“The Day of the Jackal” is one of this season’s generally great surprises.
Vermiglio is set in the eponymous alpine village during the waning days of WWII. Maura Delpero’s film, gorgeously shot by Leviathan cinematographer Mikhail Krichman, is a slow-moving fable that unfolds as a novelistic series of pastoral tableaus. The short chapters evoke Balzacian poetic realism and recall the sensual textures of last year’s The Taste of […]
The post AFI Review: Vermiglio Paints a Lyrical Portrait of Desires Constrained by Catholicism first appeared on The Film Stage.
Here at ScreenAnarchy, and indeed in this column, we have a few choice distributors whose works keep popping up. Criterion, Anime Limited, Severin, Arrow, Second Sight, Curzon and several crazy Germans and French ones manage to regularly raise our eyebrows. But there is also StudioCanal, and while they don’t always go crazy with their releases, when they DO, it’s good enough to keep an eye on them. Take their recent 4K-UHD / Blu-ray Limited Edition combo release of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, a surveillance thriller from 1974 starring Gene Hackman and featuring supporting roles for Frederick Forrest and a very young Harrison Ford (as a gay adversary, no less). It’s got bells and whistles, a ton of on-disc extras, and it is an edition…
It’s hard to overstate just how ubiquitous the Paddington films––particularly the 2017 sequel––have been in the British cultural consciousness over the last decade. Not simply massive box office successes experienced by many more millions through their seemingly weekly BBC One reruns, the big-screen adventures of the mild-mannered bear have had a deeply bizarre second life. […]
The post Paddington in Peru Review: Threequel Fails to Climb to Franchise Heights first appeared on The Film Stage.
How do you capture the essence of Donald Trump? In this case, by capturing an underexposed, pivotal period in his life. The period from 1970 to 1980, when Donald Trump was shaped by his relationship with lawyer Roy Cohn. Or perhaps one should say could have been shaped. After all, the film is fiction, and the story suggests how it might have been. But the portrayal remains close to the reality of the time when Trump was about thirty years old. It is the time when he breaks away from his father and is taken under the wing of lawyer Cohn. Cohn had and maintained a reputation as a tough, ruthless lawyer who would stop at nothing to win. He saw something in the young…
Arnold’s artful indulgences often detract from the film’s purported authenticity.
The post ‘Bird’ Review: Andrea Arnold’s Gritty, Sentimental Coming-of-Age Fable Flies Blind appeared first on Slant Magazine.
Boaz Yakin’s Once Again (For the Very First Time) signals something of a rebirth. In it’s opening moments, the protagonist falls from the heavens with bloodied clothing and lands on the doorstep of his love interest. He is a street dancer named DeRay, she’s a slam poet called Naim. They express themselves and their love through their art, him with his body, she with her words. What unfolds is a story of creation and destruction, love and death, God and humanity, told through the blending of stylistically daring film scenes that put dance and poetry front and center. It is a far cry from films like Fresh, Remember The Titans and Uptown Girls, the sort of work that filmmaker Yakin became best known for. Still,…
One of my favorite films of all time is Gust Van den Berghe’s Lucifer, a film that is so stylistically audacious it is hard to compare it to anything else. Based on a famous Flemish version of the Lucifer-story and set in Mexico, that entire film is shot in a circle aspect ratio. It is a film that calms the viewer into a sense of safety with its deceivingly simple story and hypnotic pace, until a final rug pull turns everything on its head. It is an ending that feels like a betrayal, deliciously, devilishly so. Now Van den Berghe is back with The Magnet Man (originally De magneet man), an equally allegorical tale with roots in historical Flemish religious and cultural practices. In the…
The lineup for the 13th annual Blood In The Snow Film Festival has been announced. Lowell Dean’s Dark Match is the opening night film while Vivieno Caldinelli’s Scared Shitless is all set to close out the six day event. Both are fine Canadian genre films that have been enjoying healthy runs on the festival circuit since the Summer, as has Self Driver from Michael Pierro, which was the Best First Feature Award winner at Fantasia. As expected, the home town audience here in Toronto will get to watch some of the Canadian horror antho series, Creepy Bits, made by a slew of locals in the suburb of Hamilton. Poor Agnes’ Navin Ramaswaran is returning with their new film, Invited. BiTS has massive short film…
While it looked like James Gray was going to follow up Armageddon Time with either a John F. Kennedy biopic or the ghost story Ezekiel Moses, one of America’s great filmmakers will be instead shifting gears to a new project. Gray will next direct Paper Tiger, based on his own script, with a cast led […]
The post James Gray to Direct Adam Driver, Jeremy Strong, and Anne Hathaway in Paper Tiger first appeared on The Film Stage.