It’s customary, when diving into a series of festival dispatches, to include some prefatory, contextualizing stuff up top, which has always been tough for me. This year, though, reality has made it easy: by having me arrive at Sundance a day late thanks to Air Force Two speeding Trump off to the inauguration, and in Canada in the form of a border security official, one officer Nicoara. I’d remembered last year that Canadian customs is a little more severe than you’d expect: I think I answered about five minutes’ worth of questions about anything and everything relating to my TIFF […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 8, 2017In its first half, the Competition of the 72nd Venice Film Festival has been a let-down, failing to present a single truly great title. The Orizzonti and Out of Competition selections have generally proved a safer bet, and of course the excellent Venice Classics program, which so far included screenings of restored masterpieces by the likes of Fellini, Melville and Hou Hsiao-hsien, has been a reliable and most welcome morale boost whenever necessary. Following Birdman and Gravity in the last two years, the festival extended its string of star-studded, big-spectacle openers with Baltasar Kormákur’s Everest, a fictionalization of an infamous 1996 commercial […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Sep 8, 2015