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Festivals: Locarno’s Titanus Retrospective
Tormento In 1904 a 19-year-old law school dropout named Gustavo Lombardo founded a film company in Naples. Lombardo began by distributing films by Gaumont, Éclair, Vitagraph, and other foreign...
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Film of the Week: Interstellar
In an interview in The Guardian this week, Christopher Nolan mused: “What I’ve found is, people who let my films wash over them—who don’t treat it like a crossword puzzle, or like there is a test...
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Deep Focus: Big Hero 6
In Disney’s Big Hero 6, a 14-year-old tech upstart named Hiro designs a “neurocranial” transmitter that deploys tiny robots—“microbots,” he calls them—to create any object he can imagine. What better...
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Interview: Lucie Borleteau
For FILM COMMENT's festival report on Locarno, see Chris Darke's article in the November/December issue. Far from a conventional love triangle, Fidelio: Alice’s Journey is a daring exploration of...
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Interview: Robert Drew
“I was at Life magazine producing picture stories, and I wondered why documentaries on television were dull.” That was something probably a lot of other people were wondering in the 1950s, when Robert...
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Festival: Projections at NYFF
The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Projections series gracefully bore the traces of its esteemed predecessor—the 17-years-running Views from the Avant-Garde section of the New York Film...
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Rep Diary: Shark Monroe & To the Last Man
Every film contains its own private history: of career trajectories, artistic temperaments, and the texture of its landscapes. When the film is lost or unseen, that history goes dark with it. The To...
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Deep Focus: The Homesman
Tommy Lee Jones, who reached a midcareer high in the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (and later directed McCarthy’s “novel in dramatic form,” The Sunset Limited,...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Jimmy Wong Yu
In 1967, One-Armed Swordsman burst onto Hong Kong screens as anti-colonialist riots swept the city. The carnage unleashed in that year turned the city into a war zone: in 12 months, 8,000 bombs, many...
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Review: Dumb and Dumber To
Twenty years off has not dimmed the dimwittedness of Lloyd Christmas (Jim Carrey) and Harry Dunne (Jeff Daniels), the morons of Dumb and Dumber and now its sequel. Though their faces have become riven...
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Film of the Week: Foxcatcher
A story can feel entirely different depending on whether you know the ending in advance; that’s implicit in the nature of tragedy, which addresses your awareness of watching the inexorable workings of...
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NYFF Diary #4: Voilà l’enchaînement
Beau Travail In the films of Claire Denis, intimacy between people is a constant, insoluble problem. Her characters have to either structure their lives around avoiding the company of others (The...
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Review: Fury
The guy with a weathered snapshot of his girl waiting back home; the outer-borough New Yawker, pining for Coney Island dogs and Brooklyn Dodgers games; the ethnic soldier (could be a first-gen...
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Intense Vocalization: Marguerite Duras
Hiroshima Mon Amour The Marguerite Duras retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center this month—18 years after the celebrated auteur’s death—presents an ideal opportunity to contemplate her...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Kim Ki-young
They called him Mr. Monster. From 1955 to 1990, Kim Ki-young was the lunatic in the attic of Korean cinema, a former newsreel propagandist who went on to write, direct, edit, and art direct deranged...
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Bombast: Fan Club
Pulp Fiction If Pulp Fiction, released twenty years ago this week, was the film cultural equivalent to Nirvana’s Nevermind in pop music—and I’ve argued this point more than once—then Quentin Tarantino...
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Notebook: From What is Before
Lav Diaz's latest movie, From What is Before, premiered in August at the Locarno Film Festival. His 2001 film Batang West Side screens October 19 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's series...
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Film of the Week: Force Majeure
The killer shot in Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure (aka Turist in Sweden) arrives 10 minutes into the film, lasts some four and a half minutes, and will leave you gasping, especially if you had no idea...
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Interview: Ruben Östlund
With sparing (but incisive) dialogue, long takes, and majestic wide shots, Force Majeure depicts the crisis of faith surrounding a Swedish father, Tomas, who runs away from a life-or-death situation...
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Film of the Week: Nightcrawler
Given that Nightcrawler is all about TV journalism, its content hardly screams “Breaking News.” The film reveals that freelance TV news-gathering is a nasty, amoral business, and that TV...
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