Roman Polanski
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Watch: What if Béla Tarr Made Polanski’s Repulsion?
“Inside every narrative film is a non-narrative film struggling to get out.” Here is a wonderfully distinctive video essay from critics Adrian Martin and Christina Álvarez López that reimagines Roman Polanski’s Repulsion as the work of Béla Tarr. Zeroing in on “the dank spaces and the dead moments, the images of food-as-object, the cycle of everyday activities, the endless, implacable passages of walking,” and other Tarr associated imagery, Martin and López explore filmmaking as elementary particles, tonally rearrangeable in line with a director’s vision and story. In a supplementary write-up at MUBI, the two cite Jonathan Rosenbaum’s review of The Tenant, wherein […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jan 12, 2015 -
Watch: Roman Polanski on Making Rosemary’s Baby
Got 47 minutes? Good, because you’ll want to watch this documentary from the Criterion Collection about the making of Roman Polanski’s rightly beloved Rosemary’s Baby. Present and accounted for are producer Robert Evans, with his legendary voice still intact, star Mia Farrow and Polanski himself, who recounts how Evans got in touch with him to consider directing Downhill Racer (which became Michael Ritchie’s feature debut) and sent over that script and a galley of Rosemary’s Baby, which the producer asked him to look at first. While the director initially thought it was a “kitchen melodrama for television,” Polanski got sucked […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 23, 2014 -
What the Olympics and Nazis Can Teach Us About Woody Allen and Women Directors
One friend on Facebook mentioned that offering an opinion on the Woody Allen scandal is like sticking your head into a turboprop plane on takeoff. That’s nothing — I say we might as well stick our collective heads into an Airbus A380 jet engine by throwing into the discussion the Olympics, Nazis, the scarcity of women directors and the Hollywood Blacklist. Let’s bring on the awkward! You see, last July, Entertainment Weekly — arguably the only national popular magazine devoted in large part to film coverage and criticism — did a list of their “All-Time Greatest Movies.” To be sure, […]
by Dan Mirvish on Feb 23, 2014 -
Cannes 2013: Polanski’s Venus in Fur and Katrin Gebbe’s Tore Tanzt
My last day in Cannes brought about a number of mixed emotions: relief that the somewhat grueling schedule of waking up for early morning press screenings was coming to an end, disappointment that my time at the festival was over (and that I was shut out of the afternoon screening of Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, bringing unceremonious closure to my festival experience), and excitement that I have had the experience of attending a festival like Cannes where there is so much energy devoted to the idea of cinema. Two of the last films I saw at the festival, […]
by Chuck Tryon on May 25, 2013 -
POLANSKI / PRADA
As Jeff Wells noted, this stuff “pays the bills,” but if you’re Roman Polanski there have to be worse ways to spend your time than making little movies with the likes of Ben Kingsley, Helena Bonham Carter, Ronald Harwood, Alexandre Desplat, Dean Tavoularis and Eduardo Serra…
by Nick Dawson on May 24, 2012 -
2011 ZURICH FILM FESTIVAL
A few years back, the Zurich Film Festival burst onto the map, but for all the wrong reasons. In 2009, Roman Polanski, en route to the festival to receive a lifetime achievement award, was apprehended shortly after landing on Swiss soil. He was never extradited to the United States to stand trial for his mid ’70s sexual escapades with the then underaged Samatha Geimer in Jack Nicholson’s Hollywood Hills home, and now he’s free, having returned for the seventh edition of Zurich’s increasingly important film festival. He screened his “film memoir,” which I simply loathed for its canned, staged quality, […]
by Brandon Harris on Dec 16, 2011 -
WHEN IN ZURICH, PRINT THE LEGEND: ON “ROMAN POLANSKI: A FILM MEMOIR”
Succumbing to the most numbing of documentary aesthetics, Laurent Bouzereau’s Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir had its “secret” world premiere at the Zurich Film Festival Tuesday night. Aftering being hyped as a groundbreaking work of filmic autobiography, what unspooled in this most expensive of European cities consisted mainly of footage shot by longtime Polanski friend and former producer Andrew Braunsberg, who convinced Polanski to spend 20 hours talking with him in Polanski’s Gstaad estate during his house arrest following his apprehension at Zurich’s ambitious young festival a few years ago. The film’s cumulative effect is rather enervating given its fascinating subject, […]
by Brandon Harris on Sep 29, 2011 -
“ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED” co-writer-director, Marina Zenovich
I wish I’d had a 10 percent better understanding and insight into the case when I started the movie. I say that because this has been the most complicated and difficult film I’ve ever made. The story was legally complex and took place 30 years ago. I am not a lawyer. Although my father was a politician and a judge, I do not know the inner workings of the DA’s office or how lawyers and judges behave or bargain with one another. What’s more, there were only a limited number of people I could talk to. These people were not […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 16, 2008 -
SUGAR HIGH
If you’re strolling through New York’s Chelsea neighborhood this weekend, you can stop for a bit and check out one of the more interesting films from last year’s Sundance Film Festival — in a gallery, not a theater. Running through January 7 at Roebling Hall in Chelsea is Sugar, a film installation by Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley with Samara Golden. When the feature version of this work played in Sundance’s Frontier section, I remember appreciating its visual-art feel, and now, for their gallery show, the artists have expanded on Sugar by creating “two life-size hyper-real sculptures” to accompany the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 28, 2005
