New York Film Festival 2017
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Color, Crews and Shooting Digitally: Ed Lachman and Vittorio Storaro at NYFF 2017
One of the highlights of the 55th New York Film Festival was the Master Class with Vittorio Storaro and Ed Lachman. Hosted by Kent Jones, the 90-minute presentation covered a wide range of subjects and also included key clips from the work of the two great cinematographers. Storaro and Lachman have been friends for over 40 years. Lachman claims that he was Storaro’s first American fan, after seeing both The Spider’s Stratagem and The Conformist at the 1970 NYFF. He subsequently worked with Storaro on Luna, when the Italian DP began shooting American movies but had not yet secured a […]
by Jamie Stuart on Oct 13, 2017 -
NYFF 2017: Mindhunter (Episodes 1-2), Good Streamable Chronological Narrative Content
The first two episodes of Netflix’s Mindhunter, directed by David Fincher, are slightly stylistically diluted but still distinctively his. Fincher also directed the last two episodes of the ten-episode first season, which has already been renewed for a second prior to dropping this Friday — whether I make it to his bookending episodes I have no idea, but fans should at least take a look at this starting point. “Peak TV,” or at least the limited-run series, has increasingly accommodated one director who wants to do it all: this year has seen airings of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope, Jean-Marc Vallée’s Big Little […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 12, 2017 -
NYFF 2017: Let the Sunshine In
At Cannes, Claire Denis’s Let the Sunshine In (subtitled Bright Sunshine In on the DCP) premiered to many nonplussed reactions. By some considerable measure her talkiest film, Sunshine tracks a painter, Isabelle (Juliette Binoche), as she slams straight from one romantic dalliance into another. That is, effectively, the entire plot: there are a few scenes that do not involve men, but in general the film marches inexorably and restlessly through a series of failed partnerships. The dance and sex scenes are very familiar — Denis still gets defamiliarizingly close to skins and heads — but the rest is not, necessarily. Denis has […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2017 -
Five Questions for First Reformed Director Paul Schrader
Paul Schrader returns to form with a deeply introspective film, First Reformed, which, following screenings in Venice, Telluride and Toronto, screens tonight at the New York Film Festival, where it was a late addition to the program. The writer of films including Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and director of films including American Gigolo and Affliction delivers a new work that both contains echoes of his previous pictures depicting “God’s Lonely Men” while also being quite unlike anything he’s ever done. (Plus, argues Vadim Rizov, something of a treatise on the role of Slow Cinema today.) Ethan Hawke stars as a former […]
by Ariston Anderson on Oct 6, 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 -
NYFF 2017: Hong/Garrel/Hong
NYFF’s second week of press screenings were scheduled in such an apropos way: over 36 hours, you could watch two Hong Sang-soo films sandwiched around Philippe Garrel’s latest. Two of my absolute favorite working filmmakers, they share at least two important traits: creating an illusion of verisimilitude so strong it’s near-impossible to catch anyone onscreen “acting,” and an obsessive return to the same super-straight-male preoccupations, with the Venn diagram decidedly overlapping at infidelity. (Claire Denis is a big fan of both, and her Let the Sunshine In acts as an unexpected companion piece to the films discussed here; more on […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 2, 2017 -
“Women Were Afraid to Speak Up — That’s What Made Recy Taylor So Important”: Director Nancy Buirski on The Rape of Recy Taylor
Recy Taylor walked home from church on a warm September night. A 24-year-old black woman in Abbeville, Alabama, a sharecropper and mother, Recy was the most religious member of her family and regularly went to church by herself. A full house awaited her at home: her siblings, her father, her husband, and her daughter Joyce. The year was 1944. On her way home, a group of seven white boys abducted Recy and forced her into the nearby woods. The young men gang-raped her at gunpoint. One month later, an all-white, all-male jury refused to indict any of these men. The […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Sep 29, 2017 -
Ten Films and a Retrospective to Catch at the 55th New York Film Festival
Filmmaker‘s usual “films we’re anticipating” preview — opinions gleaned from early buzz or just pure enthusiasm — doesn’t work for the New York Film Festival. Always a collection of the best films from the prior months’ festival circuit, with a few world premieres thrown in, this year finds the latter — outside of the opening (Rick Linklater’s Last Flag Flying, reviewed here) and closing nights — in shorter supply. (The pluses and minuses of the festival’s curatorial approach receive a solid debate over at Indiewire morning.) That means we’ve seen a large swatch of this year’s selection, and the below […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 28, 2017 -
NYFF 2017: Last Flag Flying
Until relatively recently, Richard Linklater’s hopscotching across genres and budgetary tiers had him generally pegged as an unpredictable magpie whose next move would never be clear; now, certain circles of online discourse have him basically pegged as the alpha male celebrator of white patriarchy (I did my song and dance on this a while ago, no reprise necessary). Setting aside those pejoratively-described constants, I think it’s true that starting with Before Midnight (the exact pivot point is arguable) the mandatory elements of A Film By Richard Linklater have become pretty fixed (put another way, I certainly don’t expect faithful filmings of mediocre plays […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 28, 2017
