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Rohmer by the Book
Friponnes de porcelaine By Eric Rohmer Ed. Antoine de Baecque & Noël Herpe La Bleue, €20 Before he became the great, singular filmmaker we all know, Eric Rohmer was Maurice Schérer, a teacher who...
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Film Comment News Digest 4/1/14
Item of the Week: Sad news from the world of motion pictures. Yesterday 35mm film projector manufacturer Kinoton announced they were dissolving the company effective immediately. This leaves only two...
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Festivals: NYICFF
Hayao Miyazaki is a serial retiree, having announced the end to his anime career numerous times before. But his press conference last September seems definitive, making The Wind Rises the final film...
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Film of the Week: Under the Skin
Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin takes risks starting with its very premise: it’s about a nameless alien being who adopts the physical form of a young human female and drives around Scotland picking...
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Interview: John Magary
An unspoken rule of surviving in New York is the necessity of making the most of opportunities, no matter the infelicitous (or moochy) circumstances. Much of the story in The Mend is precipitated by...
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Rep Diary: Broken Lullaby
The only Ernst Lubitsch sound film that is not a comedy, Broken Lullaby is widely considered his worst feature. The earnest antiwar drama received favorable reviews upon its release in 1932 but...
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Review: The Retrieval
“You gonna have to be your own man someday,” the paternal Nate admonishes Will, the 13-year-old hero of The Retrieval. It’s a recognition of the boy’s self-stunting deference, his tendency to nestle...
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Film of the Week: Only Lovers Left Alive
One tries, when discussing Jim Jarmusch and his films, not to harp on the word “cool,” which has no doubt been more of an albatross for him than for most of his contemporaries. But sometimes the word...
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Art of the Real: What Happens
For a few weeks leading up to the first edition of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual nonfiction showcase “Art of the Real,” a like-minded film series was taking place across town: a trio of...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Jackie Chan’s Trash
Jackie Chan is probably the world’s greatest action filmmaker, but he has made a lot of bad movies. Just as nothing can prepare you for seeing Jackie Chan at his best, seeing him at his worst is like...
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Interview: Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez
Art of the Real selection Manakamana screens Saturday, April 12th at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) continues to impress. The intersection of serious...
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Film Comment News Digest: 4/11/14
Lead item: Belgian horror and giallo fetishists Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, the couple behind Amer and the mind-melting The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears are striking out in a new direction....
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Interview: Narimane Mari
Art of the Real selection Bloody Beans screens Saturday and Sunday with director Narimane Mari in person. The below interview was conducted after the film’s award-winning appearance at the CPH:DOX...
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Streaming Pile: High School (Black and) Blues
Anyone who’s ever attended high school is familiar with the trauma that goes along with those four soul-crushing years: the bullying, the peer pressure, the insecurities, humiliation, and alienation....
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Kaiju Shakedown: Dante Lam
The Bride with White Hair A betrayed Brigitte Lin shrieks until her hair turns white before she reduces a temple full of swordsmen to giblets. A disheveled Tony Leung Chiu-wai stands on top of a...
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Film of the Week: Manakamana
Opened in 1998, the Manakamana cable-car system in Chitwan, Nepal, rises to a top station at 1,302 meters, near the site of the temple of the Hindu goddess Bhagwati. The ride commands some of the most...
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Review: Fading Gigolo
Even setting aside the discomfort at seeing Woody Allen play a late-blooming pimp, John Turturro’s Fading Gigolo still feels tainted. Allen plays Murray, an out-of work New York City shopkeeper who...
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Art of the Real: The Films of Mati Diop
A Thousand Suns The films of Mati Diop conjure faraway places. Characters both fictional and quasi-documentary long for locales beyond their reach, or sometimes, as if in a trance, they drift...
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Bombast: Rebirth
Oh, hello there, I didn’t hear you come in. A man wearing a richly brocaded smoking jacket lowers his magnifying glass, and closes the vellum volume he was inspecting. The sound of Schubert’s...
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Book Review: John Wayne: The Life and Legend
John Wayne: The Life and Legend by Scott Eyman Simon & Schuster, $32.50 Given a spare moment, John Wayne played chess. And bridge, and poker, and backgammon. And how about another round of drinks...
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