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4 years ago
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Courtesy of Music Box Films
The 19th feature from acclaimed French filmmaker François Ozon, Summer of 85 is based on Aidan Chambers' 1982 novel Dance on my Grave, one of the first Young Adult books published by a major house to depict homosexuality. For many teens (including Ozon, apparently), it was a hugely influential part of adolescence. A beautifully shot film (the French seaside setting plays a big role), Summer of 85 feels like a throwback to that decade: colorful, dramatic, and a little obvious. That tone, however, might mainly be due to the POV of its protagonist, a 16-year-old in the throes of love.
Alexis (Felix Lefebvre)—or Alex, as he has begun calling himself)—a cherubic blonde teen who is casually obsessed with death, has recently moved to a seaside town in Normandy where his father is a dockworker. One day he takes out a friend’s boat and capsizes, only to be saved by a slightly older, much savvier teen, David (the perfectly cast Benjamin Voisin). Early in the film, Alex refers to this angular, charismatic stranger as a “future corpse,” so we know upfront that David is doomed. In a flash-forward, we see Alex being interviewed about his role in some unnamed crime, ostensibly related to David’s demise.
Courtesy of Music Box Films
After the boating incident, David takes Alex under his well-muscled wing, bringing him home to meet his widowed mother (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) who makes him undress and take a hot bath. She's uncomfortably flirtatious, but[...]
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4 years ago
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Dekanalog Films
Two Lottery Tickets, a 2016 Romanian comedy directed by Paul Negoescu, is a diverting, enjoyable buddy caper about a trio of working-class guys who win the national lottery, lose the ticket when one them is mugged, and endure a string of adventures in an effort to collect their winnings. It’s a mostly lighthearted movie that sails along on the banter among the three friends, each of whom has an amusingly idiosyncratic personality.
Dinel (Dorian Boguță) is a fretful, sad-eyed mechanic whose wife is working in Italy for a shadowy boss. As we learn from a series of phone calls, she wants to come home, but her boss is demanding money to terminate her contract. Dinel's own life is no picnic either, as we see him browbeaten at the garage by an irate customer who doesn’t like his car's paint job. Sile (Dragoș Bucur) is a burly, big-talking gambler who is willing to bet on any sport, including the Tour de France. The trio is rounded out by Pompiliu (Alexandru Papadopol), a neatly groomed and tightly wound government functionary who is obsessed with conspiracy theories. Together they drink in a local bar and decide to purchase a lottery ticket with an eye on the big jackpot.
Dekanalog Films
Their amazing luck in actually winning is dampened by the fact that Dinel’s fannypack containing the ticket was stolen by two thugs in his own building. After knocking on several doors and encountering various characters and situations, including a clairvoyant and a cou[...]
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4 years ago
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Aliocha Merker/Zodiac Pictures Ltd.
Written and directed by Bettina Oberli, My Wonderful Wanda is a largely entertaining film about a wealthy Swiss family and its patriarch’s Polish caretaker. Although it starts off like a typical satire of class/culture divide, complete with victim and victimizers, the film soon becomes something else — a more complicated push and pull of family dynamics among two families. Though it may get overly complicated in the last half, My Wonderful Wanda’s twists and turns, as well as its strong performances, keep it watchable and emotionally engaging.
The film opens with Wanda (a sad-eyed Agnieszka Grochowska) arriving back in Switzerland after some time away from the prominent Wegmeister-Gloor family, whose patriarch, Josef (André Jung), is recuperating from a stroke. She is clearly a welcome presence in their spacious, lakeside house, judging from the reception she receives from son Gregi (Jacob Matschenz), matriarch Elsa (the elegant Marthe Keller), and especially Josef himself, who is delighted and relieved to see her. Though clearly an employee (who sleeps in a bare basement room), Wanda is no pushover, as we see her haggle successfully with Elsa over pay for taking on extra work in the kitchen. Still, all seems pretty typical until Josef calls out for her in the middle of the night. After he hands her cash, they proceed to have sex in a practiced, mechanical (at least for her) fashion that suggests this is far from the first time. As t[...]
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4 years ago
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Busca Vida Filmes
Êxtase (Ecstasy), a beautiful, unsettling pseudo-documentary from Brazilian filmmaker Moara Passoni, is the semi-autobiographical story of a young woman with anorexia, set in the tumultuous political climate of 1990s Brazil. Eating disorders are often a young person’s extreme method of exerting control over her life, and young protagonist Clara is no exception. She traces the origins of her sensitive psyche to a photo of her activist mother standing up to police during a protest, her pregnant body flooded with adrenaline. As Clara notes when her mother is elected to Congress at a time when politicians were often physically attacked, “As long as I kept an eye on my mom, nothing would happen to her.” The wary girl finds not only control, but ecstasy through starvation.
The film’s narrative is just part of the experience of Êxtase, an inventive, impressionistic work that casts its strange spell using photo stills, old news footage, beautifully framed reenactments, and sound designer Cécile Chagnaud's dramatic, disquieting soundtrack. The latter, which includes Ismael Pinkler's original score and a collaboration by David Lynch and Lykke Li, is full of classical music snippets, animal sounds, strange mechanical noises and a lot of whispering. Scenes are narrated by Clara as both child and adolescent.
Busca Vida Filmes
She describes her family's move to the country’s federal capital, Brasilia, its sleek, modern architecture adding to her culture shock[...]
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4 years ago
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Kino Lorber
Test Pattern, the debut feature from filmmaker Shatara Michelle Ford, is a tense, intense film that grabs one’s attention from the start and doesn’t let go for its entire 82-minute duration. That's quite a feat during these distracting times. I honestly can’t remember the last time I watched a film at home and did not pause it at some point for a snack or some other mental or physical interruption, but I was too caught up in Test Pattern to stop it. A well-crafted, nicely paced movie that weaves in a variety of current themes—racial and sexual dynamics, flawed healthcare, #MeToo—yet is never obvious or predictable, the film is impressive on many levels.
From the introductory scene—what looks and feels like a non-consensual sexual encounter—a creeping unease sets in. (This will undoubtedly be more severe for anyone who's experienced such an encounter.) We then watch the development of a relationship between the film’s black protagonist, Renesha (a wonderful Brittany S. Hall) and Evan (Will Brill, also excellent), a white tattoo artist who seems completely smitten with her. Despite her corporate background and his looser lifestyle, they clearly click and he seems to be a supportive boyfriend, cooking breakfast and encouraging her on the morning of the first day at a new job. Their conversations, especially as they get to know each other, have a raw, unpolished realness.
Kino Lorber
After work, Renesha’s friend Amber (Gail Bean) talks her into going out [...]
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4 years ago
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Photo: Radu Ciorniciuc
Acasă, My Home, Radu Ciorniciuc’s debut feature documentary, is an incredibly intimate look at a family living (literally) on the fringes of Romanian society. Maybe his background as an investigative reporter enabled Ciorniciuc to become so deeply embedded in the daily lives of the Enache family -- father Gică, mother Niculina and their nine children – who inhabit, and eventually leave, an abandoned water reservoir outside Bucharest. The resulting film is a sometimes troubling, always fascinating, portrait of a close, impoverished family forced to become part of a civilization they rejected two decades ago, for better and for worse.
From the start, the camera is right in the midst of the Enache kids, several of whom are paddling on a lake as older son Vali catches fish bare-handed. They’re a lively, rough-and-tumble bunch who may be acting out a little for the camera, but generally seem pretty happy. We’re then introduced to their shack-like home and compound, where pigeons, dogs, kittens, chickens and pigs roam around and eat together in peaceful, if messy, co-existence.
Photo: Mircea Topoleanu
The first sign of trouble comes with a call to Gică’s cell phone (the only electronic device in sight) from someone giving him a heads-up about the imminent arrival of Social Services. The kids immediately run into the wilderness to hide, clearly something they’ve done before, as Niculina threatens to kill the authorities in various colorful ways i[...]
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4 years ago
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Oscilloscope Laboratories
It’s a common belief that people look for fantasy entertainment during stressful, depressing times, but Matthew Rankin’s deeply surreal film The Twentieth Century would probably be satisfying to watch at any time. Well, satisfying to anyone who can appreciate an absurd, hilarious, heavily stylized “bio-pic” based on the century-year-old diaries of a Canadian prime minister.
As most Americans probably don’t know, William Lyon McKenzie King served as Canada’s PM for three non-consecutive terms in the 1920s and 30s, and is known for being a solid, if dull, statesman. For his audacious debut feature, Rankin created a film very loosely based on King’s private journal musings. Many critics have compared the result to the dark, fantastical work of fellow Winnipeg native Guy Maddin and to Monty Python, which makes sense. I'd add that The Twentieth Century is a little like a visually stunning episode of Drunk History, if the narrators dropped acid instead of drinking alcohol and Wes Anderson (also on acid) were the cinematographer. It’s full of references to historical Canadian figures and events, which invite multiple visits to Wikipedia. Or not, if viewers just want to let the film wash over them in hallucinatory waves. It obvious to anyone, though, that Rankin repeatedly pokes at Canadian traits and identity throughout the film, often its funniest bits.
Oscilloscope Laboratories
The action begins in Toronto in 1899, as young candidate King (D[...]
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4 years ago
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This may be the craziest, most emotionally disruptive fall in recent history, but the annual DOC NYC film festival is right on schedule. Like many other events these days, the country’s largest all-documentary fest, now in its 11th year, is completely virtual, making it available nationwide for the first time. Running online from November 11 through 19, and accessible to viewers across the U.S., this year’s edition includes 107 feature-length documentaries among over 200 films and dozens of events. There’s an emphasis on diversity with 57 features (53% of the lineup) directed or co-directed by women and 36 by Black, indigenous and people of color (34% of the feature program).
As always, there’s a lot of docs to choose from, many of
which are world or U.S. premieres. Aside from the films themselves, there will
be conversations with filmmakers taking place daily in “DOC NYC Live” events,
and pre-recorded filmmaker Q&As after film screenings.
Among the festival’s many worthy entries:
Duty Free, directed by Sian-Pierre Regis (making his feature debut), a film about Rebecca Danigelis, Regis’s 70-something mother, who is fired from her hotel housekeeping job. When she is unable to land another position, her son raises money through Kickstarter to fund Rebecca’s bucket list, which includes desires both humble (milk a cow) and expansive (a visit to England to her sister’s grave and reunite with the daughter she gave up). Many themes are woven throughout, in[...]
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4 years ago
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Dark Star Pictures
Orçun Behram’s feature debut The Antenna will probably be most meaningful for those living in Turkey, the Istanbul-based filmmaker’s birthplace. His stylish horror movie portrays a dystopian world in which a broadcasting system installed in apartment complexes turns out to be a monstrous presence, a clear (sometimes too clear) metaphor for life under the current regime. Beautifully shot in sickly, muted tones, the action takes place in a bleak-looking neighborhood of drab high-rises and is experienced mainly through the eyes of the soulful put-upon building attendant Mehmed (Ihsan Önal).
We first learn about the new government initiative through cheerful news bulletins, followed by the arrival of a technician who sets up a satellite dish on the roof of Mehmet’s building. When the guy abruptly meets a bad end, Mehmet’s supervisor Cihan (Levent Ünsal), a classic mid-level bureaucrat, is suspiciously nonchalant about the whole business.
Things around the apartment complex soon become very weird and threatening, as an oozing black liquid begins seeping into every apartment and scene. We see how three different tenants (a single woman, a couple with a young son, and the family of Mehmet’s friend Yasemin) fare as something inexplicable takes over.
Dark Star Pictures
The Antenna starts out quietly, but its soundtrack gradually becomes ominous and intrusive, featuring the magnification of seemingly benign sounds. Visually, ther[...]
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4 years ago
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There will undoubtedly be many movies coming out in the near future about life during the pandemic, but I’m not sure any of them will top the beautiful, resonant short Sincerely, Erik, by filmmaker Naz Riahi. This charming work about a bookseller navigating isolation in NYC during Covid-19 (played by actual bookseller Erik DuRon) was shot on location in June. Check it out: https://vimeo.com/434705621
Now that we’ve hopefully weathered the worst of it (at least in New York) and we’re feeling somewhat less traumatized by the pandemic — if not by other current events — it might feel OK to watch dark films again?
Sibyl, courtesy of Music Box Films
Two new movies that fit that description, albeit in very different ways, are Justine Triet’s mostly French-language psychodrama Sibyl and Jon Stevenson’s horror-thriller Rent-a-Pal, out on Friday. Both films are darkly comic and they both build to pretty extreme endings, but the similarities end there.
Sibyl is Triet’s third feature, all of which center on complicated women trying to keep it together amid tricky relationships and difficult situations. As in 2016's In Bed with Victoria, the protagonist is played by the luminous Virginie Efira as the title character. Sibyl is a psychotherapist who is leaving the profession to write a novel — until she is pulled back in by a young woman desperate for her help.
That is Margot (a beguiling Adèle Exarchopoulos), an actress who is anxious about shooting her first major f[...]
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5 years ago
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Laverne Cox, courtesy of Netflix
There’s a scene in Neil Jordan’s 1992 film The Crying Game in which Stephen Rea’s character vomits copiously after discovering that his love interest is not exactly the woman he thought she was. You might not recall that exact moment, but transgender people sure do. There’s a kind of homage to that scene in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective in which Jim Carrey goes way beyond vomit in response to a similar discovery. The latter is so over the top it could almost be a satire of stereotypical film reactions to transgender reveals, but it’s not quite.
Filmmaker Sam Feder has assembled those scenes and many others for the new Netflix documentary Disclosure, which charts the historical representation of transgender and non-binary characters in film and TV. Executive-produced by actress Laverne Cox (who is also interviewed in the film), Disclosure is entertaining, hard-hitting and often cringe-inducing. These often problematic screen depictions shaped not only general views of trans people, but how trans people feel about themselves.
There's commentary from various entertainment figures including Chas Bono, Candis Cayne, Jen Richards, Yance Ford, Brian Michael Smith and Lilly Wachowski, who describe their own reactions to scenes such as the above-mentioned. Like any marginalized group, trans people always looked for themselves on screen, especially while growing up. According to several Disclosure interviewees, they embraced the few relatable cha[...]
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5 years ago
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Milkwater
Like many events these days, the 23rd edition of the Brooklyn Film Festival is going virtual. New York City’s longest-running international competition film fest, which runs this year from Friday, May 29, through Sunday, June 7, is offering a full lineup of over 140 films for free. (Viewers need only register.)
Planned many months ago, the theme of this year’s event is “Turning Point,” which takes on a whole new significance given the implications of the current pandemic. In addition to 15 narrative features and 10 documentary features, there are narrative and documentary shorts, experimental films and animation. The festival’s long-running rules: Participating films cannot be older than two years, films are selected from submissions only, all the selected films participate in the competition, and the smallest film can win the top festival award: The Grand Chameleon. In each of the six film categories, a panel of judges will select the Best Film, while the festival will select the Spirit Award, and the audience the Audience Award winners. There are also awards given for Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Composer, Best Style, Best Editor, Best Cinematographer, Best Screenwriting, Best Producer, Best New Director, and Best Brooklyn Project. The festival's full slate of films can be found here.
A few highlights:
The Black Emperor of Broadway, directed by Arthur Egeli and written by Ian Bowater, is part of their Provincetown Trilogy collaboration, three narr[...]
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