Category: Film – Festivals

Screening Room: ‘After the Storm’

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The newest movie from Hirokazu Kore-eda, After the Storm, opened this week in limited release. My review is at PopMatters:

When is success or hunting for it a trap? Is it better to have dreamed of great things and fallen short or to have never had ambitions at all? Those are a couple of the questions that Hirokazu Kore-eda’s TV-like melodrama about wayward fathers and disappointed women After the Storm tangles with. Fortunately for the viewer, Kore-eda leaves those questions mostly hanging in the air and not verbalized, leaving the screen to a group of characters who are less like a family than a house of cards just waiting to be blown down by the typhoon everybody is waiting for to strike…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Personal Shopper’

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Equal parts behind-the-scenes fashion narrative, thriller, and improbable ghost story, Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper is one of more curious and rewarding movies of the spring.

After playing a few festivals last year, it’s opening this week in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:

The year is young still, but you probably won’t see a wiser, more headlong dive into the world of high fashion and celebrity than Olivier Assayas’ slippery, darkly glamorous Personal Shopper. With a cool and yet intimate approach, Assayas shows a deeper awareness of the seductive, boundary- and identity-blurring compromises than other more surface-sailing chroniclers of the beautiful life like Nicolas Winding Refn or Sofia Coppola. He also manages to string a taut thread of tension through the unlikeliest of narratives for this generally straightforward filmmaker to tackle: a ghost story…

Here is the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘I Am Michael’

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James Franco and Zachary Quinto in 'I Am Michael'
James Franco and Zachary Quinto in ‘I Am Michael’

Based on a true story, I Am Michael stars James Franco as a gay activist who turns to Christianity and rejects everything about his past. It’s playing now in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:

When we first see Michael Glatze (James Franco), trying to counsel a fellow young Christian terrified of his same-sex attractions, he initially seems supportive and gentle. The kind of preacher who reaches out, rather than condemns. Even when he says that “gay doesn’t exist,” it scans as nonjudgmental. But when he gets to the leading question, “You want to go to heaven, right?” it’s obvious that Glatze is not going to be that kind of Christian…

Here is the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Paterson’

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One of the most surprising and rewarding movie treats of 2016 is Jim Jarmusch’s quirky yet heartfelt Paterson, about a poetry-writing bus driver in New Jersey. It reminds you not just how great Jarmusch can be but renews your faith in a particular brand of American independent filmmaking.

Paterson is playing now in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:

Proudly reinforcing the at-times under-siege notion that there is great, grasping life yet in American filmmaking, Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson is a simple story told with power, complexity and vision. Like many of the Frank O’Hara or William Carlos Williams poems that the film’s namesake protagonist (Adam Driver) reads and re-reads, the film is a poignant portrait of the mundane, a singing symphony of the everyday. It’s also a comedy, a romance, a paean to American post-industrial resilience, and a sublimely enjoyable work of art about a bus driver who writes poems that he doesn’t seem to care if anybody ever reads. There’s a lot here, folded like tightly coiled wires under the seemingly placid surface…

Here’s the trailer.

Screening Room: ‘I, Daniel Blake’

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In Ken Loach’s searing new drama, an out-of-work carpenter fights to keep his humanity and a shred of dignity after being thrown into the Kafkaesque world of the UK’s social services bureaucracy.

I, Daniel Blake is playing now in limited release and is worth seeking out. My review is at PopMatters:

In many ways, I, Daniel Blake is as shamelessly manipulative as the most reductive romantic comedy or melodrama. Daniel might be the single most decent and loveable human being to grace a movie screen during the whole of 2016. At his side is a similarly decent single mother whose tearful travails are the stuff of a 19th-century immigrant’s saga. Together they contend with petty bureaucrats who never miss an opportunity to let their rulebooks and prickly egos keep them from doing their jobs. It’s David versus Goliath, only David doesn’t use a slingshot because he’s just too nice a bloke…

Here is the trailer.

Screening Room: ‘Neruda’

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In the newest film from Pablo Larrain (whose Jackie just opened), Gael Garcia Bernal plays a cop hot on the heels of the titular Chilean poet.

Neruda is opening this week. My review is at Film Journal International:

Pablo Larraín has said flat-out that he didn’t want to make a biopic of Chile’s hero poet Pablo Neruda. And that’s a wise decision. Compressing Neruda’s incident-packed life, which whipsawed from writing yearning and experimental poetry to traveling the world in the diplomatic service to pursuing a career in domestic politics and spending years on the run as a political exile, into a single film would have produced fatigue, confusion, or at the very least severe neck injuries…

The trailer is here:

Screening Room: ‘Things to Come’

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Isabelle Huppert plays a philosophy teacher whose life gets thrown for a loop in Mia Hansen-Love’s brilliant new drama.

Things to Come is opening this week in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:

After taking a detour into the vagabond world of dance-music DJs with the disappointingly blah Eden, Mia Hansen-Løve returns fantastically to form with Things to Come. It’s the kind of urbane, Éric Rohmer-inflected drama that the still-young writer-director has been turning out for a few years now and hopefully will continue to make for decades to come. There are any number of filmmakers who can make stories about Parisians with matters of the world and the heart weighing them down. But few approach them with the kind of questing emotional honesty that Hansen-Løve specializes in…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Manchester by the Sea’

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For his followup to the brilliant, if barely released Margaret, Kenneth Lonergan delivers a fistful of melancholic comedy in the surprising, deftly written Manchester by the Sea, which stars Casey Affleck as a man coming apart under the weight of multiple tragedies.

Manchester by the Sea is playing now. You probably will not see a better written or acted film this year. My review is at PopMatters:

“It’s not a good disease.” Diagnosed with cancer at the start of Manchester by the Sea, Joe Chandler (Kyle Chandler) asks his doctor if there are any good diseases. “Poison ivy,” she replies, with the barest hint of a grin. At that, Joe’s wife Elise (Gretchen Mol), furious that they’re joking at a time like this, storms out of the hospital room. Elise might be best advised not to watch Manchester by the Sea, a nearly perfect example of how to weave humor throughout tragedy…

Here is the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened’

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In 1981, Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince were the kings of Broadway. After a decade of shows from Company to Sweeney Todd that reinvented the American musical form, they were embarking on another venture: Merrily We Roll Along. Things didn’t go as planned.

Directed by Lonny Price, one of the original cast members, Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened is the up-close account of one of Broadway’s most infamous flops. It’s opening this week in limited release and will probably show up on PBS soon. My review from the New York Film Festival is at PopMatters:

At first, Price makes Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened something of a personal essay, describing with enthusiastic panache his obsessive love of the form in general and these practitioners in specific. Then he broadens the circle, marrying rehearsal footage of other cast members like Tonya Pinkins and Jason Alexander (eight years before he won a Tony and nine before appearing in Seinfeld) with new interviews. One actor remembers, “You felt like you were witnessing history.” That about sums up the type of enthusiasm that Price delivers here…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Don’t Call Me Son’

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Don’t Call Me Son, the newest film from Anna Muylaert (last year’s incredible The Second Mother), is playing now in limited release. My review is at PopMatters:

The routine for 17-year-old Pierre (Naomi Nero) appear fixed as Anna Muylaert’s Don’t Call Me Son (Mãe Só Há Uma) begins. Each day, shark-like, he fulfills one urge and then the next, dozing through school, ignoring his mother’s motor-mouthed manias, jamming with an amateur garage band, going out to dance, and hooking up with girls. It’s a familiar set-up in stories about adolescents. However, Muylaert breaks up expectations by dropping a provocative twist into the opening scene where, as Pierre has sex with a girl in a nightclub bathroom, the camera makes a point of noticing the garters he’s wearing…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘The Handmaiden’

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This Halloween, skip Madea and check out The Handmaiden. It’s playing now in limited release and is just about the best chance out there for a good time at the theater: chills, shocks, romance, secret perversions, period outfits, it’s got it all.

My review is at PopMatters:

Nothing is as it seems in The Handmaiden (Ah-ga-ssi). Park Chan-wook’s victorious return to the Korean filmmaking scene after his American debut, 2013’s Stoker, is rife with pungent physicality and nearly overwhelmingly aesthetic surfaces. We saw Park pay that same level of attention to each detail in Stoker, all those burning glances and insect closeups laid over a stifling plot. This time, he has a story that more than justifies his flagrantly overripe style…

Here’s the trailer:

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Screening Room: ‘Moonlight’

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In the sumptuous melodrama Moonlight, Barry Jenkins’s Oscar-favored film explores the three stages of a young man’s life in a rough Miami neighborhood.

Moonlight is opening this week. My review is at Film Journal International:

It’s safe to say that after his last feature, 2008’s romantic talkfest Medicine for Melancholy, few people would have expected Barry Jenkins to be starting off his newest film with a do-rag-wearing drug dealer rolling through a rough-and-tumble Miami. The characters of the more extravagantly emotional and romantic (in all sense of the word) triptych Moonlight are on the surface light years removed from the urbane hipsters of that earlier film. But really, they’re still dealing with the same issues: namely, identity, their place and purpose in the world, and the search for love…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Aquarius’

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In the newest film from Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho (Neighboring Sounds), Sonia Braga plays a retired writer trying to fight off the developers who want to demolish her cozy beachside building and all the memories it contains.

Aquarius, which was part of the just-concluded New York Film Festival, is playing now in limited release. My review is at PopMatters:

The heroine of Aquarius sees the whole world as a stage for her to command. It’s a testament to Sonia Braga’s control that she doesn’t turn this character into a domineering bore, even as she’s at the center of an overly spacious and repetitive narrative with too little to occupy herself…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘The Lost Arcade’

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For years, the last arcade in New York was a gritty little spot called the Chinatown Fair. There, night after night, gamers gathered to compete, play, gossip, and boast until the early hours. Then it closed.

The Lost Arcade has been playing the festival circuit. It opens at the Metrograph in New York this week. My review is at Film Journal International:

Everything about the videogame palaces in The Lost Arcade makes them look like oases. Shot mostly at night, because that’s when the gamers come out, the arcades blaze into the darkness with their teenage-Vegas cacophony of strobing lights, electronic bleeps, and the hoots and hollers of victors and vanquished. Clearly, these are not just places to drop some quarters and kill a half-hour on the latest Street Fighter; they are clubhouses, homes away from home…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘T-Rex’

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As if growing up poor in Flint, Michigan wasn’t difficult enough, Claressa “T-Rex” Shields decided to set herself a lofty goal: Becoming the first woman to win a gold medal in boxing at the Olympics.

Shields’s awesomely gripping story is the subject of T-Rex, which is playing now in limited release and should show up on PBS in the next year. My review is at Film Journal International:

Outgoing but tough and pragmatic, Shields is blunt about how she got started at the gym she’s been boxing at since age eleven: “I was just down here, beating guys… It was something I liked to do”…

Here’s the trailer: