8 years ago
Festivals (10 posts found)
New York Film Festival Dispatch #3: “Merchants of Doubt”, “Citizenfour” and “Foxcatcher”
Merchants of Doubt
The new documentary from Food, Inc. director Robert Kenner presents a frustrating contradiction: it’s a film designed to take down corporate America’s slippery lobbyists and think tank “experts” that too often falls into the same glib...
Read more →
New York Film Festival Review: Richard Gere Unconvincing in “Time Out of Mind”
If you believe one of film’s most important social objectives is to foster empathy – to allow the audience to walk in the shoes of someone they never would get to know in real life – then it is hard to dislike a film about homelessness. The homeless remain the...
Read more →
New York Film Festival Review: Timothy Spall Brings Mike Leigh’s “Mr. Turner” To Life
What makes a great opening shot of a film? It could simply be beautiful to look at, or intriguing enough to hook you into the story. Better still, it could perfectly distill a film’s themes into a single, compelling image. By any of these measures, the opening...
Read more →
New York Film Festival Dispatch #2: “Saint Laurent”, “National Gallery” and “Red Army”
Saint Laurent
With their strained efforts to eschew the obvious, one could argue that biopics trafficking in jumbled chronologies are in danger of becoming as clichéd as the traditional linear narrative. Such a fate too often befalls Bertrand Bonello’s ...
Read more →
New York Film Festival Review: “Gone Girl” a Pitch Black Satire of Procedural Pulp
If the eyes are the windows to the soul then Rosamund Pike is blessed with peepholes to the abyss, and David Fincher was wise to cast her in his latest prestige pulp. Speaking during a press conference at the 52nd New York Film Festival, where Gone Girl was th...
Read more →
New York Film Festival Dispatch #1: “The Look of Silence”, “Two Days, One Night” and “Jauja”
The Look of Silence
If you didn’t get enough of Joshua Oppenheimer’s last film about the Indonesian genocide of suspected communists, he’s back with an equally unnerving sequel, The Look of Silence. This time, the director approaches the harrowing saga th...
Read more →
Fantastic Fest Review: “It Follows”
After The Guest and Cub, I think I may be ready to never see another 70s/80s horror or thriller throwback film ever. No more synth scores, no more story-free villains, no more films that amount to empty homage. Between Cub’s complete lack of tension and story ...
Read more →
Fantastic Fest Review: “The Duke of Burgundy”
Isn’t it rather adorable how many self-proclaimed “men’s rights activists” go on about how women are trying to create a society without men at all, as if men were really needed for anything in the first place? It’s almost as if Peter Strickland, director of Be...
Read more →
Fantastic Fest Review: “No Man’s Land”
Ning Hao has had a rough time lately. After debuting his previous film, Crazy Racer, the Chinese director went on to make a film about a criminal defense lawyer stuck in the desert of China after winning a case for a falcon poacher. The film was rejected by th...
Read more →
Fantastic Fest Review: “Cub”
After an impressive reception at TIFF, Jonas Govaerts’ Cub landed at Fantastic Fest with great anticipation, with a premise that most would think would be obvious to try, but has been done seldom. A boy scout troop goes on a camping trip, and finds themselves ...
Read more →