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Bernard Émond is a veteran documentary filmmaker whose powerful work tends to address themes of loss, memory and the possibility of capturing fragments of truth. La femme qui boit, his stylish and finely acted debut narrative feature, is distinguished by a spectacular performance from Élise Guilbault in the title role and depicts the pain and confusion of a woman’s ruin after years of alcohol abuse.Read More »
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Some filmmakers have difficulty traveling between the short format and feature films, the former more often than not feeling like exercises, excerpts, or condensations, or the latter, in rarer cases (given the relative death of the short format some 60-odd years ago) seeming simply like brief ideas outstaying their welcome. The aesthetic of writer/director Eugène Green is so clean and simple in this age of image saturation and hyper-abundant kinetics that his “mini-film” Les Signes feels as natural and fluid as his fascinating longer features like 2004’s Le Pont des Arts and 2003’s miniature knight’s tale, Le Monde Vivant. Read More »
A rookie policeman from provincial Le Havre volunteers for the high pressure Parisian homicide bureau and is assigned to a middle-aged woman detective.Read More »
Renowned novelist Georges Guérin is out of inspiration to finish his next novel. One day, at a café, a young woman named Daisy recognizes him and they start a conversation. She says she’s a whore and makes such a story of her own life that she becomes the plot for his next novel, expected of all – especially Guillaume Lanctôt, his publisher. As the writing progresses, the relationship between them becomes more and more tender…Read More »
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Elizabeth’s heart is broken. For solace, she drops in late at night a few times at Jeremy’s diner for blueberry pie a la mode; they talk. Once, he watchers her sleep, her head on the counter. Abruptly, she leaves New York City to get away from her pain. She works a couple of jobs in Memphis. There, a heart-broken cop is drinking himself into oblivion, his ex occasionally showing up where he drinks and Lizzy works. Then, she’s in Nevada, working at a casino where she uses her savings (she wants a car) to stake Leslie, a busted gambler, in a high rollers’ game. After, Beth drives Leslie to Vegas where Leslie’s estranged father lives. Broken relationships. What about Jeremy?Read More »
A story between a mole in the police department and an undercover cop. Their objectives are the same: to find out who is the mole, and who is the cop.Read More »
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“Wendigo” is a good movie with an ending that doesn’t work. While it was not working I felt a keen disappointment, because the rest of the movie works so well. The writer, director and editor is Larry Fessenden, whose “Habit” (1997) was about a New York college student who found solace, and too much more, in the arms of a vampire. Now Fessenden goes into the Catskills to tell a story that will be compared to “The Blair Witch Project” when it should be compared to “The Innocents.” The film builds considerable scariness, and does it in the details. Ordinary things happen in ominous ways. Kim and George (Patricia Clarkson and Jake Weber), a couple from New York, drive to the Catskills to spend a weekend in a friend’s cottage, bringing along their young son, Miles (Erik Per Sullivan). Even before they arrive, there’s trouble. They run into a deer on the road, and three hunters emerge from the woods and complain that the city people killed “their” deer–and worse, broke its antlers.Read More »
A Sundance Grand Jury prize-winner and a true conversation starter, Capturing the Friedmans travels into one apparently ordinary Long Island family’s heart of darkness. Arnold and Elaine Friedman had a normal life with their three sons until Arnold was arrested on multiple (and increasingly lurid) charges of child abuse. Because the Friedmans had documented their own lives with copious home movies, filmmaker Andrew Jarecki is able to sift through their material looking for clues. Yet what emerges is more surreal than fiction: the youngest Friedman son went to jail; the eldest became a birthday-party clown. In the end, we can’t be sure whether Arnold Friedman is a monstrous child molester or the victim of railroading. The portrait of a disconnected family is deeply disturbing, either way, and this film is further proof that a documentary can be just as spellbinding as anything a great storyteller dreams up.Read More »
A family’s place in the wilderness, outside of time; free-range animals and children, junk and nature, all within the most sublime landscape.Read More »