Film Festivals Archives - Page 24 of 46

Telluride ’13: FFC Interviews “Under the Skin” Director Jonathan Glazer

September 13, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews, Telluride, Telluride 2013

On my way up the side of the mountain to the Chuck Jones Theater in the unlit gondola that serves as Telluride’s free public transportation, I watched a small cluster of lights recede beneath me, reminding me that Telluride is a tiny bubble in the middle of nowhere, really. Riding at night, all you hear is the whirr of the gondola’s gears and the whisk of wind whipping through the wires and trees. I was on my way to meet a good friend I only see once every two or three years, if that–she having just arrived after a day of delays and missed connections, me still acclimating to being back in the saddle, actively covering a festival I’d last attended in 2002. It was a hurried reunion: a quick hello, and then we were seated for what was, for me, the one film I felt I could not miss at this festival. Truly, I can’t imagine a better way to have seen Under the Skin for the first time.

Telluride ’13: “On Death Row” – Conversation with James Barnes + Portrait of Robert Fratta

September 12, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Werner Herzog, Documentary, Film Festivals, Television, Telluride, Telluride 2013

"On Death Row" Conversation with James Barnes ***/**** directed by Werner Herzog "On Death Row" Portrait of Robert Fratta **/**** directed by Werner Herzog by Walter Chaw Two shot-for-television documentaries, running about 50 minutes apiece, serve as Werner Herzog's epilogue to 2011's Into the Abyss, each profiling a single inmate in the inimitable Herzog style that has evolved over the years into something that doesn't punish its subjects (as it once did) so much as it punishes the audience. Looking back to the way he shot coroner Franc G. Fallico in Grizzly Man, allowing him to twist a few beats…

TIFF ’13: The Sacrament

September 11, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Horror, Pseudo-Documentary, TIFF

*/**** written and directed by Ti West by Bill Chambers Surrendering once again to V/H/S found-footage mode, writer-director Ti West brazenly co-opts the particulars of the mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, abandoning only the names and most expensive details (two planes become one helicopter, for instance, while the late-'70s become the present). The result is a counterfeit film without the element of surprise that also denies the viewer the lurid satisfaction of a true-crime thriller. AJ Bowen, Joe Swanberg, and Kentucker Audley--Austin's answer to the Brat Pack (or the Three Stooges)--play VICE journalists doing a story on Eden Parrish, a…

Telluride ’13: The Invisible Woman

September 10, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013, UK

***/**** directed by Ralph Fiennes by Walter Chaw It opens with an almost literal invocation to the muse, segues into a stage play like the prologue to Olivier's Henry V, and bookends itself with a stage production that, again almost literally, drops the curtain on the proceedings. Ralph Fiennes's The Invisible Woman is every inch the literary production, a classical presentation that avoids the stuffiness that often attends these things, replacing it with intimations of doom in foley and script. Based on Claire Tomalin's book, which tells of the affair between an older Charles Dickens (Fiennes) and 18-year-old actress Nelly Ternan (Felicity…

TIFF ’13: Prisoners

September 9, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Directors: Denis Villeneuve, Drama, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF

**½/****
starring starring Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Viola Davis, Paul Dano
screenplay by Aaron Guzikowski
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Angelo Muredda Denis Villeneuve comes to America with Prisoners, an alternately strange and gripping but finally self-immolating crime picture that earns the right to its austere silver Warner Bros. logo before it devolves into a Scooby-Doo mystery for sadists. Last seen beckoned to the heavens by a pre-Oscar-anointed Anne Hathaway, Hugh Jackman plunges right back into the shit here as Keller Dover, a suburban dad and mild-mannered carpenter who goes berserk when his daughter and her friend (the child of perennially underused Viola Davis and Terrence Howard) vanish after Thanksgiving dinner. The first suspect is Alex (Paul Dano), a creepy, developmentally delayed young man who roams through the neighbourhood in his RV. Though he’s arrested by crack detective Loki (nicely played by Jake Gyllenhaal, despite his character’s name and distressingly shoddy police work) and released when the investigators find nothing to pin him on, Alex is promptly recaptured by a raging Dover, who turns out to have his own torture venue for this very occasion, complete with room enough for a black box whose construction will put Dover’s woodworking skills to good use.

TIFF ’13: When Jews Were Funny

September 8, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

**½/**** directed by Alan Zweig by Bill Chambers Canadian documentarian Alan Zweig's best movies begin with a specific question--why do people collect records? Why are there good people who can't find love?--he needs to answer for the sake of his personal development, like a player desperate to advance to the next level in a videogame. Zweig's latest, a kind of companion piece/spiritual sequel to his 2004 I, Curmudgeon, finds the filmmaker struggling to articulate a thesis statement, so much so that a number of his interview subjects call him out on it. Consequently, it lacks urgency, though truth be told…

TIFF ’13: Short Cuts Canada Programme 3

September 8, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Short Films, TIFF

Candy **/****
9 mins., d. Cassandra Cronenberg
Der Untermensch **/****
9 mins., d. Kays Mejri
In Guns We Trust **½/****
12 mins., d. Nicolas Lévesque
Jimbo **½/****
23 mins., d. Ryan Flowers
Method ***/****
8 mins., d. Gregory Smith
Portrait as a Random Act of Violence ***/****
4 mins., d. Randall Lloyd Okita
We Wanted More ***½/****
16 mins., d. Stephen Dunn

by Bill Chambers Unfortunately for Candy, a non-judgmental, veritable time-lapse look at one night in the life of a prostitute that occasionally branches out to linger with her spent, oddball clientele, "Breaking Bad" got there first with an indelible montage set to The Association's "Windy" that opened season three's "Half Measures." Kudos to director Cassandra Cronenberg, however, for not making a straight-up horror and risking the same comparisons to her father that plagued brother Brandon's Antiviral.

Telluride ’13: Under the Skin

September 7, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Telluride, Telluride 2013

****/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Paul Brannigan, Krystof Hádek, Jessica Mance
screenplay by Walter Campbell and Jonathan Glazer, based on the novel by Michel Faber
directed by Jonathan Glazer

by Walter Chaw Trouble Every Day and The Man Who Fell to Earth as directed by Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer’s astonishing Under the Skin marks his return to feature filmmaking after a nine-year hiatus. The loosest of adaptations, cherry-picking from Michel Faber’s strong novel of the same name, Under the Skin is home to a trio (at least) of indelible images and a style and presentation that function as shunts into a thicket of thorny existential questions; it’s the best film I’ve seen this year and among the best films I’ve ever seen. Stripped to the bone, as capable of viciousness as it is tenderness, it achieves what seems impossible by creating a sense of the mysterium tremens in the body of a human-looking alien. When it works, it’s a stunner worthy of mention in the same breath as Blade Runner, but more significant than its immediate impact is its lingering afterimage. I liked it initially. In the six days since I saw it, scarcely an hour’s gone by that I haven’t thought about it. Under the Skin, not to be flip, burrows exactly there, and nests.

TIFF ’13: All Cheerleaders Die

September 7, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller, TIFF

*½/**** written and directed by Lucky McKee & Chris Sivertson by Bill Chambers I suppose they've both been campy at times, but I think Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson might be too grim for something like All Cheerleaders Die (or as the closing title card ominously puts it, "All Cheerleaders Die, Part One")--a title that at the least augurs fun schlock tinged with the alarmism of '50s hygiene cinema. After capturing the dubious--but funny--death of the head cheerleader on tape, standoffish Maddy (Caitlin Stasey) remodels herself as a Heather and earns a spot on the squad, much to the dismay…

Telluride ’13: Nebraska

September 6, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Road Movie, Telluride, Telluride 2013

***½/****
starring Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Stacy Keach
screenplay by Bob Nelson
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw Alexander Payne returns to form after the disappointing The Descendants with the muted, often hilarious, and sentimental-without-being-schmaltzy filial road trip Nebraska. It’s easily his most tender work, despite the mordant, sometimes bitter humour Payne has become known for in his best work (Election remains his crowning achievement; About Schmidt is no slouch, either), and it makes a brilliant move in offering a showcase opportunity for national treasure Bruce Dern. Shot in black-and-white, with a spare, minimal production design making it an expressionist piece projecting the barren interiors of its broken characters, Nebraska, though not the adaptation of the identically-named collection of Ron Hansen short stories I initially hoped it was, at least possesses the same wintry, intellectual mien.

TIFF ’13: Don Jon

September 6, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

**½/**** written and directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt by Bill Chambers Formerly Don Jon's Addiction, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's feature writing and directing debut is a cheerier, lower-stakes Saturday Night Fever. Simultaneously lampooning and humanizing The Situation in the title role, Gordon-Levitt plays a Jersey boy who has no trouble getting laid but never finds the real thing as satisfying as jerking off to Internet porn. (In a very funny opening voiceover, he admits to getting insta-wood, Pavlov-style, at the startup sound of his laptop.) When he begins dating Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson, having a good year), he hears the swoony music of…

TIFF ’13: MANAKAMANA

September 5, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez

by Angelo Muredda The most spectacular sequence in Leviathan, the last major film to come out of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, captured a horrifying seagull raid from the perspective of the birds’ prey, the camera appended to a boat and darting through the water alongside a school of anxious fish. MANAKAMANA, co-directed by the lab’s recent graduates Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez, doesn’t quite have the money shot of its predecessor, but its very existence as a finished product feels like the fulfillment of a delicate magic trick. Forgoing the dozens of lightweight cameras that made Leviathan such a visceral experience, Spray and Velez fix their single camera on a cable car as it travels over the valleys of Trisuli in Nepal, carrying all manner of local pilgrims and tourists to the titular temple. We follow the car as it goes up and down over the valley eleven times, alternately watching the restless, contended, and excited passengers register every bump and dip of the trip and feeling swept along ourselves, thanks to a transparent glass window that overlooks the hills. (As Dennis Lim pointed out in the LA TIMES, each ride’s duration of about twelve minutes neatly lines up with the length of a roll of 16mm film.)

Telluride ’13: Gravity

September 4, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Telluride, Telluride 2013, Thriller

**½/****
starring Sandra Bullock, George Clooney
screenplay by Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón
directed by Alfonso Cuarón

by Walter Chaw Alfonso Cuarón’s eagerly-anticipated, already-buzzy follow-up to the tremendous Children of Men is Gravity–a title that doesn’t reference the Ray Bradbury story “Kaleidoscope,” to which the film owes at least a little credit (in addition to the premise and theme, Gravity also lifts the character name “Stone”), or any real meat at the heart of the story. It’s not for lack of trying, as Cuarón and son/co-writer Jonás attempt, after the emotional tissue connecting the protags of Children of Men, to graft another lost-child drama onto a larger science-fiction conceit. What results is probably the most venue-dependant release of a year that includes Pacific Rim–if you can see it in IMAX 3D, you ought to: the biggest screen with the best sound. It’s possibly the first film since Avatar that actually works with the extra dimension, despite having been converted in post-production; at times while screening Gravity at the Werner Herzog Theater in Telluride, I felt a bit vertiginous. It’s an effect that no doubt had everything to do with the dual-projection and the custom-designed sound system by Meyers Sound. I talked to several techs from the company running around before the show, tweaking, testing, making sure that organs physically shifted during the presentation. My favourite story of the festival is how Cuarón, from the auditorium, instructed the booth to turn up the audio to just less than twice the “acceptable” volume.

Telluride ’13: 12 Years a Slave

September 4, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013

**½/****
starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano
screenplay by John Ridley, based on the book by Solomon Northrup
directed by Steve McQueen

by Walter Chaw With performances this good, with a director this astonishing, the only thing that could make it less than transcendent, I’m afraid, is source material so well-respected, so revered truth be known, that it limits the places the cast and director might otherwise go. What I’m saying is that the prospect of Steve McQueen making a slave narrative is one to savour, celebrate, induce chills in the hearts of every serious scholar of cinema as experiential philosophy–and the prospect of Steve McQueen adapting Solomon Northrup’s (as related to white lawyer David Wilson) 12 Years a Slave is one to inspire some level of inevitable disappointment. What I expected was to be blown away by Michael Fassbender and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s performances–and I was. What I didn’t expect was to be disturbed by a few instances of manipulation of the document that seem driven by something other than good faith. Why, for instance, would one portray the death of a black conspirator on a slaver ship bound for Louisiana at the hand of a white crewman about to rape a sympathetic figure, when the document reveals this conspirator was taken by smallpox? For the sake of drama? Were the roles reversed, this kind of narrative manipulation would take on a decidedly different hue.

TIFF ’13: The Past

September 4, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Mystery, TIFF

**/****
directed by Asghar Farhadi

by Angelo Muredda The Past is a heartbreaker, a badly
misjudged project that retraces each major step of Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation but arrives at the finish line with
little to show for itself. Like Farhadi’s previous film, we start with a
divorce, this time between Parisian Marie (Bérénice Bejo, channelling Marion
Cotillard’s more hysterical performances, especially for Christopher Nolan) and
the now Tehran-based Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa), who flies back into town to sign the
papers and see his ex off into her new relationship with Samir (Tahar Rahim).
That Samir has his own troubled past with a woman in a coma for reasons as-yet
unknown doesn’t surprise us as much as Farhadi seems to hope it will, since A Separation also culled its dramatic tension from
a pair of mirrored couples, and made similar symbolic hay of offscreen
characters in extreme states. (There an unborn child and an unspeaking parent
with dementia.) Those who went along with that instrumental use of characters
and rigorous structural doubling did so because the situations in which the
leads were put were so convincing and their reactions to their impossible
situation were almost unbearably moving. Here, one feels trapped in an aggravating
Philip Glass sonata, where each scene exists solely as a foil for the next and each
revelation becomes a transparent set-up for the ensuing real revelation, and so on ad infinitum. The point seems
to be that one never knows in love, but surely some lovers’ actions are less
ambiguous than others. The absurd final shot, which has us reading a motionless
body for either an actual or an imagined emotional response, is the most
maddening example of this noncommittal gamesmanship, a case of a talented but
lost filmmaker having his cake, eating it too, and then proclaiming, “There
is no cake–or is there?”

TIFF ’13: Short Cuts Canada Programme 2

September 4, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Short Films, TIFF

A Grand Canal ***/****
19 mins., d. Johnny Ma
Beasts in the Real World *½/****
8 mins., d. Sol Friedman
Daybreak (Éclat du jour) ***/****
11 mins., d. Ian Lagarde
Noah ***½/****
17 mins., ds. Walter Woodman & Patrick Cederberg
Out *½/****
8 mins., d. Jeremy Lalonde
Seasick **½/****
4 mins., d. Eva Cvijanovic
Young Wonder *½/****
6 mins., d. James Wilkes

by Bill Chambers It opens with a bride and groom saying their vows, but as subtitled voiceover from writer-director Johnny Ma informs us, this is not a romance. A Grand Canal dramatizes the last days of Ma's father, a Chinese boat captain who angers a mob boss by turning away a shipment, then makes things worse in trying to collect on the boss's debt. Mei Song Shun–astonishingly, a newcomer–is powerful as a proud man reduced to grovelling in a scene exceptionally well-calibrated for tension and pathos, considering this is both a short film and a student film. Shun is so good, in fact, that it feels like a betrayal of his performance when Ma decides to up and break the fourth wall with B-roll of himself directing and narration elaborating upon the therapeutic value of this endeavour.

TIFF ’13: Devil’s Knot

September 3, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Crime, Directors: Atom Egoyan, Drama, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF

**/****
directed by Atom Egoyan

by Angelo Muredda Something is off in Devil’s Knot, the third film about the West Memphis Three in as many years, and it isn’t just the Satanic panic that turned a bereaved community against three wrongfully-accused teenagers. Although its Tennessee setting takes him far from his usual haunt of Toronto, this material seemed like a slam dunk for Atom Egoyan, who’s done his best work in films about parents dwelling in the endless hangover of their children’s premature deaths. It’s a shame, then, that his new film feels like a wheel-spinning exercise rather than a deepening of old themes. Egoyan’s approach to this tapped-out story hits the dramatic and formal beats you’d expect from his filmography: here we get a child’s cryptic, disembodied voiceover about what he’s seen; there, a videotaped testimony that conceals more than it discloses. Ambiguity is the name of the game, just like in The Sweet Hereafter, where everything turns on young Sarah Polley’s poker face as she ushers the adults around her into the topsy-turvy world of the title.

TIFF ’13: Short Cuts Canada Programme 1

September 3, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Short Films, TIFF

Cochemere **/****
12 mins., ds. Chris Lavis & Maciek Szczerbowski
Gloria Victoria **/****
7 mins., d. Theodore Ushev
Pilgrims ½*/****
8 mins., d. Marie Clements
Remember Me **½/****
15 mins., d. Jean-François Asselin
Subconscious Password ***/****
11 mins., d. Chris Landreth
The Sparkling River **½/****
18 mins., ds. Félix Lajeunesse & Paul Raphaël

by Bill Chambers TIFF 13's Short Cuts Canada programme starts viewers off in the deep end with Cochemere, a bifurcated, CG-embellished mix of puppets and live-action in which a nude, polarized Mother Nature, presumably (Google tells me the title means "mother checkmark" in English), intrudes on a stormy utopia to nourish with milky saliva the uncanny fauna, who then appear to return the favour in outer space, their rapey, goblinlike presence prompting a shapely, flame-haired astronaut to start masturbating in her sleep. Sometimes enchanting–the opening images seem found, like the hidden universes of Microcosmos (and, hey, a little Barbarella kinkiness goes a long way)–but ultimately impenetrable. Perhaps all you need to know is that St. Thomas Aquinas is thanked in the credits.

Telluride ’13: Tim’s Vermeer

September 2, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013

**½/****
directed by Teller

by Walter Chaw Teller, of magician/illusionist/debunking/bullshitting duo Penn & Teller, makes his directorial debut with a documentary that, even at
a fleet 79 minutes, feels a little long. For a while, though, Tim's Vermeer
paints a compelling picture of inventor (fellow illusionist and 3-D designer) Tim Jenison
as he indulges his peculiar obsession with proving that Dutch master Johannes
Vermeer used some kind of camera obscura optical trickery to achieve his
photo-realistic style. The case seems ironclad by the end as Jenison recreates
the entire room depicted in Vermeer's "The Music Room," sets up his
little gizmo-whatsit, then sits down, the consummate non-painter, to produce a
Xerox-accurate replica of Vermeer's masterpiece. Various talking heads
weigh in, day titles depict the passage of time, and by the end it's clear that
the topic isn't so much technology's role in art (there's a proximate reality
problem presented by the film that pushes it near to a place of
science-fiction) as it is Jenison's apparent illness, his meticulousness becoming obsessive and even, at times, frightening, possibly to the point of
self-destruction. For the experiment to work, see, Jenison must be unschooled
in every required discipline of his project: architecture, costume design, construction,
and finally painting. It makes the definitive last image suddenly ambiguous:
how do we measure success, and what price is too steep?

Telluride ’13: The Unknown Known

September 2, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013

****/****
directed by Errol Morris

by Walter Chaw Errol Morris returns
to The Fog of War form in what could be seen as a complementary piece: a
feature-length conversation with Donald Rumsfeld called, appropriately, The
Unknown Known. It's a phrase that repeats throughout a picture that's scored
in a Philip Glass-ian way by Danny Elfman (who at one point channels Michael
Small's music for The Parallax View) and ends with a rimshot that would
be funnier if it weren't terrifying. Different from The Fog of War and
an apparently repentant Robert McNamara, The Unknown Known's Rumsfeld
comes off as not so much unrepentant as incapable of reasonable
self-reflection. There's a story I like to tell about talking with Capturing
the Friedmans director Andrew Jarecki, who revealed to me that at an
initial screening one of the subjects of his documentary, watching herself
speak, muttered, "I didn't say that." Rumsfeld appears to be like
that: he's not lying, he's having some kind of psychotic break. I don't
mean it flippantly, and Morris, whose line of questioning ranges from WMD to the
popular public misconception that Hussein was involved with 9/11, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, allows Rumsfeld to clarify his non-equivocal equivocations.
When Rumsfeld laughs, it's frightening–an alien thing's attempt to simulate a human
emotion. Another highlight: a portion of the Nixon tapes where Tricky Dick
reveals his mistrust of Rumsfeld to Haldeman. The Unknown Known is as fine a film as Morris has
made, all the more timely now that the United States–under new leadership, elected
on a platform of hope and change–is on the eve of another act of war.