Film

  • Girl Power

    June 21, 2018 • Amy Taubin on the 10th BAMcinemaFest

    A TERRIFIC PREVIEW of the summer’s hot independent movies and a place to make discoveries, this year’s BAMcinemaFest is one of the best in the series’ ten-year history. The films show only once, with the directors doing a Q&A after each screening. The sold-out opening night has Boots Riley presenting his debut feature, the dark, delirious Sorry to Bother You, which at Sundance seemed like Black Futurism but six months later is more like a prophecy fulfilled—maybe not today, but probably tomorrow. The visuals are as eyeball-rattling as a comic strip; the soundtrack by Tune-Yards and Riley’s

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  • The Royal Treatment

    June 08, 2018 • Nick Pinkerton on the Luchino Visconti Retrospective at Film Society

    WE TAKE IT FOR GRANTED—or should, at least—that access to the motion picture apparatus at the highest levels of authority indicates a certain advantage of birthright. If a feature fiction filmmaker’s publicity doesn’t make a point of mentioning that they didn’t grow up more than comfortable, it’s a pretty safe bet that they did. But there’s Hollywood nepotism and that garden variety privilege that marches through top ranked film schools every year, and then there’s the case of Count don Luchino Visconti Count di Modrone. One doesn’t get so many defectors from the ruling class coming from this

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  • FRENCH, OPEN

    PRINT Summer 2018 • Melissa Anderson on Adèle Haenel

    THOSE WHO SAW last year’s BPM (Beats per Minute), Robin Campillo’s pulsating drama about the Paris branch of ACT UP in the early 1990s, will never forget Adèle Haenel. She plays Sophie, the headstrong dyke member of the activist group. Fury burns in her gleaming green eyes. Her whistle at the ready, Sophie—tall, toned, physically solid—leads her comrades as they storm the headquarters of a drug company and shout, “Melton Pharm, assassin!” At one of the coalition’s weekly meetings, fake blood still staining her T-shirt, she vents her frustration with the improvised tactics of some of

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  • Heart and Soul

    May 30, 2018 • Tony Pipolo on the 18th “Open Roads: New Italian Cinema” at Film Society

    IN ADDITION TO HOSTING the American premiere of what may be the best new film of 2018 from anywhere, this year’s Open Roads at the Film Society of Lincoln Center pays tribute to four key figures of the past. Roberto de Paolis’s film Pure Hearts (about which, more below) is, at the very least, a sign of hope that the Italian cinema that gave rise to the beloved the Taviani brothers (Paolo and the recently deceased Vittorio), maverick director Marco Ferreri, and the elegant but largely underappreciated actress Valentina Cortese—not to mention the formidable masters who preceded them—still lives.

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  • Off Topic

    May 29, 2018 • Dennis Lim at the 71st Cannes Film Festival

    OF ALL THE PRESSURES weighing on a major film festival, the most urgent—and in some ways the most absurd—is the one to be topical. How does a behemoth like Cannes meet the moment, and what would that even mean? As the most powerful film showcase and marketplace in the world, Cannes doubles as an annual referendum on the state of the art and the industry, and two framing narratives dominated this year’s pre-festival coverage. The first stemmed from the festival’s ongoing battle with Netflix, with Cannes positioned as the stubborn old guard defending the sanctity of the cinematic experience against

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  • All Work and No Play

    May 10, 2018 • Tony Pipolo on Tony Zierra's Filmworker (2017)

    IF THERE IS A SINGLE, OVERRIDING THEME in Tony Zierra’s Filmworker (2017), it is that the life of Leon Vitali, the subject of this documentary, has been more or less divided between the twenty-odd years before he met Stanley Kubrick and the nearly fifty years since. Every talking head in the film, including Vitali’s, testifies to this fact, so much so that it makes us question the reality of every aspect of the man’s life that is not related to Kubrick. Late in the doc, for example, we hear Vitali’s children voicing not very happy memories about their father’s psychological (when not physical)

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  • Driver’s Seat

    May 07, 2018 • Amy Taubin on Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat

    PERHAPS A LAST LOOK at downtown New York’s inspired and inspiring, anarchic, penniless 1970s art scene, before attention shifted to the capitalist, power-shouldered 1980s, Sara Driver’s Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2017) is an archival treasure trove. It is also an illuminating if narrowly cast portrait of the formative period in the twenty-seven-year life of an artist who absorbed and synthesized a visionary moment uptown and downtown to produce some of the most complicated and thrilling paintings of the second half of the twentieth century. Driver begins her

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  • Code Red

    May 02, 2018 • Skye Arundhati Thomas on Wild Wild Country (2018)

    “YES, SHE POISONED A WHOLE TOWN, BUT . . . ,” a friend texts me after watching the recently released Netflix documentary series Wild Wild Country (2018), and it is a popular response to Ma Anand Sheela, the true heroine of the show. The six-episode film presents an extraordinary amount of footage from the four years of Rajneeshpuram, a sixty-three-thousand-acre ranch in Wasco County, Oregon, established in 1981. The five thousand people who lived at Rajneeshpuram wanted to be with their Bhagwan (the Hindi word for “God”), Rajneesh, who is better known by the name Osho. The Rajneeshees flipped

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  • A THIN LINE

    PRINT May 2018 • Melissa Anderson on Shelley Duvall

    ONE OF THE PRESENTING symptoms of my Shelley Duvall fandom is amateur numerology. The actress, among the most totemic and inimitable performers of the New American Cinema, was born on the seventh day of the seventh month of 1949. She made seven films with Robert Altman, the director with whom she remains the most closely affiliated. The greatest of their collaborations, 3 Women, was released in 1977.

    I focus on the dominance of seven in Duvall’s life and profession only to confirm what I already believe about occult signifiers: They mean nothing. Despite the lucky number, a hazy sense of

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  • Seeds of Change

    April 30, 2018 • Kaelen Wilson-Goldie on Jumana Manna's Wild Relatives (2017)

    ONE DOESN’T NEED to go far to find a meaningful connection between art and serious farming, especially when the art in question is driven by political urgency. The example of John Berger, the poet, critic, and painter who lived half his life on a remote working farm in rural France, is close enough. For the past ten years, the Palestinian artist Jumana Manna has been making dazzling films and quizzical objects about the historical strata and lived experience of cities, namely Jerusalem. Her works draw upon many sources and experiment with many genres, but virtually all of them are urban—with

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  • People, They Ain’t No Good

    April 26, 2018 • Nick Pinkerton on the Alan Rudolph retrospective at Quad Cinema

    ALAN RUDOLPH IS AN URBAN FILMMAKER, particularly if not exclusively so. It is telling that the title of his first major movie, Welcome to LA (1976), reads like a sign you encountered on the way into town. His camera moves like a flaneur’s readily distracted eye, and Rudolph loves the opportunities that a city affords for lives to intersect, cross, and recross while heading along their individual orbits.

    As any cityscape is the sum total of the layers of years past, so too are Rudolph’s films, the better part of which can be seen in a twenty-one-film retrospective at the Quad. Rudolph began his

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  • Bad Boyfriends

    April 23, 2018 • Erika Balsom on Claire Denis's Let the Sunshine In (2017)

    IF YOU’VE HEARD ANYTHING about Let the Sunshine In (2017), it is probably that Claire Denis’s new film is a romantic comedy, and that it is inspired by Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, a hyper-referential 1977 book that theorizes the language of love. So why reiterate this? Out of protest. Neither statement provides any real insight into this seductive and subtle film, but both figure as symptoms of the problem that a movie like this—which is to say, one about a mature woman’s sexuality, desire, and happiness—poses for a critical establishment that continues to have firm if

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