Film Festivals Archives - Page 10 of 46

SDAFF ’19: To the Ends of the Earth

November 21, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Japan, Qatar, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Uzbekistan

***½/****
starring Atsuko Maeda, Ryo Kase, Shota Sometani, Adiz Radjabov
written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

by Walter Chaw Kiyoshi Kurosawa's still best known to Western audiences, if he's known at all, as one of the progenitors of the Japanese J-Horror movement, which gained traction in the United States in the years immediately following 9/11. Once the U.S. joined Japan as an industrialized nation experiencing the detonation of a large-scale weapon of mass destruction over a populated area, I think it also took on Japan's cinematic mechanisms for coping: nihilistic horror films where evil comes with neither warning nor explanation–and city-levelling kaiju eiga in the form of a nearly-uninterrupted glut of superhero movies. Kurosawa's twin masterpieces, Cure and Pulse, deal in issues of technophobia and isolation with a painterly eye and a poet's patience. They are among the most frightening films of the last quarter-century, proving perpetually current as our world, and our reality with it, continues to fray. His movies used to feel like cautionary tales; now they feel like prophecy. Pulse, especially, with its tale of ghosts in the machine and airplanes falling from the sky, throbs with an insistent, hopeless melancholy that speaks to the essential loneliness of existence. It's as important a work in its way as anything by Camus or Sartre.

SDAFF ’19: Stray Dolls

November 19, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival

***/****
starring Geetanjali Thapa, Olivia DeJonge, Robert Aramayo, Cynthia Nixon
written by Charlotte Rabate & Sonejuhi Sinha
directed by Sonejuhi Sinha

by Walter Chaw Its title calling back to both Akira Kurosawa’s seminal noir Stray Dog and Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-Liang’s miserablist masterpiece Stray Dogs, Sonejuhi Sinha’s Stray Dolls would fit most comfortably on a double-bill with Sean Baker’s The Florida Project. Like it, Stray Dolls is set almost entirely in the impoverished world of permanent-residence motels, where the desperate do their best to grab their slice of the pie. Unlike Baker’s film, Sinha’s is essentially a crime movie centred on two room-cleaners: rough-and-tumble Dallas (Olivia DeJonge) and her roomie, fresh-off-the-boat immigrant Riz (Geetanjali Thapa), from whom Dallas immediately steals her belongings and holds them as ransom. The price? Riz must steal something from a guest’s room that Dallas can turn over for a quick buck. The stakes are high for Riz, who, as we see in the first of the film’s cynical turns, has her passport confiscated by her employer, Una (Cynthia Nixon), who immediately, surreptitiously shreds it. Riz is well and truly on her own, more than she knows, even: marooned in a strange land without allies or papers.

SDAFF ’19: Lucky Grandma

November 18, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival

**/****
starring Tsai Chin, Corey Ha, Michael Tow, Woody Fu
written by Angela Cheng & Sasie Sealy
directed by Sasie Sealy

by Walter Chaw There's no arguing with the craft of Sasie Sealey's Lucky Grandma, nor are there any aspersions to cast on the diversity of its crew and the inspiration of its funding as the million-dollar winner of an AT&T- and Tribeca-sponsored screenplay contest. But its backstory is ultimately more interesting than the film itself. In the end, it feels like a support system for the star-making performance of its octogenarian lead, Tsai Chin (The Joy Luck Club); it's not serious enough to make much of an emotional impact, was never meant to be an action film, and is just amusing enough to force comparisons with Stephen Chow's depictions of bad-ass grandmothers. In other words, Lucky Grandma sort of trundles along for a while and then stops. Along the way, however, there's that central performance, married to a few fine supporting turns (especially ex-basketballer Corey Ha as a gentle-souled bodyguard) and an end product that looks like it had a budget many times its actual budget. There's promise here as a feature debut.

SDAFF ’19: Driveways

November 15, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival

***½/****
starring Hong Chau, Lucas Jaye, Christine Ebersole, Brian Dennehy
written by Hannah Bos & Paul Thureen
directed by Andrew Ahn

by Walter Chaw A sentimental film neither cheap nor schmaltzy, Andrew Ahn's sophomore feature Driveways is a rare beast in more ways than that. It's a measured character piece featuring standout performances from Hong Chau, Brian Dennehy, and a kid, Lucas Jaye, who, in his unaffectedness and ease, is one to watch. Along the way, the picture is also a calm conversation about racial tension, economic privation, and mental illness in these United States, following a woman, Kathy (Chau), who's investigating a house left to her by a sister recently passed. It's tempting to dismiss anything that wears its heart so prominently on its sleeve (and so uncomfortable to look at directly sometimes for all the guilelessness), but you come to find that it's maybe the kind of palliative cure for the collective melancholy ailing us right now. Driveways doesn't condescend or try to teach something, it simply exists alongside its characters and gives us, and them, the space to recognize each other. In that, in this day of big entertainments and embittered satires, it's something like a unicorn.

SDAFF ’19: Just 6.5

November 13, 2019****/****, 2019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Iran, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Thriller

Metri Shesh Va Nim
****/****
starring Payman Maadi, Navid Mohammadzadeh, Parinaz Izadyar, Hooman Kiaee
written and directed by Saeed Roustayi

by Walter Chaw With only ten minutes left in its running time, Saeed Roustayi’s Just 6.5 introduces a brief musical sting in a film that, up to that moment, had relied entirely on diegetic audio and long, rapid-fire monologues delivered at high volume and intensity for its soundtrack. Said cue highlights erstwhile villain Nasser Khakzad (Navid Mohammadzadeh) drawing a line in the sand in a matter concerning the dispensation of a house he’s bought for his parents. It’s the fulcrum on which the entire film rests: not whether or not the Iranian state will confiscate a home, but the level of desperation that drives the lower classes into crime–and then the addictive nature of wealth that makes it impossible to retire from crime. As Nasser confesses when asked why he didn’t quit while he was ahead, “My eyes were still hungry.” The whole film is about the question of class and the possibility of ever climbing from one to the next. Everything in Just 6.5 is a barter at the world’s late-capitalism bazaar. For instance, the crazed narco cop on Nasser’s tail, Samad (Payman Maadi of A Separation), is dangled a bribe by drug lord Nasser that would essentially vault him into a different circle. It’s a boost he needs, we gather from a few tossed-off comments about his kid and a phone call he gets at the worst time that he has to take while the whole world is crowding in around him. He doesn’t take it because of “his honour,” but he might as well have. It makes no difference.

SDAFF ’19: Straight Up

November 11, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival

**½/****
starring Katie Findlay, James Sweeney, Randall Park, Betsy Brandt
written and directed by James Sweeney

by Walter Chaw James Sweeney's hyphenate debut Straight Up is a dense, screwball, and occasionally irritating though ultimately rewarding wall of words swirling around and between erstwhile lovers Rory (Katie Findlay) and Todd (Sweeney, a triple-threat here) as they negotiate standard relationship stuff like dating and cohabitation–and not-so-standard romcom fare like Todd's apparent asexuality (which is possibly homosexuality). In its antic vibe and its characters' strategy of obscuring their feelings behind shoals of patter, Straight Up most reminds of Hal Hartley's work. Todd has a thing about fluids, considers sex embarrassing and/or disgusting, and has interests obscure enough–and opinions abrasive enough–that he's having trouble finding someone who will tolerate him, let alone like him. Enter Rory, who, while enjoying sex fine, thank you, talks the same way, thinks the same way, and finds most of Todd's peccadillos to be charming.

SDAFF ’19: A French Woman

November 10, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, France, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

*/****
written and directed by Kim Hee-jung

by Walter Chaw Kim Hee-jung's A French Woman seems curiously of a piece with other recent films about dislocation and loss, such as Bi Gan's Long Day's Journey Into Night for one, Claire Denis's Let the Sunshine In for another–works at times suffocatingly pretentious but each possessed of pockets of real beauty and the occasional insight. Denis's film works the best of these, largely for the invisibility of its direction. Calling attention to oneself as a director is a high concept that can work sometimes; more often, it's a tactic that neuters emotional involvement, turning the film into an intellectual exercise and a trainspotting diversion. A French Woman follows Mira (Kim Hojung) on the worst night of her life, as she learns in the middle of a crowded Parisian restaurant that her husband's been unfaithful. She leaves to compose herself and suddenly finds herself transported back to a day some twenty years in the past when she first left Korea to pursue life and love in Paris.

SDAFF ’19: An Introduction

November 10, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival

by Walter Chaw I'm statistically past the midway point, alive for more years than I will be alive for again, and I've spent most of my time denying, being embarrassed by, often hating, who I am. I was born in Colorado in 1973, raised in downtown Golden in a Norman Rockwell postcard of an existence. I walked to school, walked to the little silversmith store my dad owned when it was over, earned pennies at the barbershop on the corner where the mayor, Frank, operated the first chair. I got my money shining shoes and catching flies in the little plastic bags my dad used to put little gems in for his customers.

TIFF 2019: Waves

October 1, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

**½/****
starring Kelvin Harrison Jr, Lucas Hedges, Taylor Russell, Sterling K. Brown
written and directed by Trey Edward Shults

by Walter Chaw The first thing I’d say about Trey Edward Shults’s Waves is that I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea that this is his story to tell. The tale of the devastation wrought upon a black family by internal and external social pressures is at once obvious in a broad racial sense and relatively superficial in Shults’s treatment of it. Narratively, there are no new insights here, although a tremendous cast exhibits truth and grace no matter the shakiness of the picture’s framework and genesis. Well into the second decade of the new millennia, however, I guess I’m advocating for stories like this to be told from a different point of view. Failing that, Waves is ultimately a Stanley Kramer melodrama with a banging, transcendent Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross soundtrack/score. It has the best of intentions, no question, but I’ve seen this story told in this voice before.

Telluride ’19: Epilogue

September 27, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Telluride

by Walter Chaw There's a scoop in the mountain face on the way back from Telluride, like a bite has been taken from the rock. Below is a clear, blue lake fed by snowmelt, so the water is bitterly cold. I found it by accident. I stop there every year to break up my drive. This year I sat on the beach for a while, stood up a few bleached wood branches into something like a cairn, took my shoes off, dug my toes into the sand, and soaked them for a minute in the water as shoals of fry darted around. I sucked air in through my teeth. I nodded off to the sound of the water lapping and the wind in the grass by the road, and I thought of this passage from The Sound and the Fury:

And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.

Attn: The 27th Annual Vintage Film Festival

September 20, 20192019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Film Festivals

Attention classic-film buffs and TCM junkies: Since FILM FREAK CENTRAL is technically a Canadian website, based in southern Ontario, I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you about the 27th annual Port Hope Vintage Film Festival. Running from September 27-29, it's a rare opportunity to see classic films--such as Top Hat, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and La Belle et La Bête (the theme for 2019 is, you guessed it, Famous Cinematic Duos)--on the big screen, at Port Hope's gorgeous Capitol Theatre (pictured above). Proceeds go to the Marie Dressler Foundation, which is raising money this year to provide…

TIFF 2019: Atlantiques

September 17, 20192019, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Senegal, Streaming, TIFF, Zombie

Atlantique
***/****
starring Mama Sané, Amadou Mbow, Ibrahima Traoré, Nicole Sougou
screenplay by Mati Diop, Olivier Demangel
directed by Mati Diop

by Angelo Muredda Working from her own 2009 short Atlantiques, first-time feature director Mati Diop makes a bold impression with Atlantics. An elegant film that will hopefully lose the ungainly subtitle "A Ghost Love Story" by the time it makes its way to Netflix (where it's bound in the coming months), it's an awfully strong directorial calling card with a distinctive rhythm and point of view, its tactility and sensuousness evoking the work of Diop's former director and mentor Claire Denis without losing its own youthful verve.

TIFF 2019: Uncut Gems

September 16, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride

***/****
starring Adam Sandler, Lakeith Stanfield, Idina Menzel, Judd Hirsch
screenplay by Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie & Benny Safdie
directed by Benny Safdie & Josh Safdie

by Walter Chaw Enfants terrible Josh and Bennie Safdie follow-up their kinetic crime thriller Good Time with Uncut Gems, another helping of the same packed with so much anxiety and energy that it becomes exhausting a good while before it's done with you. Opening in an Ethiopian opal mine, where a huge-karated black specimen is unearthed in secret by subsistence miners while one of their compatriots wails in agony over a nasty open fracture in his leg, Uncut Gems then cuts to diamond dealer Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) getting a colonoscopy. When not having the inside of his bowels photographed, he's ensconced in his little retail hole in New York's Diamond District, doing his best to fend off an endless wave of creditors while looking for that one big score. In a recent (i.e., February, 2019) article in INTERVIEW, Patrick McGraw memorably describes that stretch of West 47^th between 5^th and 6^th avenues as "…a composite of fake teeth, cheap cologne, aviators, dyed hair, machismo, self-loathing, and seemingly uncontrollable gesticulating"–a good description of Howard, too, as it happens, as Sandler finally finds a dramatic role the equal now of his finest hour, Punch-Drunk Love. Howard is not unlike Barry, the role he played in P.T. Anderson's film–if Barry had no success managing his sudden fits of manic rage.

TIFF 2019: Sound of Metal

September 15, 20192019, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, TIFF

***/****
starring Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cooke, Mathieu Amalric, Paul Raci
written by Abraham Marder & Darius Marder
directed by Darius Marder

by Angelo Muredda It comes as a pleasant jolt that there's a lot to say about Sound of Metal, The Place Beyond the Pines' co-screenwriter Darius Marder's feature debut. On paper, the story of Ruben (Riz Ahmed), a noise-metal drummer and recovering addict who suddenly loses his hearing in the middle of a tour with his girlfriend and musical partner Lou (Olivia Cooke), seems like the stuff of a run-of-the-mill disability melodrama about learning to appreciate life's little pleasures in silence. And though it veers close to something like that message in its final moments, which threaten to put a bow on a rather messy human drama, the film is surprisingly complicated about the new worlds, sensory experiences, and cultures in which Ruben is being initiated.

TIFF 2019: Joker

September 15, 20192019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Robert De Niro, Thriller, TIFF

**/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Robert De Niro
written by Todd Phillips & Scott Silver
directed by Todd Phillips

by Bill Chambers Two moments that soar: in the one, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), having just shed the last vestments of propriety, dons the complete outfit of his alter ego Joker–the green hair, the white face, the purple suit–for the first time and does an impromptu dance to Gary Glitter’s stadium staple “Rock and Roll Part 2” on an empty stairway in Gotham City. In the other, stand-up comic Joker achieves his dream of guesting on “The Murray Franklin Show”. The former is great because the music is at once non-diegetic and clearly prodding Joker; it’s one of the few times we’re indisputably inside his head, and, naturally, he’s soundtracked his grand entrance like he’s the star pitcher coming out to wow the crowd in the sixth inning. (Phoenix is arguably the first actor since Cesar Romero to accept that Joker isn’t just a psychopath, he’s also a complete dork.) The latter distinctly reminded me of Phoenix’s standoffish appearance on Letterman while he was in the throes of shooting the mockumentary I’m Still Here, but the reason the sequence works is that it’s legitimately suspenseful watching Robert De Niro’s Murray Franklin harangue Joker on live television, stoking a burning fuse. De Niro’s presence is of course a nod to Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, in which he’s an aspiring comedian so desperate to do his act on “The Jerry Langford Show” that he stalks and eventually kidnaps the titular Jerry (Jerry Lewis). Despite that legacy casting, a particularly baleful De Niro is morbidly implausible as a talk-show host of legend, yet his proto-Morton Downey Jr. is defensible in that it looks ahead to the rise of today’s angry pundits. Unlike his ingratiating contemporaries (Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, Jerry Langford)–period markers, including the cheesy glitz of “The Murray Franklin Show”‘s set design, suggest the film takes place circa 1980–Murray seems to be jonesing for conflict. Incidentally, De Niro’s head hasn’t been this square since Midnight Run.

TIFF 2019: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

September 14, 20192019, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

***/****
starring Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys, Enrico Colantoni, Chris Cooper
written by Micah Fitzerman-Blue & Noah Harpster
directed by Marielle Heller

by Angelo Muredda Marielle Heller follows the biting character drama of Can You Ever Forgive Me? with a refreshingly non-traditional biopic about a decidedly warmer public figure than Lee Israel in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the second film about Fred Rogers in the past year and certainly the more interesting one. An aesthetic and dramatic curiosity, where a more timid hagiography in the mood of Morgan Neville’s celebrated documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? might have sufficed, Heller’s take, starring a perfectly modulated and near-uncannily cast Tom Hanks (his decidedly non-Rogers gut aside), treats the children’s broadcaster not so much as a person with a life story worth profiling, but as a contagion for radical ways of sublimating anger in children and adults alike.

TIFF 2019: The Twentieth Century

September 12, 20192019, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Canada, Comedy, Esoterica, Film Festivals, TIFF

***½/****
starring Daniel Beirne, Sarianne Cormier, Mikhaïl Ahooja, Catherine St-Laurent
written and directed by Matthew Rankin

by Angelo Muredda Matthew Rankin makes good on the promise of his singular shorts in his rambunctious and beguiling feature debut The Twentieth Century, a ten-part portrait of the famously uncharismatic but long-serving Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, played to milky-white, moony-eyed perfection by Dan Beirne. A wildly inventive dramatization of the formative pre-office days of the nation’s only P.M. to host seances with his dead dogs (as most students of Canadian history will remember), the film makes bold use of the formal language of early cinema as well as the seemingly diametrically opposed Canadian penchants for shame and degeneracy.

Telluride 2019: A Hidden Life

September 12, 2019****/****, 2019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Directors: Terrence Malick, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride

****/****
starring August Diehl, Valerie Pachner, Matthias Schoenaerts, Bruno Ganz
written and directed by Terrence Malick

by Walter Chaw Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life takes its title from George Eliot's Middlemarch:

…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

I've read that over and over since watching the film to realize the more I do, the more it feels cool, soothing against my tongue as a tonic does, or an oath devoutly felt. It's a roadmap to a life lived faithfully to an ideal rather than enslaved to other considerations, venal or material–and the way I think most sensitive, intelligent, moral beings wish to live, had they only the means to do it. Especially if they don't. Freedom shouldn't be something we afford, but rather something we can't afford to be without. A Hidden Life is an ecstatic telling, like Malick's The New World, of the life of a real person. In this case, of Austrian saint Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), beatified in 2007; his martyrdom is told here in a manner half like The Passion of Joan of Arc and half an imagistic adaptation of William Cullen Bryant's "Thanatopsis." It's heartbreaking in its beauty, immense in its sadness, and so topical as to be all but unbearable. The tragedy of us is that this story will always be topical.

Telluride 2019: The Climb

September 10, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Telluride

***/****
starring Michael Covino, Kyle Marvin, Gayle Rankin, George Wendt
written by Kyle Marvin & Michael Covino
directed by Michael Covino

by Walter Chaw Michael Covino's The Climb paints a portrait of male friendship through a series of clever, tightly-scripted vignettes that depict the buddies in question at several points in their lives. It opens with Mike (director and co-writer Covino) and Kyle (co-writer Kyle Marvin) riding a bike up a steep grade–the perfect opportunity for Mike to confess to the less-in-shape Kyle that he's had an affair with Kyle's fiancée. It's a funny conceit carried by Mike and Kyle's rapport: Kyle, furious, can't quite catch up with Mike to kill him; Mike admitting that was the plan all along. The film then jumps forward to a funeral, a Christmas party (where Kyle's mom (Talia Balsam) says everything except what she means when recruiting a drunken Mike into her plan to separate her kid from the woman, Marissa (Gayle Rankin), whom everyone hates), a wedding, and so on, until finally lands it at a place where it becomes clear that despite the ever-changing circumstances of their lives, Mike and Kyle's friendship, like all good friendships, stayed exactly the same.

TIFF 2019: Pain and Glory + Varda by Agnès

September 8, 2019****/****, 2019, Authors: Bill Chambers, Disability, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Spain, TIFF

Dolor y gloria
***½/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Asier Exteandia, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Penélope Cruz
written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar

Varda par Agnès
****/****
directed by Agnès Varda

by Bill Chambers Salvador Mallo is first seen in hydrotherapy for his scarred back, lost in an underwater reverie. The lapping waves trigger a memory of his mother (Penélope Cruz, who must have a painting of herself rotting away in the attic) washing clothes in the river when he was just a boy. Played by Pedro Almodóvar discovery and muse Antonio Banderas, Salvador is an informally retired film director who dresses like Almodóvar, resides in Almodóvar’s real-life apartment, and suffers a litany of ailments–spinal problems, tinnitus–much like Almodóvar’s own. The kinkiness of Almodóvar’s work has always made it seem personal and confessional, but with Pain and Glory he moves into the roman à clef territory of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz–although Pain and Glory is considerably more chill, treating even picking up a heroin habit in middle age as less self-destructive than incorrigible. Salvador is introduced to the drug while making amends with Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia), star of his acclaimed Sabor (“Flavour”). Alberto is a long-time junkie; Salvador once held this against his performance in Sabor but no longer does, because time has altered his perception of it. The two agree to do a Q&A at a screening of the film’s restoration, which, uh, doesn’t quite go as planned but does lead to Alberto putting on an unpublished play that Salvador wrote, which leads to Salvador briefly reconnecting with Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), the old lover the play is about. This spurs him to be proactive about his health: Salvador realizes that he needs to get back to making art, because sharing this one story with others has turned out to be so much more rewarding than wallowing in nostalgia.