Tabla de contenidos para November-December 2018 Vol. 54 No.6 en Film Comment

TODAY IS KIND OF A SUCKY DAY.” It is with those ignoble words that Peter Barbey reportedly informed his staff, one fine day this August, that The Village Voice was ceasing publication for good. Almost exactly one year earlier, the Voice stopped publishing in print, switching to an ambitious, exclusively online edition and leaving behind its beloved red plastic vendor boxes on street corners across Manhattan to collect debris. A couple of months later, I attended a kind of memorial for the Voice: a panel of some of its extant critics at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image, including such formative giants as Amy Taubin, Molly Haskell, J. Hoberman, and Jonas Mekas, with Mekas kicking things off by setting up a video camera on a pillow on his knees…

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs Joel & Ethan Coen “From cartoonish folk-fables to worldly philosophical ruminations, the Coens turn the Western into an imaginary realm for personal expression.” —MYM Cold War Pawel Pawlikowski “Adventurous with structure and eclectic song score, though a bit less sure-footed than Ida. Great start, shaky finish.”—ND The Favourite Yorgos Lanthimos “More British costume dramas should partake of Lanthimos’s mock-Kubrickian severity. And of Olivia Colman, too.” —JC Happy as Lazzaro Alice Rohrwacher “Rohrwacher imbues the overused term ‘timeless’ with actual meaning in her remarkable neorealist fantasy about holy fools and lost souls.” —MK If Beale Street Could Talk Barry Jenkins “An inspired marriage of James Baldwin and Wong Kar Wai, consummated in dreamy whorls of cigarette smoke.” —JC Monrovia, Indiana Frederick Wiseman “Well-meaning citizenry, industrial farming,…

IN JANUARY 2009, A GRAY-HAIRED, 73-YEAR-OLD ALAIN DELON was interviewed on French TV about his long and distinguished film career, which by then had essentially come to an end. Delon, the grandson of Corsican immigrants, spoke of himself as a saltimbanque (street entertainer) made good, accurately characterizing his enormous popular appeal as deriving as much from his essential vulgarity as his extraterrestrial handsomeness. At an appointed juncture in the program, the interviewer turned the subject to another aging star who had come from humble beginnings—but this one was refusing to go quietly. A two-minute clip was aired from the newly released Un homme et son chien (2008), in which a 75-year-old Jean-Paul Belmondo appeared as a homeless man, after an eight-year absence from the screen. The scene was framed in…

Director: Patrick Wang Country/Distributor: USA, In the Family LLC Opened: October 26 A cash-strapped community theater director summons a lovelorn young man onstage, and as he faces an empty house (and a bleak future), knowingly assures him, “Things look different from here.” Moments later, he’s dispensing a tentative but truthful reading of Euripides’ Hecuba, finding a creative outlet for his pain and attesting to the need for spaces where art can flourish without commercial hooks. In Patrick Wang’s deceptively tranquil, flawlessly acted, formally subversive A Bread Factory, a converted bakery that’s brought performances to a small hamlet in upstate New York for 40 years now clings precariously to public funding. In passages heartbreakingly familiar to anyone who’s had to panhandle to bureaucrats who misguidedly conflate progress with sensation, elderly founders…

Director: Brady Corbet Country/Distributor: USA, NEON Opening: December 7 Divided into chapters, Vox Lux begins at the end of the 20th century, when a school shooting leaves teenage Celeste (Raffey Cassidy) with a lifethreatening injury. She and her older sister (Stacy Martin) channel their trauma into song, both to console their deceased peers’ families and as a diversion from their own irremediable pain. The music swiftly lands Celeste a record deal, a characteristically sleazy manager (Jude Law), and a notoriety that deliriously shifts gears in the new century: a glossy, bread-and-circus era with Celeste (now played by Natalie Portman) as its avatar. Brady Corbet’s follow-up to 2015’s The Childhood of a Leader begins sharply with deadly violence before resurrecting itself with an arena-sized sense of dread and musicality, manifested in…

BlacKkKlansman Spike Lee, USA, 2018; Focus Features Black Widow Nunnally Johnson, USA, 1954; Twilight Time Custody Xavier Legrand, France, 2017; Kino Lorber Eighth Grade Bo Burnham, USA, 2018; Lionsgate Forty Guns Samuel Fuller, USA, 1957; The Criterion Collection Good Manners Marco Dutra & Juliana Rojas, Brazil/France/Germany, 2017; Icarus Films Hallelujah the Hills Adolfas Mekas, USA, 1963; Kino Lorber He Was Her Man Lloyd Bacon, USA, 1934; Warner Archive The Last Movie Dennis Hopper, USA, 1971; Arbelos Films The Last Seduction John Dahl, UK/USA, 1994; Scorpion Releasing Looker Michael Crichton, USA, 1981; Warner Archive The Magnificent Ambersons Orson Welles, USA, 1942; The Criterion Collection Les parents terribles Jean Cocteau, France, 1948; Cohen Media Group Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers 50-plus films on six discs, USA, 1911-29; Kino Lorber Puzzle Marc Turtletaub, USA,…

Though something of a festival darling in 1998, Sebastian Gutierrez’s attention-grabbing directorial debut has kept an unexpectedly low profile ever since. With no streaming or Region 1 DVD options currently in sight, it’s worth hunting down one of the various foreign releases of this disarmingly hyperactive New Orleans–set crime caper centering on a group of low-level blackmailers who decide to kick it up a notch up to kidnapping—but their first attempt turns quickly and violently sour. Judas Kiss benefits from an early lead performance by the always-charismatic Carla Gugino, Gutierrez’s life partner and future longtime collaborator, and a large ensemble cast chock-full of super-recognizable faces. Most notably, the dueling (in banter and professional progress) FBI agent and local detective assigned to the case are played, respectively, by Emma Thompson and…

VERY FEW FILM DISTRIBUTION COMPANIES are closely aligned with one single artist or have a particular graphic house style. But Rialto Pictures—a boutique label that has re-released many of the classics of mid-century European art cinema over the past two decades—has fostered a recognizable look thanks to Japanese artist Keiko Kimura. Married to Rialto founder—and Film Forum repertory maestro—Bruce Goldstein, Kimura has given many of Rialto’s deathless masterpieces a fresh look with her vivid, witty, and impressionistic sketches and paintings. Her signature is to focus on female stars: Delphine Seyrig, Simone Signoret, Emmanuelle Riva, Chantal Goya, Anna Karina, and most especially Jeanne Moreau, whom she has painted for Rialto three times. It’s no surprise then that in Japan Kimura is best known for her magazine illustrations of beautiful women. Born…

READING JAMES BALDWIN WITH A MIND TOWARD ADAPTING him was a daunting prospect. I’d always worshipped James Baldwin. For me, as it pertains to exploring humanity through writing, he was the monolith at the conclusion of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: oblique, unassailable. This adaptation was different and distinct from the previous film. With Moonlight, the visual inspirations were largely rooted in cinema, the work of Wong Kar Wai and Hou Hsiao-hsien. Claire Denis. With If Beale Street Could Talk, we took a course dictated by Baldwin’s words—the lyrical poetry of his syntax. Baldwin had a way of making sentence structure expressive, a mastery of craft in which the tools used to deliver the message, the very words themselves, became art. In a film so driven by the interior voice of the…

Aside from the very specific peculiarity of eating chicken in the dark, it’s become fairly unremarkable to watch the latest blockbuster or art-house crossover while being served a full-course meal. This reportedly quite profitable trend is not going anywhere for the time being, as it’s helping smaller foodie-movie theaters like New York’s Nitehawk and national chains like Alamo Drafthouse cut down on the potential devastations felt throughout the industry. But with their gains come our losses, and we’re not just talking about the dubious quality of buffalo cauliflower “wings” or the risk of a gloppy queso dribble ending up on your pants. It’s hard to name the least movie-conducive thing about watching a film while conscientious waiters scurry around in front of you like whack-a-moles, but it might be when…

WHEN DONALD TRUMP WAS ELECTED PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES in November 2016, many Americans felt trepidation about handing over the most powerful job in the world to a pugnacious, intellectually incurious, alarmingly partisan political neophyte. Some dissenters politicized; others descended into depression; still others focused on personal, perhaps more manageable matters; many cried. Almost immediately, questions arose within documentary circles about how best to respond to the changed situation, one in which reported facts had become relativized, all news was being read as sectarian spin, anything other than fighting for or protecting the vulnerable felt irresponsible, and sources of financing and logistical support seemed destined to either double down on or revert to a standard of advocacy and opposition. Many nonfiction films have been developed, produced, and released since…

THERE ARE CERTAIN MOMENTS IN THE CAREER OF A filmmaker that illuminate not only their past movies but also the ones to come: the opening of Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, which, after his so-called Fascist Trilogy, signaled the director’s ideological and aesthetic awakening; the furious chasing shots in the prelude of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s Rosetta, a sudden clarification of the severity and rigor of the Belgian brothers’ filmic vision after La Promesse; or the monumental wordless prologue of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, which inaugurated the director’s critical exploration of American history. Contrary to these filmic rebirths—moments of stylistic and thematic expansion rather than turning points—the crucial revelatory moment in Alice Rohrwacher’s oeuvre doesn’t emerge at the beginning of a film, but at the end. The…

AT ETERNITY’S GATE IS A PORTRAIT OF Vincent van Gogh during the last and most prolific years of his life. It is directed by Julian Schnabel, himself a painter, and stars Willem Dafoe. The film is so much a collaboration that I hesitate to designate it Schnabel’s alone. Together, Schnabel and Dafoe, who is in virtually every frame, have made the first convincing and illuminating non-documentary film about what great painters do and how they see, and for his efforts, Dafoe won Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival. Since 1980, he has appeared in over 100 films and has been nominated for three Supporting Actor Oscars. He began in the theater as a founding member of the experimental company The Wooster Group. While bringing the group’s physical approach to…

THE CINEMA OF JACQUES TOURNEUR COMES BACK TO me in pieces, dissolved but for the few bits that bob to the surface of the mind, sometimes the same ones, sometimes different. In a conversation on Tourneur’s works, Pedro Costa, an admirer, once commented: “They have a strange quality of… films that seem to generate some kind of oblivion inside of them. You tend to forget parts.” This isn’t a matter of the movies themselves being forgettable, though—very far from it—or of otherwise undistinguished industrial product being redeemed by a few stray grace notes, those little stylistic touches through which the auteur of cinephile lore would mark his territory. Rather, there is something in Tourneur’s films that has the quality of a familiar tune half heard from a distant room; even…

Director: Joseph Kahn Country/Distributor: USA, YouTube Originals & NEON Opening:November 2 In battle rap parlance, to be “bodied” is to be thoroughly verbally dominated by one’s opponent in combat. So dizzying and unceasing is the wordplay in Joseph Kahn’s Eminem-produced interrogation-slash-satire of the racial and gender politics surrounding this subculture that audiences themselves may feel bodied by the end of its hefty 120 minutes. Like 8 Mile with a master’s degree, Bodied follows a Caucasian wannabe into a black-dominated music scene, here subbing wispy Berkeley grad student Adam (ginger Calum Worthy) for Eminem’s blue-collar B-Rabbit. The swap in protagonists allows Bodied to draw intriguing points of connection and contrast between the rapid-fire racially transgressive putdowns slung among the musicians Adam faces and the more refined version of the same that…

Director: Karyn Kusama Country/Distributor: USA, Annapurna Pictures Opening:December 25 When Nicole Kidman enters Destroyer as Erin, an LAPD officer in evident conflict with a swarm of demons, you’ll either gasp at her gaunt, hollow-eyed, knockkneed appearance or you’ll furrow your brow at such boldfaced decrepitude. Frankly, it’s a bit much, with the camera and editing continually underscoring the grisly externals of Kidman’s performance. This aggressive hard sell not only misserves an actress whose efforts come off looking strenuous, but it stands at odds with the script’s sidewinding construction, which lays out the pieces of a broad-canvas murder mystery, only gradually revealing which elements are central, and why. As major cruxes of plot, tone, and theme start locking into place—which almost palpably happens during a mid-film standoff between Kidman and a…

Adelheid Frantisek Vlácil, Czechoslovakia, 1970; Amazon Blood Rage John Grissmer, USA, 1987; Amazon Dino Risi x 4: I mostri, Italy/France, 1963; In the Name of the Italian People, Italy, 1971; March on Rome, Italy/France, 1962; Noi donne siamo fatte così, Italy, 1971; FilmStruck Errementari: The Blacksmith and the Devil Paul Urkijo Alijo, Spain/France, 2017; Netflix The Medusa Touch Jack Gold, UK/France, 1978; Amazon The Night Eats the World Dominique Rocher, France, 2018; multiple major platforms Pacific Adventure Ken G. Hall, Australia, 1946; Kanopy Philippe de Broca x 2: Chouans!, France, 1988; L’incorrigible, France, 1975; FilmStruck Placido Luis García Berlanga, Spain, 1961; FilmStruck Pour la peau d’un flic Alain Delon, France, 1981; Amazon Puberty Blues Bruce Beresford, Australia, 1981; Amazon & Kanopy Satan’s Slaves Joko Anwar, Indonesia/South Korea, 2017; Shudder Split…

(Act of August 12, 1970: Section 3685. Title 39. United States Code) 1. Title of publication Film Comment 2. Publication number 8017-60 3. Date of filing September 19, 2018 4. Frequency of issue Bimonthly 5. Number of issues published annually 6 6. Annual subscription price $29.95 7. Location of known office of publication 70 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023-6595 8. Location of the headquarters or general business offices of the publishers 70 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023-6595 9. Names and addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor: publishers Lesli Klainberg & Eugene Hernandez, 70 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023-6595 editor Nicolas Rapold, 70 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023-6595 managing editor Laura Kern, 70 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023-6595 10. Owner The Film Society of Lincoln Center, Inc., 70 Lincoln…

Director: Steve McQueen Country/Distributor: UK/USA, 20th Century Fox Opening: November 16 Veronica Rawlings (Viola Davis) isn’t a criminal, but her husband Harry (Liam Neeson) was. After he and his crew die in fiery chaos at the start of Steve McQueen’s Widows, Veronica unearths instructions for another multimilliondollar heist, and enlists other women widowed by Harry’s fatally botched job (including a showstopping Elizabeth Debicki and a resolute Michelle Rodriguez). In his first feature since Academy Award–winner 12 Years a Slave, McQueen artfully blends suspense and social commentary in a fast-paced thriller with a stacked cast. But to call Widows a heist movie does this provocative film a disservice. McQueen and coscreenwriter Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl) have adapted a 1980s British television show into a sprawling, twistfilled Chicago narrative that foregrounds race,…

Director: Peter Farrelly Country/Distributor: USA, Universal Pictures Opening:November 21 Published from 1936 to 1966, the “green book” was a travel guide for African-Americans that listed housing and other establishments known to be welcoming to them in the otherwise terroristic segregated South. In Green Book, directed by Peter Farrelly, Italian-American club doorman Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen) is handed a copy by the managers of black classical pianist Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), who has hired him as chauffeur for a Southern tour with his trio. Their trip together, which comprises the bulk of the film, gets much mileage out of a familiar but exquisitely performed Odd Couple routine: Tony the lovable, crude but decent-hearted lug is schooled on the finer points by the cultured, finicky, immaculately dressed Don. In response to both…

The Owl’s Legacy Chris Marker, France/Greece, 1989; Icarus Films IN 1989, THE FRENCH PUBLIC TELEVISION CHANNEL LA SEPT broadcast all 13 of the 26-minute episodes of The Owl’s Legacy, a documentary series directed by Chris Marker about the impact of Ancient Greece on modern thinking and European identity. Over the previous two years, Marker had traveled the world filming conversations with a variety of scholars, philosophers, and artists (and one cruise-ship operator) and edited them into thematic installments, each loosely guided by a word inherited from the Greek, including such unavoidable terms as “democracy,” “tragedy,” and “philosophy,” as well as more unexpected entries like “amnesia” and “misogyny.” Naturally, one thing you can rely on with Marker is the unexpected: over the course of this fascinating and at times overwhelming examination…