NEW
YORK FILM FESTIVAL
2017 –
55th Festival
As
always, the 2017 New York
Film Festival—the 55th
edition—was an extremely enjoyable and rich experience. It is always one of our favorite things to do
in NYC each year. The Main Slate
of the 2017 NYFF was an unusually
mixed bag this year, however. Perhaps
this accounts for my tardiness in sending out these reviews. On the other hand, I feel a pressure to get
them out now, as many of these films are currently available. Of the 20 films we saw, there were several
wonderful films, a number of very enjoyable films, a few that just weren’t all
that special (or, perhaps, just not to my taste), and two that were embarrassingly bad.
Our favorites were all extremely good: Noah Baumbach’s The Myerowitz
Stories, (currently in theaters and available to stream on Netflix), Arnaud Desplechin’s
Ismaël’s Ghosts, two films by the prolific Hong Song-soo—The Day
After and On the Beach Alone at Night (the latter now in theaters,
including the Film Society’s Elinor
Bunin Munroe Film Center), and Aki Kaurismäki’s The
Other Side of Hope (currently in limited theatrical release). I really cannot understand the reason that two
of the films in the Main Slate were
included in the Festival at all: Sere Bozon’s Mrs. Hyde, and the totally horrible film by Woody Allen, Wonder Wheel. (BEWARE: this last one is currently
premiering in theaters, and I want to warn you about it! See below.)
Also, be on the lookout for Sara
Driver’s Boom for Real, which, while not
in the Main Slate (see Spotlight
on Documentary, below), was one of our favorite films in the Festival.
As
always, the NYFF included a great Spotlight
on Documentary, a Retrospective
(this year of the films of Robert Mitchum [which provided us with the opportunity to
see Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man on the big
screen—something we never pass up!]),
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”), Special
Events, Revivals,
and Talks.
Also
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 Festival.
The thing that usually unites this diversity, however, is that all the
films are almost always great examples of what they are—all excellent, even when
I actually do not like them. This is
what made the last two on my list such negative standouts: I did not feel they at all satisfied this
criterion.
Following
the convenient format I developed in recent years, to save time I am going to
do brief assessments of the films we saw—including first for each film the Film
Society’s own descriptions of the basic information, along with my personal
reactions and evaluations. [If you click
on the title of a film at the beginning of its description below (but not in
the list below), you will be taken to the Film
Society’s webpage for the film—including a photographic image from that
film. You would then have to hit “Back” on your browser to return to my
descriptions.]
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 directly to its
review; you can then hit “back” to return to the list):
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
Ismael’s Ghosts, Director’s Cut
The
Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
·
Noah Baumbach
·
2017
·
USA
·
110 minutes
North American Premiere
Noah Baumbach revisits the terrain of family vanities and warring
attachments that he began exploring with The Squid and the Whale in
this intricately plotted story of three middle-aged siblings (Adam Sandler, Ben
Stiller, and Elizabeth Marvel) coping with their strong-willed father (Dustin
Hoffman) and the flightiness of his wife (Emma Thompson). Baumbach’s
film never stops deftly changing gears, from surges of pathos to painful comedy
and back again. Needless to say, this lyrical quicksilver comedy is very much a
New York experience. A Netflix release.
If you like Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale,
this film is a must-see. For whatever
reason, Baumbach
is better at presenting on screen narcissistic parents and the subtle
variations of the effect of their narcissism on various sorts of their children
than any other filmmaker around. His
characters are always a bit cardboard, and his narratives always a bit forced;
but the characterizations they create hit home in powerful and effective
ways. This film has a great cast, and it
is done masterfully—in Baumbach’s very idiosyncratic style. It is entertaining as it is intense. As I said, if you like his style (most
perfectly realized in The Squid and the Whale, you will really like this film. We very much did.
Ismael’s Ghosts,
Director’s Cut
·
Arnaud Desplechin
·
2017
·
France
·
132 minutes
North American Premiere
Phantoms swirl around
Ismael (Mathieu Amalric), a filmmaker in the throes
of writing a spy thriller based on the unlikely escapades of his brother, Ivan Dedalus (Louis Garrel). His only
true stability, his relationship with Sylvia (Charlotte Gainsbourg),
is upended, as is the life of his Jewish documentarian mentor and father-in-law
(László Szabó), when
Ismael’s wife Carlotta (Marion Cotillard), who
disappeared twenty years earlier, returns, and, like one of Hitchcock’s
fragile, delusional femmes fatales, expects that her husband and father are
still in thrall to her. A brilliant shape-shifter—part farce, part melodrama—Ismael’s
Ghosts is finally about the process of creating a work of art and all the
madness that requires. A Magnolia Pictures release.
As always with Arnaud Desplechin’s
films, we cannot wait to see this one again.
It is extremely dense and complex, but at the same time powerful and
moving. Virtually at the other end of the
spectrum from Noah Baumbauch, Arnaud’s characters and narratives have an intense complexity and
profound humanity—they express aspects of the overall human condition by way of
their extreme individuality and specificity.
The emotions are raw and deep, and yet they have a comic element as
well. The story is at once literal and
metaphoric. In many ways it is a
continuation of the ever-morphing and evolving family narrative that has woven
through so many of Arnaud’s films—most
obviously Kings and Queen, but also very much My Golden Days and A
Christmas Tale; nevertheless, it completely stands on its own as a totally
separate and independent work. We all
loved it!
·
Hong Sang-soo
·
2017
·
South Korea
·
101 minutes
Hong Sang-soo’s movies have always invited autobiographical readings,
and his 19th feature is perhaps his most achingly personal film yet, a steel-nerved,
clear-eyed response to the tabloid frenzy that erupted in South Korea over his
relationship with actress Kim Min-hee. The film
begins in Hamburg, where actress Young-hee (played by
Kim herself, who won the Best Actress prize at Berlin for this role) is hiding
out after the revelation of her affair with a married filmmaker. Back in Korea,
a series of encounters shed light on Young-hee’s volatile
state, as she slips in and out of melancholic reflection and dreams. Centered
on Kim’s astonishingly layered performance, On the Beach at Night Alone is
the work of a master mining new emotional depths. A Cinema Guild release.
I am always eager to see what our favorite
Korean director, Hong Sang-soo, comes up with, and this year he had two films in the Main Slate of the Festival—and
they were both wonderful. In a couple of
the talks and Q&A’s Hong did this year, we learned much more about his
approach to filmmaking: he gets up early
each morning, writes for a few hours, discusses what he has written with his
actors, and then films that segment of the film he is working on; and this
process repeats every day of the filming in exactly the same way. This gave us a powerful insight into the
reason his films have the unique texture and quality that seems to characterize
them. The process seemed to Nancy and me
like it is some amalgam of painting, writing poetry, and filmmaking—in a way
that builds continually on the segment which has just been laid down before it. His stories seem always to weave back and
forth through the same issues, but always differently…and, to us, always deeply
satisfyingly.
U.S. Premiere
Hong continues in the
openly emotional register of his On the Beach at Night Alone, also
showing in this year’s Main Slate. Shot in moody black and white, The
Day After opens with book publisher Bongwan
(Kwon Hae-hyo) fending off his wife’s heated
accusations of infidelity. At the office, it’s the first day for his new
assistant, Areum (Kim Min-hee),
whose predecessor was Bongwan’s lover. Mistaken
identity, repetition compulsion, and déjà vu figure into the narrative as the
film entangles its characters across multiple timelines through an intricate
geometry of desire, suspicion, and betrayal. The end result is one of Hong’s most
plaintive and philosophical works.
In this second example, the action develops
much more internally—but no less intensely. As much as On the Beach at Night Alone plays out in expansive color against open seascapes, The Day After plays out in
constrictive interiors, in somber black and white. They are both very different, but both underlyingly deeply connected. See them both and experience for yourself
what wonderful experiences Hong
creates—unique yet deeply interrelated.
·
Aki Kaurismäki
·
2017
·
Finland
·
98 minutes
Leave it to Aki Kaurismäki (Le Havre, NYFF 2011), peerless master of
humanist tragicomedy, to make the first great fiction film about the 21st
century migrant crisis. Having escaped bombed-out Aleppo, Syrian refugee Khlaed (Sherwan Haji) seeks
asylum in Finland, only to get lost in a maze of functionaries and
bureaucracies. Meanwhile, shirt salesman Wikström (Sakari Kuosmanen) leaves his
wife, wins big in a poker game, and takes over a restaurant whose deadpan staff
he also inherits. These parallel stories dovetail to gently comic and enormously
moving effect in Kaurismäki’s politically urgent
fable, an object lesson on the value of compassion and hope that remains
grounded in a tangible social reality. A Janus Films release.
Of all the films I have seen dealing with
the migrant crisis in Europe, this film by Kaurismäki makes far and away the
most powerful and meaningful statement—in part because it is not heavy-handedly
about the crisis: it is first and foremost a story, with human
interest and humor as well as pathos, and in that cinematic mixture it draws us
into feeling and understanding things that more direct statements almost
invariably fail to do. We like his
films, and this one ranks high among the ones we’ve seen.
·
Sean Baker
·
2017
·
USA
·
115 minutes
A six-year-old girl
(the remarkable Brooklynn Prince) and her two best friends run wild on the grounds
of a week-by-week motel complex on the edge of Orlando’s Disney World. Meanwhile,
her mother (talented novice Bria Vinaite) desperately
tries to cajole the motel manager (an ever-surprising Willem Dafoe) to turn a
blind eye to the way she pays the rent. A film about but not for kids, Baker’s
depiction of childhood on the margins has fierce energy, tenderness, and great
beauty. After the ingenuity of his iPhone-shot 2015 breakout Tangerine,
Baker reasserts his commitment to 35mm film with sun-blasted images that evoke
a young girl’s vision of adventure and endurance beyond heartbreak. An A24 release.
I really expected not to like this film,
and I was surprised and pleased to have liked it very much. It was resoundingly successful: it drew me
right into its story, entertained me, and made me think in a way I had not been
prepared to expect. Willem Dafoe was superb, but so were all of the kids in it. It is
not a perfect film, but it is well-worth seeing.
·
Todd Haynes
·
2017
·
USA
·
117 minutes
Centerpiece Selection
In 1977, following
the death of his single mother, Ben (Oakes Fegley) loses
his hearing in a freak accident and makes his way from Minnesota to New York,
hoping to learn about the father he has never met. A half-century earlier,
another deaf 12-year-old, Rose (Millicent Simmonds), flees her restrictive
Hoboken home, captivated by the bustle and romance of the nearby big city. Each
of these parallel adventures, unfolding largely without dialogue, is an
exuberant love letter to a bygone era of New York. The mystery of how they
ultimately converge, which involves Julianne Moore in a lovely dual role,
provides the film’s emotional core. Adapted from a young-adult novel by Hugo
author Brian Selznick, Wonderstruck is an all-ages enchantment, entirely
true to director Todd Haynes’s sensibility: an intelligent, deeply personal, and
lovingly intricate tribute to the power of obsession. An Amazon
Studios release.
This is another film I did not expect to
like. I have not been a fan of Todd Haynes’s previous films, so my
expectations were very low.
Nevertheless, I found that I enjoyed it for the most part. The intertwining of the two time-separated
narratives worked for me. (I know it did
not for many people.) I did have trouble, however, with the
rather artificial and forced denouement of the themes—and especially the hokey
device which essentially creates a long, talky explanation in the attempt to
unify the disparate pieces of what had gone on—seemed like a resort to an
extremely unsophisticated expedient that cheapened my overall experience of the
film.
·
Greta Gerwig
·
2017
·
USA
·
93 minutes
Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut is a portrait of an artistically
inclined young woman (Saoirse Ronan) trying to define herself in the shadow of her
mother (Laurie Metcalf) and searching for an escape route from her hometown of
Sacramento. Moods are layered upon moods at the furious pace of late adolescence
in this lovely and loving film, which shifts deftly from one emotional and
comic register to the next. Lady Bird is rich in invention and
incident, and it is powered by Ronan, one of the finest actors in movies. With
Lucas Hedges and Timothée Chalamet
as the men in Lady Bird’s life, Beanie Feldstein as her best friend, and Tracy
Letts as her dad. An A24 release.
This was a remarkably good film for a first
time director. I expected to hate it (I
am not a fan of Greta Gerwig as an actor), but I was pleasantly
surprised. It was more sophisticatedly
handled and professionally executed than I had imagined; and it made for a good
film experience. Gerwig did not handle the ending
of the film particularly well, but this is a flaw that is common for even far
more seasoned writer/directors.
·
Joachim Trier
·
2017
·
Norway/Sweden/France
·
116 minutes
In the new film from
Joachim Trier (Reprise), an adolescent country girl (Eili
Harboe) has just moved to the city to begin her
university studies, with the internalized religious severity of her quietly
domineering mother and father (Ellen Dorrit Petersen
and Henrik Rafaelsen) always in mind. When she
realizes that she is developing an attraction to her new friend Anja (Okay
Kaya), she begins to manifest a terrifying and uncontrollable power that her
parents have long feared. To reveal more would be a crime; let’s just say that
this fluid, sharply observant, and continually surprising film begins in the
key of horror and ends somewhere completely different. Warning: This
film contains flashing lights which may not be suitable for photosensitive epilepsy.
Viewer discretion is advised. A release of The Orchard.
This is an interesting film. It has many imperfections—and some lost opportunities
in where it chooses to go; but it is a gripping and absorbing piece of
filmmaking.
·
Luca Guadagnino
·
2017
·
Italy/France
·
132 minutes
A story of summer
love unlike any other, the sensual new film from the director of I Am
Love, set in 1983, charts the slowly ripening romance between Elio (Timothée Chalamet), an American
teen on the verge of discovering himself, and Oliver (Armie
Hammer), the handsome older grad student whom his professor father (Michael Stuhlbarg) has invited to their vacation home in Northern
Italy. Adapted from the wistful novel by André Aciman, Call
Me by Your Name is Guadagnino’s most
exquisitely rendered, visually restrained film, capturing with eloquence the
confusion and longing of youth, anchored by a remarkable, star-making
performance by Chalamet, always a nervy bundle of
swagger and insecurity, contrasting with Hammer’s stoicism. A
Sony Pictures Classics release.
This is almost
a good film. It just didn’t quite work
for me. I had trouble with Armie Hammer as
the graduate student, gay lover—and as Jewish, for that matter; and, largely
(but not completely) because of that, I had trouble with the relationship. And, whereas the romance with the physical
setting worked from Guadagnino in I Am Love (where it
echoed Visconti’s use of the settings in The Leopard), it was just a
distraction here. It was beautiful, but
disappointing.
·
Richard Linklater
·
2017
·
USA
·
119 minutes
Opening Night Selection · World Premiere
In Richard Linklater’s
lyrical road movie, as funny as it is heartbreaking, three aging Vietnam-era
Navy vets—soft-spoken Doc (Steve Carell), unhinged and unfiltered Sal (Bryan
Cranston), and quietly measured Mulhall (Laurence Fishburne)—reunite
to perform a sacred task: the proper burial of Doc’s only child, who has been
killed in the early days of the Iraq invasion. As this trio of old friends
makes its way up the Eastern seaboard, Linklater gives us a rich rendering of
friendship, a grand mosaic of common life in the USA during the Bush era, and a
striking meditation on the passage of time and the nature of truth. To put it
simply, Last Flag Flying is a great movie from one of America’s finest
filmmakers. An Amazon Studios release.
I have not been a fan of Linklater, and was dreading this film
as Opening Night. I was surprised by the
fact I found it for the most part to be far better than I had anticipated. I rather enjoyed some of the interplay and
banter between the main characters as it developed throughout the film—but it
was very uneven: as one friend put it, Bryan Cranston almost did a great
acting job, Laurence Fishburne did a
good enough acting job, and Steve Carell
almost did a good enough acting job. The
real problem for me was in where the film went:
it started out being a powerful indictment of the false glorification of
the heroism of individual soldiers used purposefully to distract from the moral
shortcomings of the wars they are fighting (set in 2003, it is focused on the
death in action in the Iraq War of the son of one of the three main characters,
who were soldiers together years before in the Vietnam War); but, by the end,
it ends up somehow going along with most of what it originally had found so atrociously
unacceptable—in a totally unconvincing way, that, for me, seemed liked a
complete sellout. This is one the
further I got from it, the less I liked it.
·
Claire Denis
·
2017
·
France
·
95 minutes
North American Premiere
Juliette Binoche
is both incandescent and emotionally raw in Claire Denis’s extraordinary new
film as Isabelle, a middle-aged Parisian artist in search of definitive love. The
film moves elliptically, as though set to some mysterious bio-rhythm, from one
romantic/emotional attachment to another: from the boorish married lover
(Xavier Beauvois); to the subtly histrionic actor
(Nicolas Duvauchelle), also married; to the dreamboat
hairdresser (Paul Blain); to the gentle man (Alex Descas)
not quite ready for commitment to . . . a mysterious fortune-teller.
Appropriately enough, Let the Sun Shine In (very
loosely inspired by Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse) feels
like it’s been lit from within; it was lit from without by Denis’s longtime
cinematographer Agnès Godard. It is also very funny. A Sundance Selects release.
I very much like the films of Claire Denis, and I love the acting of Juliette Binoche; but this one mostly
lost me. It is not that it is badly
directed (except for the final scene over the end credits—and that must have been
a directorial decision), and Binoche
acts well, as always. I suspect the
problem was the writing: the story is
deeply flawed, unconvincing, and actually shallow in its conception—and I think
that was what ruined it for me. As for
the heavy-handedness of last scene, in which Gérard Depardieu drones on endlessly right into and over the
closing credits, the implied cleverness of it didn’t work for me at all.
·
Alain Gomis
·
2017
·
France/Senegal/Belgium/Germany/Lebanon
·
124 minutes
U.S. Premiere
The new film from
Alain Gomis, a French director of Guinea-Bissauan and
Senegalese descent, is largely set in the roughest areas of the rough city of
Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Here, a woman named Félicité (Véro Tshanda Beya Mputu)
scrapes together a living as a singer in a makeshift bar (her accompanists are played
by members of the Kasai Allstars band). When her son
is seriously injured in an accident, she goes in search of money for his
medical care and embarks on a double journey: through the punishing outer world
of the city and the inner world of the soul. Félicité is
tough, tender, lyrical, mysterious, funny, and terrifying, both responsive to the
moment and fixed on its heroine’s spiritual progress. A Strand
Releasing release.
The is an imperfect, but quite enjoyable film. There are wonderful moments in it, and it is
a terrific product from a young French director. There are noticeable rough spots in the
story, but they do not interfere with this being a basically successful film.
·
Lucrecia Martel
·
2017
·
Argentina/Brazil/Spain/France/Mexico/USA/The
Netherlands/Portugal
·
115 minutes
U.S. Premiere
The great Lucrecia
Martel ventures into the realm of historical fiction and makes the genre
entirely her own in this adaptation of Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 classic of
Argentinean literature. In the late 18th century, in a far-flung corner of what
seems to be Paraguay, the title character, an officer of the Spanish crown (Daniel
Giménez Cacho) born in the Americas,
waits in vain for a transfer to a more prestigious location. Martel renders
Zama’s world—his daily regimen of small humiliations and petty politicking—as
both absurd and mysterious, and as he increasingly succumbs to lust and
paranoia, subject to a creeping disorientation. Precise yet dreamlike, and
thick with atmosphere, Zama is a singular and intoxicating experience, a
welcome return from one of contemporary cinema’s truly brilliant minds.
I have very much
liked many of Lucrecia Martel’s
earlier films, so I was particularly disappointed by this one. It is beautiful in its languorous slowness,
as many of her films can successfully be; but it is essentially pointless (unless
the point is that colonialism was inhumane and demeaning, but that the
colonized can sink to the same inhumane and demeaning depths as their oppressors)
and deadening. What makes it worse is having to watch all of the violence and cruelty along the
way. In the long, slow disappearance
into the “beautiful” death of the swamp at the end, all I could think about was
the final scene of The Life of Brian,
with the crucified singing “Look on the Brighter Side of Life.” This was not a good association for this
film.
·
Serge Bozon
·
2017
·
France
·
95 minutes
North American Premiere
Serge Bozon’s eccentric comedic thriller is loosely based on Robert
Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with many
a twist. Isabelle Huppert hypnotizes us again as Mrs. Géquil,
a timid and rather peculiar physics professor, teaches in a suburban technical high
school. Apart from her quiet married life with her gentle stay-at-home husband,
she is mocked and despised on a daily basis by pretty much everyone around
her—headmaster, colleagues, students. During a dark, stormy night, she is
struck by lightning and wakes up a decidedly different person, a newly powerful
Mrs. Hyde with mysterious energy and uncontrollable powers. Highlighted by Bozon’s brilliant mise en scène, Isabelle Huppert hypnotizes us again, securing
her place as the ultimate queen of the screen.
I really love Isabelle Huppert as an actor. I think she is terrific. Why she agreed to do this mindless, pretentious,
puerile piece of trash is beyond me…but I sincerely wish I had not seen it. It is not easy to make Isabelle Huppert look bad as an actor—but Serge Bozon succeeded in doing just that.. As far as I can tell, Mrs. Hyde has no redeeming aspects. Avoid it at all
costs.
·
Woody Allen
·
2017
·
USA
Closing Night • World Premiere
In a career
spanning 50 years and almost as many features, Woody Allen has periodically
refined, reinvented, and redefined the terms of his art, and that’s exactly
what he does with his daring new film. We’re in Coney Island in the 1950s. A
lifeguard (Justin Timberlake) tells us a story that just might be filtered
through his vivid imagination: a middle-aged carousel operator (Jim Belushi) and his beleaguered wife (Kate Winslet), who eke out a living on the boardwalk, are visited by his
estranged daughter (Juno Temple)—a situation from which layer upon layer of
all-too-human complications develop. Allen and his cinematographer, the great
Vittorio Storaro, working with a remarkable cast led
by Winslet in a startlingly brave, powerhouse performance, have created a
bracing and truly surprising movie experience. An Amazon
Studios release.
I thought Mrs. Hyde was a low point in Festival
choices until I saw this one. To me, it
is inexcusable that this was included in the Festival at all, no less in a
position of honor. At the beginning of
the film, listening to Jim Belushi sound like an amateur who had never acted
before, I leaned over to Nancy and asked whether she thought he was as terrible
an actor as I was experiencing him to be—and she concurred. Shortly thereafter, however, Kate Winslet began to do her lines, and
she also sounded like a terrible actor, too. Now, I know Kate Winslet is a wonderful actor. It became painfully evident very quickly that
the problem was that the writing was inane and stilted, the story was stupid,
and the directing was abominable! It made even the great actors in it seem like
hacks. And the shallow, vacuous yet
pretentious story underscored the badness of the writing and directing. I—who idolizes
the many years of Woody Allen’s
early genius—am someone who thinks he has not made a good film since 1999; but
this for me was a new low. This film is
dreadful. Do yourself a favor and miss
it.
·
Jim Jarmusch
·
1995
·
USA
·
35mm
·
121 minutes
Jim Jarmusch’s hypnotic, parable-like, revisionist Western
follows the spiritual rebirth of a dying 19th-century accountant (Johnny Depp)
named William Blake (no relation to the poet . . . or is there?). Guiding Blake
through a treacherous landscape of U.S. Marshals, cannibalistic bounty hunters,
shady missionaries, and cross-dressing fur traders is a Plains Indian named Nobody (Gary Farmer), one of the most fully realized Native
American characters in contemporary cinema. Dead Man doubles as a barbed
reflection on America’s treatment of its indigenous people and a radical twist
on the myths of the American West. Jarmusch’s metaphysical
masterpiece features Robert Mitchum in one of his
final roles, as a gun-toting, cigar-smoking factory owner.
This is one of our very favorite Jim Jarmusch
films—and we love Jim’s films! If you’ve never seen it, find it online
immediately and watch it (if you like
Jarmusch;
he’s not for everybody)
The documentaries in this
year’s NYFF were great! Sara Driver’s Boom for Real was one of
our favorite films in the Festival—ranking higher than all but the top four in
my Main Slate list in how wonderful we thought it was.
·
Sara Driver
·
2017
·
USA
·
79 minutes
U.S. Premiere
Sara Driver’s
documentary is both a celebration of and elegy for the downtown New York
art/music/film/performance world of the late 1970s and early ’80s, through
which Jean-Michel Basquiat shot like a rocket. Weaving Basquiat’s life and
artistic progress in and out of her rich, living tapestry of this endlessly
cross-fertilizing scene, Driver has created an urgent recollection of freedom
and the aesthetic of poverty. Graffiti meets gestural painting, hip hop infects
rock and roll and visa versa, heroin comes and never
quite goes, night swallows day, and everybody looms as large as they feel like
looming on the crumbling streets of the Lower East Side.
Sara Driver’s documentary is a tour de force! It vividly brings to life Basquiat’s early
life in NYC and the roots of his artistic career; but it is so much more than
this: it is a love poem to the life of
the Lower East Side from 1977-80. It is
a brilliant portrayal of that time and place, and of the people who were shaped
by it and who made it what it was. And
it is fabulous as a film! It is entertaining, absorbing, and
emotionally moving…and it was one of our favorite films of this Festival!
·
Ena Talakic, Ines Talakic
·
2017
·
USA
·
87 minutes
World Premiere
In this lively
documentary portrait, the great nonpartisan investigative reporter Edward Jay
Epstein, still going strong at 81, takes us through his most notable articles
and books, including close looks at the findings of the Warren Commission, the
structure of the diamond industry, the strange career of Armand Hammer, and the
inner workings of big-time journalism itself. These are interwoven with an
in-progress investigation into the circumstances around Edward Snowden’s 2013
leak of classified documents, resulting in Epstein’s recently published,
controversial book How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and
the Theft. One of the last of his generation of journalists, the energetic,
articulate, and boyish Epstein is a truly fascinating character.
Ed Epstein is a one-of-a-kind, larger-than-life
personality, and this documentary by the talented, young Ena and Ines Talakic
is very successful in capturing a real sense of this. If you do not know or know about Ed, he burst on the scene in 1966 with
his book, Inquest: The Warren Commission
and the Establishment of Truth, which ignited the entire genre of work
questioning the veracity of the Warren Commission and its conclusions about the
assassination of Jack Kennedy. He has
continued in this tradition of no-holds-barred, out-of-the-box investigative
reporting on the widest variety of subjecs ever
since.
Q&As with Mathieu Amalric on 10/13 and 10/14
These three
movies from Mathieu Amalric are musicals, from the
inside out: they move with the mental and physical energies of the wildly
prolific John Zorn, and the great Canadian-born soprano/conductor/champion of
modern classical music Barbara Hannigan.
We particularly liked the two 20 minute
films of Barbara Hannigan. Mathieu’s
treatment of this extremely talented (and beautiful) soprano is especially
effective and powerful.