Film Festivals Archives - Page 9 of 46

Fantasia Festival ’20: Feels Good Man

August 19, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals

**/****
directed by Arthur Jones

by Walter Chaw Evolutionary anthropologist Richard Dawkins was right about a few things. In my limited experience, evolutionary anthropology tends to be right about everything. In his book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins posited that people, like every other organism, are only self-interested, and that one means through which we propagate is the dissemination of imitated images: that is, “memetics,” or “memes.” Something about the picture of us as deterministic automatons attracted to the simplicity of duplication appeals to me. One problem with the Internet is that it’s the Tower of Babel when it comes to the replication of images and ideas. That’s not a bad thing if the images and ideas foster acceptance; it’s a very bad thing when it breeds a feeling of community and consensus in the trafficking of dangerous-unto-nihilistic philosophies.

Fantasia Festival ’20: The Columnist

August 17, 20202019, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Netherlands

*/****
starring Katja Herbers, Bram van der Kelen, Claire Porro, Rein Hofman
screenplay by Daan Windhorst
directed by Ivo van Aart

by Walter Chaw Pity the hot-button Film of the Moment that is still somehow not about very much at all. Such is the fate of Ivo van Aart’s The Columnist, which tackles Twitter and online trolling with style to burn and a game cast with nothing much to do and even less to say. Femke (Katja Herbers) is a widely-read columnist who’s made some enemies by suggesting that Zwarte Piet is racist and that women should be treated as human beings. Addicted to social media, she makes the fatal error of reading the comments, is driven mad, sort of (I think), and starts murdering her trolls after Googling them. There’s something about how she’s blocked until after she kills someone, at which point she’s able to pump out another widely-read piece about some meaningless piffle that keeps her employed. Worse, she’s now under a deadline (haha, see what I did there?) to complete a book–a setup for either escalation or piquant irony, though in the case of The Columnist, it’s setup for tepid social commentary made instantly impotent by the hellscape of our current reality.

Fantasia Festival ’20: Introduction

August 15, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals

Fantasia Festival runs from August 20 to September 2, 2020. For more details, visit their website.

by Walter Chaw I don't have a lot to add about how exceptional Montreal's Fantasia International Film Festival is or what a shame it is not to be able to have it in person this year. I don't know that there's a lot I can add to any conversation right now. I do have something to say, I guess, about how much film festivals have meant to me over the last few years as I deal with sometimes-crippling depression–about how just being in rarefied air among friends and colleagues who only know me as a film critic means…something. It represents a possible present where I don't have regrets and resentments, though, in fairness, I don't have either of those things much anymore. Time has worn me out and down, grooves in me where the needle skips.

Sundance ’20: Luxor

February 6, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Egypt, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Sundance, UK

***/****
starring Andrea Riseborough, Karim Saleh, Michael Landes, Sherine Reda
written and directed by Zeina Durra

by Walter Chaw In Zeina Durra’s Luxor, Andrea Riseborough plays Hana, a British surgeon in Luxor, Egypt on a short leave between horrific assignments first in devastated Syria, then in Yemen. She’s shell-shocked, it’s clear. She spends her days wandering through the ancient city and allows herself one night to be picked up in her hotel’s bar by an unctuous Yank throwing his money around. She lies in her hotel room for hours, trying to nap, and when she does sleep, she wakes to find herself another day closer to some sort of hell. Durra captures her listlessness as a feeling ineffable of being lost but never lost enough. Hana sits by herself at the far left end of a park bench, arms folded across her chest and a baseball cap pulled down low over her stunned expression. She visits a pyramid one day, just another tourist, and overhears a tour guide giving the yokels a taste of the gravid mysticism they’re paying for. It all lands as empty for Hana. Hana, who doesn’t have anything left inside after all this time bearing witness to the absence of God.

Sundance ’20: Yalda, A Night for Forgiveness

February 6, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Iran, Luxembourg, Satire, Sundance, Switzerland

*/****
starring Sadaf Asgari, Behnaz Jafari, Babak Karimi, Fereshteh Sadr Orafaee
written and directed by Massoud Bakhshi

by Walter Chaw About 20 minutes into Massoud Bakhshi’s shrill Yalda, A Night for Forgiveness (hereafter Yalda), I put my hands over my ears to blunt the constant keening. It’s also the point where I started wondering what this film was on about. There’s something brilliant and fascinating at the core of Yalda–a movie about an Iranian variety/game show in which the fate of someone sentenced to death hangs on the forgiveness of one of the people they’ve wronged–that makes its hamfistedness a real pity. Gathered are what we might call the plaintiff and the defendant to sit in an “Ellen”-style talk-show nook to tell their stories and air their grievances and then let the audience deliver a verdict via text message, whether or not a blood-money bounty will be paid to the aggrieved should they decide to exercise some grace. That’s horrible. It’s not more horrible than the U.S. justice system, which offers no such opportunity of recourse for the accused (heaven forbid a Christian nation ever exercise forgiveness and actually value life), but it’s horrible just the same.

Sundance ’20: The Evening Hour

February 3, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance

***/****
starring Philip Ettinger, Stacy Martin, Cosmo Jarvis, Lili Taylor
screenplay by Elizabeth Palmore, based on the novel by Carter Sickels
directed by Braden King

by Walter Chaw Everybody likes Cole (Philip Ettinger, the suicidal environmentalist from First Reformed), and for good reason. Cole is young, handsome, pleasingly brawny, appears to genuinely enjoy his job at the old-folks home, and takes care of his grandmother (Tess Harper) and demented-and-fading-fast grandfather (Frank Hoyt Taylor). As it happens, his grandfather looks a little bit like my late father-in-law, who was taken by dementia a couple of years ago at the beginning of one of the more bleak periods of my life. The way Cole reacts when he learns that plans are being made to move his grandfather into more structured care feels familiar and true. When Braden King's The Evening Hour is best, it's for how lived-in everything feels. Elizabeth Palmore's screenplay, an adaptation of a novel by Carter Sickels, sounds good and right in the mouths of these actors. I do wish it had eschewed its criminal subplot in favour of more, well, flavour, but even in its MacGuffin, find embedded modern bogeys like financial desperation, the opioid epidemic, and a broken healthcare state. Weighty stuff, and The Evening Hour handles it with agility and charm.

Sundance ’20: Beast Beast

February 1, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance, Teen

*½/****
starring Shirley Chen, Will Madden, Jose Angeles, Courtney Dietz
written and directed by Danny Madden

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Slacking around in the common area shared by Elephant, Madeline's Madeline, and Skate Kitchen, Danny Madden's message-heavy melodrama Beast Beast would've been better served just being about the difficulties of adolescence without wading into the gun debate. Once this pretty decent hangout flick tries to gain some gravitas, it invites close scrutiny of the ways it's going about it. One side will start looking for reasons to discredit it, while the other will be burdened by this uneasy recognition that sometimes, undisciplined good intentions make the struggle harder. There's a fine line between a cogent argument, after all, and The Life of David Gale, and Beast Beast is further evidence that liberals tend to be their own worst enemy. It's too bad.

Sundance ’20: La Leyenda Negra

February 1, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance, Teen

*/****

starring Monica Betancourt, Kailei Lopez, Irlanda Moreno, Justin Avila
written and directed by Patricia Vidal Delgado

by Walter Chaw Shot in black-and-white, Patricia Vidal Delgado's La Leyenda Negra is filled with good intentions. It's the story of El Salvadoran Aleteia (Monica Betancourt), a high-school senior studying with a "Temporary Protected Status" that's about to be rescinded under Trump's xenophobic, white-nationalist administration. She has a scholarship to UCLA, the film is quick to remind, but she still has to make it through graduation. Easier said than done when her school's curriculum seems set on teaching antiquated attitudes towards imperialism and the genuine evil of nations that have devastated whole populations in the name of Manifest Destiny. There's a classroom scene where Aleteia corrects her white teacher's pronunciation of her name before laying into her for perpetuating the party line. Aleteia is meanwhile developing a crush on Rosarito (Kailei Lopez–a budding star, perhaps), a shy girl in the sway of a monstrous bully, Monica (Irlanda Moreno), who does not approve of potentially losing an acolyte to the interloper.

Sundance ’20: Summer White

January 31, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico, Sundance

Blanco de Verano
**½/****
starring Adrián Rossi, Sophie Alexander-Katz, Fabián Corres
written by Rodrigo Ruiz Patterson & Raúl Sebastián Quintanilla
directed by Rodrigo Ruiz Patterson

by Walter Chaw Aspiring for something like The 400 Blows with a young protagonist who looks and acts like 15-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud, Rodrigo Ruiz Patterson’s directorial debut Summer White seeks to explain the pain and occasional outbursts of a young man coming of age without the means to express himself. The film’s style lies somewhere at the intersection of early Harmony Korine and Ken Loach: it’s aggressively not-showy–so devoted to its austerity and so accomplished in achieving it, in fact, that its aesthetic humility becomes a kind of distraction. It looks beautiful. Maybe too beautiful. It looks like an Y Tu Mamá También while acting like a Ratcatcher or a Kes, and reconciling that dissonance begins to feel difficult. In the end, what disappoints most about Summer White is that I started to question whether the film wanted to be something for its own sake or if it was just something done by someone who’d seen a few Linda Manz movies and thought she was really great. I mean, she is, of course. Linda Manz is awesome.

Sundance ’20: High Tide

January 30, 20202020, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Horror, Sundance, Thriller

***½/****
starring Gloria Carrá, Jorge Sesán, Cristian Salguero, Mariana Chaud
written and directed by Verónica Chen

by Walter Chaw Verónica Chen's astonishing High Tide threatens for a while to be the distaff version of Alain Guiraudie's Stranger by the Lake before it takes something like a turn into the basement of some dark, dismal, class-based noir. It opens with rich, anxious Laura (Gloria Carrá) dancing in front of an uncurtained, wall-length window, seemingly aware of the three workmen watching in her yard as the sun goes down and they break for the day. The foreman, Weisman (Jorge Sesán), stays behind to a couple of sly, knowing looks, and engages in a rough seduction that finds Laura at turns the aggressor and the aggrieved. She doesn't like the rough talk. She thinks Weisman's a bit of a pig but softens when he apologizes and calls her "ma'am." It's a clue–though it's not obvious what kind of clue until later. The next morning, she sends him away and, while shopping, gossips to a friend about the size of Weisman's dick and his "animalistic" stamina. It's the set-up for something James M. Cain might have written, but it's told from the point of view of the fatale.

Sundance ’20: Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on ‘The Exorcist’

January 30, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: William Friedkin, Documentary, Film Festivals, Spain, Sundance

**/****
directed by Alexandre O. Philippe

by Walter Chaw There’s a moment in Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on ‘The Exorcist’ (hereafter Leap of Faith), the latest feature from cinephile documentarian Alexandre O. Philippe (78/52), where Friedkin talks about a shot he framed so that Max Von Sydow is in the foreground of the Tomb of Nebuchadnezzar. It’s followed fast by Friedkin talking about how he didn’t intend anything in The Exorcist. In other words, he says he didn’t impose meaning and then immediately offers exceptions. He brings up instinctual filmmaking after speaking to how carefully he developed the script to be a series of slow revelations and portents. Friedkin is, in short, a mass of contradictions. But rather than look on it as disingenuousness or confusion, I sense that he doesn’t really know why The Exorcist works the way it does, but it got under his skin and into his bed in the same way it has for audiences these past 47 years. We do our best to dance about architecture, but in the end, architecture can only be enhanced by the dance, not defined by it.

Sundance ’20: Once Upon a Time in Venezuala

January 29, 20202020, Austria, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brazil, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sundance, Venezuala

*/****
directed by Anabel Rodríguez Ríos

by Walter Chaw My favourite part of Anabel Rodríguez Ríos's pretty documentary Once Upon a Time in Venezuela isn't the mad woman who has a shrine to Hugo Chavez and forces people to touch a giant, door-sized poster of him before entering her room, nor is it the two old men who cry while talking about the way things used to be in their little floating/stilts-bound town of Congo Mirador before playing pointed tunes on an old rat-box guitar. No, my favourite part of Once Upon a Time in Venezuela is how it's loosely structured around a doomed election that has no real bearing on this tiny place's inevitable disintegration. There's a lot to pull from this idea that the works of Man are but a speck of dust and all that–a mote in God's design, right? Some of the locals, especially one garish busybody, are also displeased with the quality of education their children are receiving while the world falls apart around them. It's fun to watch people without a future try to plan for the future. And then you realize the film is talking about us.

Sundance ’20: And Then We Danced

January 28, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Georgia, Romance, Sports, Sundance, Sweden

***/****
starring Levan Gelbakhiani, Bachi Valishvili, Ana Javakhishvili, Kakha Gogidze
written and directed by Levan Akin

by Walter Chaw I don’t know that Levan Akin’s beautifully-shot, sensitively-performed And Then We Danced does anything especially novel, but it lands everything it attempts. That’s an apt metaphor, I think, for a film about an elite Georgian dance troupe that ends with an audition where our hero, Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani), Curt Schilling-bloody-socks his way through a gutsy routine. It plays out a lot like the audition in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria reboot in all its physicality and injury fear/revulsion, just as the rest of it plays out like Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name in the broad strokes of its gay coming-of-age melodrama. And Then We Danced is derivative, sure, but at least it’s derivative of the right films.

Sundance ’20: Amulet

January 27, 20202020, Film Festivals, Horror, Sundance, UK

***/****
starring Carla Juri, Alec Secareanu, Angeliki Papoulia, Imelda Staunton
written and directed by Romola Garai

by Walter Chaw Romola Garai makes her directorial debut with the gnarly, self-described “feminist” horror film Amulet, which doesn’t tread much new ground until, suddenly, it does. It’s a lovely debut, smart and fruitfully repugnant–an able showcase for Garai as a filmmaker possessed of a nice sense of pacing and a good, gothic eye for object placement and gore. One scene, taking place in the musty attic of a crumbling old house, made me feel exactly the way I felt the first time I saw Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, back when I was a teenager and easier to freak out. Something about unnatural births, and all that, and unexpected apertures opening with unexpected wetness, carried off with this impeccable feeling for archetypally disturbing ideas. Telling more would be telling, but from that point on–about two-thirds of the way in–Amulet not only had my attention, it also had my respect.

Sundance ’20: La Llorona

January 26, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Guatemala, Horror, Sundance

***½/****
starring María Mercedes Coroy, Margarita Kénefic, Sabrina De La Hoz, Julio Diaz
written by Jayro Bustamante & Lisandro Sánchez
directed by Jayro Bustamante

by Walter Chaw In a film comprising indelible compositions, one in particular stands out in Jayro Bustamante’s doom-laden La Llorona. It’s not a supernatural tableau, although the film is thick with them, nor is it one from a devastating war-crimes trial where an old Guatemalan general, Enrique Monteverde (Julio Diaz), stands accused of unspeakable atrocities visited upon Mayan women during a horrific, early-’80s pogrom against them. No, the moment that lingers for me is a brief one where a new maid in the General’s household, Alma (María Mercedes Coroy), kneels beside a giant backyard pool and fishes protest flyers out of the water as a frog swims laconically past. The sequence itself captures the mild surreality of a picture set against a sociopolitical reckoning with an ugly period in Guatemala’s history. The General and his family rattle around in a mansion, surrounded by tokens of their affluence. Our first night with them, long-suffering wife Carmen (Margarita Kénefic) is mistaken for a ghost and shot at by the great man, and their daughter Natalia (Sabrina De La Hoz), a doctor only now coming to learn of the crimes of which her father’s accused, also discovers that his facilities are, perhaps greatly, diminished.

Sundance ’20: Be Water

January 25, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Martial Arts, Sundance

*/****
directed by Bao Nguyen

by Walter Chaw Bao Nguyen’s Bruce Lee documentary Be Water is a moving hagiography of a legend immortalized by his sudden death at the beginning of his career. He reminds of James Dean in that respect, captured in amber as this eternally young punk icon for the disenfranchised, the alienated, the frustrated. He was a point of pride for Asian-Americans and became a peculiar rallying point for African-Americans, too. The pressure for me to write favourably about this film is crippling and depressing. It occurred to me not to review it at all. Bruce Lee’s legacy is complicated. He was someone I lionized when I was a kid. Slight, wiry, he looked like me when I was little. That he could become something so huge in my imagination was to me extraordinary. If he, with his heavy accent and ferociously Chinese demeanour, could refuse to assimilate and yet rise, maybe this country meant what it said. You know what, though? It doesn’t mean what it says.

Sundance ’20: Aggie

January 25, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sundance

**/****
directed by Catherine Gund

by Walter Chaw Agnes Gund is a fantastic person, a philanthropist art collector who sits as President Emirita for the Museum of Modern Art. She champions artists while they’re living, visits them in their studios to better understand the hands that move the creations, and recently sold a famous Roy Lichtenstein original (“Masterpiece”) for an ungodly sum of $162 million, which she used to create a foundation called “Art for Justice” dedicated to penal reform, with the ultimate aim of eradicating mass incarceration. She’s been called the “last good rich person” by the NEW YORK TIMES and it’s hard to argue, though the bar is admittedly low. The temptation is to launch into a long screed on the moral abomination of allowing such a thing as a billionaire to exist in the first place, just one of the many digressions that daughter Catherine’s able, functional documentary Aggie inspires. There are moments in this film where Gund, now in her eighties, needs to be cajoled into speaking (they’re played off as more of her humility), intercut with archival footage of a younger Gund demonstrating a more able public persona. She’s slowed down considerably, and I wondered a time or two if she has someone to manage her estate. I worry about her, but the film does not.

Sundance ’20: Black Bear

January 24, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance

**/****
starring Aubrey Plaza, Christopher Abbott, Sarah Gadon, Paola Lázaro
written and directed by Lawrence Michael Levine

by Walter Chaw Hyphenate Lawrence Michael Levine (Uncle Kent 2) ventures into Darren Aronofsky territory with his insular, solipsistic Black Bear–the kind of movie that actually deploys “solipsistic” as a word to develop its two female leads: one uses it, the other pretends not to know what it means. It’s a game that sophisticates play with one another, I guess, and Black Bear, split into two loosely-related halves, is also a game sophisticates are playing with one another, or at least with themselves. In the first segment, co-producer Aubrey Plaza is Allison, a movie director renting a room in a cabin in the woods from a bickering couple, Gabe (Christopher Abbott) and Blair (Sarah Gadon). Blair is pregnant, Gabe is insufferable, and the two of them spend a lot of time arguing about whether or not women had it better in the 17^th century, when they were the property of men. (It’s one of those arguments Jordan Peterson makes because Jordan Peterson is an incredible asshole.) So they fight, and Allison is caught in the middle. They also bicker about whether or not Blair should be drinking wine while she’s pregnant, and then Blair goes completely apeshit and says that Allison’s pussy probably smells like “spider shit.” It might be an improvisation, which is really something if it is–and really something if it isn’t.

Sundance ’20: The Painter and the Thief

January 23, 2020****/****, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Norway, Sundance

****/****
directed by Benjamin Ree

by Walter Chaw Shot over the course of three years, Benjamin Ree’s documentary The Painter and the Thief details the relationship that blooms between artist Barbora Kysilkova and a man, Karl-Bertil Nordland, who stole two of her paintings from a gallery. That’s it. You should see this movie and then come back here because I want to talk about it with someone–but you should see it first. Okay. You back?

Strangers in Strange Lands: FFC Interviews Andrew Ahn

November 24, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews, San Diego Asian Film Festival

One goal for minority filmmakers is to no longer be considered minority filmmakers. Failing that, it would be keen to be asked about craft rather than minority identity. As an Asian-American born in the United States of immigrant parents, I'm still trying to sort all that out for myself. There's an Ani DiFranco lyric that's stuck with me from those halcyon grad-school days where she was a constant point of reference for me (and now you know just enough about me). It goes, "Every time I move, I make a woman's movement." Yeah, preach it. Who the fuck knows what we represent to the ruling culture? I'm just over here making shit.