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Film of the Week: The Two Faces of January
There’s a nice moment in The Two Faces of January when, after his character has suffered a dramatic downturn, Viggo Mortensen appears in close-up. As pursued conman Chester MacFarland muses on his...
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Bombast: Belly
When Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers was released in 2013, at least a handful of viewers had the same response that I did to the blacklight-lit, slo-mo heist at the film’s climax: “Oh, hey, Korine is...
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Interview: David Fincher
Although he made one movie about mad love—The Curious Case of Benjamin Button—David Fincher never seemed a director deeply concerned with intimate relationships between women and men. His primary...
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NYFF Diary #1: The Princess of France
Repetition has always been a key structural device in the work of the young, prodigiously gifted Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro, and The Princess of France, the third of the director’s beguiling,...
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Film of the Week: The Blue Room
These days, Mathieu Amalric plays adults with a bit of life experience behind them—a weary married man in Sophie Fillières’s recent If You Don’t, I Will, an émigré psychoanalyst in Arnaud Desplechin’s...
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NYFF Diary #2: People Will Talk
Several minutes before its protagonist first appears on screen, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s rich, elusive 1951 fable People Will Talk confesses that he might be too good to be real. “There may be some,”...
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Interview: Debra Granik
With Stray Dog, a kind of documentary follow-up to the award-winning Winter’s Bone (10), Debra Granik returns to the Ozarks of southern Missouri to profile Vietnam veteran Ron “Stray Dog” Hill. An...
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Interview: Josh & Benny Safdie
Few films in the main slate of this year’s New York Film Festival match the sheer rigor of the fourth feature by the Safdie Brothers, Heaven Knows What. Singularly committed to plumbing the depths of...
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Interview: Takashi Makino
The experience of watching Takashi Makino’s work is perhaps best expressed by the title of one of his films: still in cosmos. On the one hand, the filmmaker attempts to create a pure frenzy through...
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Interview: Luis López Carrasco
El Futuro starts off with a black screen. It’s 1982. The voice of Felipe Gonzalez, head of the socialist party, is announcing with studied optimism his acceptance of the newly created prime...
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Interview: Abel Ferrara
Pier Paolo Pasolini, the subject of Abel Ferrara’s latest film, had a great love for hustlers—and Ferrara is nothing if not that. He has been at least a half-dozen different kinds of filmmaker, having...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Tetsuro Tamba
Eight years ago last month Tetsuro Tamba went to the After Life World, leaving behind a cloud of contradictions that linger in the air long after his departure, like a zesty aftershave made of...
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Interview: Matias Piñeiro
Matias Piñeiro’s ongoing series of idiosyncratic Shakespeare adaptations continues with The Princess of France, one of the shortest yet most slippery and complex features in the main slate of this...
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NYFF Diary #3: Inherent Vice
“History is not Chronology, for that is left to lawyers,—nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of...
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Film of the Week: Listen Up Philip
If you don’t like spoilers, or if you don’t find desolation a source of immense pleasure in films, you might want to skip this first paragraph. But it’s one of the subtle joys of Alex Ross Perry’s...
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NYFF: Shorts Program
Crooked Candy As anyone who has been trapped in an interminable conversation can attest, the ability to make a long story short is a rare gift. So why is it that the short film (unlike the short...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Dhoom
Ten years ago, Abhishek Bachchan leapt a speedboat over a highway while shooting out the windshield of an 18-wheeler driven by the leader of a gang of bank-robbing pizza deliverymen—and the Dhoom...
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Bombast: Gone Finching
Gone Girl A big part of the case for David Fincher, at least as I’ve heard it put forward by his more eloquent defenders, is that he’s a throwback—that is to say that, with his unfailing technical...
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Interview: Alice Rohrwacher
At the Cannes press conference for The Wonders, the first thing director Alice Rohrwacher said was: “This is not an autobiographical film.” Certain elements are indeed drawn from her life—she grew up...
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Interview: Mathieu Amalric
Whereas Mathieu Amalric’s previous film, On Tour (10), was an open-hearted and free-wheeling story about a troupe of American burlesque performers and their devoted manager (Amalric), his latest, an...
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