NEW
YORK FILM FESTIVAL
2016 –
54th Festival
The
2017 NYFF ended on 16 October. This
Festival—the 54th edition—again under the brilliant leadership of Kent Jones (Director of the NYFF) and Lesli Klainberg (Executor
Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center) was a particularly enjoyable
one.
The
Selection Committee (chaired by Kent
Jones, and including Dennis Lim,
FSLC Director of Programming; Florence Almozini, Associate Director of
Programming for the FSLC ; and Amy Taubin, Contributing Editor, Art Forum and Film Comment)
put together an incredible Festival, with a Main Slate of 25 wonderful
selections, whih including our very favorite of the
27 films we saw, Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson. Jim’s film was
closely followed in our personal preference by one that was not even in the
Main Slate: Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro. We also loved Hong Sangsoo’s
Yourself
and Yours, Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight,
Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, and Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper…closely followed by Jean-Pierre
and Luc Dardenne’s The Unknown Girl ,
and Paul Verhoeven’s Elle; and the next seven films on my
list were also quite wonderful—so, with 15 “wonderful” films, this was an
excellent Festival, indeed! (We
actually saw 28 screenings, as we ended up seeing two screenings of I Am Not Your Negro, because it was
so incredible.)
This
year’s Spotlight on Documentary was particularly fabulous (including our second
favorite film in the Festival, I Am Not Your Negro): we were able to see four, even though there
were several others we wished there had been time to schedule. There were some great Special Events, including a great screening of Jim Jarmusch’s
Gimme Danger, a documentary about Iggy Pop, and two special dinner
conversations (that were a bit rich for our blood) with Adam Driver and Kristen
Stewart (the former of which I really wish we could have seen). There were so many wonderful things we did
not have time to avail ourselves of, because there simply wasn’t enough time in
our days: a series of Revivals , a Retrospective, Convergence (“a variety of interactive experiences, panels, and
presentations”), Projections (“a
broad range of innovative modes and techniques, including experimental
narratives, avant-garde poetics, crossovers into documentary and ethnographic
realms, and contemporary art practices”),
and Talks. It was a fabulous, fun 17 days—during which
time Nancy and I saw 28 screenings (we were supposed to see 29, but we ended up
just not being to schedule one of the documentaries we had very much wanted to
see, Two
Trains Runnin’, (the FS’s
description of which I am including anyway).
As
always, the range of films in the NYFF was extremely wide. Given that range, is rather impossible for a
person to like everything in the NYFF.
The only thing that unites this diversity, however, is that all the
films are great examples of what they are—they are all excellent, even though
some of them I actually did not like.
Following
the convenient format I developed last year, I am going to do briefer
assessments this year of the 27 films we saw—including, along with my personal
reactions and evaluations, the Film Society’s descriptions of the basic
information about each film to save time.
THE MAIN SLATE
of FILMS IN THE FESTIVAL
Here
is the list of MAIN SLATE films, in descending order of how much we liked them
(each title contains an embedded link that will take you to its review; you can
hit “back” to return to the list):
I Am Not Your Negro [not actually in the Main Slate]
My Entire High School Sinking into
the Sea
Jim Jarmusch 2016 USA 118 minutes
Paterson
is an amazing film. It is pure Jarmusch…and to me that means it is perfection.
Even the intertwining intricacies of the set of it are wonderful: a bus driver (played by Adam Driver, no less) named Paterson, in Paterson, NJ, who writes
poetry…in an homage to the book-length poem, Paterson, by William Carlos Williams (who lived in Paterson,
naturally). But the most elegant
intricacy is that this film about writing poetry is in itself so poetic. As almost every one of Jim’s films,
Paterson is gorgeously filmed—this time by DP Frederick Elmes. It is about poetry and creation, and it is a
poetic creation…and it was hands-down our favorite film this year.
U.S. Premiere
Paterson (Adam Driver)
is a bus driver who writes poetry drawn from the world around him. Paterson is also
the name of the New Jersey city where he works and lives with his effervescent
and energetic girlfriend (Golshifteh Farahani). And Paterson is the title of the great
epic poem by William Carlos Williams, whose spirit animates Jim Jarmusch’s exquisite new film. This is a rare movie
experience, set to the rhythm of an individual consciousness absorbing the
beauties and mysteries and paradoxes and joys and surprises of everyday life,
at home and at work, and making them into art. An Amazon
Studios Release.
Hong Sangsoo 2016 South Korea 86
minutes
We adore the films of Hong Songsoo. This writer/director creates these masterpieces
at the rate of ~1 film per year, and they are all about approximately the same
characters and themes; and they are all so terrific that they are almost always
in the Main Slate of the NYFF. In his introduction of Yourself and Yours, Dennis Lim (The Director of Programming
for the Film Society) actually
quoted a conversation I had had with him earlier that day, when I said that Hong keeps making the same film over
and over again each year, but that it is an incredibly wonderful film—and that
it grows and evolves in the most profoundly rewarding way in each of its new
iterations. We never miss one of his
films, and he has never disappointed us!
This film centers on the tortured relationship between a painter and his
girlfriend, whose excessive drinking and flirting (and fighting) with other men
exasperate and infuriate him—and yet whom he loves in a powerful, albeit
infantile dependent, way. But don’t be
misled by this description: the film is
lighthearted and tender! And that such content can have such a feel to it is
very much part of Hong’s
genius. If you do not know his work, you
really should discover it. His oeuvre is
a joy awaiting you. (And he can pull off
such a wondrous experience in an 86 minute run time…something I consider an enormous
added talent and benefit.)
Prolific NYFF favorite
Hong Sangsoo boldly and wittily continues his ongoing
exploration of the painful caprices of modern romance. Painter Youngsoo (Kim Joo-hyuk) hears
secondhand that his girlfriend, Minjung (Lee Yoo-young), has recently had (many) drinks with an unknown
man. This leads to a quarrel that seems to end their relationship. The next
day, Youngsoo sets out in search of her, at the same
time that Minjung—or a woman who looks exactly like
her and may or may not be her twin—has a series of encounters with strange men,
some of whom claim to have met her before . . . Yourself and Yours
is a break-up/make-up comedy unlike any other, suffused with sophisticated
modernist mystery.
Barry Jenkins USA 2016 110m
This is a wonderfully complex, layered, sophisticated film—on subject
matter that easily could have been dealt with in a heavy-handed, clumsy
way. It is totally absorbing, grippingly
emotional, and satisfyingly intelligent.
Alex Hibbert, Aston Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes each
do an incredible job of portraying the film’s main character at three stages of
his life; and the others in the cast are also wonderful. Barry
Jenkins has written and directed a great film.
Barry Jenkins more than fulfills the
promise of his 2008 romantic two-hander Medicine
for Melancholy in this three-part narrative spanning the childhood,
adolescence, and adulthood of a gay African-American man who survives Miami’s
drug-plagued inner city, finding love in unexpected places and the possibility
of change within himself. Moonlight
offers a powerful sense of place and a wealth of unpredictable
characters, featuring a fantastic ensemble cast including André Holland, Trevante Rhodes, Naomie Harris,
and Mahershala Ali—delivering performances filled
with inner conflict and aching desires that cut straight to the heart. An A24
release
Maren Ade 2016 Germany 162
minutes.
I like films to be two
hours or less, and this was closer to three
hours; but the fact that it kept my rapt attention—and that I thoroughly
enjoyed it—speaks to how wonderful this film is. It is funny; it is clever; it is
entertaining. It works. It easily could have been a full hour
shorter, and it would have been much better had it been—in fact, heavy editing
would have made this an incredible
film. Nevertheless, even as it stands,
it is an extremely good film, and well worth watching—and many moments in it are truly fabulous.
The fact that Ade has chosen
to make it so long hints at its other flaw:
it takes itself a bit too seriously; but the flaw is a minor one. The film, works best on it outlandish, comic
level…and on that level it is a joyful experience.
An audacious twist on
the screwball comedy—here, the twosome is an aging-hippie prankster father and
his corporate-ladder-climbing daughter—Toni Erdmann delivers art and
entertainment in equal measure and charmed just about everyone who saw it at
the Cannes Film Festival this year. Maren Ade’s dazzling script has just enough
of a classical comedic structure to support 162 minutes of surprises big and
small. Meanwhile, her direction is designed to liberate the actors as much as
possible while the camera rolls, resulting in sublime performances by Sandra Hüller and Peter Simonischek, who
leave the audience suspended between laughter and tears. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
Olivier
Assayas 2016 France 105 minutes
This is one of those films
about which my opinion changed profoundly as I became more distant from
it. I have generally loved all of Olivier Assayas’s films, and I consider him of one
of the great directors of our day.
Although it was a beautifully filmed, exquisitely executed work, my first reaction
to Personal
Shopper was not to like it all that much. It had two major strikes against it for
me: first, Kristen Stewart, whom I had liked in his fabulous Clouds of Sils
Maria last year, is actually not an actor I generally like, and she is in
almost every frame of this film—very much being the flat, pouty, discontented
Millennial she seems usually to be onscreen; second, the film seems very much
about mediums and “spiritual” experiences with ghosts and the paranormal—all of
which is an immediate turnoff to me. With every passing hours from having seen
the film, and for days afterwards, my appreciation for the film continued to
grow and my liking for it, increased. I
began to feel the subtlety that Olivier
had generated in the tension not only of the plot, but in the meaning of the
character’s experience itself. I should
have known that he would not—even as a thriller—simply buy in to the paranormal
as an accepted reality; he is someone acutely and sophisticatedly attuned to
the nuances of how people create their experience in the world, and we are
witnessing in this film his exploration of certain people’s experience—and, in
particular, that of the main character.
Silly me to have made any assumptions that we should be taking her
experience at face value! In this light,
all my objections—even my dislike of her acting persona—take on new meaning;
and, in this light, the film transformed for me into an elegant and wonderful
exploration of the human psyche and of personal experience of the sort I have
come to love and expect from this great director. It would be too much of a spoiler to describe
and discuss some of the details of what was directly in the film which I had
ignored before my view began pleasantly to mutate; but let me risk it enough to
tell you to reflect upon and think about (after you have watched the film) the
aspects of the experience different from and/or omitted from her account to the
police. In the end, I consider Personal
Shopper a great film.
U.S. Premiere
Kristen Stewart is the
medium, in more ways than one, for this sophisticated genre exploration from
director Olivier Assayas (Clouds of Sils Maria). As a fashion assistant whose twin brother
has died, leaving her bereft and longing for messages from the other side,
Stewart is fragile and enigmatic—and nearly always on-screen. From an opening
sequence in a haunted house with an intricately constructed soundtrack to a
high-tension, cat-and-mouse game on a trip from Paris to London and back set
entirely to text messaging, Personal Shopper brings the psychological
and supernatural thriller into the digital age. An IFC Films release.
Jean-Pierre
and Luc Dardenne 2016 Belgium 106
minutes
The Unknown Girl is an exploration of guilt—perhaps even an elegy to guilt—and possibly of redemption, as
well. It is a gripping and suspenseful,
yet subtle and complex human drama.
Made with all the skill and expertise customary for these two fabulous filmmakers, the
film goes in directions somewhat new to them.
U.S. Premiere
It’s a few minutes after closing
time in a medical clinic in Seraing, Belgium. The buzzer rings. Doctor Jenny (Adèle Haenel) tells her assistant
(Olivier Bonnaud) to ignore it. She is later informed
that the girl she turned away was soon found dead on the riverside. From that
moment, Jenny becomes a different kind of doctor, diagnosing not just her
dispossessed patients’ illnesses but also the greater malady afflicting her
community. And this is a different kind of movie for Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, in which the urgency pulses beneath the seemingly
placid surface, and it is all keyed to Haenel’s
extraordinary performance. A Sundance Selects release.
Paul Verhoeven 2016 France/Germany/Belgium 131
minutes
U.S.
Premiere
Elle is an incredibly intense, difficult,
provocative film. To illustrate, it is
enough to say that it alternates between scenes of Michèle, played in a bravura performance by the
incomparably talented and beautiful Isabelle
Huppert, being violently raped and being amusingly droll and and funny. One is
emotionally whipsawed about in the vacillation in this film, a feeling
intensified by the tension and danger that pervades its story. Nevertheless, it it
an intelligent and deep exploration of the badness and feared inner badness
that underlies the psychological phenomenon of victimization that leads people
to abuse and to open themselves to be abused—an exploration that is integrally
embedded in the narrative of the action, and never as a separate
intellectualization. On this count, I
found this to be a marvelous film.
Unfortunately, my low tolerance for violence made it an extremely hard
film for me to watch, and actually lessened my ability fully to appreciate it.
Paul Verhoeven’s
first feature in a decade—and his first in French—ranks
among his most incendiary, improbable concoctions: a wry, almost-screwball
comedy of manners about a woman who responds to a rape by refusing the mantle
of victimhood. As the film opens, Parisian heroine Michèle
(a brilliant Isabelle Huppert) is brutally violated in her kitchen by a hooded
intruder. Rather than report the crime, Michèle, the
CEO of a video game company and daughter of a notorious mass murderer, calmly
sweeps up the mess and proceeds to engage her assailant in a dangerous game of
domination and submission in which her motivations remain a constant source of
mystery, humor, and tension. A Sony Pictures Classics
release.
20th Century Women Centerpiece
Mike Mills 2016 USA. 118 minutes
20th Century
Women features magnificent
performances by virtually every member of its outstanding cast: Annette
Bening is fabulous, as is Elle Fanning, and Lucas Jade
Zumann (who plays Bening’s teenage son); and even Greta Gerwig,
whose usual flighty, adolescent performances I have come not to like, turns in
a great performance, quite different from her usual roles. The film is witty and clever, and full of
extraordinarily funny moments, making it quite enjoyable. It suffers, however,
from two—probably related—problems: it
is too long by at least 15 or 20 minutes, detracting from its dramatic and
comic movement; and it takes itself too seriously, in a way that detracts from
its far more successful light hearted mood. It still remains well worth seeing.
World Premiere
Mike Mills’s
texturally and behaviorally rich new comedy seems to keep redefining itself as
it goes along, creating a moving group portrait of particular people in a
particular place (Santa Barbara) at a particular moment in the 20th century
(1979), one lovingly attended detail at a time. The great Annette Bening, in one of her very best performances, is Dorothea,
a single mother raising her teenage son, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann),
in a sprawling bohemian house, which is shared by an itinerant carpenter (Billy
Crudup) and a punk artist with a Bowie haircut (Greta Gerwig)
and frequented by Jamie’s rebellious friend Julie (Elle Fanning). 20th
Century Women is warm, funny, and a work of passionate artistry. An A24 release.
Pedro Almodóvar 2016 Spain 99 minutes
I adore Pedro Almodóvar,
and my reaction to almost all of his films has been somewhere between rapture
and just adoration. I very much liked Julieta,
but it did not rise to the level of greatness for me that most of his films
have. Don’t get me wrong: I thoroughly
enjoyed it. It is beautiful, it is
engaging, it is well made, and it is well acted and directed. The problem for me is that I do not feel that
Pedro “got” the main character in a
critical way. What was particularly
upsetting about this is that he “gets” his female characters more profoundly
and more wonderfully—and more lovingly and clearly—than almost any director
around; and the title role (played in her younger incarnation by Emma Suárez, and in her older one by Adriana Ugarte;
both actresses are beautiful and talented, and I think were successfully
portraying their roles as directed—but therein I suspect lies the problem)
bothered me and detracted from my appreciation of this film. This is a serious film, not a comedy; and it
is about an upsetting subject, that involves the narcissism of its main
character. The irony is that Pedro usually understands and
successfully and lovingly appreciates the narcissism of his female roles in the
deepest and most penetratingly accurate of ways; but, in Julieta, I am afraid he
misses it,and/or seriously
misunderstands it. Perhaps it is this
particular “North American” brand of narcissism (the film takes place here, and
actually was originally intended to be made here in English [an undertaking
that did not work out]), and perhaps it was exacerbated by the film being based
on three stories by Alice Munro
(which I do not know, BTW), but the film doesn’t seem to grasp how
destructively selfish and self-centered Julieta is. The fact that it so seriously misses how
terrible this is—especially for her son—made it very hard for me to like the
film as much as I very much wanted to.
Pedro Almodóvar explores his favorite themes of love, sexuality,
guilt, and destiny through the poignant story of Julieta, played to perfection
by Emma Suárez (younger) and Adriana Ugarte
(middle-aged), over the course of a 30-year timespan. Just as she is about to
leave Madrid forever, the seemingly content Julieta has a chance encounter that
stirs up sorrowful memories of the daughter who brutally abandoned her when she
turned eighteen. Drawing on numerous film historical references, from Hitchcock
to the director’s own earlier Movida era work, Almodóvar’s twentieth feature, adapted from three short
stories by Alice Munro (“Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence”), is a haunting drama
that oscillates between disenchanted darkness and visual opulence. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
Mia
Hansen-Løve
2016 France/Germany 100 minutes
I am not a fan of Hansen-Love, and I rather disliked her
last two films. I really enjoyed Things
to Come, however. (I suspect that with this film she done
something rather different, as some friends who have loved her last films rather disliked this one.) The film is aided by the amazing performance
of the wonderful Isabelle Huppert,
who plays a radically different role in this film than she does in Elle—similar
only in how wonderful her acting is.
The film has a beautifully successful texture to it, and it is engaging
and entertaining—albeit not as profound as I suspect it takes itself to be.
In the new film from Mia
Hansen-Løve (Eden), Huppert is Nathalie, a
Parisian professor of philosophy who comes to realize that the tectonic plates
of her existence are slowly but inexorably shifting: her husband (André Marcon) leaves her, her mother (Edith Scob)
comes apart, her favorite student decides to live off the grid, and her first
grandchild is born. Hansen-Løve carefully builds Things
to Come around her extraordinary star: her verve
and energy, her beauty, her perpetual motion. Huppert’s remarkable performance
is counterpointed by the quietly accumulating force of the action, and the
result is an exquisite expression of time’s passing. A
Sundance Selects release.
Pablo Larraín 2016
Chile/Argentina/France/Spain 107 minutes
This
film was not at all what I was expecting:
it was far more a fantasy spun out from the feel of Pablo Neruda’s life than a story about his life. I’m not sure I like the portrayal of Neruda; but I am sure I enjoyed it. Neruda
creates an adventure fantasy, in which Neruda (played by Luis Gnecco, who, at very least
physically, recreates the great Chilean poet marvelously) is pursued by a
fictional detective (played wonderfully by Gael
Garcia Bernal): it becomes a kind of
poetic detective story in which the pursued leaves the pursuer copies of
detective novels as he narrowly avoids being captured by him. Although it is “messing” with a figure I hold
in enormously high esteem, the film manages somehow to be a thoroughly
enjoyable romp along the edge of an important piece of history.
Pablo Larraín’s exciting, surprising, and colorful new film is
not a biopic but, as the director himself puts it, a “Nerudean”
portrait of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s years of flight and exile
after his 1948 denunciation of his government’s leadership. Larraín’s
heady blend of fact and fancy (the latter embodied in an invented character,
straight out of detective fiction, played by Gael García
Bernal) is many things at once: a loving, kaleidoscopic recreation of a
particular historical moment; a comical cat-and-mouse game; and a pocket epic. Featuring Luis Gnecco, a dead ringer for
the poet and a formidable actor, alongside a terrific cast. Released by The Orchard.
Kenneth
Lonergan 2016 USA 137 minutes
This is a film I expected
to dislike completely: I had thoroughly
disliked Lonergan’s
earlier film, You Can Count on Me;
and the description of Manchester by the Sea made it sound
like it was going to be the most maudlin of soap opera-ish
melodramas, and, at a run time of 137, I expected to be in severe pain from
it—and I was not expecting at all to like the acting of Casey Affleck. I was
completely surprised to find that I enjoyed this film! With the exception of the music—and, while I
shall not dignify the person who did it by looking to see what his or her name
was, I think the person should be drawn and quartered—which was absolutely
embarrassingly and disgustingly terrible (even more maudlin and melodramatic
than my worst fears about what the film was going to be: choral sighing and wailing, more soupy even
than strings playing emotionally drenched muck), Surprisingly, the film
actually took a rather high dramatic road through this potentially sappy
material. Even at 137 minutes, it was
quite watch-able. Casey Affleck was quite good.
And the story held my attention quite well. Nevertheless, this is a film which, as I
moved further from the immediate experience of it, progressively diminished in
my estimation with the passage of time.
Perhaps it was because my expectations had been so extremely low and had
been so significantly exceeded, but I ended up thinking that it was only
“OK”—not particularly good. I will say,
though, that—with the notable exception of the music—it is a watchable and
enjoyable film.
In Kenneth Lonergan’s intimate yet grandly scaled new film, Casey
Affleck is formidable as the volatile, deeply troubled Lee Chandler, a
Boston-based handyman called back to his hometown on the Massachusetts North
Shore after the sudden death of his brother, Joe (Kyle Chandler), who has left
behind a teenage son (Lucas Hedges). This loss and the return to his old
stomping grounds summon Lee’s memories of an earlier, even more devastating
tragedy. In his third film as a director, following You Can Count on Me
(2000) and Margaret (2011), Kenneth Lonergan,
with the help of a remarkable cast, unflinchingly explores grief, hope, and
love, giving us a film that is funny, sharply observed, intimately detailed yet
grand in emotional scale. An Amazon Studios Release.
Eugène Green 2016 France/Belgium 113 minutes
From its description as a
“nativity story reboot,” I had no idea what to expect of this film. We decided to see it because it had Mathieu Amalric
in it…and, of course, because the very fact of being in the NYFF means that a film is likely to
have great merit! We were very glad we
did, as this is a beautiful and interesting film. Had I looked carefully at the
description and thought about its description of director Eugène Green’s
cherishing of Baroque architecture (which I abhor, BTW), I might have recognize
him as the director behind La Sapienza,
his last film which I deeply disliked.
Green looked familiar when he spoke to introduce Son of Joseph; but
mercifully, I couldn’t place him. I say
“mercifully,” as I suspect the association with his last film might have made
it impossible for me to have enjoyed this one—and enjoy it I did. It treads on the edge of corny-ness and
religiosity; but, with the exception of the music in one scene, it successfully
avoids all that. Son of Joseph is the
story of a teenager, Vincent, whose mother (Marie, no less) tells him he has no
father. The boy discovers his actual
father (Mathieu Amalric),
who is every bit the cad his mother had thought him to be (in deciding not to
tell Vincent about him). Vincent
connects with his father’s estranged brother, Joseph (of course), and makes a
father out of him for himself. There is
even a scene in which Joseph is leading Vincent and Marie (who he is leading
seated on an ass, no less) out of danger.
Sounds hokey, right? It actually isn’t!
It is a lovely, warm, human drama that does not require one do anything with The Biblical references and parallels
except to enjoy them. What an unexpected
treat!
The American-born
expatriate filmmaker Eugène Green exists in his own
special artistic orbit. All Green’s films share a formal rigor and an
increasingly refined modulation between the playfully comic, the urgently
human, and the transcendent, and they are each as exquisitely balanced
as the baroque music and architecture that he cherishes. His latest movie, Son
of Joseph, is perhaps his most buoyant. A nativity story reboot that gently
skewers French cultural pretensions, it features newcomer Victor Ezenfis as a discontented Parisian teenager in search of a
father, Mathieu Amalric and Fabrizio
Rongione as his, respectively, callous and gentle
alternative paternal options, and Natacha Régnier as
his single mother. A Kino Lorber
Films release.
Kelly Reichardt 2016 USA 107 minutes.
Kelly Reichardt is a bit of an acquired
taste: her films are slow, languorous,
visually lush, and extremely mutedly emotional.
Certain Women is no exception.
It is beautifully filmed and brilliantly acted. It presents three apparently unrelated
stories of everyday life in a small Montana town—subtly intertwined by
character overlaps via visual and verbal references (in a way ever-so-slightly
reminiscent of what Jim Jarmusch does far more
extensively in Midnight Train). Very little actually happens, although there
is much going on. (One
of our friends who saw it with us—and who is not someone who wants to acquire
this taste—said that, “Well. It’s sort of a Western: horses, cowboys, guns, a train…”) It is suffused with
sad sense of unrequited longing, verging on resignation. In parts, it is quite brilliant; throughout
it is quite beautiful; but it does not make it as a great film.
The seventh feature by
Kelly Reichardt (Meek’s Cutoff), a lean
triptych of subtly intersecting lives in Montana, is a work of no-nonsense
eloquence. Adapting short stories by Maile Meloy, Certain Women follows a lawyer (Laura Dern)
navigating an increasingly volatile relationship with a disgruntled client; a
couple (Michelle Williams and James Le Gros), in a
marriage laden with micro-aggression and doubt, trying to persuade an old man
(Rene Auberjonois) to sell his unused sandstone; and
a young ranch hand (Lily Gladstone) fixated on a new-in-town night school
teacher (Kristen Stewart). Shooting on 16mm, Reichardt
creates understated, uncannily intimate dramas nestled within a clear-eyed
depiction of the modern American West. An IFC
Films release.
The 13th Opening Night
Ava DuVernay 2016 USA 100 minutes
I was
told this one would be amazing; I was it afraid would be terrible; it wasn’t—I
basically enjoyed it. But it was
definitely not wonderful; and the further I got away from it and the more I
thought about it, the less I liked it.
The first time ever that a documentary opened the NYFF, this was a very
timely choice, given the subject matter, but not a great choice given the
film—especially when another documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, not even in
the Main Slate, was orders of magnitude better in every way. The 13th was
cinematographically clever and well-done (unless you are bothered by intense
rapid-fire graphics which often resolve into animation, as was Nancy and some
of our friends); but it was sloppy and flawed about its extremely important
subject matter—the mass incarcerations in the US and the fact that it so
disproportionately is directed against Black men. It confuses and conflates Nixon’s Southern
strategy with the law and order movement, rolls them together with the war on
drugs, sees it all as part of the mass incarcerations that make the US (with 5%
of the world’s population, have 25% of
those in the world who are in in jail), and attributes it all to the clause in
the 13th Amendment (which abolished slavery: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude…shall exist
within the United States.”) that excludes those who are incarcerated (“except as a punishment for crime whereof the party
shall have been duly convicted”); and it sees it all as a deliberate attempt to
keep Blacks—and particularly Black men—in chains. It does little or nothing to document or
elucidate that claim; but that is the basis for the thesis—and title—of this
documentary. It does offer the
tantalizing fact that after Reconstruction, apparently indiscriminate arrest was used in the South against Black
people; but it does nothing to establish that was the intent of the
clause—something I would be most interested in knowing more about, even though I doubt the film’s hypothesis. I do know, however, from having been very involved at the time,
that Nixon’s Southern strategy (which, of course, is exactly responsible for
why the racists and bigots of our country make up such a big part of the
Republican party—and are the ones openly being courted by Donald Trump, in a
way they have been consistently been covertly courted by the Republican Party since the Democrats [whose party
previously had been home to these folks—particularly in the South] passed Civil Rights legislation under Johnson
in the 60s), was not the same as the
law and order strategy; and that while the effects of these two strategies
eventually did have a terrible impact
on the Black community—and the Civil Rights movement—it was not their conscious intent, as naively
asserted by The 13th. The
film makes a nod to the fact that it knows that the Congressional Black Caucus
actually supported the law and order legislation (without actually mentioning
that—just parading Charlie Rangel as a buffoonish legislator who supported it
and only later realized his folly in doing so), but never treats the fact
seriously. There are many, many
problematic historical issues in this film, and it glosses over the differences
of the 60s and 70s, and then proceeds to merge them with the 80s and 90s. It dumps together every currently important
issue of race and injustice and inequality facing the US right up to the
current day. So, while it raised
numerous crucially important issues, I was extremely dissatisfied with the lack
of sophistication in its presentation and handling of these issues.
World Premiere
The title of Ava DuVernay’s
extraordinary and galvanizing documentary refers to the 13th Amendment to the
Constitution, which reads “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as
a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall
exist within the United States.” The progression from that second qualifying
clause to the horrors of mass criminalization and the sprawling American prison
industry is laid out by DuVernay with bracing
lucidity. With a potent mixture of archival footage and testimony from a
dazzling array of activists, politicians, historians, and formerly incarcerated
women and men, DuVernay creates a work of grand
historical synthesis. To quote Woodrow Wilson on another movie, it’s like
writing history with lightning. A Netflix original
documentary.
Matías Piñeiro 2016 Argentina/USA 87 minutes
This is a pleasant enough
film, engaging at moments, clever in its overlapping of narrative threads. But its forward movement via the use of
progressive flashbacks, each of which itself moves forward in the time sequence
of the past action lends a sense of sophistication that is contrived,
artificial, and ultimately very shallow.
It is more “clever” than it is smart; it is more catching of attention
than it is of meaningfully sustaining of it.
There is clearly directorial ability shown by Matias Piñeiro in this film, but he has a lot to learn
about creating meaningful story line.
U.S. Premiere
Shooting outside his
native Argentina for the first time, New York–based Matias Piñeiro
fashions a bittersweet comedy of coupling and uncoupling that doubles as a love
letter to his adopted city. Working on a Spanish translation of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream on an artist residency, Camila (Agustina Muñoz) finds herself
within a constellation of shifting relationships (an old flame, a new one, a
long-lost relative). Mingling actors from the director’s Buenos Aires repertory
with stalwarts of New York’s independent film scene (Keith Poulson, Dustin Guy Defa, Dan Sallitt), Hermia and
Helena offers the precise gestures, mercurial moods, and youthful energies
of all Piñeiro’s cinema, with an emotional depth and
directness that make this his most mature work yet.
Alison
Maclean 2016
New Zealand 75 minutes
This
is a well-acted, well-done film…and I started out really liking it. But it takes a turn that made me rather
totally dislike it: it becomes as
adolescent and shallow as some of its characters, and this deeply bothered
me. The fact that Alison Maclean can do
such a technically good film makes it even worse that her vision is ultimately
so puerile. I suppose we are to think
that there is redemption for the miscreant behavior in the ending’s turn
around; but long before that the film turned sour on me. I did not buy there being anything redemptive
at all; and the fact that the characters—and the filmmaker—seemed to feel
differently put the nail in the coffin of this film for me.
U.S. Premiere
Alison Maclean (Jesus’
Son) returns to her New Zealand filmmaking roots with a multilayered
coming-of-age story about a young actor (James Rolleston) searching for the
truth of a character he’s playing onstage and the resulting moral dilemma in
his personal life. Set largely in a drama school, featuring Kerry Fox as a
diva-like teacher who tries to shape her student’s raw talent, The
Rehearsal, adapted from the novel by Eleanor Catton, demystifies actors and
acting in order to reveal the moments where craft becomes art. The same happens
with Maclean’s understated but penetrating filmmaking. Her concentration on the
quotidian yields a finale that borders on the sublime.
Gianfranco
Rosi 2016 Italy/Franc 108 minutes
This is one that almost
worked: the idea of embedding the
extreme immigration crisis of North Africa into the extremely mundane everyday
life of the Italian island of Lampedusa is a clever one…and it does almost work. Immersing the viewer in the quotidian
existence of a pre-adolescent boy and his family, and only having the horror
and pain of the refugees to the island community in which he lives emerge
slowly in the interstices of our view of his life on the island actually could
have created an even higher level of contrast.
Unfortunately, I think Gianfranco
Rosi goes too far in the amount of time he spends
focusing on the quotidian—and in the end it provides a distraction rather than
a contrast. Politically the film is
well-meaning and on target.
Cinematically it misses the mark.
Winner of the Golden
Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, Gianfranco Rosi’s
documentary observes Europe’s migrant crisis from the vantage point of of Lampedusa, a Mediterranean island where hundreds of
thousands of refugees, fleeing war and poverty, have landed in recent decades. Rosi shows the harrowing work of rescue operations but
devotes most of the film to the daily rhythms of Lampedusa, seen through the
eyes of a doctor who treats casualties and performs autopsies, and a feisty but
anxious pre-teen from a family of fishermen for whom it is simply a peripheral
fact of life. With its emphasis on the quotidian, the film reclaims an ongoing
tragedy from the abstract sensationalism of media headlines. A
Kino Lorber release.
James Gray 2016 USA 140 minutes
I had wanted to like this
film. We had even brought with us to see
it two Peruvian architects, one of whom actually did a masters
thesis that involved the civilization in question in that part of the Bolivian
Amazon. Some hour or so into this film,
however, I began to ask myself, “Why am I supposed to care about this?” By two hours into the film I was angrily
convinced that I absolutely did not, and that there was no conceivable reason
why I should. The glorification of the
main character’s obsessive pursuit of this exploration in no way seemed to
justify the toll it took on his family—nor on me as
the viewer. It was pitched as “visually
resplendent”; but, aside from the visual excitement of the initial hunting
scene (totally ripped off from the almost identical—but far better—sequence in
Tony Richardson’s academy award winning Tom
Jones), we did not find it
particularly wonderful visually. The
grandiosity of thinking this mess of a story merited a two hour and twenty
minute film is very much involved in what was so dreadfully wrong with it: it took itself incredibly seriously without
any earthly justification for doing so.
It did have high production values; but, as always, that only
intensifies my disliking a film when its story and dramatic meaning are so
bad. It indeed is a film of epic size;
but is a work of tiny value or import,
World Premiere
James Gray’s emotionally
and visually resplendent epic tells the story of Lieutenant Colonel Percy
Fawcett (a remarkable Charlie Hunnam), the British
military-man-turned-explorer whose search for a lost city deep in the Amazon
grows into an increasingly feverish, decades-long magnificent obsession that
takes a toll on his reputation, his home life with his wife (Sienna Miller) and
children, and his very existence. Gray and cinematographer Darius Khondji cast quite a spell, exquisitely pitched between
rapture and dizzying terror. Also starring Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland, The
Lost City of Z represents a form of epic storytelling that has all but
vanished from the landscape of modern cinema, and a rare level of artistry.
My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea
Dash Shaw 2016 USA 75
minutes
I have no idea what this
was doing in the NYFF: it seemed much
more like a high school art project than a professional film. It certainly is not for children: it is dark and violent in a deeply disturbing
way; but I did not find it suitable for adults, either: it is puerile and vacuous in an unpleasant
and unfulfilling way. We and our guests
all felt it had been a total waste of time to have gone to see it.
U.S. Premiere
No matter your age, part
of you never outgrows high school, for better or worse. Dash Shaw, known for
such celebrated graphic novels as Bottomless Belly Button and New
School, brings his subjective, dreamlike sense of narrative; his empathy
for outsiders and their desire to connect; and his rich, expressive drawing
style to his first animated feature. Packed with action but seen from the
inside out, My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea is about friends
overcoming their differences and having each other’s backs in times of crisis,
and its marvelously complex characters are voiced by Jason Schwartzman, Lena
Dunham, Reggie Watts, Maya Rudolph, and John Cameron Mitchell.
The documentaries in this
year’s NYFF were fabulous! I have
already included our favorite, I Am Not Your Negro, above among the
films of the Main Slate, as it was our second favorite film in the Festival—and
we saw it twice! But many of the documentaries below would
rank among our favorite films in the NYFF this year, far above many in the Main
Slate.
This absolutely incredible documentary should have
been in the Main Slate of the NYFF, and I included it above with the Main Slate
because it not only deserved to be there, in my opinion it should have been the
Opening Night film. It was our second
favorite film in the NYFF, and we saw it twice!
(See the review above)
Linda Saffire,
Adam Schlesinger 2016
USA 90 minutes
We would not have missed this documentary, even if only to support our
friend Adam Schlesinger, who
co-directed it with Linda Saffire; but, in actuality, it is a terrific film that would be a must-see
for us under any circumstances! It is
an excellent piece of cinema, engaging, entertaining, and quite moving. Although Wendy
Whelan is a world renowned ballerina, known to all who over the years have
followed the NY City Ballet, she is not someone I have been particularly
interested in; nor am I particularly interested in dance in general. It does not matter: the story of her hip injury and her incredible
drive to overcome it and to reclaim her decades-long extraordinary career is so
riveting—and the filmmaking about it is so spectacular—that it is virtually
impossible not to be thoroughly drawn in and entranced by this film. What a treat!
And, if you do love dance, it
is an absolute must.
Q&As with Wendy Whelan, Linda Saffire, Adam Schlesinger and additional crew members*
In 1984, Wendy Whelan joined the New
York City Ballet as an apprentice; by 1991, she had been promoted to Principal
Dancer. She quickly became a revered and beloved figure throughout the dance
world. Wrote Roslyn Sulcas, “her
sinewy physicality, her kinetic clarity, and her dramatic, otherworldly
intensity have created a quite distinct and unusual identity.” Linda Saffire and Adam Schlesinger’s film follows this
extraordinary artist throughout a passage of life that all dancers must face,
when she must confront the limitations of her own body and adapt to a different
relationship with the art form she loves so madly.
Errol Morris 2016 USA 76 minutes
Ten years ago, Elsa Dorfman took one of her signature 20 x 24 inch Polaroid
photographs of Alex, Nancy, my parents, and me.
Two years later, my Dad died, and four years after that my Mom died—so
this portrait has become a family heirloom.
It is also a totally amazing
photograph! (At the reception in her honor before the premiere of the film, I
was telling Elsa how special that
photograph, taken as a present for my 60th birthday had become; and
she said, “Oh! You’re the psychoanalyst!”How she
remembered is beyond me…but not beyond her.)
Elsa has always been able to
capture something enormously special in her work; and there is something
technically special visually rich about these extremely large format Polaroid
photographs. The esteemed documentarian Errol
Morris has made a deeply personal, beautiful, touching,
and totally wonderful film about her. It
is set as an interview in her Cambridge studio, and consists mostly of her
going through photographs she has taken over the years. (The title, The B-Side derives from
the fact that the copies she has are the ones her clients did not choose. These Polaroids are one-offs, unique
originals; so there are no copies of a photograph, only the actual originals
themselves.). In the course of her reminiscing, however, she recounts her
personal and professional history, the story of her family and friends (often,
like Allen Ginsberg, her subjects as well), and the many years she has been
creating this art. Morris, who is a loving friend of Elsa, has
created a film that captures the marvels of this fantastic woman and her
incredible work. You will be captivated
and thrilled to watch it.
Errol Morris’s surprising new film is
simplicity itself: a visit to the Cambridge, Massachusetts studio of his
friend, the 20×24 Polaroid portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman,
who specifies on her website that she likes her subjects “to wear clothes (and
to bring toys, skis, books, tennis racquets, musical instruments, and
particularly pets…).” As this charming, articulate, and calmly uncompromising
woman takes us through her fifty-plus years of remarkable but fragile
images of paying customers, commissioned subjects, family, and close friends
(including the poet Allen Ginsberg), the sense of time passing grows more and
more acute. This is a masterful film.
Whose Country?
Mohamed Siam
2016 Egypt/USA/France
60 minutes
Co-Produced
by our friend Bruni Burres, Whose Country?
is enormously powerful, partly because it is so
personal and understated. Mostly an
interview with a former policeman under the Mubarak regime, the film outlines
the corruption and brutality of the police and their devastating effects on the
lives of innocent Egyptian citizens. It moves
through the period of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood (when the main figure
re-enters the police department), with its failed hope that more fairness will
enter the system; and it continues into the military coup that ended that
failed project. The only constants seem
to be corruption and brutality. It is a
personal tale of a politically crucial swath of Egypt’s modern history—made even
more complex by the obvious distortions of the main character’s
biased telling of the story…and perhaps even by the filmmaker Mohamed Siam’s
own personally related history. It is a
completely fascinating piece of documentary cinema that should be seen.
A remarkable, one-of-a-kind film from Egypt, Whose Country? has a
point of view that grows in complexity as it proceeds, alongside the shifting
fortunes and affiliations of the Cairo policeman who is the film’s subject and
guide. By his side, we witness the fall of Mubarak, the rise and fall of Morsi
and the Muslim Brotherhood, and the rise of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
The level of craft in this film is extraordinary, and so is the close
attention that the director pays to his difficult task: illuminating the
compromised lives of the protagonist and his friends and the convulsive nation
they call home.
Mohammed and Bapu
are itinerant film showmen who travel through the Western Indian state of
Maharashtra and show 35mm film prints on makeshift screens at village fairs.
All the while, they struggle with both the growing possibility of obsolescence
and the increasing fragility of their enormous rusty, clanking projectors, kept
in barely working order by a repairman named Prakash (who has a beautiful
invention: an “oil bath” projector). This colorful, five-years-in-the-making
documentary is a real Last Picture Show, but its melancholy is leavened with
joy and delight, and the wonder of still images coming to life at 24 frames per
second.
SPECIAL EVENTS
Jim Jarmusch 2016 USA 108 minutes
Jim Jarmusch is a
musician and a music lover, and music always plays an integral and wonderful
role in all his films. As in his 1997
documentary about Neil Young and Crazy Horse's 1996 concert tour, Year of the Horse, in Gimme Danger Jim has created a very
personal, beautiful portrait of a musician and his work—this time Iggy Pop and the musicians he worked
with, especially the members of his band, The
Stooges. This is an intimate, funny,
historically important, humanly insightful piece of work. I loved it, even though I am not at all
familiar with the music involved.
Iggy Pop and Jim Jarmusch
in person!
“Music is life and life is not a business,” said
Iggy Pop when he and his surviving bandmates from The Stooges were inducted
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010. Jim Jarmusch’s
cinematic offering to the punk gods of Ann Arbor traces the always raucous and
frequently calamitous history of the Stooges from inception to the present.
With the help of animator James Kerr, plus glimpses of Lucille Ball and a
shirtless Yul Brynner amidst a bonanza of archival performance footage, photos,
and interviews, Gimme Danger has the
feeling of a night at Max’s Kansas City. An Amazon Studios and Magnolia
Pictures release.
Pablo Larraín 2016 USA/Chile/France 99 minutes
As much as I had liked Pablo Larraín’s Neruda, I totally disliked his Jackie. I found it an empty, exploitative,
self-important and self-indulgent aimless wandering through a painful moment in
American history, the assassination of Jack
Kennedy. Natalie Portman, whom I usually very much like, was either dreadful
in the title role of this film, or she
was very successfully acting the flat, empty-headed portrayal of Jackie Kennedy
that the director was going for. Either
way, it was horrid. One can react many
ways to that First Lady’s preoccupation with style and appearance; and, while
it is possible to conclude that it did reflect an actual shallowness and
self-centeredness, it hardly justifies making a film around that—particularly
utilizing the extremely graphic representations of the assassination itself to
punctuate this view point. I was not a
fan of JFK, nor was I particularly an admirer of his First Lady; but I feel
that this pointless and pretentious film is an exploitative and empty taking of
this moment in our country’s history.
The music was every bit as maudlin and melodramatic as the direction-pperhaps even more disgustingly so. Yuck.
(The feel of Jackie was so totally different from anything I can imagine
from Pablo Larrain,
I actually wonder how much may be attributable to Darren Aronofsky, who was one
of the producers, and whose project this originally was, and whose work I have
thoroughly disliked.) I am only glad that this was only a last
minute addition to the Festival as a Special Event, and not deemed to be worthy
to be part of the Main Slate.
Pablo Larraín’s first
English-language film is a bolt from the blue, a fugue-like study of Jackie
Kennedy, brilliantly acted by Natalie Portman. Dramatizing events from just
before, during, and after JFK’s assassination, this carefully reconstructed,
beautifully visualized film is grounded in Jackie’s interactions with her
children, her social secretary (Greta Gerwig), LBJ’s special assistant Jack Valenti
(Max Casella), her brother-in-law Bobby (Peter Sarsgaard),
a priest (John Hurt), a journalist (Billy Crudup), and others. In this
emotionally urgent film, from a script by Noah Oppenheim, we feel not only
Jackie’s tragic solitude but also her precise awareness that every move she
makes carries historical ramifications. A Fox Searchlight
release.
In the “Freedom Summer”
of 1964, hundreds of young people—including James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and
Michael Schwerner—were drawn to the deep South to take part in the Civil Rights movement. At the
same moment, two groups of young men (including guitarist John Fahey and Dick
Waterman, the great champion of the Blues) made the same trip in search of
Blues legends Skip James and Son House. That these two quests ended in the
volatile state of Mississippi, whose governor famously referred to integration
as “genocide,” is the starting point for Sam Pollard’s inventive, musically and
historically rich film.