Stray Dogs
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2014: The Year in Movers, Shakers and Standout Scenes
Last year I skirted around the issue of a Top 10 list by highlighting my 10 favorite scenes of the year, my logic hovering somewhere above “What is an effective film, if not the sum of its parts?” This year, I’m not so sure that axiom stands. Whether or not you regard it as the masterpiece it may or may not be, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood has unimpeachably proved to be *the* film of 2014. I was fortunate it enough to see it in its best possible setting: front row at the Paramount Theater at SXSW, where a sizable chunk of the audience was hometown cast and crew. […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Dec 18, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs
Venice Grand Jury Prize winner and all around critical favorite Stray Dogs will be making its way into American theaters sometime this year, courtesy of Cinema Guild. Here’s an early look at the film, via a Unifrance trailer, which centers on a homeless family in Taipei. There’s little plot to tell of, as director Tsai Ming-liang prefers to relate his characters’ circumstance through series of unbroken, often excruciating takes: a scene in which the father, ashamed at his inability to provide, role plays caregiver and destroyer with a head of cabbage is particularly striking. As a Cinema-Scope review noted, Ming-liang’s austerity can […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jun 26, 2014 -
Venice International Film Festival 2013
To get to the Lido — the strip of beachy land upon which the Venice Film Festival is held every year — one must take the vaporetto (or water taxi) from the Marco Polo Airport. While waiting for the transport to arrive, one is stuffed into a rectangular holding pen that sways and jerks with the current, provoking a mild but unmistakable seasickness in the more sensitive among us. Little did I know I was to experience almost exactly the same feeling the following morning while watching festival opener Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón’s first since 2006’s Children of Men. It’s an […]
by Ashley Clark on Oct 21, 2013 -
Toronto International Film Festival 2013
The Toronto International Film Festival, where mainstream critics stick to premieres, freelance writers look for discoveries, programmers tend to their demographic and harried acquisition agents run from theater to theater. For all, time is key: getting to the show on time, standing in long lines for the latest indie blockbuster, rushing to grab something resembling food and sitting through mediocre films because there’s nothing else playing. Appropriately, several of this year’s films mirrored this emphasis on time and the demands it makes on the viewer. Many of the festival’s most daring films were in the Wavelengths section, which last year […]
by Lori Donnelly on Oct 21, 2013 -
NYFF Critics Notebook: Stray Dogs, Bastards, Redemption
The New York Film Festival’s most exciting offerings are often those deemed “undistributable” and unlikely to make a return visit soon, with Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs this year’s standard-bearer. By 2009’s Face, Tsai seemed in an increasingly droll mood, embracing slow-burn physical comedy for its own sake; Stray Dogs — his first feature since — strips out nearly all levity under digital’s harsh glare. An early daylight shot of an isolated rural area is representatively demanding/rewarding, initially nearly swallowed by a dense cluster of skinny trees, whose semi-open circle hedges in a cave-like darkness lit by floating motes slowly identifiable […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 9, 2013 -
Good To Go: New York Film Festival II
Eclecticism governs the second half of the 51st NYFF just as it did the first. According to the Times, several common threads run through the week two batch, but these are little more than on-deadline segues. We could perhaps agree that all the films run at 24 frames per second. Below are recommendations I hope will sate the discerning ticket buyer. These are accomplished movies by directors who are not very well known in this country. Other films will sell out based on name recognition no matter the critical response, so, whether good, bad, or in-between, they will not be […]
by Howard Feinstein on Oct 2, 2013
