Tabla de contenidos para November-December 2019 Vol. 55 No.6 en Film Comment

TRACY LETTS APPEARS IN TWO FILMS THIS fall: Ford v Ferrari, as automobile scion Henry Ford II, who’s pushing to build a better race car, and Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, as a book editor. Letts is also a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright (August: Osage County) who has adapted three of his own works for the screen. I spoke with the master of playing what the Coen Brothers call “the Man Behind the Desk”—among other roles. You play these establishment guys in a psychologically astute way that seems to come from having dealt with those types of people for years. It’s interesting—my father was a university professor. He was very intelligent, and he was also a masculine presence. He’d been in the military, and yet he also had his own insecurities, his…

ENDLESS NIGHT ELOY ENCISO ECHOES OF POST–CIVIL WAR SPAIN REVERBERATE THROUGH THE COUNTRY’S CURRENT socioeconomic landscape in unique and unsettling ways in Eloy Enciso’s third feature, which sets the first years of the Franco dictatorship as the inception point for the ensuing decades of violence and class disparity. Centered loosely on the return of Anxo (Misha Bies Golas) to an unnamed village in the years following the war, the film moves in episodic fashion from day to night, alighting on a series of characters of various class distinctions, including a homeless man and woman outside a church, a group of bourgeois men at a bar, and a mayoral candidate and his assistant in an office suite, all engaged in conversations concerning poverty, wealth, oppression, and inequality. Anxo gradually becomes a…

WE JEWS CAN’T STOP, WON’T STOP. THE DESperation for economic and cultural stability so endemic to the immigrant experience fuels the constant hustle that drives, shakes, jangles, and quakes Josh and Benny Safdie’s Uncut Gems, which stars Adam Sandler as harried Diamond District business owner Howard Ratner, who’s on the verge of scoring big, or on the brink of doom, or at the edge of sanity, or, more likely, all three at once. It’s an exceedingly Jewish movie, and, in this era of movie product lacking cultural specificity and homogenized for prime international export, that’s a good—even shocking—thing. It’s also an uncomfortably Jewish movie, and, in this era of sanded-down edges, when movies are so carefully formulated and tested so as not to offend anyone and potentially end up with…

Director: Terrence Malick Country/Distributor: Germany/USA, Fox Searchlight Opening: December 13 “Is this the end of the world? The death of the light?”—FRANZ JӒGERSTӒTTER TERRENCE MALICK’S LATEST IS ABOUT Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian conscientious objector who refused to sign a loyalty oath to Hitler and was imprisoned and then beheaded on August 9, 1943. In practical terms, his refusal “meant nothing.” The war did not stop. Millions were killed. But what would have happened if a whole nation had followed his example? In 2009, Jägerstätter’s letters from prison were published (Malick includes much of this material in the film). Two years earlier, the Catholic Church beatified Jägerstätter in Linz, Austria. A man of deep faith, he has always been an important figure in Catholic circles, and A Hidden Life brings him…

Director: Edward Norton Country/Distributor: USA, Warner Bros. Opening: November 1 Norton regrafts Lethem’s pastiche back onto the ’50s—there’s a Post reporter who says “fuggedaboutit” in the film’s cast of neo-noir revenants, and one scene is even staged in the old Penn Station. SHOT ON BROWNSTONE STREETS dressed in fedoras, old sedans, and curbside heaps of ’50s junk—a past you can inhabit within the bounds of the frame, and no further—Motherless Brooklyn is not just nostalgic for the New York City it recreates, but fixated on the moment of its loss. Set on the cusp of the Dodgers’ move to L.A., this noir concerns old neighborhoods being rebuilt around car usage by master-of-the-universe developers. Notes from Chinatown swirl like a saxophone solo as Motherless Brooklyn witnesses the birth of the city…

The films Tomás Gutiérrez Alea made before and after the twisting, ironic Memories of Underdevelopment show what a wide range of tones, styles, and modes of address he could use. Five films by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea: Death of a Bureaucrat (1966), A Cuban Fight Against Demons (1972), The Art of Tobacco (1974), The Last Supper (1976), The Survivors (1979) Academy Film Archive in association with Cinemateca de Cuba THE CUBAN DIRECTOR TOM¾S GUTIÈRREZ ALEA (1928-1996) gave strenuous thought to the relationship in revolutionary filmmaking between content and form. His films try out such varied approaches to that subject that none of them seems representative. It was his fifth feature, the fictional portrait of a sneering Havana intellectual Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), that came to loom over his reputation in the U.S., but the films he made before and after that…

THERE IS A FAMILIAR BEAT TO ON-SCREEN STORIES ABOUT RAPE SURVIVORS attempting to reclaim the control that was taken from them. These stories often either open with or build up to the moment when a woman is sexually assaulted, then lead their protagonists through an arc of self-actualization and revenge. In fact, they make up an entire subgenre that zigzags across drama, horror, thriller, and action, from The Accused (1988) to Teeth (2007) to Hannie Caulder (1971) to Avenged (2013) to Lipstick (1976) to Ms. 45 (1981). Perhaps the most recognizable modern film that exploited these tropes and then rearranged them for a broad audience is Thelma & Louise, Ridley Scott’s 1991 classic starring Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis. Plenty of rape-revenge films predated Thelma & Louise, but it continues…

Director: Scott Z. Burns Country/Distributor: USA, Amazon Opening: November 15 THE PROPHETIC BOMBAST OF KARL ROVE hangs heavy over Scott Z. Burns’s The Report. Speaking to a New York Times journalist back in 2004, the former Senior Advisor to George W. Bush supposedly dismissed what he called “the reality-based community”—by which he meant those anachronistic sad sacks who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” Warming to his theme, he reportedly continued, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just…

Director: Jessica Hausner Country/Distributor: Austria/UK/Germany, Magnolia Films Opening: December 6 DRAWING AS MUCH FROM FAIRY TALES as from psychological horror, Austrian director Jessica Hausner’s rigorously crafted movies investigate the uncanny forces lurking beneath reality’s placid surface. Whether a mountain resort in Hotel (2004), a pilgrimage town in Lourdes (2009), or a 19th-century bourgeois house in Amour fou (2014), the filmmaker excels at investing seemingly ordinary settings with supernaturally tinged narratives. In Little Joe, her fifth feature and first in English, Hausner fully embraces her genre influences to chart the disquieting repercussions of an antidepressant houseplant conceived by Alice (Emily Beecham), a gifted geneticist and single mother. Guilt-ridden for spending more time in the laboratory than with her teenage son, Joe (Kit Connor), Alice offers him a sample of the attractive…

The Art of Film Projection: A Beginner’s Guide Edited by Paolo Cherchi Usai, Spencer Christiano, Catherine A. Surowiec & Timothy J. Wagner, George Eastman Museum, $29.95 Doggedly holding the archival line from inside the projection booth is a refrain heard through all 10 chapters of The Art of Film Projection, which lucidly explicates the process of showing movies on film as both a technical challenge and a sacred responsibility. NOW THAT COMMERCIAL FILM MULTIPLEXES HAVE ALL BUT completely switched over to digital (after computerized “platter” film projection systems had already sent a generation of projectionists to the unemployment office), the prospect of becoming a film projectionist may seem like suiting up as a Civil War reenactor. But in a co-written foreword to the George Eastman Museum’s The Art of Film…

WHEN WE FIRST REPORTED LAST YEAR on a new Japanese-Uzbek co-production to be directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the notion seemed unusual if tantalizing. Now To the Ends of the Earth exists and has been making the rounds, if not to the ends of the earth, then at least to the main slate of the New York Film Festival, following Locarno and Toronto screenings. Starring pop idol/actress Atsuko Maeda, it’s the gathering story of a Japanese TV journalist shooting a travel show in Uzbekistan and feeling the stress of relentless production schedules and existing as a foreigner in an unfamiliar country. While the past few years of Kurosawa’s unstinting output have increasingly found him testing the dramatic boundaries of fantasy, horror, and science fiction, his latest returns him, with aching poignancy,…

IN SERGEI LOZNITSA’S STATE FUNERAL, SOVIET CITIZENS congregate throughout the country in March 1953 to honor the passing of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin. Entirely archival, the footage for the film derives from a movie called The Great Farewell, which draws on dozens of filmmakers who captured the four days of public mourning that followed Stalin’s death. That early film had been shelved and was scarcely seen until the ’90s, whereas Loznitsa’s premiered in September in Venice before coming to North America for the Toronto and New York film festivals. State Funeral gathers that raw material, shot on both black-and-white and color film stock, into an effectively linear synchronicity of disparate shoots all witnessing a similar procession of reverence and solemnity: from…

IN 2015, BRITISH GAME DESIGNER SAM BARLOW RELEASED HER STORY FOR PC AND mobile devices. Its curious gaming interface mimics a mundane database search engine that accesses a trove of interviews recorded with a single subject, a woman undergoing a series of police interrogations. That the game is built entirely around full-motion video (FMV) clips represented something of an anomaly in the gaming scene. The player watches the interviews to learn more about the woman’s tale, gleaning new information to search for more clips that help further the narrative. Playing it on my iPhone, quickly calling up video after video, was something of an astonishment. I can still remember the day nearly 20 years ago when I fired up my rudimentary PC, popped in the first of many CD-ROMs containing…

THE BACKBEAT TO MARTIN SCORSESE’S THE IRISHMAN is a lulling road trip, taken by Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) with his boss Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) and their wives, sometime in 1975. They’re headed to a family wedding, but there will be business to attend to, ugly business, even if their chitchat and carping could be heard in any of a million such cars where grandpa rules apply (here, no smoking) and rest stops are legion. Framing the trip, and narrating Frank’s rise as a mercenary for the mob and a right-hand man to Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino with chummy showmanship), is… Frank, aged and wheelchair-bound in an old folks’ home, geriatrically affable, speaking as if from beyond the grave, or at least beyond the graves of all those he…

This interview with the director of Portrait of a Lady on Fire took place at Cannes, where the film premiered in competition. To what degree were you thinking about the many movies that have been made about a male artist and the woman who inspired him? I didn’t have to think much about that because basically we know by heart the story as it has been told so far, so I didn’t have to craft my answer to that. I wanted to tell another story, not didactically, but in very emotional, sentimental, political ways. At the center of the film is this idea that there is no muse, or that it’s a beautiful word for hiding the reality of how women have been collaborating with artists. I wanted to portray…

Director: Melina Matsoukas Country/Distributor: USA/Canada, Universal Pictures Opening: November 27 IN AN ERA WHEN "BLACK LIVES MATTER" narratives often focus on tragedy and violence, director Melina Matsoukas’s Queen & Slim, twists the formula, offering a surprisingly tender tale about two complicated lovers driven toward each other after a fateful police encounter. Written by Lena Waithe, this bold new drama refuses to either vilify or commend its lead characters, played by Jodie Turner-Smith and Daniel Kaluuya, who cling to each other after a frightening act of self-defense launches them into infamy. Queen & Slim excels as a poetic romance between two virtual strangers who try to redesign their tragic fates together as everyone else abandons them—even those they trust. And it all starts with Tinder. Queen, an astute criminal defense lawyer,…

•DVD/⋆DEBUT •BLU-RAY/⋆DEBUT ▸STREAMING ▸EXCLUSIVE TO VOD Adam Sandler on Netflix PEOPLE LOVE TO HATE ADAM SANDLER AS MUCH AS THEY love to love him. His deals with Netflix seem to have kicked this tendency into overdrive. He’s currently one movie into his second four-picture deal with them—a partnership that, since 2015, has produced five features (average Rotten Tomatoes rating: 22 percent) and the standup special Adam Sandler: 100% Fresh (2018). The hack line is that he’s phoning it in for an obscene amount of money, and this objection seems to be as much about the form as the content. He’s still making broad, shaggy comedies, often with goofy premises (in The Do-Over, estranged high school friends fake their own deaths) and preposterous twists (the Do-Over friends end up curing cancer).…