Ben Rivers
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TIFF 2025: Mare’s Nest, Blue Moon (Songs about Decline and Obsolescence)
Narratives of decline and obsolescence, frequently as a consequence of unforced errors made by the wealthy and unaccountable (the latter adjective redundant when paired with the former), are going to be a big theme this fall. The global political situation is self-evident; zooming down to the media tier, rumors of imminent firings and general bloodletting are swirling. (Wait for those quarterly reports to come in at the top of October and let the pain begin.) Zooming way down to the relatively parochial level of “one specific film festival,” TIFF was once a global powerhouse and automatic stop for the year’s […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 5, 2025 -
Locarno 2025: A Cinema of Risks
A few black-and-white photos of Locarno’s first editions hung from the walls of the hotel that hosted me there for five days this month. Long before it began to stretch across several venues around town—none more iconic than the Piazza Grande, which every night turns into an 8,000-seat open air theater—the fest originally took place in the garden of Locarno’s Grand Hotel. This is where those pictures were taken. It is August 22, 1946, and they’re watching Giacomo Gentilomo’s My Sun—a crowd-pleaser with which the festival, just relocated from Lugano, opened the first edition in the city it’d be renamed […]
by Leonardo Goi on Aug 21, 2025 -
“What Was I Going to Do, Edit Don DeLillo?”: Ben Rivers on Locarno 2025 Premiere Mare’s Nest
For a film about the end of the world, Mare’s Nest is hardly lugubrious. Then again, you could say the same about Ben Rivers’s entire oeuvre. Few directors who’ve kicked off their careers after the proverbial “end of history” have so assiduously used their cameras to imagine what that might look like; fewer still have pictured the Armageddon as existing somewhere between dystopia and utopia. It can be difficult to tell whether Rivers’s films are post- or pre-apocalyptic, if the solitary figures they often center on—like the old hermit riffing on Darwin’s theories from his dilapidated forest hovel in The […]
by Leonardo Goi on Aug 13, 2025 -
NYFF Critics’ Notebook: The Sky Trembles and The Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes are Not Brothers
The Sky Trembles and The Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes are Not Brothers (you can memorize the title after reciting it enough times — don’t fret) opens with a small fleet of ’80s Mercedes-Benz coupes, trailed by dune buggies, speeding across a desert. A chase scene entered in media res? The armed-escort arrival of dubious capitalists on the trail of some as-yet-underexploited resource? (Is there any more potent symbol of ostensibly removed colonialism’s lingering presence than the unkillable, diesel-fueled Mercedes that still stalk the globe?) As the sun sets and the caravan moves closer, the camera inches from a far-off, locked-down wide lens perspective to closer […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 2, 2015 -
Right Then, Right Now: The Locarno Film Festival 2015
Considering last year’s Locarno Film Festival presented what turned out to be some of the best films of 2014 – Lav Diaz’s From What Is Before, Pedro Costa’s Horse Money, Martín Rejtman’s Two Shots Fired and Matías Piñeiro’s The Princess of France – artistic director Carlo Chatrian had a lot to live up to in his third year of tenure. Unbelievably, when the program of the festival’s 68th edition was announced, the main competition featured an even more impressive selection of auteurs. Though the extremely high expectations weren’t quite met, it was nevertheless an excellent year, and for every disappointment […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Aug 19, 2015 -
Rotterdam at 44, Volume #3: Then There Were Winners
Rotterdam #44 came and went with less fanfare than in the past. The Hivos Tiger Awards, the main competition’s top prizes, were given out to a trio of films Friday night. The winners — Carlos M. Quintela’s German-Cuban-Argentine co-production La Obra Del Siglo, Jakrawal Nilthamrong’s odd and dreamy Thai drama Vanishing Point and Juan Daniel F. Molero’s pomo comedia-tragedia Videophilia (and other Viral Syndromes) — each took home 15,000 euros. All three remain unseen by this critic, as does the FIPRESCI prize winner Battles, by Isabelle Tollenaere, the KNF Award winner Key House Mirror, by Michael Noer, and the IFFR Audience […]
by Brandon Harris on Feb 2, 2015 -
The Top 10 Movies, in Their Own Ways, of 2014
I’m not much for year-end listmaking — the release calendar variables for potential inclusion are pretty limited, so it feels like a pointless exercise in rearranging the same 20 pieces as everybody else, and I’ve probably written about the movies in question enough for the time being by year’s end. It is, nonetheless, the tail end of the season where people put out their lists and justifications, so I’ve laid out ten arbitrary categories that allow me to tout some titles, released in the US in 2014 unless otherwise noted. Best DTV Casualty Few people have reshaped the multiplex landscape as much in […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 12, 2015 -
Cinema Eye Honors Announces 2015 Heterodex Nominees
The Cinema Eye Honors for Nonfiction Filmmaking today announced the five nominees for its annual Cinema Eye Heterodox Award, sponsored by Filmmaker Magazine, a publication of IFP. The Cinema Eye Heterodox Award honors a narrative fiction film that imaginatively incorporates nonfiction strategies, content and/or modes of production. The five films nominated this year for the Cinema Eye Heterodox Award are: Boyhood directed by Richard Linklater Heaven Knows What directed by Josh and Benny Safdie A Spell to Ward off the Darkness directed by Ben Rivers and Ben Russell Stop the Pounding Heart directed by Roberto Minervini Under the Skin directed […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 8, 2014 -
“Is This Line to See the Avant-Garde Show?”: NYFF 2014 Projections
There was an inauspicious start to the New York Film Festival’s inaugural Projections sidebar, a weekend showcase of experimental film and video, which, for 17 years prior as “Views from the Avant-Garde,” had been curated by Mark McElhatten and Gavin Smith. Nearly an hour before the first screening, a long line extended along the exterior glass wall of the Eleanor Bunin Film Center. Having successfully secured my tickets, I scuttled around looking for familiar faces in the crowd. As I began chatting with a friend, an elderly gentleman with a confused expression approached us. “Excuse me. Is this line to […]
by James Hansen on Nov 7, 2014 -
TIFF 2013: Ben Rivers and Ben Russell’s A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
One of the more anticipated films of a very strong Wavelengths section, Ben Rivers and Ben Russell’s A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness unspooled Saturday night to a packed house at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Jackman Hall. A true collaborative effort by two major filmmakers, the feature follows a black guitar player, Robert A.A. Lowe, from a northern Finland commune through a solitary journey across a lake into an isolated wilderness to the climactic scene on a stage in Estonia, where he performs with a black metal band. The film is less of a character study than it is the […]
by Mike S. Ryan on Sep 8, 2013
