Faces Places
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2017 in Ten Double Features
Why not pair, rather than pit against one another, the great films of a given year? This was the question that led me to reconsider the year-end top-10 list in terms of double features. In 2016 and 2015 I ranked my favorite double features of the year on this very site. I love the double bill for its flexibility. You can pair films based on any connective tissue: style, setting, subject matter, theme, time period, director, star. Viewing and thinking about films this way urges you to consider them anew. What do we think of the suburban woes of Lady […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Jan 3, 2018 -
Top Ten Films Directed/Co-Directed by Women of 2017
Many might see 2017 as a tumultuous year for women in film, but it wasn’t. I see it as the year that women in the industry began the long journey towards ending the tumult, starting with the huge artistic risks they have taken in their work. Each film I chose for this list holds a purely individual voice, each voice starting a conversation about the future of not just women in film but the future of film as a whole. 2017 was only the beginning of hearing our stories, and we have a lot more to say. 10. Kiss and […]
by Donna K on Dec 29, 2017 -
Critic’s Notebook NYFF: Faces Places, The Rape of Recy Taylor, Last Flag Flying
Seventeen years ago, Agnès Varda filmed her own hand in horror. The blotches, the wrinkles, the bulging blue veins: These may as well be the hands of a stranger. “My hair and my hands keep telling me that the end is near,” she says in her 2000 film The Gleaners & I. Despite the forebodings of death in Gleaners and 2008’s The Beaches of Agnès, Agnès is still with us; what a gift it is to have her still around. Varda, now 89, has partnered with French artist JR to co-direct another freewheeling, full-of-life documentary. Faces Places overflows with the […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Oct 4, 2017 -
TIFF Critic’s Notebook 4: 3/4, Faces Places
Ilian Metev’s deliberately small-scale, extremely precise 3/4 puts a trio of non-actors through fictional paces. The family unit: teen classical pianist Mila (Mila Mihova), preparing for an audition that, if all goes well, will let her continue her studies in Germany; oft-annoying younger brother Niki (Nikolay Mashalov); physicist dad Todor (Todor Veltchev). (Mom is unseen: I’m the umpteenth to note that the title is both a time signature and way of noting that three out of four family members are present.) Mila’s stress over this impending potential pivot point in her life is transferred onto father and son, who react in different ways. Niki […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 11, 2017 -
Cannes Dispatch #2: Faces Places, Claire’s Camera, The Square
At some point the past year, Rive Gauche icon Agnès Varda and French photographer JR went on a road trip through rural France documenting whatever locals they encountered and, lucky for us, decided to make a movie about it. The main activity of their excursion involved producing pieces for JR’s ongoing Inside Out project, wherein he takes portraits of the subjects he happens upon (or lets them enter into his van-cum-photobooth to capture their own images), prints them out at a scale somewhere between life-size and mammoth, and then pastes the images onto a building or transportation vessel that is meaningful […]
by Blake Williams on May 22, 2017
