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Let’s Make a Deal: Faust on Film
The Faust legend—freshly reinterpreted in Aleksandr Sokurov’s film, which opens Friday at Film Forum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center—first appeared in print in late 16th-century Germany by way...
View ArticleFilm Comment Selects: Two by Brian G. Hutton
Since 2000, Film Comment Selects has provided sneak peeks of upcoming releases, showcased eclectic international and avant-garde films, and given retrospectives to rare and overlooked directors,...
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Review: Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?
It’s not surprising that Michel Gondry confesses to what he calls a “childish” point of view: his movies tend to bounce around like an energetic kid trying to sit still. Whether it’s the “Sweded”...
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Rep Diary: Nazis, Noirs, and Getting Lucky at MoMA
Among other things, the wide-ranging lineup of To Save and Project depicts the effects World War II has had on our national consciousness—from the fearful anticipation leading up to the war (anti-Nazi...
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Film of the Week: Nebraska
Road movies can be about two things: going somewhere, or going nowhere. The opening of Alexander Payne’s new film tells us right away that Nebraska is in the latter category: the elderly Woody Grant...
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Rep Diary: Mauvais sang
“I’ve only loved girls with dead fathers,” Alex (Denis Lavant) tells Anna (Juliette Binoche) during a sleepless night of romantic near-connection. Is it any surprise that enfant terrible Leos Carax...
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Review: Oldboy
Written by Mark Protosevich, Spike Lee’s thriller Oldboy is an action-packed reimagining of Chan-wook Park’s 2003 Korean film of the same name. A paranoia-laced tale of injustice, obsession, and...
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Review: The Punk Singer
It seems that the fundamental flaw of music documentaries made up of more talking heads than live performance is that they put life and legend before music. Taking their cues from Pare Lorentz and Ken...
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Film of the Week: The End of Time
Peter Mettler’s documentary The End of Time begins with archival footage of U.S. Air Force pilot Joe Kittinger, who in August 1960 ascended 102,800 feet from the earth’s surface in a helium balloon....
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Review: Black Nativity
Kari Lemmons’s Black Nativity, loosely based on Langston Hughes’s 1961 “gospel song play,” is a glossy, well-intentioned musical with a three-way mix of contemporary R&B, large-scale church...
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Rep Diary: Cousin Jules
Dominique Benicheti’s Cousin Jules, recently restored after decades of languishing in obscurity, is a vigorously materialist examination of daily life in rural France. The slow and steady drip of...
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Film of the Week: White Reindeer
At this time of year, nothing warms the cockles of a cynic’s heart like a properly sour Christmas movie. Unfortunately, there aren’t nearly enough of these to keep us contented, and till now we’ve...
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Review: Out of the Furnace
Just when you think you’ve seen every variation on the all-American hero, along ambles Christian Bale as Russell Baze, a steel worker from hardscrabble rural Pennsylvania. In the first half of Out of...
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Review: Lenny Cooke
“Get that money, baby,” an off-camera pal hollers to a young Lenny Cooke during a pit stop on a lengthy road trip. Sadly, Cooke, the titular subject of Josh and Benny Safdie’s new documentary, would...
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Review: American Hustle
Everybody is on the take or on the make in David O. Russell’s American Hustle, shifting and grifting their way through a post-Watergate, pre-Reaganomics America. The time is 1978, and the premise is...
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Festivals: Rome
All last year, a steady stream of rumors poured out of the Festival internazionale del film di Roma concerning Marco Müller's fights with the city’s power brokers and politicos, while the attitude...
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Film of the Week: Saving Mr. Banks
If Saving Mr. Banks has the effect on you that it’s so craftily engineered to have, you may come out wanting, as the song says, to go fly a kite. Of course, the kite is heavily emblazoned with the...
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Review: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
“Are they still making those?” That was the response of a middle-aged critic sitting behind me at a recent press screening when his colleague brought up The Desolation of Smaug, the second entry in...
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Critical Dialogue: Inside Llewyn Davis
Another damn day, take it away / Gotta make my gig on time / Playin’ guitar, bein’ a star, / stumbling for nickels and dimes… Those lines come from the legendary folk singer Dave van Ronk—they open...
View ArticleFilm Comment Selects: Ted Post In Memoriam
In the November/December issue of FILM COMMENT, Maitland McDonagh describes 1973’s The Baby as “so stupefyingly offensive to 21st-century sensibilities that it looks as suggestively out of time as...
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