Eugene Green
-
Makeovers: The New York Film Festival, Part II
Every film not only tells a story but is a story. Lumping several movies together to find commonality is a perilous pursuit. For example, we have to determine if shared traits operate at the level of content, plot or characters. Or might they be more in the vein of form — style, perhaps, or generic membership? Last week, zeroing in on what I consider the six finest features screening in the first third of the New York Film Festival led me to a marked thematic thread, which we can file under “loneliness and the attempt to escape it.” From the […]
by Howard Feinstein on Oct 7, 2016 -
NYFF ’14: Hill of Freedom and La Sapienza
The same trajectory through similar way stations has served Hong Sang-soo equally well from 2004’s Woman is the Future of Man onwards: ill-fated romantic and sexual encounters between men and women fueled and derailed by epic soju consumption, meetings which repeat with a disconcertingly slight degree of difference across the same locations. From such modest materials, the tone has swerved from potentially inconsequential farce (Like You Know It All, In Another Country) to the recent dourness and cyclical/purgatorial futility of The Day He Arrives, Nobody’s Daughter Haewon and Our Sunhi. For detractors, this reliance upon nearly interchangeable plots is an […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 26, 2014 -
Down in the Boondocs: The NYFF’s Go-To Films (I)
The expansive New York Film Festival is no longer the greatest-hits affair of three decades back when it was built around 20-25 titles, a majority of which were what had been on display at the previous Cannes. The arrangement was a gift and a curse: manageable, for both journalists and completists, but limited. I remember what a production it was when the fest dared to add a lowbrow Hong Kong movie by one Jackie Chan. Now there are lots and lots of strands, which cover a variety of genres and niche audiences — followers of the avant-garde and new technologies, […]
by Howard Feinstein on Sep 26, 2014
