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Two from Open Roads
Quick, name the movie: an artist looks back on his adolescence in Italy’s recent past, recalling his discovery of girls and politics, heartbreak and corruption, with a mixture of longing for bygone...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Hopping Vampires Edition
This week sees the U.S. release of Rigor Mortis, a 2013 Hong Kong horror movie that raked in big bucks at the box office, then became one of the top-grossing Hong Kong movies in Taiwan. It’s won a...
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Interview: Nadav Lapid
“It’s time for the poor to get rich, and for the rich to start paying,” declares Shira, the 22-year-old protagonist of Nadav Lapid’s Policeman. Founders of an Israeli protest movement that’s like a...
View ArticleReview: One Day Pina Asked…
One Day Pina Asked... has an exclusive theatrical engagement at Film Society of Lincoln Center from June 6 - 12. One Day Pina Asked... During a 2011 post-screening Q&A of Ishtar at the 92nd Street...
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Interview: Gianfranco Rosi
From an untouchable boatman floating along the Ganges (Boatman, 93), to a downtrodden trailer encampment in the California desert (Below Sea Level, 08), to a fugitive drug-cartel contract killer holed...
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Review: Dormant Beauty
Eluana Englaro is Italy’s analogue to Terri Schiavo: a woman in a vegetative state for well over a decade, whose fate became a cause célèbre when the decision was made to remove her from life support....
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Bombast: The Punishment Continues
Late last week—either Day 3,928 or Day 16,954 after the Death of Cinema, depending on which calendar you’re using—I sat down for dinner and drinks with a good friend who’s also freelancer in the film...
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Review: Burning Bush
Agnieszka Holland’s absorbing, intelligent account of the fallout resulting from a young Czech student’s symbolic self-immolation at the close of the Prague Spring was produced for HBO Europe as a...
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Review: A Coffee in Berlin
Chronic dissatisfaction, self-absorption, financial dependence, laziness—the dominant traits of the Gen Y gene are hardly desirable when it comes to generating the lead character of a film. That...
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Interview: Nadav Schirman
Mosab Yousef, the eldest son of a Hamas leader, spent over a decade as an undercover agent working for Shin Bet, Israel’s espionage and counterterrorism agency. At great personal risk, he helped head...
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Bombast: Punking Out
We Are the Best! is wrapping up the second week of its New York run, having engendered enough positive press and word of mouth to ensure itself a happy VOD afterlife. (A typical note, struck by the...
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Notebook: Norte, The End of History
1. The thematic ambition and complexity of Lav Diaz’s Norte, The End of History is simply astonishing. The comprehensive thematic orientation of the film is political: it examines how cumulative...
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Kaiju Shakedown: No Man’s Land
“I understand that we need to conform to the current rules,” Chinese director Ning Hao said recently when asked about the Mainland Chinese censorship process. “After all, kids may watch it as well,...
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Interview: Marin Karmitz
Marin Karmitz, the founder of French production and distribution group MK2, may seem like a walking paradox: a one-time director of militant leftist films who now heads one of the most powerful film...
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Film of the Week: Norte, The End of History
Norte, The End of History is the new short film by Lav Diaz—OK, that’s the facile joke out of the way. Yes, at four hours, Norte qualifies as one of the Filipino director’s shorter features—a mere...
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Bombast: Drop Dead Fred, Come Back Rik Mayall
The Young Ones Last Monday, word went around that Rik Mayall, the English comedian, had died at the age of 56. He was buried yesterday. And while I’m not a great believer in the RIP industry and the...
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Festivals: SFIFF
I came into the San Francisco International Film Festival straight from a horror festival. Perhaps bingeing on movies that weren’t exactly going for subtlety altered my senses, but what greeted me in...
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Review: A Summer’s Tale
A Tale of Autumn In a representative scene from an Eric Rohmer film, a handsome high school philosophy teacher and a much younger woman—his former student and ex-lover—are sitting on the sculpted rock...
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Festivals: NYAFF
Entering its 13th year, the New York Asian Film Festival is no longer a brazen upstart. Now it’s something of an institution, having migrated from the dank cinephilic swamps of Anthology Film Archives...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Snowpiercer
This Friday, audiences in the U.S. will get to see the foreign-film distribution equivalent of a Sophie’s choice: the result of a director forced to pick between two undesirable options. Bong Joon Ho,...
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