 23, 2021 -
Back to One, Episode 147: Lily Rabe
Lily Rabe is probably best know for inhabiting a half-dozen characters over many seasons on Ryan Murphy’s hugely popular American Horror Story series, and recently her supporting performance in The Undoing had a lot of people talking, but in New York City, she’s theater royalty. I pinpoint my first encounter with her greatness. It was as Portia in The Merchant of Venice for Shakespeare in the Park. The court scene. She details the lengths director Daniel Sullivan went to avoid rehearsing that scene, and the miraculous occurrence when they finally did. She talks about being an “over-packer” when it comes […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Mar 23, 2021
