Bastards
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Bastards — A Hammer To Nail Review
(Bastards is being released theatrically on Wednesday, October 23, 2013 and on iTunes and VOD two days later, through Sundance Selects. It world premiered at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.) Arguably the most muscular of contemporary cineastes, Claire Denis engineers some of the richest filmic experiences that viewers can treat themselves to — or punish themselves with. Denis’ work contains soothing and unsettling multitudes, but for the sake of making heads or tails of her latest feature, Bastards, let’s posit that throughout her career she has generally alternated between two modes: one is mellow, sensual, drift-like and attuned to the […]
by Dan Sullivan on Oct 23, 2013 -
“Only At the End You Can See the Origin of Tragedy…. So I Used a Small Camera”: Claire Denis on Bastards
Over 25 years of directing films, Claire Denis has explored the silent rhythms of men and women as they move through spaces of romance and violence, attraction and solitude in stories that range from the love affairs of cannibals (Trouble Every Day), to the exercises of the French Foreign legion (Beau Travail), to the every day spaces of domesticity (35 Shots of Rum). A filmmaker who prefers monologue to dialogue, and silence to any speech at all, her intimate spaces, impressionistic photography, and oblique scenarios can divide audiences, but provide untold riches for those willing to forgo plot devices and […]
by David Barker on Oct 23, 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
