NYFF 2015
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Night Vision: Some Questions Posed by Lois Patiño’s Negative Image Night Without Distance
One of the best films I saw during this year’s NYFF cost nothing to access. Paired with Calum Walter’s (very strong) Terrestrial as part of a free program running on a loop for a day during the Projections weekend, Lois Patiño’s Night Without Distance is a hypnotic 21-minute experiment that immediately gets your attention for a very simple reason: all the images have been negative reversed, creating a whole new patina for what could otherwise be an overfamiliar landscape. The festival film world has seen a surplus of post-Apichatpong forest reveries, to which Night Without Distance restores a sense of mystery: the grass is purple, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Nov 3, 2015 -
“There Is No Thinking of Poverty Without Subjectivity”: Isiah Medina on 88:88
From its opening frames, Isiah Medina’s first feature 88:88 announces itself as a torrential carousel of images and sounds, with one seemingly independent from the next even as they teeter along the same line of questioning. Loosely described as a personal meditation on poverty, friends and family in his hometown of Winnipeg (with scant commonalities to Guy Maddin’s characterization), Medina uses a variety of camera technologies to interrogate a specific situation of young adulthood that nonetheless consumes the viewer in its visceral flashes of intimacy. Filmmaker spoke to Medina about democracy in filmmaking, his concept of the cut, and whether or not he considers his work documentary. 88:88 […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Oct 9, 2015 -
NYFF Critics’ Notebook: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Junun
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to speculate that any director, following his second ambitious, divisive high-profile theatrical underperformer/probable money-loser (or anyone fresh off a recently completed production, really), might generally welcome a chance to get out of town. It’s unclear how far in advance Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood planned to go to Rajasthan to collaborate on an album with Israeli-born, Indian-residing Sufi convert Shye Ben Tzur, or whether Paul Thomas Anderson initially committed to tagging along; regardless, it seems to have been restorative fun. Junun is a 54-minute music doc in which Anderson shoots whatever he wants, however he wants to. There are five credited camera operators, including Anderson […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 8, 2015 -
NYFF ’15: In The Shadow of Women and No Home Movie
Slotting a festival schedule is one of those tasks that falls subject to a number of outside variables, namely, filmmaker and celebrity availability. One would figure that less thought goes into structuring a press and industry schedule, where 10 AM screenings are decidedly void of glamour, and yet the occasional revelatory double feature presents itself, in which two disparate filmmakers appear in dialogue. Case in point: back-to-back screenings of Philippe Garrel’s In the Shadow of Women and Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie proved a joint exercise in obstruction, fostering a shifting interplay between objects and protagonists, despite their very different surroundings. Garrel […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Oct 2, 2015 -
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 -
NYFF ’15: Right Now, Wrong Then and Maggie’s Plan
About three-quarters of the way into Hong Sang-soo’s deja vu diptych Right Now, Wrong Then, the camera zooms in on a pair of women alternately shielding their eyes and ogling a drunken man as he strips before their dinner table. It’s a classic instance of attraction/repulsion, a train wreck one can’t quite turn away from despite knowing exactly where it’s headed. The same could be said for Hong’s latest outing, which is certainly no train wreck, but nevertheless employs a structure that redoubles the film’s first hour from a slightly skewed angle, pushing the reinvention conceit of In Another Country into subtler, more challenging territory, which ultimately begets two variations […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Oct 1, 2015 -
NYFF Critics’ Notebook: De Palma
Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s De Palma is a fans-only interview session with the director. Straightforward, even staid in its construction, it consists almost entirely of two shots of a seated De Palma — one in medium close-up, the other presumably punched-in in post — and appositely illustrative clips and stills. The film currently only has two credits: the opening all-caps title “DE PALMA” scrolling left to right in lurid red, and a closing copyright credit (hard-working editors will, presumably, be thanked at a later date). Interlocutors Baumbach and Paltrow are never heard; according to this useful interview, they never even considered […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 30, 2015 -
NYFF ’15: Laura Poitras, AJ Schnack and Charlotte Cook Talk Field of Vision
Ahead of the official launch of Field of Vision at 1 pm today, co-creators Laura Poitras, AJ Schnack and Charlotte Cook gave an NYFF free talk last night on the brand new documentary unit of The Intercept. The trio spoke at length about their aims within the realm of episodic and short form nonfiction, and how the filmmaker-driven platform will function at the nexus of journalism and documentary. Below are a few highlights. Poitras was inspired to create Field of Vision after working with both The New York Times and Julian Assange. While working on the feature films that constitute her post-9/11 trilogy, Poitras […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Sep 29, 2015 -
NYFF Critics’ Notebook: Carol and The Assassin
At no point in Todd Haynes’ Carol is the word “lesbian” heard — nor “homosexual,” the now-arcane “homophile” or any other period-appropriate descriptor of the LGBTQ spectrum. This is the love that literally dare not speak its name, a conspicuous absence viewers will automatically fill in (especially after seeing dozens of headlines and articles bluntly/reductively identifing the film as a “lesbian drama”). Depending on your POV, this resistance to labeling is either an accurate depiction of period repression, or oddly up-to-the-minute given increased aversion to categorical sexual labels and regular terminological resets. As in Safe, Far From Heaven and Mildred Pierce, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 28, 2015 -
Festen: The New York Film Festival 2015
For the first time in recent memory, it’s extremely difficult to select the top of the crop at this 53rd edition of the New York Film Festival (September 26-October 11), a question of too many contenders. I am not taking into consideration the tentpole films that anchor the festival, or any big studio movies, like Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies. That’s another kettle of fish. Down below I list what I consider the crème de la crème (appropriate phrase, considering the usual Gallic slant) and review those titles briefly. Since they will all have commercial runs, I’ll be reviewing at length […]
by Howard Feinstein on Sep 25, 2015
