From the Mouths of Filmmakers: Tracy Droz Tragos

Tracy Droz Tragos

FROM THE MOUTHS OF FILMMAKERS:

TRACY DROZ TRAGOS
By Tracy Droz Tragos and Joshua Handler 

Recently I've been disturbed by the amount of people who don't seek out independent films, non-English-language films, and classics.  So, I asked some of the most distinctive voices in independent and world cinema to submit responses to a few questions about why/if they think indies/non-English-language films/classics are important to view, and how those films have been influential on their careers.

The responses below are from Tracy Droz Tragos, producer/co-director of RICH HILL, winner of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize for Documentary.  Tragos also won an Emmy for "Be Good, Smile Pretty", an episode of INDEPENDENT LENS that she co-wrote/directed/produced.

Do you feel that it is important for aspiring filmmakers and filmgoers to view independent and world cinema and why?

Yes! Independent films take a lot of risks - they are often the purest form of a director's vision - without commercial pressures. New talent, untold stories, voices that aren't usually heard - that's what it's all about. Seeing all sorts of genres and perspectives can be hugely helpful in honing in on what you like and don't like as a filmmaker - what you want to imitate, expand upon, react against and ignore.  It's all helpful in learning and growing as a filmmaker. I watch as much work as I possibly can!  I often learn more from the films I might dislike than from the films I love.

Do you feel that it is important for aspiring filmmakers and filmgoers to view films of the past and why?

Yes! It is important - but I also don't think it's a requirement.  I know I'm often intimidated if I don't know a film that's brought up in a meeting or at a dinner table. Often, I feel like an idiot - like I haven't seen enough films.  Usually, I'm honest and say that I haven't seen a film (when I haven't) - and I try to make a note of it for later viewing. I have a long list of films I'd like to see. 

Bottom line, I don't think you have to beat yourself up if you haven't seen every classic.  It's all very helpful - but see what you can - find films that inspire and disturb you. I don't think you have to force yourself to watch films that have no appeal or put you to sleep - but it's always good to know why, and what isn't working - and if you view a film from that perspective it can be much more interesting.

 How did viewing indies and films from around the world help you when making RICH HILL?

Indies informed us a lot.  We saw ONLY THE YOUNG, BOMBAY BEACH, HOOP DREAMS, and the narratives KES and BALLAST.  We were inspired - not always to imitate - but just by the subject matter and all the different approaches we could take.  I also watched films I had seen before - and like to revisit from time to time, GREY GARDENS and HARLAN COUNTY, U.S.A.

What's one American indie and one non-English-language film that you would recommend that film-lovers or young/aspiring filmmakers see?

TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT by the Dardenne brothers - I saw it in Paris this summer, without subtitles - and I'm not entirely fluent in French.  I was still wowed. 

I love personal documentaries - three of my favorites are SHERMAN'S MARCH, NOBODY'S BUSINESS, STORIES WE TELL

From the Mouths of Filmmakers continues on Wednesday. 

NYFF Main Slate Commentary

NYFF MAIN SLATE COMMENTARY

By Joshua Handler

This year's NYFF main slate has very few surprises, though I'm extremely excited to dig into this year's selection.  For those of you who haven't seen the main slate, here it is:

Opening Night Gala Selection
GONE GIRL
Director: David Fincher

Centerpiece Gala Selection
INHERENT VICE
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Closing Night Gala Selection
BIRDMAN OR THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE 
Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu

BELOVED SISTERS (Die geliebten Schwestern)
Director: Dominik Graf

THE BLUE ROOM (La chambre bleue)
Director: Mathieu Amalric

CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA
Director: Olivier Assayas

EDEN
Director: Mia Hansen-Løve

FOXCATCHER
Director: Bennett Miller

GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE (Adieu au langage)
Director: Jean-Luc Godard

HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT
Directors: Josh & Benny Safdie

HILL OF FREEDOM (Jayuui Eondeok)
Director: Hong Sang-soo

HORSE MONEY (Cavalo Dinheiro)
Director: Pedro Costa

JAUJA
Director: Lisandro Alonso

LIFE OF RILEY (Aimer, boire et chanter)
Director: Alain Resnais

LISTEN UP PHILIP
Director: Alex Ross Perry

MAPS TO THE STARS
Director: David Cronenberg

MISUNDERSTOOD (Incompresa)
Director: Asia Argento

MR. TURNER
Director: Mike Leigh

PASOLINI
Director: Abel Ferrara

THE PRINCESS OF FRANCE (La Princesa de Francia)
Director: Matías Piñeiro

SAINT LAURENT
Director: Bertrand Bonello

LA SAPIENZA
Director: Eugène Green

’71
Director: Yann Demange

TALES OF THE GRIM SLEEPER
Director: Nick Broomfield

TIMBUKTU
Director: Abderrahmane Sissako

TIME OUT OF MIND
Director: Oren Moverman

TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT (Deux jours, une nuit)
Directors: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne

TWO SHOTS FIRED (Dos Disparos)
Director: Martín Rejtman

WHIPLASH
Director: Damien Chazelle

THE WONDERS (Le meraviglie)
Director: Alice Rohrwacher

I'm extremely surprised and disappointed that this year's Palme d'Or-winner, Winter Sleep, wasn't included in the line-up as well as Andrey Zvyagintsev's Leviathan, Xavier Dolan's Mommy, and Ruben Östlund's Force Majeure.  However, I'm very, very excited to see Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Two Days, One Night, Olivier Assayas' Clouds of Sils Maria, Abderrahmane Sissako's Timbuktu, Alice Rohrwacher's The Wonders, Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher, Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner, David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars, Yann Demange's '71, Damien Chazelle's Whiplash, and Alex Ross Perry's Listen Up Philip, along with the big three premieres of Gone Girl, Inherent Vice, and Birdman.  Frankly, I'm excited to see just about everything playing at this year's fest, but the above films hold the most appeal for me.

It's very surprising and exciting to see two well-loved Sundance titles (Whiplash - winner of the fest's Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award - and Listen Up Philip).  The past two years were very light on Sundance titles (if they had any at all), so it's nice to see some included here.  I'm also excited to see what films I'll see on a whim and end up loving.  Last year had a few of those like Gloria and Le Week-End.  There are quite a few films in this year's lineup that I haven't heard of yet (quite a few are premiering now in Locarno), so it will be an adventure going into many of these films with no previous knowledge about them.

Another interesting observation is that the running times on this group of NYFF films is noticeably shorter than last year's group.  Last year had five films clocking in at 3 to 4 hours in length.  This year's longest film is 170 minutes.  

Overall, I'm looking forward to this NYFF.  While I'm very disappointed to see Winter Sleep and Leviathan left out, I'm overall very satisfied. I'll be publishing more NYFF news in the next few weeks, so stay tuned.

From the Mouths of Filmmakers: Maxim Pozdorovkin

Maxim Pozdorovkin

FROM THE MOUTHS OF FILMMAKERS:

MAXIM POZDOROVKIN
By Maxim Pozdorovkin and Joshua Handler 

Recently I've been disturbed by the amount of people who don't seek out independent films, non-English-language films, and classics.  So, I asked some of the most distinctive voices in independent and world cinema to submit responses to a few questions about why/if they think indies/non-English-language films/classics are important to view, and how those films have been influential on their careers.

The responses below are from Maxim Pozdorovkin, best-known for his 2013 documentary, PUSSY RIOT: A PUNK PRAYER, and his most recent documentary, THE NOTORIOUS MR. BOUT.  PUSSY RIOT premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival where it won a Special Jury Award. Released theatrically around the world, the film was shortlisted for an Academy Award.

Do you feel that it is important for aspiring filmmakers and filmgoers to view independent and world cinema and why?

Being a voracious and promiscuous viewer of independent and world cinema is to my mind the single most important requirement for aspiring filmmakers and for anyone with an interest in film. We become better filmmakers and viewers of cinema by engaging in dialogue with film language that is not immediately familiar to us, with cinematic forms that expand our sense of what film is capable of expressing. Less subject to commercial constraints and familiar templates, independent and world cinema is more likely to challenge us with their film grammar, to surprise and dazzle us with its unorthodox leaps and detours, to inspire us with their lack of familiar constraints.

Do you feel that it is important for aspiring filmmakers and filmgoers to view films of the past and why?

The first generation of filmmakers looked out at the world and made movies about what they saw. The second generation of filmmakers watched films and made their work in response to their predecessors. Filmmakers today, a third generation of sorts, emboldened by the opportunities open to them by the widespread availability of affordable digital technology can be said to make films based on what they find inside a camera catalog. The democratization of film production has been an incredible boon for aspiring filmmakers but has on occasion made us myopic to cinema's evolution as a narrative form. Delving into cinema's past, including silent cinema, a period of unprecedented innovation and efficiency in visual storytelling, is an unparalleled way of exposing ourselves to the storytelling modes and techniques perfected through trial and error. The availability of such a historical panorama at the click of a button is a sizeable privilege, one that should neither to be ignored nor taken lightly by aspiring filmmakers. 

 How did viewing indies and films from around the world help you when making PUSSY RIOT: A PUNK PRAYER and THE NOTORIOUS MR. BOUT?

I am extremely fortunate to have worked with collaborators who are diehard cinephiles. Thus, the process of making a movie for me has always included daily conversations about other films. The application of these references to my own films ranges from thoughts about how to frame individual shots to the structure of scenes and all the way up to broad narrative strategies that films employ as a whole. From the outset my first film CAPITAL was an attempt to make a contemporary version of a city symphony films, popular in the teens and twenties. The question of how to depict a metropolis as a character hung over the entire production and was solved with frequent reflection and reviewing of films like Sheeler and Strand's MANHATTA, Vertov's MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA, Ruttman's BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY, and Ivens' RAIN. 

In structuring PUSSY RIOT the central challenge was to find a balance between the courtroom drama at the heart of the story and the need to convey the political energy in Moscow during the six months following the women's arrest for their controversial performance in Russia's biggest cathedral. Along with studying trial films such as Dreyer's THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC, I found myself thinking about many of the great politically engaged French documentaries of the 60s and 70s, in particular Chris Marker's LE JOLI MAI and A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT.  

Both PUSSY RIOT and THE NOTORIOUS MR. BOUT were, to a large extent, found footage films. In working with found footage, the central challenge is always how to bring an authorial voice to material that is not your own and was often produced for very different ends. In appropriating such material, I am often inspired by genre cinema and scenes from fiction films. In BOUT, the clearest example of this is a wedding scene that crosscuts between a wedding video and archival footage of tumult and uprising in Russia between 1991 and 1993. The scene takes as its inspiration the opening of Fassbinder's THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN, which oscillates between a wedding and an aerial bombardment.

What's one Russian-language film and one non-Russian-language film that you would recommend that film-lovers or young/aspiring filmmakers see?

One Russian film that I've appreciated more and more recently is Mikhail Romm's 1965 found footage masterpiece ORDINARY FASCISM (aka TRIUMPH OVER VIOLENCE). The film is compiled largely out of the bloopers from Hitler's propaganda newsreels and is by turn ghastly and hilarious. More than anything, it is a master class on the re-appropriation of footage.

I am a great admirer of Dusan Makavejev's work and would strongly recommend, especially to those familiar with his W.R.: MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM and SWEET MOVIE, an earlier film called INNOCENCE UNPROTECTED, which tries to reconstruct the first Serbian sound film, made by a strongman during Nazi occupation. Formally daring and an absolute joy to watch. 

From the Mouths of Filmmakers continues on Monday. 

ABUSE OF WEAKNESS Review

Courtesy of Strand Releasing

ABUSE OF WEAKNESS

2013, 105 minutes

Not Rated

Review by Joshua Handler

This review was originally published on October 15, 2013 during the New York Film Festival.

Catherine Breillat's audacious autobiographical new film Abuse of Weakness is as uncompromising and horrifying as its title suggests, but is also a contemplative, moving self-study of a woman recovering from a stroke who is taken advantage of by a con man.  Featuring the female performance of the year from the always-astounding Isabelle Huppert, Abuse of Weakness is a true work of art by a gutsy filmmaker.

Abuse opens with the Breillat character, Maud, having a stroke.  This scene is filmed with a cold, detached style that gives the audience a taste of what they're in for.  Breillat wants us to know that this isn't going to be a mushy, sentimental film of a woman's struggle to overcome her horrible circumstances.  No, this is going to be a realistic film full of the horrors of real life.  Breillat's precise, beautiful framing of each shot during the opening stroke sequence informs the audience that they're in the hands of a master.

However, under all of the coldness on the surface, there is a humanity running underneath the surface.  When Maud wakes in the hospital, she says all she wants to do is laugh again.  This moving moment shows that there's a soul beneath the cold exterior of Maud.  Even the hardest humans have the need to laugh and for Breillat, a filmmaker known for her cold provocations, to include this in her film shows that there is a human below her coldness.

Isabelle Huppert (The Piano Teacher, Amour), an actress known for her disturbing, physical performances is, yet again, astounding in Abuse of Weakness.  Huppert is a recognizable actress due to the fact that she appears in so many films, but during Abuse, I completely forgot I was watching her.  Huppert digs into the complicated mind of Maud and makes sense of the jumbles inside.  For the majority of the film, Maud is physically impaired and Huppert rises to the challenge, portraying every physical limitation and completely convincing me that she had actually suffered a stroke.  Huppert makes us feel for Maud; she creates a real person with whom we can simultaneously sympathize and want to chastise for her naïve behavior.

Overall, Abuse of Weakness is a triumph on every level and was one of the more memorable experiences at NYFF.  It's always best not knowing much about the film you're about to experience and  Abuse of Weakness is the perfect illustration of that.  While I know about Breillat's films and I knew the story, it was fantastic not having read too many opinions of it or having seen any trailers.  This is simply an extraordinary film made by a brilliant director and one of the world's greatest actresses working in perfect sync.

4/4

From the Mouths of Filmmakers: Lana Wilson

Lana Wilson
Courtesy of Lana Wilson

FROM THE MOUTHS OF FILMMAKERS:

LANA WILSON
By Lana Wilson and Joshua Handler 

Recently I've been disturbed by the amount of people who don't seek out independent films, non-English-language films, and classics.  So, I asked some of the most distinctive voices in independent and world cinema to submit responses to a few questions about why/if they think indies/non-English-language films/classics are important to view, and how those films have been influential on their careers.

The responses below are from Lana Wilson, co-director of the provocative 2013 documentary, After Tiller, a film that focuses on the last few doctors in the United States who perform third-trimester abortions as well as the patients who use their clinics.

Do you feel that it is important for aspiring filmmakers and filmgoers to view independent and world cinema and why?

For aspiring filmmakers, of course. Watching films is the best way to learn how to make a film, period. And no one is making movies in a vacuum. 

"From the moment you make up your mind not to live on a desert island you no longer pick everything for yourself." That's something Rainer Werner Fassbinder once said to a group of schoolchildren. And you know that guy had good advice for eight-year-olds.
Everyone is making work within a broader context, and we're all inevitably influenced by our own lives, so why not push to have the widest range of experience possible? It's not a chore--it's a luxury.  

If you think independent and foreign films are too boring, challenging, or arty to prioritize, then clearly you've never seen DRUNKEN MASTER 2. Watch that film and then tell me you regretted the experience for a single second--I defy you!

Do you feel that it is important for aspiring filmmakers and filmgoers to view films of the past and why?

Yes. If you don't know history, you don't really know anything. And why would you want to shut yourself off from all the beauty and pleasure of watching movies from the past?

How did viewing indies and films from around the world help you when making AFTER TILLER?

I used to be a film curator, so I always had a lot of other movies on my mind while making AFTER TILLER. 

Like everyone who loves "fly on the wall"-style shooting, I learned so much from watching Frederick Wiseman. His style is observational, but with a clear point of view--he's chosen to put the camera somewhere, after all. He isn't uncovering one simple "truth," but rather revealing a complex and ambiguous reality. And that's what I think the best documentaries do. 

My co-director Martha Shane and I also looked at the Chinese documentary LAST TRAIN HOME for specific help with our visual style. We figured out how many different angles we would try to shoot during each conversation scene, as well as a few filming tricks that would be a big help to us later in editing, by analyzing the shot structure of LAST TRAIN HOME's vérité scenes.  

Oddly enough, the '70s thriller DELIVERANCE became a bit of a reference point for us, too. Our director of photography, Hillary Spera, said that she was trying to film AFTER TILLER like it was a nature documentary, and once muttered something about feeling like she was shooting DELIVERANCE. I first I couldn't see what she was talking about, but when I re-watched DELIVERANCE I realized what she meant, because it's a film that's shot very beautifully, but in a way that never draws attention to itself. The camera is always just in the right place at the right time. It's a muted and unobtrusive visual style that works brilliantly with such sensational material. I got a lot out of looking back at that. 

Finally, we wanted AFTER TILLER to feel very different from reality television, which is what I think dominates most people's perceptions of "documentary"-style content now. We tried to avoid the feeling of "following" people everywhere, we didn't want the content to feel maudlin or exploitative, and if I was ever really confused about what the best thing to do would be, I would think, "What would William Wyler do?" The answer to that was often, "Probably, he would just wait here, and let the people move around inside the frame." Ultimately, I don't kid myself that AFTER TILLER is anything like a William Wyler film, but I still like to think that he was a secret consultant on the project.

What's one American film and one film not in English that you would recommend that film-lovers or young/aspiring filmmakers see?

DOG STAR MAN (Stan Brakhage)
PLAYTIME (Jacques Tati)

From the Mouths of Filmmakers continues on Friday. 

BREAKING: NYFF Main Slate Announced

The following is a press release from the Film Society of Lincoln Center.  I'll publish my commentary on this later today:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

THE FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER announces
Main Slate selection for the  
2014 NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

30 features include new films by Lisandro Alonso, Asia Argento,
Olivier Assayas, Nick Broomfield, Pedro Costa, David Cronenberg,
Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Abel Ferrara, Jean-Luc Godard, Hong Sang-soo,
Mike Leigh, Mia Hansen-Løve, Bennett Miller, Oren Moverman, Alex Ross Perry,
Alain Resnais, Alice Rohrwacher, Josh & Benny Safdie, and more

NEW YORK (August 13, 2014) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced today the 30 films that will comprise the Main Slate official selection of the 52nd New York Film Festival (September 26 – October 12), including such notable directors as Lisandro Alonso, Asia Argento, Olivier Assayas, Nick Broomfield, Pedro Costa, David Cronenberg, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Abel Ferrara, Jean-Luc Godard, Hong Sang-soo, Mike Leigh, Mia Hansen-Løve, Bennett Miller, Oren Moverman, Alex Ross Perry, Alain Resnais, Alice Rohrwacher, and Josh & Benny Safdie.

New York Film Festival Director and Selection Committee Chair, Kent Jones said: “Sometimes the sheer breadth of cinema amazes me. In this year’s lineup, we have great big films alongside films made on the most intimate scale, personal epics and intricately constructed chamber pieces, films of great serenity and films that leave you dazed, first films and last films, all equally vivid, alive, and essential. Taken altogether, this year’s Main Slate reminds me, all over again, why I love the cinema so much, and it will do the same for you.”

Award winners from other festivals presented for the first time to New York audiences include four from this year’s Cannes Film Festival: Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders, the winner of the 2014 Grand Prix Award; Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, for which he was named Best Director, David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, for which Julianne Moore won the prize for Best Actress, and Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner, for which Timothy Spall received the Best Actor Award for his performance as the painter J.M.W. Turner. Additional award winners are Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, which won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and Life of Riley, the final feature from the late Alain Resnais, which took home the Berlin Film Festival’s Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize. The 4K restored version of Resnais’s first feature,Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), was previously announced as part of the Revivals selection at this year’s NYFF.

Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language, his first feature in 3-D, will fittingly screen at NYFF in the wake of the comprehensive retrospective of the filmmaking legend’s work that was a highlight of last year’s festival. Other notables among the many filmmakers returning to NYFF with new works are Olivier Assayas with Clouds of Sils Maria, which stars Juliette Binoche as an actress preparing for a new role and Kristen Stewart as her assistant; Pedro Costa with Horse Money, a moving look at the life of Cape Verdean Ventura, who has worked with Costa on his last few films; Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne with Two Days, One Night, which stars Marion Cotillard as a woman desperately trying to save her job; and Abel Ferrara, with his biographical film Pasolini, starring Willem Dafoe as the controversial filmmaker/poet/novelist.

NYFF’s 2014 Filmmaker in Residence Lisandro Alonso’s latest film, Jauja, which stars Viggo Mortensen as an Argentinian officer in the 1870s searching for his missing daughter, will be a highlight, as will the North American premiere of French actor Mathieu Amalric’s heated dramatization of Georges Simenon’s novel The Blue Room, about a love triangle coming to a dangerous conclusion. Actress Asia Argento also puts on the director’s hat once again with her new autobiographical film,Misunderstood, about a pre-teen girl all but ignored by her self-absorbed superstar parents in 1980s Rome.

The city of New York takes center stage via the works of local filmmakers Alex Ross Perry, Oren Moverman, and Josh & Benny Safdie. Perry’s Listen Up Philip stars Jason Schwartzman as an insufferable young literary star taken under the wing of an older literary lion played by Jonathan Pryce. Moverman’s Time Out of Mind features a remarkable performance by Richard Gere as a man who finds himself out on the streets. The Safdie Brothers’ Heaven Knows What places us in the world of two heroin-addicted young lovers as they struggle to live and find their next fix.

Lesli Klainberg, the Executive Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, said: “The Film Society is very proud to continue our commitment to present the years most significant films from around the world at our latest edition of the New York Film Festival. With films from festival veterans and newcomers alike, the NYFF continues to be a home to a wide range of film styles and perspectives. You will not be disappointed with the breathtaking range of films curated by our selection committee.”

Additional special events, documentary sections, and filmmaker conversations and panels, as well as NYFF’s Projectionsand the full Convergence programs, will be announced in subsequent days and weeks

 

The 52nd New York Film Festival Main Slate

Opening Night Gala Selection
GONE GIRL
Director: David Fincher

Centerpiece Gala Selection
INHERENT VICE
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Closing Night Gala Selection
BIRDMAN OR THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE 
Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu

BELOVED SISTERS (Die geliebten Schwestern)
Director: Dominik Graf

THE BLUE ROOM (La chambre bleue)
Director: Mathieu Amalric

CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA
Director: Olivier Assayas

EDEN
Director: Mia Hansen-Løve

FOXCATCHER
Director: Bennett Miller

GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE (Adieu au langage)
Director: Jean-Luc Godard

HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT
Directors: Josh & Benny Safdie

HILL OF FREEDOM (Jayuui Eondeok)
Director: Hong Sang-soo

HORSE MONEY (Cavalo Dinheiro)
Director: Pedro Costa

JAUJA
Director: Lisandro Alonso

LIFE OF RILEY (Aimer, boire et chanter)
Director: Alain Resnais

LISTEN UP PHILIP
Director: Alex Ross Perry

MAPS TO THE STARS
Director: David Cronenberg

MISUNDERSTOOD (Incompresa)
Director: Asia Argento

MR. TURNER
Director: Mike Leigh

PASOLINI
Director: Abel Ferrara

THE PRINCESS OF FRANCE (La Princesa de Francia)
Director: Matías Piñeiro

SAINT LAURENT
Director: Bertrand Bonello

LA SAPIENZA
Director: Eugène Green

’71
Director: Yann Demange

TALES OF THE GRIM SLEEPER
Director: Nick Broomfield

TIMBUKTU
Director: Abderrahmane Sissako

TIME OUT OF MIND
Director: Oren Moverman

TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT (Deux jours, une nuit)
Directors: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne

TWO SHOTS FIRED (Dos Disparos)
Director: Martín Rejtman

WHIPLASH
Director: Damien Chazelle

THE WONDERS (Le meraviglie)
Director: Alice Rohrwacher

The 17-day New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema, featuring top films from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. The selection committee, chaired by Kent Jones, also includes Dennis Lim, FSLC Director of Programming; Marian Masone, FSLC Senior Programming Advisor; Gavin Smith, Editor-in-Chief, Film Comment; and Amy Taubin, Contributing Editor, Film Comment and Sight & Sound.

NYFF previously announced the retrospective Joseph L. Mankiewicz: The Essential Iconoclast, as well as initial selections in NYFF Convergence and the Revivals section, including Burroughs: The Movie, The Color of Pomegranates, Hiroshima Mon Amour, and Once Upon a Time in America.

Tickets for the upcoming New York Film Festival range in price from $15 & $25 for most screenings to $50 & $100 for Gala evenings. Film Society members receive a discount on tickets as well as the benefit of a pre-sale opportunity.

For NYFF Free events: Starting one hour before the scheduled time of the event, complimentary tickets will be distributed from the box office corresponding to the event's venue. Limit one ticket per person, on a space available basis. Please note that the line for tickets may form in advance of the time of distribution.

Visit filmlinc.com for more information.

Please note: All sales are final. No refunds or exchanges. Tickets are subject to availability. Programs and prices are subject to change.

Updated NYFF App will soon be available on iOS and Android.

 

52nd NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
Films & Descriptions

Opening Night – World Premiere
Gone Girl
David Fincher, USA, 2014, DCP, 150m
David Fincher’s film version of Gillian Flynn’s phenomenally successful best seller (adapted by the author) is one wild cinematic ride, a perfectly cast and intensely compressed portrait of a recession-era marriage contained within a devastating depiction of celebrity/media culture, shifting gears as smoothly as a Maserati 250F. Ben Affleck is Nick Dunne, whose wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) goes missing on the day of their fifth anniversary. Neil Patrick Harris is Amy’s old boyfriend Desi, Carrie Coon (who played Honey in Tracy Letts’s acclaimed production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) is Nick’s sister Margo, Kim Dickens (Treme, Friday Night Lights) is Detective Rhonda Boney, and Tyler Perry is Nick’s superstar lawyer Tanner Bolt. At once a grand panoramic vision of middle America, a uniquely disturbing exploration of the fault lines in a marriage, and a comedy that starts black and keeps getting blacker, Gone Girl is a great work of popular art by a great artist. A 20th Century Fox and Regency Enterprises release.

Centerpiece – World Premiere         
Inherent Vice
Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2014, 148m
Paul Thomas Anderson’s wild and entrancing new movie, the very first adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel, is a cinematic time machine, placing the viewer deep within the world of the paranoid, hazy L.A. dope culture of the early ’70s. It’s not just the look (which is ineffably right, from the mutton chops and the peasant dresses to the battered screen doors and the neon glow), it’s the feel, the rhythm of hanging out, of talking yourself into a state of shivering ecstasy or fear or something in between. Joaquin Phoenix goes all the way for Anderson (just as he did in The Master) playing Doc Sportello, the private investigator searching for his ex-girlfriend Shasta (Katherine Waterston, a revelation), menaced at every turn by Josh Brolin as the telegenic police detective “Bigfoot” Bjornsen. Among the other members of Anderson’s mind-boggling cast are Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro, Martin Short, Owen Wilson, and Jena Malone. A trip, and a great American film by a great American filmmaker. A Warner Bros. Picturesrelease.

Closing Night – New York Premiere
Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance
Alejandro G. Iñárritu, USA, 2014, DCP, 119m
In Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s big, bold, and beautifully brash new movie, one-time action hero Riggan Thomson (a jaw-dropping Michael Keaton), in an effort to be taken seriously as an artist, is staging his own adaptation of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. As Thomson tries to get his perilous undertaking in shape for the opening, he must contend with a scene-hogging narcissist (Edward Norton), a vulnerable actress (Naomi Watts), and an unhinged girlfriend (Andrea Riseborough) for co-stars; a resentful daughter (Emma Stone); a manager who’s about to come undone (Zach Galifianikis)... and his ego, the inner demon of the superhero that made him famous, Birdman. Iñárritu’s camera magically prowls, careens, and soars in and around the theater, yet remains alive to the most precious subtleties and surprises between his formidable actors. Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance is an extravagant dream of a movie, alternately hilarious and terrifying, powered by a deep love of acting, theater, and Broadway—a real New York experience.A Fox Searchlight Pictures and New Regency release.


North American Premiere
Beloved Sisters / Die geliebten Schwestern
Dominik Graf, Germany/Austria, 2014, DCP, 170m
German and French with English subtitles
Romantic sentiment runs high but aristocratic decorum holds sway in this beautiful and thoroughly modern rendering of the real-life 18th-century love triangle involving German poet Friedrich Schiller (Florian Stetter) and two sisters of noble birth, Charlotte (Henriette Confurius) and Caroline (Hannah Herzsprung), whose strikingly intense relationship and profound mutual devotion verge on symbiosis. As Schiller’s star rises in the philosophical-literary world of Weimar Classicism, with Charlotte at his side, the married Caroline chooses to stay close by—with dramatic consequences. Sisterhood is finally the most passionate and wrenching form of love in the aptly titled Beloved Sisters, and the deeply felt performances of Confurius and Herzsprung are hard to forget. Meanwhile, there’s a fresh, bracingly contemporary sense of energy, a relaxed pace and a down-to-earth directness to director Dominik Graf’s unfussy re-creation of ultra-formal 18th-century town-and-country life. A Music Box Films release.

North American Premiere
The Blue Room / La chambre bleue
Mathieu Amalric, France, 2014, DCP, 76m
French with English subtitles
A perfectly twisted, timeless noir, Mathieu Amalric’s adaptation of Georges Simenon’s domestic crime novel also tips its hat to Alfred Hitchcock/Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train. A country hotel’s blue room is the scene of erotic rapture, but the adulterous man (Amalric) and woman (a boldly sexual Stéphanie Cléau, co-author of the script with Amalric) who meet there have different visions of their future. She is more obsessed than he, and his misunderstanding of the madness in her desire will destroy him and all he holds dear. Amalric’s direction is brutally spare, as is his performance of a man caught in a vise—a situation of his own making. The classic aspect ratio (1:33) and Grégoire Hetzel’s turbulent, insistent score heighten the sense of entrapment. Léa Drucker as the deceived wife and Cléau as the desperate mistress make strong impressions, but Amalric, who has the most eloquent eyes in contemporary cinema and uses them here to convey lust, guilt, bewilderment, and the dawning realization that he is a pawn in a malignant game, is unforgettable. A Sundance Selects release.

U.S. Premiere
Clouds of Sils Maria
Olivier Assayas, Switzerland/Germany/France, 2014, DCP, 124m
English and French with English subtitles
Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) is a middle-aged actress who soared to stardom in her twenties in a play called Maloja Snake, in which she created the role of a ruthless young woman named Sigrid who engages in a power game with her older boss. Now an established international actress, Maria is considering the role of the older woman in a heavily promoted revival, with an infamous young superstar (Chloë Grace Moretz) as Sigrid. Maria and her savvy personal assistant (Kristen Stewart) prepare for the production at a secluded spot in the Swiss Alps, in a series of stunning scenes that are the beating heart of Olivier Assayas’s brilliant new film. What begins as a chronicle of an actress going through the paces of celebrity culture (fashion shoots, official dinners, interviews, Internet rumors) gradually develops into something more powerfully mysterious: a close meditation on time and how one comes to terms with its passage. An IFC Films release.

U.S. Premiere
Eden
Mia Hansen-Løve, France, 2014, DCP, 131m
Mia Hansen-Løve’s fourth feature is a rare achievement: an epically scaled work built on the purely ephemeral, breathlessly floating along on currents of feeling. Eden is based on the experiences of Hansen-Løve’s brother (and co-writer) Sven, who was one of the pioneering DJs of the French rave scene in the early 1990s. Paul (Félix de Givry) and his friends, including Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter (otherwise known as Daft Punk), see visions of ecstasy in garage music—as their raves become more and more popular, they experience a grand democracy of pure bliss extending into infinity, only to dematerialize on contact with changing times and the demands of everyday life. Hansen-Løve’s film plays in the mind as a swirl of beautiful faces and bodies, impulsive movements, rushes of cascading light and color (she worked with a great cameraman, Denis Lenoir), and music, music, and more music. Eden is a film that moves with the heartbeat of youth, always one thought or emotion ahead of itself.

New York Premiere
Foxcatcher
Bennett Miller, USA, 2014, DCP, 134m
Bennett Miller’s quietly intense and meticulously crafted new film deals with the tragic story of billionaire John E. du Pont and the brothers and championship wrestlers Dave and Mark Schultz recruited by du Pont to create a national wrestling team on his family’s sprawling property in Pennsylvania. Miller builds his film detail by detail, and he takes us deep into the rarefied world of the delusional du Pont, a particularly exotic specimen of ensconced all-American old money and privilege. Miller’s film is a powerfully physical experience, and the simmering conflicts between his characters are expressed in their stances, their stillnesses, their physiques, and, most of all, their moves in the wrestling arena. At the core is a trio of perfectly meshed and absolutely stunning performances from Mark Ruffalo as Dave, Channing Tatum as Mark, and an almost unrecognizable Steve Carell as the fatally dissociated du Pont. Foxcatcher offers us a vivid portrait of a side of American life in the ’80s that has never been touched in movies. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

New York Premiere
Goodbye to Language / Adieu au langage
Jean-Luc Godard, France, 2014, DCP, 70m
French with English subtitles
The 43rd feature by Jean-Luc Godard (and the only film at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival to get a round of applause mid-screening), Goodbye to Language alights on doubt and despair with the greatest freedom and joy. At 83, Godard works as a truly independent filmmaker, unencumbered by all concerns beyond the immediate: to create a work that embodies his own state of being in relation to time, light, color, the problem of living and speaking with others, and, of course, cinema itself. The artist’s beloved dog Roxy is the de facto “star” of this film, which is as impossible to summarize as a poem by Wallace Stevens or a Messiaen quartet. Goodbye to Language was shot, and can only be truly seen and experienced, in 3-D, which Godard has put to wondrous use. The temptation may be strong to see this film as a farewell, but this remarkable artist is already hard at work on a new project. A Kino Lorber release.

U.S. Premiere
Heaven Knows What
Josh & Benny Safdie, USA, 2014, DCP, 93m
Harley (Arielle Holmes) is madly in love with Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones). She’s sure he loves her just as much, if only he could express it. Both of them are heroin addicts, kids who pretend to be heavy-metal rockers but spend their time scuffling, arguing, and preying on each other as they wander around New York looking for a fix and the chump change to pay for it. The script, based on a Holmes’s memoir and written by the Safdies with Ronald Bronstein, is a miracle of economy. Sean Price Williams’s cinematography expresses the clouded vision of kids who can’t imagine how invisible they are to the New Yorkers who take their homes and jobs for granted. And the Safdie Brothers, in their toughest and richest movie, direct a cast composed largely of first-time actors so that they disappear into their characters, horrify us, and break our hearts.

U.S. Premiere
Hill of Freedom / Jayuui Eondeok
Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2014, DCP, 66m
Korean and English with English subtitles
Kwon (Seo Young-hwa) returns to Seoul from a restorative stay in the mountains. She is given a packet of letters left by Mori (Ryo Kase), who has come back from Japan to propose to her. As she walks down a flight of stairs, Kwon drops and scatters the letters, all of which are undated. When she reads them, she has to make sense of the chronology… and so do we. Hong Sang-soo’s daring new film, alternately funny and haunting, is a series of disordered scenes based on the letters, echoing the cultural dislocation felt by Mori as he tries to make himself understood in halting English. At what point did he drink himself into a lonely stupor? Did he sleep with the waitress from the Hill of Freedom café (Moon So-ri) before or after he despaired of seeing Kwon again? Sixteen films into a three-decade career, Hong has achieved a rare simplicity in his storytelling, allowing for an ever-increasing psychological richness and complexity.

U.S. Premiere
Horse Money / Cavalo Dinheiro
Pedro Costa, Portugal, 2014, DCP, 103m
Portuguese and Creole with English subtitles
Since the late ’90s, Pedro Costa has devoted himself to the task of doing justice to the lives and tragedies and dreams of the Cape Verdean immigrants who once populated the now-demolished neighborhood of Fontainhas. Costa works with a minimal crew and at ground level, patiently building a unique cinematographic language alongside the men and women he has befriended. Where does his astonishing new Horse Money “take place”? In the soul-space of Ventura, who has been at the center of Costa’s last few shorts and his 2006 feature Colossal Youth. It is now, a numbing and timeless present of hospital stays, bureaucratic questioning, and wandering through remembered spaces… and it is then, the mid ’70s and the time of the Carnation Revolution, when Ventura got into a knife fight with his friend Joaquim. A self-reckoning, a moving memorialization of lives in danger of being forgotten, and a great and piercingly beautiful work of cinema.

U.S. Premiere
Jauja
Lisandro Alonso, Argentina/Denmark/France/Mexico/USA/Germany/Brazil, 2014, DCP, 108m
Danish and Spanish with English subtitles
A work of tremendous beauty and a source of continual surprise, Alonso’s first film since 2008’s Liverpool is also his first period piece (set during the Argentinian army’s Conquest of the Desert in the 1870s), his first film with international stars (led by Viggo Mortensen), and his first screenplay with a co-writer (poet and novelist Fabián Casas). But the emphasis, as in all his work, is on bodies in landscapes. Danish military engineer Gunnar Dinesen (Mortensen, in a Technicolor-bright cavalry uniform) traverses a visually stunning variety of Patagonian shrub, rock, grass, and desert on horseback and on foot in search of his teenage daughter (Viilbjørk Agger Malling), who has eloped with a new love. Alonso’s style reaches new heights of sensory attentiveness and physicality, driving the action toward a thrilling conclusion that transcends the limits of cinematic time and space.

New York Premiere
Life of Riley / Aimer, boire et chanter
Alain Resnais, France, 2014, DCP, 108m
French with English subtitles
Adapted from Alan Ayckbourn’s Relatively Speaking, Life of Riley, the final work by Alain Resnais, is the story of three couples in the English countryside who learn that their close mutual friend is terminally ill. Yet the story is only half the movie, a giddily unsettling meditation on mortality and the strange sensation of simply being alive and going on, feeling by feeling, action by action. The swift, fleeting encounters between various combinations of characters (played by Resnais regulars André Dussollier and Sabine Azéma—the director’s wife—along with Michel Vuillermoz, Hippolyte Girardot, Sandrine Kiberlain, and Caroline Silhol) take place on extremely stylized sets, and they are punctuated with close-ups set against comic-strip grids, and broken up by images of the real English countryside. Funny but haunting, Life of Riley is a moving, graceful, and surprisingly affirmative farewell to life from a truly great artist. A Kino Lorber release.

New York Premiere
Listen Up Philip
Alex Ross Perry, USA, 2014, DCP, 108m
Alex Ross Perry’s third feature heralds the arrival of a bold new voice in American movies. Even more than in his critically lauded The Color Wheel, Perry draws on literary models (mainly Philip Roth and William Gaddis) to achieve a brazen mixture of bitter humor and unexpected pathos. In this sly, very funny portrait of artistic egomania, Jason Schwartzman stars as Philip Lewis Friedman, a precocious literary star anticipating the publication of his second novel. Philip is a caustic narcissist, but the film, shot with tremendous agility on Super-16mm by Sean Price Williams, leaves his orbit frequently, lingering on the perspectives of his long-suffering photographer girlfriend, Ashley, (Elisabeth Moss) and his hero, the Roth-like literary lion Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce), who himself considers Philip a major talent. A film about callow ambition,Listen Up Philip is itself remarkably poised, a knowing, rueful account of how pain and insecurity transfigure themselves as anger but also as art. A Tribeca Film release.

U.S. Premiere
Maps to the Stars
David Cronenberg, Canada/Germany, 2014, DCP, 111m
David Cronenberg takes Bruce Wagner’s script—a pitch-black Hollywood satire—chills it down, and gives it a near-tragic spin. The terrible loneliness of narcissism afflicts every character from the fading star Havana (Julianne Moore, who won the Best Actress Award at Cannes for her nervy performance) to the available-for-anything chauffeur (Robert Pattinson) to the entire Weiss family, played by John Cusack, Olivia Williams, Evan Bird, and Mia Wasikowska. The last two are brother and sister, damaged beyond repair and fated to repeat the perverse union of their parents. And yet, in their murderous rages, they have the purity of avenging angels, taking revenge on a culture that needs to be put out of its misery—or so it must seem to them. Cronenberg’s visual strategy physically isolates the characters from one another, so that their occasional violent connections pack a double whammy. An eOne Films release.

North American Premiere
Misunderstood / Incompresa
Asia Argento, Italy/France, 2014, DCP, 110m
Italian, French, and English with English subtitles
The imaginative life of a preteen girl in Rome in the 1980s is depicted with love and humor by Asia Argento, who grew up in the same place and time under similar showbiz circumstances. All but ignored by her divorced, narcissistic parents and tormented by her more conventional and manipulative siblings, Aria (a marvelous Giulia Salerno) shuttles between the well-appointed digs of her singer mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and actor father (Gabriel Garko), carrying her only companion, a large cat who is more affectionate and comfortable in his own skin than any of the humans in her life. A precociously gifted writer, Aria elaborates her cat-accompanied walks into the sometimes life-threatening adventures that mix with mundane actualities. As a projection of young female subjectivity, Misunderstood is ingenious, direct, and utterly real.

New York Premiere
Mr. Turner
Mike Leigh, UK, 2014, DCP, 149m
Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner is certainly a portrait of a great artist and his time, but it is also a film about the human problem of… others. Timothy Spall’s grunting, unkempt J.M.W. Turner is always either working or thinking about working. During the better part of his interactions with patrons, peers, and even his own children, he punches the clock and makes perfunctory conversation, while his mind is clearly on the inhuman realm of the luminous. After the death of his beloved father (Paul Jesson), Turner creates a way station of domestic comfort with a cheerful widow (Marion Bailey), and he maintains his artistic base at his family home, kept in working order by the undemonstrative and ever-compliant Hannah (Dorothy Atkinson). But his stays in both houses are only rest periods between endless and sometimes punishing journeys in search of a closer and closer vision of light. A rich, funny, moving, and extremely clear-eyed film about art and its creation. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

U.S. Premiere
Pasolini
Abel Ferrara, France/Belgium/Italy, DCP, 87m
Italian, English, and French with English subtitles
Pier Paolo Pasolini—filmmaker/poet/novelist, Christian, Communist, permanent legal defendant, and self-proclaimed “inconvenient guest” of modern society—was an immense figure. Abel Ferrara’s new film compresses the many contradictory aspects of his subject’s life and work into a distilled, prismatic portrait. We are with Pasolini during the last hours of his life, as he talks with his beloved family and friends, writes, gives a brutally honest interview, shares a meal with Ninetto Davoli (Riccardo Scamarcio), and cruises for the roughest rough trade in his gun-metal gray Alfa Romeo. Over the course of the action, Pasolini’s life and his art (represented by scenes from his films, his novel-in-progress Petrolio, and his projected film Porno-Teo-Kolossal) are constantly refracted and intermingled to the point where they become one. A thoughtful, attentive, and extremely frank meditation on a man who continues to cast a very long shadow, featuring a brilliant performance by Willem Dafoe in the title role.

U.S. Premiere
The Princess of France / La Princesa de Francia
Matías Piñeiro, Argentina, 2014, DCP, 70m
Spanish and Italian with English subtitles
As in his critical hit Viola (2013), Matías Piñeiro doesn’t transplant Shakespeare to the present day so much as summon the spirit of his polymorphous comedies. Víctor (Julián Larquier Tellarini) returns to Buenos Aires after his father’s death and a spell in Mexico to prepare a radio production of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Reuniting with his repertory, he finds himself sorting out complicated entanglements with girlfriend Paula (Agustina Muñoz), sometime lover Ana (María Villar), and departed actress Natalia (Romina Paula), as well as his muddled relations with the constellation of friends involved with the project. As the film tracks the group’s criss-crossing movements and interactions, their lives become increasingly enmeshed with the fiction they’re reworking, potential outcomes multiply, and reality itself seems subject to transformation. An intimate, modestly scaled work that takes characters and viewers alike into dizzying realms of possibility, The Princess of France is the most ambitious film yet from one of world cinema’s brightest young talents, a cumulatively thrilling experience. A Cinema Guild release.

North American Premiere
Saint Laurent
Bertrand Bonello, France, 2014, DCP, 146m
French with English subtitles
Running counter to the current strain of wan, mechanical biopics, Bertrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent toys deliriously with the genre’s rules and limitations. Focusing on a dark, hedonistic, wildly creative decade (from 1967 to ’77) in Yves Saint Laurent’s life and career, Bonello considers the couturier (convincingly embodied by Gaspard Ulliel and later by Visconti stalwart Helmut Berger) as a myth, a brand, an avatar of his era. Bonello’s star-studded supporting cast (including Louis Garrel, Léa Seydoux, Jérémie Renier, and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) serves as first-rate human mise en scène amid a kaleidoscopic torrent of lavish excess, retrospectively pieced together with a Proustian form of fast-and-loose association. As much as his subject and the gravitational pull he exerts in the hothouse environments of atelier and nightclub, Bonello is interested—as he was in House of Pleasures, his sumptuous portrait of a fin de siècle Parisian brothel—in cinema’s potential both to capture and to warp the passage of time and our perception of it. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

U.S. Premiere
La Sapienza
Eugène Green, France/Italy, 2014, DCP, 100m
French and Italian with English subtitles
In Eugène Green’s exquisite new film, Alexandre (Fabrizio Rongione) and Aliénor (Christelle Prot Landman) are a married couple who are unhappy in an all-too-familiar way: they have retreated into silence and away from intimacy. Alexandre, an architect, decides to restore himself by renewing his old dream of writing about the great Baroque architect Francesco Borromini. They drive to Ticino, Borromini’s birthplace, and then to Stresa on Lake Maggiore, where they meet a brother and sister. Goffredo (Ludovico Succio) is an architecture student in need of support and Lavinia (Arianna Nastro) is a shut-in who goes into a panic when her brother is too far away. As Alexandre and Aliénor offer their friendship to Goffredo and Lavinia, they restore their own sense of inner balance. It’s difficult to convey the precise beauty of La Sapienza, to describe its serenity, its quiet intensity, or the delicate equilibrium Green locates between faces, landscapes, and architectural forms.

New York Premiere
’71
Yann Demange, UK, 2014, DCP, 99m
A riveting thriller set in the mean streets of Belfast over the course of 24 hours, ’71 brings the grim reality of the Troubles to vivid, shocking life. Within days of being posted to Northern Ireland in a divided province that would soon turn into a war zone after January 1972’s Bloody Sunday, squaddie Gary (Jack O’Connell) finds himself trapped and unarmed in hostile territory when a house raid provokes a riot. Running for his life as the lines between friend and foe become increasingly blurred, Gary gets a baptism of fire and we get a stark, eye-opening look at the dirty war that tore Northern Ireland apart. Suggesting an update of Carol Reed’s classic Odd Man Out, this tough, compact suspenser is tightly written by Black Watchplaywright Gregory Burke and handled with a dynamic, vigorous energy by debut director Yann Demange. A Roadside Attractions release.

New York Premiere
Tales of the Grim Sleeper
Nick Broomfield, USA/UK, 2014, DCP, 105m
When Lonnie Franklin Jr. was arrested in South Central Los Angeles in 2010 as the suspected murderer of a string of young black women, police hailed it as the culmination of 20 years of investigations. Four years later documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield took his camera to the alleged killer’s neighborhood for another view. At first, Franklin’s pals stand up for him: he was the go-to guy, and certainly no murderer. But soon friends and neighbors start offering up chilling testimony, as do local activists who question why it took so long for the authorities to pay attention: certainly the community doesn’t trust the LAPD, with good reason, so they don’t talk. But if they did, what would the police do? Aided by Pam, a former prostitute and crack addict who knows the streets and the people walking them, Broomfield reveals the journey of a serial killer, gives voice to his victims, and finds the racial divide that still exists between the police and African-Americans in Los Angeles.

U.S. Premiere
Timbuktu
Abderrahmane Sissako, France/Mauritania, 2014, DCP, 100m
Arabic, Bambara, French, English, Songhay, and Tamasheq with English subtitles
Abderrahmane Sissako’s new film looks at the terror and humiliation of occupation with an uncommonly serene eye. We are in the ancient Malian city of Timbuktu, where foreign jihadists are enforcing bans against sports, music, loafing, and bare-headed women. Sissako gracefully pivots between multiple characters, some of whom are seen only fleetingly (a group of young people who gather to sing, a woman who refuses to wear gloves), while others, like the Tuareg family living in the hills near the city, we come to know intimately. Visually, Timbuktu is a series of wonders—once seen, visions of jihadists beaming their criss-crossing flashlights into the deep blue night or of a man treading the length of a shallow river from a distant vantage point are not easily forgotten. And Sissako’s becalmed and sensitive eye for beauty intensifies the absurdity and horror of the film’s quietly unfolding tragedy. A Cohen Media Group release.

U.S. Premiere
Time Out of Mind
Oren Moverman, USA, 2014, DCP, 117m
We are in an apartment from which the tenant has been evicted. Junk is piled everywhere. A man, sleeping in the bathtub, is awoken by the maintenance crew. He is forced onto the streets, and into a series of realizations that gradually materialize over the unending days that stretch to infinity: that he must find clothing to cover himself, food to eat, liquid to drink, a bed to sleep in. And we are simply with him, and with the sound and movement of the city that engulfs him and makes him seem smaller and smaller. As George, Richard Gere may be the “star” of Oren Moverman’s new film, but he allows the world around him to take center stage, and himself to simply be: it’s a wondrous performance, and Time Out of Mind is as haunting as a great Bill Evans solo. With lovely work by Ben Vereen as George’s one and only friend and Jena Malone as his estranged daughter.

New York Premiere
Two Days, One Night / Deux jours, une nuit
Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium/France/Italy, 2014, DCP, 95m
French with English subtitles
The action is elemental. The employees in a small factory have been given a choice. They will each receive a bonus if they agree to one of them being laid off; if not, then no one gets the bonus. The chosen employee (Marion Cotillard) spends a weekend driving through the suburbs and working-class neighborhoods of Seraing and Liège, knocking on the doors of her co-workers and asking a simple but impossible question: will you give up the money to let me continue to earn my own living? The force of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s new film lies in the intensity with which they focus on the second-by-second toll the situation takes on everyone directly affected, while the employers sit at a benign remove. In Two Days, One Night, the Dardennes take an urgent and extremely relevant ethical inquiry and bring it to bold and painfully human life. A Sundance Selects release.

U.S. Premiere
Two Shots Fired / Dos Disparos
Martín Rejtman, Argentina, 2014, DCP, 105m
Spanish with English subtitles
The first feature in a decade by Martín Rejtman (The Magic Gloves), a founding figure of the new Argentine cinema, is an engrossing, digressive comedy with the weight of an existentialist novel. Sixteen-year-old Mariano (Rafael Federman), inexplicably and without warning, shoots himself twice—once in the stomach and once in the head—and improbably survives. As his family strains to protect Mariano from himself, his elder brother (Benjamín Coehlo) pursues a romance with a disaffected girl (Laura Paredes) who works the counter at a fast-food restaurant, his mother (Susana Pampin) impulsively takes off on a trip with a stranger, and Mariano recruits a young woman (Manuela Martelli) to join his medieval wind ensemble. Rejtman tells this story with both compassion and formal daring, pursuing one thread only to abandon it for another. Two Shots Fired is a wry, moving, consistently surprising film about the irrationality of emotions and how they govern our actions at each stage of our lives.

New York Premiere
Whiplash
Damien Chazelle, USA, 2014, DCP, 105m
A pedagogical thriller and an emotional S&M two-hander, Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash is brilliantly acted by Miles Teller as an eager jazz drummer at a prestigious New York music academy and J.K. Simmons as the teacher whose method of terrorizing his students is beyond questionable, even when it gets results. Dubbed “Full Metal Jacket at Juilliard” at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award, Chazelle’s jazz musical was developed from his short film of the same name, which premiered at Sundance the previous year. The live jazz core that is fused with Justin Hurwitz’s ambient score, the blood-on-the-drum-kit battle between student and teacher, and the dazzling filmmaking will keep your pulse rate elevated from beginning to end. A kinesthetic depiction of performance anxiety—you don’t need to be a musician to feel it—Whiplash also presents us with a moral issue open to debate. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

North American Premiere
The Wonders / Le meraviglie
Alice Rohrwacher, Italy/Switzerland/Germany, 2014, DCP, 110m
Italian, German, and French with English subtitles
Winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, Alice Rohrwacher’s follow-up to Corpo celeste (NYFF 2011) is a vivid story of teenage yearning and confusion that revolves around a beekeeping family in rural central Italy: German-speaking father (Sam Louwyck), Italian mother (Alba Rohrwacher), four girls. Two unexpected arrivals prove disruptive, especially for the pensive oldest daughter, Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu). The father takes in a troubled teenage boy as part of a welfare program and a television crew shows up to enlist local farmers in a kitschy celebration of Etruscan culinary traditions (a slyly self-mocking Monica Bellucci plays the bewigged host). The film never announces its themes but has plenty on its mind, not least the ways in which old traditions survive in the modern world, as acts of resistance or repackaged as commodities. Combining a documentary attention to daily ritual with an evocative atmosphere of mystery,The Wonders conjures a richly concrete world that is nonetheless subject to the magical thinking of adolescence.



FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER
Founded in 1969 to celebrate American and international cinema, the Film Society of Lincoln Center works to recognize established and emerging filmmakers, support important new work, and to enhance the awareness, accessibility, and understanding of the moving image. The Film Society produces the renowned New York Film Festival, a curated selection of the year’s most significant new film work, and presents or collaborates on other annual New York City festivals including Dance on Camera, Film Comment Selects, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Latinbeat, New Directors/New Films, NewFest, New York African Film Festival, New York Asian Film Festival, New York Jewish Film Festival, Open Roads: New Italian Cinema and Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. In addition to publishing the award-winning Film Commentmagazine, The Film Society recognizes an artist's unique achievement in film with the prestigious Chaplin Award. The Film Society’s state-of-the-art Walter Reade Theater and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, located at Lincoln Center, provide a home for year-round programs and the New York City film community.

The Film Society receives generous, year-round support from Royal Bank of Canada, Jaeger-LeCoultre, American Airlines, The New York Times, Stella Artois, HBO®, The Kobal Collection, Trump International Hotel and Tower, Row NYC Hotel, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Support for the New York Film Festival is also generously provided by KIND Bars, Portage World Wide Inc., WABC-7, and WNET New York Public Media.

For more information, visit www.filmlinc.com and follow @filmlinc on Twitter.
 

THE BIG CHILL: Criterion DVD Review

Courtesy of The Criterion Collection

THE BIG CHILL 

Criterion DVD Review

1983, 102 minutes

Rated R

Review by Joshua Handler

The Breakfast Club, Friends, and countless others films/TV shows have been influenced by Lawrence Kasdan's warmhearted American classic, The Big Chill, loved for both its relatability and its soundtrack.  I had not seen The Big Chill before reviewing Criterion's DVD release with 4K restoration, so when the disc came in the mail, I was forced to finally view it.  I enjoyed myself throughout, and my appreciation for the film grew watching the excellent special features.

The Big Chill is an ensemble drama that follows what happens when a group of Baby Boomers reunite for the first time since college after the death of one of their friends.  The principal cast includes Glenn Close, Kevin Kline, Tom Berenger, Meg Tilly, Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt, Mary Kay Place, and JoBeth Williams.  This movie launched all of their careers, and it's not hard to see why.  Every one of them gives likable, believable performances, and their chemistry is among the best ever seen on film.  In one of the special features, the cast was describing how Kasdan did everything he could to keep the set environment inviting and friendly.  The cast also described how Kline and Goldblum lived together during the shoot and rented a piano so that everyone could sing and dance at their condo, which became known as the party place.  The onscreen chemistry appears to be representative of the off-screen chemistry.

There are countless moments in The Big Chill that I'll never forget, many related to that amazing soundtrack.  For example, at the funeral at the beginning of the film, a character goes up to give a speech and starts reading the lyrics to The Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want".  The reading then fades into the actual song playing across into the next scene.  And, there are many pieces of dialogue that melted my heart because they were things I had thought but had never put into words.

And I think that's one of the reasons that this movie has endured - people see themselves in it.  It's fascinating because in the excellent hour-long "making-of" documentary included in the special features, we hear that The Big Chill almost didn't get made.  Because of the massive successes of Body Heat, The Empire Strikes Back, and Raiders of the Lost Ark (the latter two of which Kasdam co-wrote), the studios offered to let Kasdan make anything he wanted.  However, they were against The Big Chill, the one project that Kasdan wanted to make.  The on-set stories from that doc are equally fascinating.  One of my favorite moments is when Kevin Kline discusses singing and dancing to songs played in his ear piece.  Because the sound man wanted a clean track without music, Kline and cast had ear pieces in their ears for the scene in which they all dance to "Ain't Too Proud to Beg".  We are treated to viewing this scene without the music, which is hilarious.  In another scene, Kline is in his car drumming on his steering wheel to a "song on the radio".  In reality during the filming of that scene, the song choice wasn't set yet, so we see essentially see Kline drumming to nothing.

The other major special feature is a 40-minute cast and crew Q&A reunion at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2013.  While this Q&A covers some of the same ground as the making-of doc, it still has some great moments.  It's also fascinating to see the cast 30 years older and discussing the film.  Also included on the disc are deleted scenes and a new interview with Kasdan.

Overall, if you love The Big Chill, it's a no-brainer that you should buy this.  The film looks and sounds great, and the special features are enlightening.  If you blind-buy The Big Chill, there's a very good chance you'll love the movie.  Again, there's a reason it's over 30-years-old and still widely-loved.  While this movie may not hold as strong a place in my heart as it does in many others', it's still an immensely enjoyable, beautifully-acted film that I would highly recommend seeking out.