Paris is burning. It’s been set ablaze by a dozen disaffected millennials in Bertrand Bonello’s new film Nocturama. As the City of Light succumbs to dark acts, we’re left to wonder: Who are these young terrorists? How did they come together? What are they fighting for? It’s all up for heated debate, which is surely one reason why the Film Society of Lincoln Center and UniFrance included Nocturama in the 22nd annual Rendez-Vous with Frenc...
Textured, bittersweet and laced with irony, John Lee Hancock’s unvarnished chronicle of the Ray Kroc legend is hardly a hagiography. But its very ambivalence about the McDonald’s brand builder gives The Founder ethical shadings that lift it beyond facile biopic and into the realm of nuanced morality tale. Sly visual choices by cinematographer John Schwartzman further ensure that no tidy judgment is served up in this real-life tale.
Whether you find it appet...
In Manifesto, Julian Rosefelt's multi-screen video installation, Cate Blanchett plays 13 roles. Following its run at the Park Avenue Armory, that installation itself took on a new role: a feature film. Manifesto is set to screen in the Spotlight Narrative section of the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, where viewers will watch from their seats. Here's the excersise they won't be getting, from the installation:
http://www.thalo.com/articles/view/1304/cate_blanchett_em...
As a young boy coming up in rural India, Saroo Brierley often helped his big brother Guddu scavenge for food and money on trains. One evening in 1986 the brothers got separated. Five-year-old Saroo accidentally wound up a thousand miles from home, after boarding what turned out to be an empty, decommissioned train. “Dickensian” doesn’t begin to describe the conditions he toughed out in Kolkata, West Bengal, before being adopted by a well-heeled Australian couple. A qu...
More than most films, the costumes in Toni Erdmann tell the story. Director Maren Ade’s new tragicomedy of manners makes its points as much through what its characters are and aren’t wearing as through anything they say. Set largely in Bucharest, it follows buttoned-up corporate consultant Ines Conradi (Sandra Hüller) and her prankish father Winfried (Peter Simonischek) as they struggle to reconnect as adults.
The 65-year-old widower makes an impromptu visit...
There’s a moment in Seasons when a bear covers its eyes in distress as two ursine cousins go at one another with a vengeance. It’s one of many heart tugging scenes in Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud’s new wildlife drama that captures empathy and tenderness, anger and aggression and a range of relatable behaviors in between. We can’t help but see a bit of ourselves in the secret lives of non-pets such as antelopes, horses, wolves and lynxes, but also smaller...
Harlem artist Marivel Mejia was making a painting, but she wasn’t using a brush. Nor were any of the other creatives gathered this past Saturday at Manhattan’s Bond Street branch of Blick Art Materials. That’s because they were vying in the GRAFF CAPZZ graffiti hat competition, where markers and spray paint were the mediums in play for crafting their entries.
Held from noon to 8 pm, the East Village shindig produced a colorway of wearable works that rivaled anything ...
Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson is set in the eponymous New Jersey town, and although its brick mill vibe seems an anachronism in our time-lapse, media blitzed world, it invites us to enter a time warp and ponder eternal themes like love.
Poetry is of essence in Paterson, beginning with its soulful protagonist. Adam Driver plays a bus driver who composes verse while working his route, and then scrawls it on the pages of his secret diary. He has the same name as this former e...
“It was just a subconscious vibe: We’re going to get along and we’re going to augment each other,” recalled cinematographer Sean Porter of his first Skype chat with director Mike Mills. “Its kind of like love at first sight.” The feeling was clearly mutual, and it led to Mills hiring Porter to shoot his new film 20th Century Women.
It wasn’t an obvious choice. As the 34-year-old DP pointed out, “We grew up in totally different generations.&...
It’s August 1715, and the French monarch Louis XIV is perched upon his wheelchair, not his throne. The sun has yet to rise over the Gardens of Versailles, yet the crepuscular mood isn’t about the elements. Not even the revelries within his Château can brighten the King’s funk as black gangrenous spots start to spread across his royal flesh.
The extinguishing of the Sun King occurs almost entirely around his death chamber in Albert Serra’s new film The Death ...
There’s nothing pretty about heartbreak and guilt or abandonment and loss. But Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar has a knack for gussying up even the darkest themes, and Julieta brings his latest example.
The film is constructed from three Alice Munro short stories — Chance, Soon and Silence — gathered in the Canadian author’s Runaway collection. A fair bit of running away goes on in Almodóvar&rsqu...
Moonlight, the new film by Barry Jenkins, follows a gay African-American’s quest for identity in a disadvantaged section of Miami. Just as the moon projects no light of its own, but bounces reflected sunlight off its surface, so too the cypher at the core of Jenkins’ drama derives his earliest sense of self from what others make of him. Yet Moonlight is richly illuminating.
The production designer Hannah Beachler was tapped to visualize its three distinct phases. Drawn f...
Using large Polaroid film can get pricey. That’s why photographer Elsa Dorfman always made a point of snapping two photos of her sitters with her large-format Polaroid 20-inch-by-24-inch camera. They got to choose one, and she took the remaining “B-Side.” Dorfman’s distinctive former practice and persona inform The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography.
Featured in the 54th New York Film Festival, Errol Morris’s latest documentary carries on his ...
It’s taken James Schamus nearly three decades to tackle directing — and he had to charm Philip Roth in the process. That’s because he chose to adapt the author’s novel Indignation for his feature debut. But Schamus hadn’t exactly been twiddling his thumbs. Among his myriad credits are screenwriter (The Ice Storm and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon); producer (Brokeback Mountain) and industry suit (Good Machine, Focus Features), to name...
Take a chimpanzee. Think about what she thinks about. Does she understand that she has a mind? Can she grasp that other individuals have a mind? Does she have a concept of time? If so — as scientific studies show — this chimp is what animal advocate Steven Wise argues is a self-aware, autonomous “person.” Now to get U.S. law to recognize the fundamental civil rights he says great apes therefore deserve.
Unlocking the Cage documents Wise’s efforts to do just...
Opinions vary as to whether we should eat meat. Between At the Fork director John Papola and his producer wife Lisa Versaci, these range from yes, but to hell no. He’s an omnivore; she’s a vegan. That tension — and Papola’s gradual rethinking of food politics — peppers their new film about how animals are raised for our consumption.
It’s March 2015 when the couple sets out across America to find producers of pork, beef, chicke...
A video game a day keeps the doctor away. Maybe not yet, but as the Games for Change Festival highlighted during its June 23-24 run at The New School’s Parsons School of Design, growing numbers of games are being designed as Rx for the body and mind. Play, it seems, is a serious matter.
For its 13th edition, G4C featured a strand probing the impact games can have on health and neuroscience. Many of the mavens who were invited to speak waxed enthusiastic about the potential of ga...
You might not expect much tender concern for legitimacy in a film called Art Bastard. Its subject, artist Robert Cenedella, trumpets his rogue status with glee. But Victor Kanefsky’s empathic character study probes the soft underbelly beneath the swagger and exposes the scars of not belonging. Unless you’re a cold-blooded bastard, you’ll come away from this visceral portrait of sentiment, conscience and humor not only enthralled but ready to write your local mus...
Finally you can finally stop kicking yourself for missing The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s blockbuster show China: Through the Looking Glass. In making it the focus of The First Monday in May, filmmaker Andrew Rossi has you covered.
Rossi grants a privileged look behind the scenes at the process of conceiving and mounting what went down in Met history as its best-attended exhibition. There’s more texture and fiber onscreen than what you could reasonably expect from the o...
Elvis & Nixon recalls Elvis Presley’s 1970 rendezvous with President Richard Nixon at the White House. If, like me, you’ve never read Jerry Schilling’s first-person account in Me and a Guy Named Elvis: My Lifelong Friendship with Elvis Presley, your next best bet is to go with the movie. Come to think of it, Liza Johnson’s take is kicky enough on its own merits, you can forget any comparison at all.
Already from the opening sequence, the film draws you in...
Irish director Paddy Breathnach (I Went Down, Shrooms) gleaned the idea for his latest film Viva during a visit to Cuba 20 years ago. Now that film, a study in transformation, arrives as the socialist island country braces for inevitable change.
Viva follows a gay 18 year old named Jesús (Héctor Medina), who styles wigs for the drag queen joint run by Mama (Luis Alberto Garcia). Jesus himself dreams of taking the spotlight, as glam alter ego Viva. At the other end...
The king in A Hologram for the King is Saudi Arabia’s, and the hologram involves the Boston sales exec who pitches it to his royal highness. Alan Clay’s the name. Every bit the emotional golem that would suggest, he is America itself, a creature of the corporate mud.
Will our has-been marketer win the bid to supply telecommunications to the King’s Metropolis of Economy and Trade megaproject? It doesn’t much matter, because in this film by Tom Tykwer, he&rsquo...
What to do if you’re a raging anti-Semite and you discover your Jewish roots? As probed in the documentary Keep Quiet, it’s the stunner that Hungarian ultra-nationalist Csanád Szegedi began grappling with when his maternal grandparents were outed as Jews.
Keep Quiet opens by showing family snapshots in nostalgic black-and-white. Yet any stirring of sentimentality is quickly dashed with a caveat about what happens “when you base your story on a lie.&rdquo...
Narcissim? Masochism? Dreams of redemption? Whatever may have motivated fallen congressman Anthony Weiner to let filmmakers Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg make a documentary about his 2013 run for mayor of New York City, it’s hard not to ponder this mystery while watching Weiner. So when Kriegman asks his subject, "Why have you let me film this?" he also speaks for the head-scratching viewer.
The question comes up the day after the Democratic mayoral primary, whi...
The setting of Yaelle Kayam’s Mountain is Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives. This is where, according to Jewish and Christian scriptures, the Messiah will arrive on the Day of Judgment and resurrect the dead. This is also the unlikely spot where our heroine (Shani Klein) and her Yeshiva teacher husband, Reuven (Avshallom Pollack), are raising four young children in the Orthodox Jewish tradition.
Tzvia – if that’s indeed her name – is herself a dense mass loom...
