Smart Words About Cinema
For years I’ve listened to people rave about the Vancouver International Film Festival. Several Seattle-based film critic friends swear by it, attending every year; and I understand it’s the absolute personal favorite festival of a certain stellar pair of film scholars who catch a lot of these around the globe. Somehow, I’ve never quite made [...]
The best films I saw during my week at the Vancouver Film Festival were Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Béla Tarr’s incomparable The Turin Horse. Both ran two hours plus. The storytelling in the former unreels slowly, cumulatively, so mysteriously that if you don’t watch with intense concentration, you’ll miss [...]
Setting out to say something about Sleeping Sickness, a film by Ulrich Köhler shown in the recent Vancouver International Film Festival, I looked up the blurb I wrote nearly a decade ago for the director’s maiden feature Bungalow: An army truck convoy pulls into a rest stop, disgorging the troops for a brief coffee break. [...]
A couple of years ago, U.S. festival and arthouse audiences were riveted by Red Riding Trilogy, a production for Britain’s Channel Four exploring a history of crime, of both the organized and the darkly obsessive varieties, twisting its way through a community in the North of England over the span of a decade. The trilogy [...]
AFI grad Gerardo Naranjo’s Miss Bala can’t help but make art movie aficionados swoon—and Hollywood sit up and take notice. Might there be just a whiff of opportunism, aesthetic and thematic, in this pedal-to-the-metal thriller about the victimization of a young and beautiful woman (Stephanie Sigman) inadvertently swept into the bloody war among Mexican drug [...]
DENDERA In Shohei Imamura’s 1983 masterpiece The Ballad of Narayama, a woman fast approaching 70—the age when the old are sent into the mountains to die—works to ensure her sons’ future well-being. Marrying fatalism and selflessness, the film measures the flow of life and death in a village that lives on the edge of starvation. [...]
ALMAYER’S FOLLY After getting up early and driving for three hours, perhaps the first film you watch in the Vancouver International Film Festival should not be Chantal Akerman’s Almayer’s Folly, all two-plus hours of it. Akerman is not the liveliest of directors; her style is lengthy staring, to frame a scene and contemplate it with [...]
Apologies for the tardiness of my third dispatch. I had to duck out of festival mode and jump back into the home video mode of my day job for a couple of days. Now I’m back at the festival and back on the fest blog beat, catching up with notes of films I saw earlier [...]
Just like Toronto 2011 and many festivals over the past year, the digital evolution stumbled big when VIFF scheduled numerous DCP (Digital Cinema Projection, the gold standard of high definition digital cinema) screenings in the Granville 7, the biggest house in the Granville multiplex, only to be left high and dry with two faulty projectors. [...]
The 30th Vancouver International Film Festival opened on Thursday, September 29 with a full day of screenings and an opening night double-shot event of Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In and Fredrick Wiseman’s documentary Crazy Horse at the Vogue (back in the VIFF stable of screens after an absence of many years). I arrived [...]
Consider it a triumph of the medium that soon we may not speak of “in-between-ness” or indeterminacy in cinema (let alone “slow” or “contemplative”), such attributes having become subsumed by and substantive of film itself, commonly deployed to a point of sufficiency. In which case a film such as Valérie Massadian’s Nana, recently awarded the [...]
“Desperate men and dangerous women, smooth talk and barbed wisecracks, cheap perfume and gun smoke, dreams and dead ends. The night, shaped like movies. The world’s longest-running film noir series celebrates its thirty-fourth season with an opening night feast of black and white doughnuts, courtesy of Top Pot Doughnuts.” The words and the address are [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 53, January 1977] Don Siegel, a man with an impressive history of making competent, toughminded, fast-moving films, admits that he’s trying to alter his “image” as an action director. In his most recent film, The Shootist, we can feel the tug between action and reflection, violence and elegy, present and [...]
There is a defining contradiction at the center of Mr. Fix-It, the buoyant 1918 Douglas Fairbanks comedy directed and written by Allan Dwan, their sixth or seventh feature together (they made four films together in 1918 alone). Fairbanks’ Dick Remington is ostensibly a British student at Oxford and roommate to American Reginald Burroughs (Leslie Stuart). [...]
The biggest film history news of 2010 was without a doubt the discovery of Upstream (1927), a John Ford comedy from the late silent era previously thought lost, found in a New Zealand film archive along with numerous other American shorts, features and fragments. After screenings in Los Angeles, Pordenone, New York and elsewhere, San [...]