Pithy half-hour documentary concerning New German Cinema (when it was on fire), focusing on and featuring interviews with “the big five”: Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff & Hans-Jürgen Syberberg
Most notable being the rare interview with a young Herzog, and behind-the-scenes footage of him at work.
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Radically rethinking the tired talking-heads template, Tsai Ming-liang’s latest digital experiment turns the human face into a subject of dramatic intrigue. Comprised of a series of portrait shots of mostly anonymous individuals (Tsai devotees will no doubt recognize his long-time muse, Lee Kang-sheng), the film shrewdly deemphasizes language while reducing context to a bare minimum. In their place, the beauty and imperfections of each face take center stage. Accompanied by Ryuichi Sakamoto’s soundtrack of dynamically modulating drone frequencies, Tsai’s subjects variously speak, stare, and, at one point, sleep as the camera quietly registers the weight of personal history and accumulated experience writ beautifully across every last pore and crevasse.
—NYFFRead More »
Quote:
Fellini lore has it that the master made “Juliet of the Spirits” as a gift for his wife. Like many husbands, he gave her the gift he really wanted for himself. The movie, starring a sad-eyed Giulietta Masina who fears her husband is cheating, suggests she’d be happier if she were more like her neighbor, a buxom temptress who entertains men in a tree house.Read More »
Both the shortest Lav Diaz film, and the longest Viennale trailer:
Quote:
VIENNALE TRAILER 2018
THE BOY WHO CHOSE THE EARTH by Lav Diaz
The Viennale is pleased to announce that this year’s trailer was created by the multiple award-winning Filipino director Lav Diaz. Many of his films, outstanding also due to their length, have been shown at previous Viennale festivals. In 2014 he won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival and two years ago the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for THE WOMAN WHO LEFT.Read More »
When a police inspector is murdered in hospital, the investigation led by detective Martin Beck uncovers reports of police misconduct and a possible revenge motive.Read More »
NUCLEAR FAMILY explores institutional and personal representations of memory and behavior through a complex interweaving of scientific documentation, animal behavior experiments and vintage pre-school footage. The approach is formalistic and optically printed material is used throughout. The drama of the nuclear family is played by a series of non-human subjects ranging from mannequins used in 1950s nuclear blast experiments to doves playing ping-pong. The notion of family is experienced as iconic, nostalgic and a recollected remnant of the nuclear age.
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Coincoin and the Extra Humans review: Bruno Dumont raises a stink in a small town
| Sight & Sound
Ben Nicholson 15 August 2018
There was something rotten in the soil of northern France in Bruno Dumont’s blackly comic mini-series, P’tit Quinquin (2014). A four-episode television mystery that was also released as a single feature film, it was a confounding and macabre parody of a procedural police drama filled with unexpected (for the famously serious filmmaker), and often uncomfortable, laughs. It followed a bumbling duo of gendarmes as they investigated a sequence of grisly deaths in the environs of a small town as a group of mischievous kids, led by the eponymous Quinquin, watched on.Read More »
Plot Synopsis from allmovie:
Iranian expatriate Amir Naderi completes the trilogy he began with Manhattan by Numbers and A, B, C… Manhattan with this unusual drama about a woman obsessed. Gretchen (Sara Paul) is a woman living in Manhattan who is fascinated with crossword puzzles, and has issued a stern challenge to herself — to complete over 77 newspaper crossword puzzles in 24 hours, which would beat the number she did in a similar period the previous year. Gretchen does most of her work riding subways or buses, following the square grid of the city which somehow resembles the puzzles that fascinate her, and when she is at home, she listens to recordings of the noise of the street, unable to separate the urban landscape from her compulsive behavior. Leading actress Sara Paul appeared in a different role in Naderi’s earlier A, B, C… Manhattan.Read More »
Antoine’s future is all mapped out. A student at France’s top business college, some day he’ll slip into his father’s shoes at the head of a booming company.
Antoine is brilliant, but he’s bored. As a game or a challenge, to prove to himself he’s not on a one-way street, he agrees to play the lead in a film in preparation. It’s a scandal. The more Antoine delves into the unknown, the more he finds himself alone, misunderstood, torn between the wounded love of his parents and his lady director’s voracious passionRead More »