New York Film Festival 2018 (forum)

[Chris Knipp]

New York Film Festival 2018 (Sept. 28-Oct. 14). Opening, Centerpiece, closing night films.

FESTIVAL COVERAGE THREAD (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37130#post37130)

Opening Night: Yourgos Lanthimos: The Favourite

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Yourgos Lanthimos The Favourite

New York, NY (July 23, 2018) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center announces Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite as Opening Night of the 56th New York Film Festival (September 28 – October 14), making its New York premiere at Alice Tully Hall on Friday, September 28, 2018. The Favourite is a Fox Searchlight Pictures release and opens November 23, 2018.

In Yorgos Lanthimos’s wildly intricate and very darkly funny new film, Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz), and her servant Abigail Hill (Emma Stone) engage in a sexually charged fight to the death for the body and soul of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) at the height of the War of the Spanish Succession. This trio of truly brilliant performances is the dynamo that powers Lanthimos’s top-to-bottom reimagining of the costume epic, in which the visual pageantry of court life in 18th-century England becomes not just a lushly appointed backdrop but an ironically heightened counterpoint to the primal conflict unreeling behind closed doors.

New York Film Festival Director and Selection Committee Chair Kent Jones said, "The Favourite is a lot of things at once, each of them perfectly meshed: a historical epic; a visual feast; a wild, wild ride; a formidable display of the art of acting from Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone, and Olivia Colman, abetted by a brilliant cast; a tour de force from Yorgos Lanthimos. And… it’s a blast. We’re very excited to have it as our opening night film."

Centerpiece: Alfonso Cuarón's ROMA

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The Academy Award-winning director's vibrant, epic drama makes its New York Premiere as the official Centerpiece selection. In Cuarón’s autobiographically inspired film, set in Mexico City in the early ’70s, we are placed within the physical and emotional terrain of a middle-class family whose center is quietly and unassumingly held by its beloved live-in nanny and housekeeper. Netflix will distribute the film.

[Chris Knipp]

Closing Night: Julian Schnabel: At Eternity's Gate

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Willem Dafoe in Schnabel's At Eternity's Gate

"Willem Dafoe leads the brilliant cast, which also includes Oscar Isaac, Rupert Friend, Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, and Mads Mikkelsen."

"At Eternity’s Gate is such a surprising film, for all kinds of reasons. Julian Schnabel makes use of the most up-to-date information about Vincent van Gogh, altering our accepted ideas of how he lived and died; he grounds the film in the very action of painting, the intense contact between an artist and the world of forms and textures colored by light; and he gives us Willem Dafoe’s performance as Vincent—acting this pure is endlessly surprising."
– Kent Jones, NYFF Director and Selection Committee Chair.

[Chris Knipp]

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NYFF 2018 Main Slate.

Opening Night
The Favourite
Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos

Centerpiece
ROMA
Dir. Alfonso Cuarón

Closing Night
At Eternity’s Gate
Dir. Julian Schnabel

3 Faces
Dir. Jafar Panahi

Asako I & II
Dir. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

Ash Is Purest White
Dir. Jia Zhangke

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Dir. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

Burning
Dir. Lee Chang-dong

Cold War
Dir. Paweł Pawlikowski

A Faithful Man / L’Homme fidèle
Dir. Louis Garrel

A Family Tour
Dir. Ying Liang

La Flor
Dir. Mariano Llinás

Grass
Dir. Hong Sangsoo

Happy as Lazzaro / Lazzaro felice
Dir. Alice Rohrwacher

Her Smell
Dir. Alex Ross Perry

High Life
Dir. Claire Denis

Hotel by the River
Dir. Hong Sangsoo

If Beale Street Could Talk
Dir. Barry Jenkins

The Image Book / Le Livre d’image
Dir. Jean-Luc Godard

In My Room
Dir. Ulrich Köhler

Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Dir. Bi Gan

Monrovia, Indiana
Dir. Frederick Wiseman

Non-Fiction / Doubles vies
Dir. Olivier Assayas

Private Life
Dir. Tamara Jenkins

RAY & LIZ
Dir. Richard Billingham

Shoplifters
Dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda

Sorry Angel/Plaire, aimer et courir vite
Dir. Christophe Honoré

Too Late to Die Young
Dir. Dominga Sotomayor

Transit
Dir. Christian Petzold

Wildlife
Dir. Paul Dano

[Chris Knipp]

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New York Film Festival Main Slate: Descriptions of the films.

CK COMMENTS are made before seeing the films but after reading about them. I would not take my own comments in this vein very seriously, but they may provide some useful information.

NYFF Special Events, Spotlight on Documentary, Retrospective, Revivals, Convergence, Shorts, and Projections sections, as well as filmmaker conversations and panels, will be announced in the coming weeks.

The 17-day New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema, featuring works from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. The selection committee, chaired by Jones, also includes Dennis Lim, FSLC Director of Programming, and Florence Almozini, FSLC Associate Director of Programming.

Tickets for the 56th New York Film Festival will go on sale to the general public on September 9. Festival and VIP passes are on sale now and offer one of the earliest opportunities to purchase tickets and secure seats at some of the festival’s biggest events, including Opening and Closing Night. Learn more at filmlinc.org/NYFF56Passes. Press and industry accreditation for NYFF56 is open now and closes August 13th; apply at filmlinc.org/press.

56th NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
Films & Descriptions

Opening Night
The Favourite
Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos, Ireland/UK/USA, 2018, 121m
In Yorgos Lanthimos’s wildly intricate and very darkly funny new film, Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz), and her servant Abigail Hill (Emma Stone) engage in a sexually charged fight to the death for the body and soul of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) at the height of the War of the Spanish Succession. This trio of truly brilliant performances is the dynamo that powers Lanthimos’s top-to-bottom reimagining of the costume epic, in which the visual pageantry of court life in 18th-century England becomes not just a lushly appointed backdrop but an ironically heightened counterpoint to the primal conflict unreeling behind closed doors. A Fox Searchlight Pictures release.
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CK COMMENT: Not sure exactly why the British spelling of the one-word title, but this is featured at the coming LFF too, and I might see it there. Despite the great praise heaped upon Lantimos' work, his The Lobster (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4022-New-York-Film-Festival-2015&p=33960#post33960)(NYFF 2015) struck me as cruel and mean-spirited - and also, as Richard Brody pointed out (https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-petty-laments-of-yorgos-lanthimoss-the-lobster), pompous nonsense about a non-issue. I am not a fan. But he is brilliant, and I have to admit I found his more conventional film of last year, The Killing of a Sacred Deer (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4406-THE-KILLING-OF-A-SACRED-DEER-(Yorgos-Lanthimos-2017)), rather enjoyable. I want to see The Favouirite. It sounds very entertaining.

Centerpiece
ROMA
Dir. Alfonso Cuarón, Mexico/USA, 2018, 135m
In Alfonso Cuarón’s autobiographically inspired film, set in Mexico City in the early ’70s, we are placed within the physical and emotional terrain of a middle-class family whose center is quietly and unassumingly held by its beloved live-in nanny and housekeeper (Yalitza Aparicio). The cast is uniformly magnificent, but the real star of ROMA is the world itself, fully present and vibrantly alive, from sudden life-changing events to the slightest shifts in mood and atmosphere. Cuarón tells us an epic story of everyday life while also gently sweeping us into a vast cinematic experience, in which time and space breathe and majestically unfold. Shot in breathtaking black and white and featuring a sound design that represents something new in the medium, ROMA is a truly visionary work. A Netflix release.
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CK COMMENT: This film debuted at Toronto, also showing at Venice. The theme of the nanny or maid who is central to the life of a bourgeois or well-off family is a familiar one in Latin American movies. A thrillingly original variation in this year's New Directors/New Films was Brazilians Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas' Good Manners. (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4466-NEW-DIRECTORS-NEW-FILMS-2018-(March-28%96April-8-2018)-Festival-Coverage&p=36599#post36599) "Netflix Release" may mean this is one of the films recently squeezed out of Cannes because the festival doesn't support movies calling themselves movies that aren't primarily big screen releases. If you think about it, Cannes is right. If it's not on a big screen, it's not a movie; it's a TV show. IMDb says the release of this is "14 Dec. 2018 - (internet)" which Sounds like straight-to-video, but Netflix says it will release it in theaters too. Netflix rules now: it has four Main Slate NYFF 2018 films. Magnolia only one. ROMA has had nothing but raves. I want to see it, for sure but I may be willing to wait.

Closing Night
At Eternity’s Gate
Dir. Julian Schnabel, USA/France, 2018, 106m
North American Premiere
Julian Schnabel’s ravishingly tactile and luminous new film takes a fresh look at the last days of Vincent van Gogh, and in the process revivifies our sense of the artist as a living, feeling human being. Schnabel; his co-writers Jean-Claude Carrière and Louise Kugelberg, also the film's editor; and cinematographer Benoît Delhomme strip everything down to essentials, fusing the sensual, the emotional, and the spiritual. And the pulsing heart of At Eternity’s Gate is Willem Dafoe’s shattering performance: his Vincent is at once lucid, mad, brilliant, helpless, defeated, and, finally, triumphant. With Oscar Isaac as Gauguin, Rupert Friend as Theo, Mathieu Amalric as Dr. Gachet, Emmanuelle Seigner as Madame Ginoux, and Mads Mikkelsen as The Priest. A CBS Films release.
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CK COMMENT: Debuted at Venice. This arouses some suspicions nowadays being an English-language film with French characters. It alsofollows in the wake of the Vincent Cassel Gauguin film earlier this year, in the right languages, but still ringing false. Puff-words like "ravishingly tactile and luminous" don't totally convince. Schnabel made three great movies, till Miral, which seemed made to please his girlfriend. The motley cast of the new one, again nowadays, fails to impress. But I hope I am wrong and that it's a return to quality for Schnabel. It has been bought by CBS.

3 Faces
Dir. Jafar Panahi, Iran, 2018, 100m
U.S. Premiere
Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s fourth completed feature since he was officially banned from filmmaking is one of his very best. Panahi begins with a smartphone video shot by a young woman (Marziyeh Rezaei) who announces to the camera that her parents have forbidden her from realizing her dream of acting and then, by all appearances, takes her own life. The recipient of the video, Behnaz Jafari, as herself, asks Panahi, as himself, to drive her to the woman’s tiny home village near the Turkish border to investigate. From there, 3 Faces builds in narrative, thematic, and visual intricacy to put forth a grand expression of community and solidarity under the eye of oppression.
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CK COMMENT: Another Cannes Competition film. My Filmleaf Cannes-remote comment: "A Filmstage review (https://thefilmstage.com/reviews/cannes-review-jafar-panahis-3-faces-is-a-loose-empathetic-ultimately-minor-work/) (by Giovanni Marchini Camia) calls this 'a loose, empathetic, ultimately minor work,' and that is the general critics' opinion. They note that it draws on Iranian cinematic tradition, but disappointingly eschews Panahi's own more adventurous stylistic strategies. Bradshaw (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/may/13/three-faces-review-jafar-panahis-latest-is-calm-modest-and-inscrutable) called it 'calm, modest – and inscrutable' and gave it 3/5 stars. Panahi's fourth film made since he was banned from making them, this again premiered with an empty seat in his honor because he has no passport to leave Iran. In the film Panahhi appears driving an SUV, and it's a road trip movie with references to suicide, women with acting aspirations, and male chauvinism. It has meta-narrative aspects, but 'staggers along,' says Eric Kohn in his Indiewire review (http://www.indiewire.com/2018/05/three-faces-review-jafar-panahi-cannes-2018-1201963927/), in a film that echoes Kiarostami but lacks his warmth and charm. One gets the impression this is a distinctive but definitely minor effort. Not excited about this one but, of course, one must follow Panahi."

Asako I & II
Dir. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Japan/France, 2018, 119m
U.S. Premiere
A truly original Vertigo riff, based on a novel by Tomoka Shibasaki, Asako I & II is an enchanting, unnerving paean to the notion of love as a trance state. Asako (Erika Karata) and Baku (Masahiro Higashide) share an intense, all-consuming romance—but one day the moody Baku ups and vanishes. Two years later, having moved from Osaka to Tokyo, Asako meets Baku’s exact double. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, who gained plenty of attention for 2015’s five-hour-plus Happy Hour, has returned with a beguiling and mysterious film that traces the trajectory of a love—or, to be accurate, two loves—found, lost, displaced, and regained. A Grasshopper Film release.
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CK COMMENT: This was in Competition at Cannes, which some thought early for this young filmmaker to be so honored, but his very long Happy Hour (ND/NF 2016 (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34501#post34501)) was great, even if it went on a bit long. This new one was thought by some Cannes critics to be a letdown after Happy Hour, but nonetheless made it onto a late Jury Grid, if only with a 2.4, above Sorry Angel but below six other films. My Filmleaf Cannes-remote commentary: "It's an "earnest romance," says Bradshaw in his Guardian review (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/may/15/asako-i-ii-review-japanese-romcom-flips-gaze-ryusuke-hamaguchi), that "switches things up by having a woman obsessed with a man’s beauty and then falling for his double." 3/5 stars nonetheless. This is a less provocative or unusual followup to the director's 5-hour Happy Hour (ND/NF 2016 Filmleaf (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34501#post34501)), which palled a bit for me in the last couple of hours, but was quite wonderful for a long time, and in its patient, immersive detail, bold and original. Variety (Maggie Lee) (http://variety.com/2018/film/asia/asako-i-ii-review-netetemo-sametemo-1202809972/) and others agree on the difference, but it seems the point is the woman's inability to choose between two very alike looking men, but a more interesting novel source turns to "a banal indecision" here, says Lee. This ranks around 8th on the Jury Grid. The theme appeals to me."

Ash Is Purest White
Dir. Jia Zhangke, China, 2018, 142m
U.S. Premiere
Jia Zhangke’s extraordinary body of work has doubled as a record of 21st-century China and its warp-speed transformations. A tragicomedy in the fullest sense, Ash Is Purest White is at once his funniest and saddest film, portraying the passage of time through narrative ellipses and, like his Mountains May Depart (NYFF53), a three-part structure. Despite its jianghu—criminal underworld—setting, Ash is less a gangster movie than a melodrama, beginning by following Qiao and her mobster boyfriend Bin as they stake out their turf against rivals and upstarts in 2001 postindustrial Datong before expanding out into an epic narrative of how abstract forces shape individual lives. As the formidable, quick-witted Qiao, a never better Zhao Tao has fashioned a heroine for the ages. A Cohen Media Group release.
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CK COMMENT: From Cannes Competition. My remote Cannes coverage Filmleaf commentary: "Zhao Tao and Liao Fan star in Jia Zhang-ke's chronicle of the relationship between a low-level Chinese crook and the woman who goes to prison for him (David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/ash-is-purest-white-cannes-2018-1111288)). It received a 'mild standing ovation. Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/may/11/ash-is-purest-white-review-chinese-gangsters-girlfriend-saga-burns-bright) gave it 4/5 stars: 'Jia Zhang-ke’s latest is an often glorious drama about how one woman’s journey from self-sacrificial moll to avenging criminal echoes her country’s embrace of capitalism.' Davis Erlich in his Indiewirelreview (http://www.indiewire.com/2018/05/ash-is-purest-white-review-jia-zhangke-cannes-2018-1201963491/) found it 'a long and melancholy rehash' of other better work by Jia. I will have to watch it and find out for myself." In fact, Jia's oeuvre isn't something I'd want to lose track of. If pressed, it won't be a priority here, though.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Dir. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, USA, 2018, 128m
North American Premiere
Here’s something new from the Coen Brothers — an anthology of short films based on a fictional book of "western tales," featuring Tim Blake Nelson as a murderous, white-hatted singing cowboy; James Franco as a bad luck bank-robber; Liam Neeson as the impresario of a traveling medicine show with increasingly diminishing returns; Tom Waits as a die-hard gold prospector; Zoe Kazan and Bill Heck as two shy people who almost come together on the wagon trail; and Tyne Daly, Saul Rubinek, Brendan Gleeson, Chelcie Ross, and Jonjo O’Neill as a motley crew on a stagecoach to nowhere. Each story is distinct, but unified by the thematic thread of mortality. As a whole movie experience, Buster Scruggs is wildly entertaining, and, like all Coen films, endlessly surprising. An Annapurna Production and Netflix release.
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CK COMMENT: This is described on IMDb as a TV mini-series, but it is only 2 hours 12 minutes long. In any case, it's quite likely to be fun. The Coens' films aren't equally memorable, though, and the brothers may be suffering from overproduction. Probably this will be either on your TV or in your local theater, so at the NYFF, it's not a must-see.

Burning
Dir. Lee Chang-dong, South Korea, 2018, 148m
Expanded from Haruki Murakami’s short story "Barn Burning," the sixth feature from Korean master Lee Chang-dong, known best in the U.S. for such searing, emotional dramas as Secret Sunshine (NYFF45) and Poetry (NYFF48), begins by tracing a romantic triangle of sorts: Jongsu (Yoo Ah-in), an aspiring writer, becomes involved with a woman he knew from childhood, Haemi (Jun Jong-seo), who is about to embark on a trip to Africa. She returns some weeks later with a fellow Korean, the Gatsby-esque Ben (Steven Yeun), who has a mysterious source of income and a very unusual hobby. A tense, haunting multiple-character study, the film accumulates a series of unanswered questions and unspoken motivations to conjure a totalizing mood of uncertainty and quietly bends the contours of the thriller genre to brilliant effect. A Well Go USA release.
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CK COMMENT: Not only the top rated Competition film at this year's Cannes, but a record 3.8 rating on the ScreenDaily "Jury Grid." It sounds fabulously good. I'm sorry to see that another highly rated Cannes film, Garrone's Dogman, isn't on the NYFF Main Slate. Magnolia has picked up the rights to it and plans a 2019 release, at least. Too bad it's not here, however: we need to see and celebrate the best new Italian cinema. Dogman has two superb performances, the dog (who got the DogPalm at Cannes) and Marcello Fonte, who won the acting award there for his performance in the nerdy, scrounge-y lead role of Marcello. Excited to see Burning - and (eventually) Dogman.

Cold War
Dir. Paweł Pawlikowski, Poland, 2018, 90m
Academy Award–winner Paweł Pawlikowski follows up his box-office sensation Ida with this bittersweet, exquisitely crafted tale of an impossible love. Set between the late 1940s and early 1960s, Cold War is, as the title implies, a Soviet-era drama, but it stringently and inventively avoids the clichés of many a classical-minded World War II art film, tracking the tempestuous love between pianist (Tomasz Kot) and singer (Joanna Kulig) as they navigate the realities of living in both Poland and Paris, in and outside of the Iron Curtain. Shot in crisp black-and-white and set to a bewitching jazzy score, Pawlikowski’s evocative film consummately depicts an uncompromising passion caught up in the gears of history. An Amazon Studios release.
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CK COMMENT: Another high-rated film from Cannes competition, and as they say, finely crafted, as was Ida, which everyone admired. Many thought it was the best at Cannes and would win. It didn't. You can review the Filmleaf Cannes-remote coverage of the Cannes Competition rankings and winners HERE (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4479-Cannes-Film-Festival-2018&p=36874#post36874). The Filmleaf Cannes-remote notes on Cold War: "Followup to Ida, says Guy Lodge in his Variety review (http://variety.com/2018/film/reviews/cold-war-review-1202804041/), is 'another immaculate monochrome study of midcentury Polish discontent," like his Best Foreign Oscar winner Ida, but adds that "this star-crossed, jazz-infused romance moves to its own rhythm.' David Erlich in Indiewire (http://www.indiewire.com/2018/05/cold-war-review-pawel-pawlikowski-cannes-2018-1201962858/)calls this 'one of the bleakest love stories ever told' and makes Ida seem cheery. Tim Robey of the Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/cold-war-review-love-finds-way-jazzed-up-war-torn-poland/) says it's more personal than Ida. For anyone who liked Ida this will be a must-see. "

A Faithful Man / L’Homme fidèle
Dir. Louis Garrel, France, 2018, 75m
U.S. Premiere
Nine years after she left him for his best friend, journalist Abel (Louis Garrel) gets back together with his recently widowed old flame Marianne (Laetitia Casta). It seems to be a beautiful new beginning, but soon the hapless Abel finds himself embroiled in all sorts of dramas: the come-ons of a wily jeune femme (Lily-Rose Depp), the machinations of Marianne’s morbid young son, and some unsavory questions about what exactly happened to his girlfriend’s first husband. Shifting points of view as nimbly as its players switch partners, the sophomore feature from actor/director Louis Garrel—co-written with the legendary Jean-Claude Carrière — is at once a beguiling bedroom farce and a slippery inquiry into truth, subjectivity, and the elusive nature of romantic attraction.
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CK COMMENT: For his first time as a director Louis Garrel collaborated with Christophe Honoré for the writing; Carrière is an older, more established, "legendary" screenplay collaborator, and this bids fair to be a logical (rapid) progression from Garrel's recent directorial debut, Two Friends/Les Deux amis (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3197), moving along to a less young-man aspect of relationships. I'm a fan of Garrel, and his talky, frenetic debut had class without pretension. This New York screening is way ahead of the 20 March 2018 French release date. I want to see it.

A Family Tour
Dir. Ying Liang, Taiwan/Hong Kong/Singapore/Malaysia, 2018, 107m
U.S. Premiere
Since his 2012 feature When Night Falls, a stinging critique of state power that the Chinese authorities attempted to suppress, the director Ying Liang has been forced to live in exile in Hong Kong. His return to feature filmmaking is a characteristically precise and powerful work, and, as inspired by his own precarious situation and based on a reunion with his in-laws, an autobiographical one. The film follows a Hong Kong–exiled director (Gong Zhe) as she travels to a film festival in Taiwan with her husband and toddler, while her ailing mother (Nai An) vacations there separately with a tour group. To avoid attracting attention, the family shadows the tour’s sightseeing itinerary, visiting each other during photo stops and mealtimes. An empathetic snapshot of a mother-daughter relationship, this brave, poised film is also a deeply moving testament to the inseparability of the personal and the political.
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CK COMMENT: Jay Weissberg's Variety review (https://variety.com/2018/film/reviews/a-family-tour-review-1202895285/) witten at this film's August Locarno debut calls this "highly intelligent" and the director's "most polished work to date." His early Taking Father Home is discussed by Richard Brody online for The New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/dvd-of-the-week-taking-father-home). He says Liang is one of the most exciting young directors in the world today; and needs our support, because his realistic depiction of the ugly side of mainland China today has got him in big trouble at home. I will remind faithful readers of Filmleaf (like me) that Travis Kirby, writing for Filmleaf 12 years ago at the SFIFF, found Taking Father Home (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?1742-Sfiff-Reviews-By-Travis-Kirby) distractingly, embarrassingly crude.

La Flor
Dir. Mariano Llinás, Argentina, 2018, 807m
North American Premiere
A decade in the making, Mariano Llinás’s follow-up to his 2008 cult classic Extraordinary Stories is an unrepeatable labor of love and madness that redefines the concept of binge viewing. The director himself appears at the start to preview the six disparate episodes that await, each starring the same four remarkable actresses: Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa, and Laura Paredes. Overflowing with nested subplots and whiplash digressions, La Flor shape-shifts from a B-movie to a musical to a spy thriller to a category-defying metafiction—all of them without endings—to a remake of a very well-known French classic and, finally, to an enigmatic period piece that lacks a beginning (granted, all notions of beginnings and endings become fuzzy after 14 hours). An adventure in scale and duration, La Flor is a marvelously entertaining exploration of the possibilities of fiction that lands somewhere close to its outer limits.
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CK COMMENT: Extraordinary Stories was in the New York Latinbeat Festival and was an ambitious, complex work, four hours long. I did not see it, and it has not had a lot of press, but you may be able to find it. What I have seen suggests something very literary, very thoughtful. The blurb exaggerates: this new one isn't fourteen hours long - only thirteen and a half. I'm not planning to watch it at the festival. As my friend Turaj used to say, maybe later - maybe much, much later.

Grass
Dir. Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2018, 66m
U.S. Premiere
Sitting in a café, typing on a laptop, Areum (Kim Min-hee) eavesdrops on three dramatic situations unfolding in her general vicinity: a young woman bound for Europe and a male friend who erupt in vitriolic accusations, a washed-up actor trying to sweet-talk his way into staying with an old friend, and a narcissistic actor-director (Jung Jin-young) trying to rope a young writer into his next project. Playing out largely in long-take two-shots, these conversations create a kind of never-ending theatrical performance, with Areum as the anchor. With its raw emotions and seeming formal simplicity masking a complex episodic approach, Grass finds Korean master Hong Sangsoo setting up a fascinating narrative problem for himself and solving it as only he can. A Cinema Guild release.

CK COMMENT: Again, I welcome Hong, especially with Kim Min-hee, and this one has a distributor, indicating more mainstream appeal, presumably. Indiewire (David Ehrlich) says this 66-min. film is "for fans only," but Variety (Jessica Kiang) says Hong " packs a surprising level of engaging complexity into this deceptively modest hour-long package." Hong is an acquired taste this writer has acquired. I always have time for his films.

Happy as Lazzaro / Lazzaro felice
Dir. Alice Rohrwacher, Italy, 2018, 128m
North American Premiere
In the transfiguring and transfixing third feature from Alice Rohrwacher (The Wonders, NYFF52), we find ourselves amid a throng of tobacco farmers living in a state of extreme deprivation on an estate known as Inviolata, with wide-eyed teenager Lazzaro (nonprofessional discovery Adriano Tardiolo) emerging as a focal point. Although this all seems to be taking place in the past (as implied by the warm grain of Hélène Louvart’s 16mm cinematography), a stunning mid-movie leap vaults the narrative squarely into the present day and into the realm of parable. In a fable touching on perennial class struggle with Christian overtones, Rohrwacher summons the spirit of Pasolini, while also nodding to Ermanno Olmi and Visconti. A Netflix release.
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CK COMMENT: Boyd van Hoeij in his Cannes Hollywood Reporter review (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/happy-as-lazzaro-lazzaro-felice-1111486) called this "half a good movie," and that goes for my reaction to Rohrwacher's other films; but their good halves are really good. Not obligatory though.

Her Smell
Dir. Alex Ross Perry, USA, 2018, 134m
U.S. Premiere
The latest from Alex Ross Perry (Listen Up Philip, NYFF52) traces the psychology of an unforgettable woman under the influence. Becky Something (Elisabeth Moss, in a powerhouse performance), the influential lead singer of a popular ’90s alt-rock outfit, struggles with her demons as friends, family, and bandmates alike behold her unraveling through a prism of horror, empathy, and resentment. Perry tracks Becky’s self-destruction—and potential creative redemption—through snaking long takes (arguably some of DP Sean Price Williams’s finest work) in claustrophobic backstage hallways, garishly lit dressing rooms, and recording studios, and the film’s ensemble cast (including Cara Delevingne, Ashley Benson, Amber Heard, Virginia Madsen, Dan Stevens, and Eric Stoltz) is impeccable in support of Moss’s rattling trip to the brink.
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CK COMMENT: Alex Ross Perry has been a darling of the New York Film Festival who represents a kind of sophisticated young American, particularly East Coast, sensibility the NYFF needs to support and in a sense one of their responsibilities. It may not be yours. But on the other hand, Elizabeth Moss has been on a roll lately, and could really be something to watch in this. It's been a while since I've seen Eric Stolz, who's forever enshrined in my mind for his part in Pulp Fiction. I'll pass on this, though.

High Life
Dir. Claire Denis, Germany/France/USA/UK/Poland, 2018, 110m
U.S. Premiere
Claire Denis’s latest film is set aboard a spacecraft piloted by death row prisoners on a decades-long suicide mission to enter and harness the power of a black hole. But as is always the case with this filmmaker, the actual structure seems to evolve organically through moods and uncanny spells, and the closest juxtapositions of violence and intimacy. High Life features some of the most unsettling passages Denis has ever filmed, as well as moments of the greatest delicacy and tenderness. With Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, André Benjamin, and Mia Goth.
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CK COMMENT: Claire Denis' first film in English. She has a good knowledge of English. " Nick Laird co-wrote the screenplay for the film. Additionally Laird's wife Zadie Smith contributed to early drafts of the English version of the screenplay" (Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Life_(2018_film))entry on the film). A big fan of Claire Denis - she is one of my favorite French directors - I would put this on my must-see list.

Hotel by the River
Dir. Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2018, 96m
U.S. Premiere
Two tales intersect at a riverside hotel: an elderly poet (Ki Joo-bong), invited to stay there for free by the owner, summons his two estranged sons, sensing his life drawing to a close; and a young woman (Kim Min-hee) nursing a recently broken heart is visited by a friend who tries to console her. At times these threads overlap, at others they run tantalizingly close to each other. Using a stark black-and-white palette and handheld cinematography (with frequent DP Kim Hyung-ku), Hong crafts an affecting examination of family, mortality, and the ways in which we attempt to heal wounds old and fresh.

CK COMMENT: The NYFF has been a longtime champion of Hong Sang-soo, and I know his work through chiefly Lincoln Center. He is becoming even more fluent and productive, and the FSLC is showing more Hong. That's fine with me. I really like his work. Why stop now?

If Beale Street Could Talk
Dir. Barry Jenkins, USA, 2018
U.S. Premiere
Barry Jenkins’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning Moonlight is a carefully wrought adaptation of James Baldwin’s penultimate novel, set in Harlem in the early 1970s. Fonny (Stephan James) and Tish (KiKi Layne) are childhood friends who fall in love as young adults. Tish becomes pregnant, and Fonny suffers a fate tragically common to young African-American men: he is arrested and convicted for a crime he didn’t commit. Jenkins’s deeply soulful film stays focused on the emotional currents between parents and children, couples and friends, all of whom spend their lives repairing and reinforcing the precious but fraying bonds of family and community in an unforgiving racist world. With Regina King, Colman Domingo, Teyonah Parris, Aunjanue Ellis, and Michael Beach. An Annapurna Pictures release.
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CK COMMENT: Have not heard anything about this or the James Baldwin novel but I admire James Baldwin and his elegant prose style. I also liked Moonlight; so did the Academy (Best Picture Oscar). I'll have to look further into this new one. You know what? Joyce Carol Oates reviewed Baldwin's If Beale Street Could Talk for the NYTimes (https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-beale.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) in 1974, when it came out. She called it "vividly human" and "timeless." I must-see, but it will be in theaters soon.

The Image Book / Le Livre d’image
Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland, 2018, 90m
U.S. Premiere
Jean-Luc Godard’s "late period" probably began with 2001’s In Praise of Love, and since then he has been formulating and enacting a path toward an ending: the ending of individual films, the ending of engagement with cinema, and, now that he’s 87, the possible ending of his own existence. With The Image Book all barriers between the artist, his art, and his audience have dissolved. The film is structured in chapters and predominantly comprised of pre-existing images, many of which will be familiar from Godard’s previous work. The relationship between image and sound is, as always, intensely physical and sometimes jaw-dropping. And…isn’t it enough to say, simply, that this is the work of a master? And that you have to see it? A Kino Lorber release.
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CK COMMENT: Well, they said it, and the words "must see" are in there.
But I would not put it at the very top of my must-see list. Because it's not Jane Austen, if you know what I mean. Late Godard films are rich and complex but without any conventional narrative hook at all and pretty much interchangeable except for the devotee.

In My Room
Dir. Ulrich Köhler, Germany, 2018, 119m
U.S. Premiere
The fourth feature from German director Ulrich Köhler (Sleeping Sickness, NYFF49) takes a disarmingly realistic and restrained approach to a fantastical premise: the eternally popular fantasy of the last man on earth. Sad-sack, 40ish TV cameraman Armin (Hans Löw) has been summoned home by his father to help tend to his terminally ill grandmother, but awakens one morning to find the world around him entirely depopulated. Eventually, the film introduces a fellow survivor, an Eve (Elena Radonicich) to complicate the apparent contentment of its Adam. In My Room is a film of meticulous details and sly, subtle ironies, crafted by the skills, temperament, and philosophical inquiry of an emerging master. A Grasshopper Film release.

CK COMMENT: This debuted at Cannes in Un Certain Regard. It makes me think of the Swedish director, Roy Andersson, and I want to see this. It is likely to be pure pleasure.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Dir. Bi Gan, China/France, 2018, 133m
U.S. Premiere
As proven by his knockout debut, Kaili Blues, Bi Gan is preoccupied with film’s potential to both materialize mental space and convey physical sensation. His cinematic ambitions are further crystallized, to say the least, in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a noir-tinged film about a solitary man (Huang Jue) haunted by loss and regret, told in two parts: the first an achronological mosaic, the second a nocturnal dream. Again centering around his native province of Guizhou in southwest China, the director has created a film like nothing you’ve seen before, especially in the second half’s hour-long, gravity-defying 3D sequence shot, which plunges its protagonist—and us—through a labyrinthine cityscape.

CK COMMENT: This is another Cannes one, shown Out of Competition there. It was that special thrill of discovery that you live for as a film critic to watch Bi Gan's Kaili Blues (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4120-New-Directors-New-Films-2016-Film-Comments-Selects&p=34482#post34482) at a little screening of New Directors/New Films two years ago and discover a new vision, someone who works his own magic with a camera. That's what it's all about. Of course this is a must-see.

Monrovia, Indiana
Dir. Frederick Wiseman, USA, 2018, 143m
U.S. Premiere
Every new film from Frederick Wiseman, now 88 years old, seems more vigorous and acute than the last. His subject here is Monrovia, Indiana; population 1063, as of 2017; located deep in the American heartland. Wiseman alights on key activities: talk among friends over coffee at the diner, packaging meat at the supermarket, trucks loading with corn, expansion debates at town planning commission meetings, and, most intriguingly, a funeral. Monrovia, Indiana is a tough, piercing look at the rhythm and texture of life as it is lived in a wide swathe of this country. A Zipporah Films release.

CK COMMENT: Frederick Wiseman, the tireless, ageless, relentless documentary filmmaker, has been selected many times by the festival, starting with his risky first documentary, Titicut Follies.

Non-Fiction / Doubles vies
Dir. Olivier Assayas, France, 2018, 106m
Set within the world of publishing, Olivier Assayas’s new film finds two hopelessly intertwined couples—Guillaume Canet’s troubled book executive and Juliette Binoche’s weary actress; Vincent Macaigne’s boorish novelist and Nora Hamzawi’s straight-and-balanced political operative—obsessed with the state of things, and how (or when) it will (or might) change. Is print dying? Has blogging replaced writing? Is fiction over? But the divide between what these characters—and their friends, and their enemies, and everyone in between—talk about and what is actually happening between them, moment by moment, is what gives Non-Fiction its very particular charm, humor, and lifelike stabs of emotion. A Sundance Selects release.
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CK COMMENT: This comes out in France 16 Jan. 2019. It sounds complicated enough to be a Arnaud Desplechin plot. Assayas is capable of making a marvelous film. We'll see, hopefully. .

Private Life
Dir. Tamara Jenkins, USA, 2017, 123m
In Tamara Jenkins’s first film in ten years, Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti are achingly real as Rachel and Richard, a middle-aged New York couple caught in the desperation, frustration, and exhaustion of trying to have a child, whether by fertility treatments or adoption or surrogate motherhood. They find a willing partner in Sadie (the formidable Kayli Carter), Richard’s niece by marriage, who happily agrees to donate her eggs, and the three of them build their own little outcast family in the process. Private Life is a wonder, by turns hilarious and harrowing (sometimes at once), and a very carefully observed portrait of middle-class Bohemian Manhattanites. With John Carroll Lynch and Molly Shannon. A Netflix release.
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CK COMMENT: This debuted at Sundance opening night and was very well received. It sounds like an interesting film, and has high Metascore (81%). Theatrical release coming September 21, 2018. I think wide release, so it's not necessary to see it at a film festival; it will be in a theater near you. Guess what? This is the first NYFF that has two directors named Jenkins in its Main Slate.

RAY & LIZ
Dir. Richard Billingham, UK, 2018, 107m
U.S. Premiere
English photographer and visual artist Richard Billingham’s first feature is grounded in the visual and emotional textures of his family portraits, particularly those of his deeply dysfunctional parents, whose names give the film its title. Billingham builds astonishing and unflinching scenes with his principal actors—Ella Smith as Liz, Justin Salinger as Ray, Patrick Romer as the older Ray, Tony Way and Sam Gittins as neighbors, and Joshua Millard-Lloyd as the youngest child—that play out second by second as if by some new form of direct transmission from the artist’s memory bank. There is not a single second of this electrifying debut that doesn’t feel 100% rooted in personal experience.
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CK COMMENT: As one might guess, this raw lower-class slice of life comes from Locarno, a festival that's been a frequent FSLC source for the edgier stuff. Leslie Felperin's Variety review (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/ray-liz-review-1132281) says "its key antecedent is his acclaimed mid-1990s series of snaps of his alcoholic dad Ray, chain-smoking mom Liz and younger brother Jason, who was taken into care when he was 11." "Some were featured in the notorious Sensation exhibition" Rudy Giuliani tried to shut down the Brooklyn Museum over. Closer to Andrea Arnold than to Ken Loach, says Felperin, its POV "inscrutable." The older Liz is played by a non-actress famous in England from reality shows. Daniel Landin's images (he shot Glazer's Under the Skin), in academy ration 16mm film, add some glam to the yuck.

Shoplifters
Dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan, 2018, 121m
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner is a heartrending glimpse into an often invisible segment of Japanese society: those struggling to stay afloat in the face of crushing poverty. On the the margins of Tokyo, a most unusual "family"—a collection of societal castoffs united by their shared outsiderhood and fierce loyalty to one another—survives by petty stealing and grifting. When they welcome into their fold a young girl who’s been abused by her parents, they risk exposing themselves to the authorities and upending their tenuous, below-the-radar existence. The director’s latest masterful, richly observed human drama makes the quietly radical case that it is love—not blood—that defines a family. A Magnolia Pictures release.
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CK COMMENT: Last month this became Koreeda's biggest box office hit in Japan with a take of $30 million . See the reviews cited in my remote Cannes coverage (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4479-Cannes-Film-Festival-2018&p=36850#post36850) - this rated a very high 3.2 on the ScreenDaily Jury Grid - all of which lead one to conclude this is a must-see.

Sorry Angel
Dir. Christophe Honoré, France, 2018, 132m
North American Premiere
The ever-unpredictable Christophe Honoré (Love Songs) returns with perhaps his most personal, emotionally rich work yet. At once an intimate chronicle of a romance and a sprawling portrait of gay life in early 1990s France, Sorry Angel follows the intertwining journeys of Jacques (Pierre Deladonchamps), a worldly, HIV-positive Parisian writer confronting his own mortality, and Arthur (Vincent Lacoste), a curious, carefree university student just beginning to live. Brought together by chance, the men find themselves navigating a casual fling that gradually deepens into a tender, transformative bond. Graced with vivid, complex characters and inspired flights of cinematic imagination, this is a vibrant, life-affirming celebration of love, friendship, and human connection. Released by Strand Releasing.
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CK COMMENT: The translaters mean "Sorry, Angel," to be a grammatical stickler: it's not a movie about a "sorry angel." Anyway, the French title, awkward to translate, is Plaire, aimer et courir vite ("To please, to love, and to run fast"). This film debuted in Competition at Cannes.It's Honoré's most autobiographical work to date, and lacks his "muse" Louis Garrel. It's not a musical like Honoré's Love Songs, but Les Inrocks has commented it's "as if each character had his or her designated playlist." This is an opportunity for the young Vincent Lacoste, whose well-demonstrated gift is for comedy, to costar in something more serious along with two other fine actors (also new to Honoré films), Pierre Deladonchamps of Stranger by the Lake (2013) and veteran film actor and Comédie Française member Denis Podalydès. I've followed Honoré all along and would welcome this early opportunity to see and report.

Too Late to Die Young
Dir. Dominga Sotomayor, Chile/Brazil/Argentina/Netherlands/Qatar, 2018, 110m
U.S. Premiere
The year 1990 was when Chile transitioned to democracy, but all of that seems a world away for 16-year-old Sofia, who lives far off the grid in a mountain enclave of artists and bohemians. Too Late to Die Young takes place during the hot, languorous days between Christmas and New Year’s Day, when the troubling realities of the adult world—and the elemental forces of nature—begin to intrude on her teenage idyll. Shot in dreamily diaphanous, sun-splashed images and set to period-perfect pop, the second feature from one of Latin American cinema’s most artful and distinctive voices is at once nostalgic and piercing, a portrait of a young woman—and a country—on the cusp of exhilarating and terrifying change.
_____________________
CK COMMENT: This actually is Dominga Sotomayor Castillo's third feature; the second was called Mar; and she co-directed a 30- minute film called La isla. Jay Weissberg is admiring of this new one in his Variety review (https://variety.com/2018/film/reviews/too-late-to-die-young-review-1202895572/); but he thinks it a bit over-long. It debuted at LOcarno.

Transit
Dir. Christian Petzold, Germany/France, 2018, 101m
U.S. Premiere
In Christian Petzold’s brilliant and haunting adaptation of German novelist Anna Seghers’s 1942 book Transit Visa, a hollowed-out European refugee (Franz Rogowski), who has escaped from two concentration camps, arrives in Marseille assuming the identity of a dead novelist whose papers he is carrying. There he enters the arid, threadbare world of the refugee community, and becomes enmeshed in the lives of a desperate young mother and son, and a mysterious woman named Marie (Paula Beer). Transit is a film told in two tenses: 1940 and right now, historic past and immediate present, like two translucent panes held up to the light and mysteriously contrasting and blending.
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CK COMMENT: The blurb above doesn't really spell it out, but it's an iportant aspect of Petzold's film that its WWII story is staged without any period trappings, thus reframing the Holocaust in the present and inviting links with today's neo-Naziism. A star-making role for Rogowski. His character goes to Paris first, then escapes to Marseille after the Occupation starts. The chance opportunity for assumed identity and escape from the country, a love story, and noirish twists and turns follow. Guy Lodge's Variety review from the film's debut in the Berlinale make Transit sound provocative - and delicious. After being charmed by Jerichow (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1239) (2008) at Film Comment Selects, I have been a fan, and I enthusiastically reviewed Barbara (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2189) (NYFF 2012) and Phoenix (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2988&view=next) (2014). This new one is his first in 13 years not starring Nina Hoss; her absence, Lodge felt, helps underline the film's intentionally pervasive sense of absence, emptiness and loss.

Wildlife
Dir. Paul Dano, USA, 2018, 104m
In the impressive directorial debut from actor Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood), a carefully wrought adaptation of Richard Ford’s 1990 novel, a family comes apart one loosely stitched seam at a time. We are in the lonely expanses of the American west [Montana] in the mid-’60s . An affable man (Jake Gyllenhaal), down on his luck, runs off to fight the wildfires raging in the mountains. His wife (Carey Mulligan) strikes out blindly in search of security and finds herself running amok. It is left to their young adolescent son Joe (Ed Oxenbould) to hold the center. Co-written by Zoe Kazan, Wildlife is made with a sensitivity and at a level of craft that are increasingly rare in movies. An IFC Films release.
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CK COMMENT: After its Sundance debut, this was opening film of Cannes Critic Week. All the reviews (Metascore 82%) indicate this is a very solidly good watch with superior acting, a career best for Mulligan, an admirable literary adaptation, one of the year's best American films and a splendid debut for Dano. In Filmleaf's 2018 Sundance thread (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4437-SUNDANCE-Film-Festival-2018-Jan-18-2018-%96-Jan-28&p=36429#post36429), I cited Owen Gleiberman's glowing review (https://variety.com/2018/film/reviews/wildlife-review-carey-mulligan-1202671259/). This is worthy of being seen at the festival, even if it is going to be in theaters 19 Oct. Not sure I can get into the NYFF screenings, at this point, though.

[Chris Knipp]

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/W4.jpg

Projections series announced.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center has now announced its "Projections" series sidebar of the NYFF, which is devoted to experimental and avant-garde films. Find the preview here: CLICK (https://www.filmlinc.org/press/fslc-announces-lineup-annual-avant-garde-showcase-projections-nyff54/).

[Chris Knipp]

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/GRG.jpg

Revivals series announced.

You will find the list here: CLICK (https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2018/daily/nyff56-retrospective-and-revivals-announced/).

The Retrospective and Revivals sections have been announced for the 56th New York Film Festival, taking place September 28–October 14 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

This year’s three-part Retrospective section pays tribute to late film industry luminaries Dan Talbot and Pierre Rissient, and spotlights three documentary odes to cinema

[oscar jubis]

Thank you for the wealth of opinion and information provided; you're quite a resource for someone like me who doesn't attend the festival circuit anymore.

[Chris Knipp]

What do you think of the Latin American choices in the Main Slate? I am just making a list of 15 I will see if I can''t see all of them but have to wangle passes or buy tickets at the festival as I did last year. There will be an emphasis on German, Polish, and Asian, it looks like.

[Chris Knipp]

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/Ot.jpg

Special events section announced.

Details here: click (https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2018/daily/orson-welles-the-other-side-of-the-wind-nyff56-special-events/).
Highlights include Orson Welles’s long-awaited The Other Side of the Wind and Morgan Neville’s companion doc They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead; Rex Ingram’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with a live score; and an expanded Film Comment Presents

Plus Main Slate selection Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk will have its U.S. Premiere at the historic Apollo Theater

Rex Ingram’s World War I epic The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), the breakout film for iconic silent actor Rudolph Valentino, will screen on a beautiful 35mm print from Martin Scorsese’s collection, accompanied by the North American premiere of a new live score written and performed by a five-piece orchestra led by Matthew Nolan.

The sixth annual Film Comment Presents selections are Ali Abbasi’s genre-friendly fantasy-drama Border, which won Cannes’ Un Certain Regard award, and The Wild Pear Tree, an intimate portrait of a promising but adrift young literary graduate from Turkish Palme d’Or winner Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, NYFF49). In previous years, Film Comment has championed films such as Sergei Loznitsa’s A Gentle Creature, Terence Davies’s A Quiet Passion, Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, and László Nemes’s Son of Saul. The magazine will also host three live events: a roundtable discussion with a trio of NYFF filmmakers about their experiences as movie lovers and creators, a dialogue on representation in cinema, and a critical wrap report of the festival’s highs and lows. All three will also be recorded for the weekly Film Comment Podcast.

Finally, the New York Film Festival is pleased to announce that the U.S. premiere of Main Slate selection If Beale Street Could Talk will take place at the world famous Apollo Theater, the first time that the festival will present a screening at the historic theater. The film was largely shot in New York City, including many Harlem locations. In celebration of the vibrant community and their support of the film, Annapurna, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and the Apollo Theater will work together to present a host of outreach programs. Local students as well as Harlem residents will be among the first audiences invited to see the James Baldwin adaptation, in the neighborhood that is home to its characters. The film will also screen on the Lincoln Center campus during the festival.

Writer-director Barry Jenkins said, “It's been an honor working with the estate to bring this piece of James Baldwin's legacy to the screen. From the birthplace of Baldwin to the streets and homes within which we made this film, the honor is doubly felt in the NYFF’s generous offer to widen its borders for our U.S. premiere: up on 125th Street, in the community Jimmy forever knew as HOME.”

[oscar jubis]

What do you think of the Latin American choices in the Main Slate?
I wouldn't have a clue. I find out about new films from you.
The last contemporary film I watched was Downsizing. I've liked all 7 features directed by Alexander Payne (Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, Nebraska) and this one no less than the others.
I watched my two favorite films of 2017 for the third time. I think I understand them quite well now. They are The Death of Louis XIV and Mudbound.
Zama and Foxtrot are the 2018 fiction releases that seem most memorable to me as I write these lines. The documentary The King also made a big impression on me.

[Chris Knipp]

I asked you about the Latin American selections because they leave me sort of cold even though maybe I should be excited about the Cuarón. So I was hoping you'd be excited about them. But it's only three, isn't it? Dominga Sotomayor, Mariano Llinás, and Alfonso Cuarón, the first two from Chile and Argentina, respectively. I haven't heard anything about them. Thought maybe you would have.

A lot of the titles you may know about from my Cannes coverage. It's from Cannes that I was expecting the FSLC to include Garrone's Dogman, which sounds so interesting. Latin American is under-represented. The top titles seem to be Asian (top rated in reports and awards at Cannes). Two French titles I see as sort of FSLC "pets," Christophe Honoré and (his pet) Louis Garrel, plus everybody's pet, Claire Denis; maybe Assayas should be my pet;I've loved some of his films and some not.

Downsizing isn't up to his other work at all, really pretty much a misttep. I did not like The King for all its ambition, but Zama and Foxtrot are very cool, I quite agree. I already commented on Death of Louis XIV and Mudbound, the latter I didn't review because I couldn't get through it.

[oscar jubis]

Because of my interests in cinema are broad, contemporary international commercial films have to compete with other things. For example, at the moment I am exploring films by Chicagoan Bill Morrison other than his masterpiece Decasia which I saw at a festival in which I met Morrison and had a chance to talk with him extensively. His filmography has been released on BR in the UK and I have a copy of this voluminous volume.
I have also been paying attention to the (experimental) editing in 2 Dziga Vertov films: 3 Songs for Lenin and Enthusiasm. I am also still shocked by the anti-religiosity in his films. There's a segment in Kino Pravda about a Muslim girl being "liberated" by the revolution from having to cover her head. Enthusiasm begins with the removal of Christian icons from a church.
Latin American is ALWAYS under-represented at US festivals because there is scapegoating of Latinos and immigrants in general throughout the US. Generally speaking, American film festivals and academic institutions are Eurocentric. Miami is the exception. Even in NY and LA I feel like a second class citizen, so I will stay put.

[Chris Knipp]

I'm sure you're right. But as I said the balance for the top films in this year's NYFF arguably tips more toward Asian than Euro. And Cuaron's ROMA is the Centerpiece film, and Zama was one of the big films at last year's NYFF, shown in Alice Tully Hall with a big crowd. Lincoln Center also does have a new Latin American film series, Neighboring Scenes. I haven't seen it. It's a try anyway. https://www.filmlinc.org/daily/neighboring-scenes-returns-on-february-28-with-new-latin-american-cinema/
Some advantage has been lost since Richard Peña isn't Program Director anymore and Dennis Lim is program director. People notice a shift in taste. Peña was pals with Almodóvar and the Q&As with them were always a lot of fun.

[oscar jubis]

This is very interesting thanks. I depend on your writing more than ever. You certainly know more about contemporary Latin American cinema than I do. I love Ixcanul and Zama, which you've seen and reviewed. The most exciting and unique movie I've discovered recently is Hellzapoppin' (1941)

[Chris Knipp]

You certainly know more about contemporary Latin American cinema than I do. Hard to believe; but I appreciate the compliment. The Neighboring Sounds FSLC Latin series is new and will need some time to get up to the level of the amazing NYAFF (https://www.filmlinc.org/festivals/new-york-asian-film-festival/), which I've covered for two years, but has been in existence (not always at Lincoln Center but there now) for seventeen. They had over 50 films (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018) and I had access to most of them though I couldn't watch that many! But Latin American doesn't have film industries as well funded as those of China, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea I'm guessing, so that is an issue too. I have never seen Helzapoppin'. I am trying to selectively review the oeuvre of Woody Allen now. So far I've watched Match Point, Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Bananas. So entertaining and original.

I'm not accredited for the NYFF anymore, but I still am going and hope to see as many as I can of the Main Slate.

[Chris Knipp]

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/DjO.jpg

For you, Oscar~
The new Criterion Collection entries in their August 2018 newsletter include Edward James Olmos' The Ballad of Gregoria Cortez (https://www.criterion.com/films/29142-the-ballad-of-gregorio-cortez), and the site also has an interview with Chloe Zhao talking (https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5837-an-intense-curiosity-chlo-zhao-on-the-new-world) about Terrence Malick's The New World, and Jeremiah Zagar, the director of the exciting new film We the Animals, listing his top ten favorite Criterion disks (https://www.criterion.com/current/top-10-lists/343-jeremiah-zagar-s-top-10).

[oscar jubis]

Thanks Chris. I think it's very likely I didn't see "The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez". I don't know about you but I cannot remember whether I watchED a movie in full or a trailer or only a part of the movie (perhaps because I watched it on TV and perhaps it had already started when I caught it, or because the TV broadcast version is shorter than the original cut. I look forward to it in this restored version.

As far as Malick is concerned, I am among those who embrace his use of characteristic swirling camera movements while the character's stream-of-consciousness is presented via voice-over. These are Malick's philosophical investigations (some mat call them ruminations). I have see different versions of THE NEW WORLD several times; love it. So I will check out this interview promptly.

I rewatched Jarecki's impassioned THE KING. A top 10 film of 2018 for me along with Jim McKay's EN EL SEPTIMO DIA and Martel's ZAMA.
I watched Alex Garland's ANNIHILATION and I liked the trippy visuals and the performances by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Natalie Portman but its dramaturgy falters and yields a film that constitutes a lesser achievement than the director's own EX MACHINA and recent Sci-Fi films by Cuaron and Villeneuve.

I re-watched Alfred Hitchcock's THE PARADINE CASE. It's very upsetting when you know enough to recognize precisely how David O. Selznick is getting in the way of a potential masterpiece and forces Hitchcock to make compromises for the sake of convention and the bottom line. Like SUSPICION AND REBECCA, It's not a bad film, of course, but it's not prime Hitchcock like other films he made in the 40s such as NOTORIOUS and STRANGERS ON THE TRAIN.

I continue to think that Alexander Payne's DOWNSIZING is very interesting and rewarding film. Plan to rewatch.

The remake of the Argentinian film "Rompecabezas" titled PUZZLE is solid and a pleasant experience to many, as I noticed from the showings in my theater.I don't have strong opinions about it, to be honest.

[Chris Knipp]

Thanks for your views and report. I haven't seen Gregorio Cortez, or En el septimo dia, or Annihilation.

Why are we talking about Terrence Malick? I loved The New World too, and Tree of Life, but lately with To the Wonder and Knight of Cups he has struck out, to the point of self-parody, and I've lost faith. Of course we like the mobile camera like Emmanuel Lubezki's for Cuaron, but we also like the Asian-style static one (Hou Hsiau Hsien). Depends on the individual use of it and its appropriateness to the film.

My Filmleaf review of The King (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4507-THE-KING-(Eugene-Jaarecki-2018)) will show as I think I said to you directly before, I sort of found it to be overambitious and overstuffed, though an impressive effort. An editing issue. There's material for a good film there, even if an editorializing, poetic one, rather than an informational one. I like docs that present hard fact like Dark Money or new intimate information that's factual but moving like To Be and To Have and My Architect.

I've seen many of Hitchcock's movies but not The Paradine Case. It sounds like a good display of Hitchcockian technique. Strangers on a Train isn't a Forties film but 1951.

Puzzle (my review (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4021)) ends up being a watchable but blah, "meh" piece of work; I heard the original is great but didn't get to see it, so far. Irfan Khan is very cool but not Kelly Macdonald.

I still think Downsizing (I repeat) is a meandering, "meh" disappointment, again see my review (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3791).

I'm pretty good at remembering movies I've seen, but not every single one.

Have you seen Sorry to Bother You, Blindspotting and BlacKKKlansman? If not, drop everything and go see them.

[oscar jubis]

Hard to believe; but I appreciate the compliment. The Neighboring Sounds FSLC Latin series is new and will need some time to get up to the level of the amazing NYAFF (https://www.filmlinc.org/festivals/new-york-asian-film-festival/), which I've covered for two years, but has been in existence (not always at Lincoln Center but there now) for seventeen. They had over 50 films (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018) and I had access to most of them though I couldn't watch that many! But Latin American doesn't have film industries as well funded as those of China, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea I'm guessing, so that is an issue too. I have never seen Helzapoppin'. I am trying to selectively review the oeuvre of Woody Allen now. So far I've watched Match Point, Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Bananas. So entertaining and original.

I'm not accredited for the NYFF anymore, but I still am going and hope to see as many as I can of the Main Slate.
How come you're not accredited? Tell me about this process, if you don't mind. I haven't covered a film festival in about 5 or 6 years. Do festivals still have screenings and screeners? Isn't it all about getting a special code from the publicist so you can download or stream the films they are showing?
The last Woody Allen film I liked may be HUSBANDS AND WIVES, almost 20 years ago. I know Match was good too but it's not a film I'm inclined to re-watch. I like Allen's films of the 70s and 80s less than I used to.

[Chris Knipp]

No, it's not online screeners. It's separate press screenings of all the Main Slate NYFF films (plus a few extras) shown in sequence, starting always in the morning, mostly at the same location, starting a week or two earlier than the public ones. Why am I not accredited now? You tell me. A lot of people have been eliminated over a period of five or so years. I could talk a lot about Woody Allen but I'll save that till later. After all, he's done over fifty films. For now, my description, 'so entertaining and original,' will do.

Let me correct what I said: not to see 'as many as I can of the Main Slate,' but just to see most of the ones that look interesting to me, without knocking myself out.

[Chris Knipp]

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/9o0.jpg (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018)

More about the NYFF Special Events, and Film Comment Selects for the Festival.

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Dir. Rex Ingram, USA, 1921, 132m, 35mm
Rex Ingram’s adaptation of the famous novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez gave us one of cinema’s greatest antiwar films and catapulted actor Rudolph Valentino into history as one of the first screen idols. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is a devastating epic centered around a divided Argentine family fighting on opposite sides during World War I. Famously remembered for the cool, sensual, and powerful tango sequence lead by Valentino, the film endures for Ingram’s meticulous attention to mise en scène—beautiful and macabre compositions alike—and the nuanced performances from a cast including Alice Terry and Josef Swickard. The Film Society is pleased to present the North American premiere of a live score written and performed by Matthew Nolan (electric guitar/electronics), Seán Mac Erlaine (reeds/electronics/vocal), Adrian Crowley (Mellotron/vocal), Kevin Murphy (cello/vocal), and Barry Adamson (bass guitar/percussion/synths/vocal).

The score was commissioned by and premiered at the St. Patrick’s Festival Dublin in March 2018. Supported by Culture Ireland. Special 35mm print courtesy of Martin Scorsese from the M.S. Collection at the George Eastman Museum.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/WW2.jpg
John Huston, Orson Welles, Peter Bogdonovitch

The Other Side of the Wind
Dir. Orson Welles, USA, 2018, 122m
Cinema lovers around the world have been waiting to see this legendary movie for more than 40 years. Orson Welles started shooting in 1970 with a precarious funding scheme, an ever-mutating script, and the lead role of Jake Hannaford, an old-guard macho Hollywood director at the end of his tether, yet to be cast. When he died fifteen years later, the film was not only unfinished but in legal limbo. Almost 50 years after Welles started shooting, The Other Side of the Wind has finally been completed by Welles’s collaborators, including producers Frank Marshall and Filip Jan Rymsza. The film features a collection of actors as eclectic as the cast of Touch of Evil, including John Huston as Hannaford, Peter Bogdanovich, Oja Kodar, Edmund O’Brien, Susan Strasberg, Lilli Palmer, Paul Stewart, Mercedes McCambridge, Cameron Mitchell, Paul Mazursky, Henry Jaglom, Claude Chabrol, and, in a movie-stealing performance as Hannaford’s right-hand man, Welles’s old collaborator Norman Foster. A Netflix release.

They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead
Dir. Morgan Neville, USA, 2018, 98m
The story of the making of The Other Side of the Wind is as engrossing and rich in character and incident, and perhaps even more epic in scale, than the film itself. Morgan Neville’s documentary complements and deepens the experience of Welles’s film by placing it within the context of his life and career, setting the scene and the particular mood of Hollywood in the early 1970s, and chronicling every last creative, legal, financial, and behavioral twist and turn on the circuitous road from the first set-up to the first official screening almost 50 years later. The title, of course, comes from none other than Welles himself. A Netflix release.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/WW.jpg
Behind the scenes of The Other Side of the Wind.

Film Comment at NYFF 2018

Film Comment Presents:

Border
Dir. Ali Abbasi, Sweden/Denmark, 2018, 108m
Scandinavian mythology makes for a visceral fantastical drama on the mystery of identity in this adaptation of a story by Let the Right One In writer John Ajvide Lindqvist. Ali Abbasi’s twisty Cannes award-winner (Un Certain Regard, 2018) centers on a customs inspector, Tina, who possesses the ability to sniff out contraband and moral corruption. Her findings lead her into a criminal investigation, but the heart of Border lies with Tina, who tires of her deadbeat boyfriend and experiences a full-bodied awakening like little else seen on screen. Grounding it all is Eva Melander’s outstanding, minutely sensitive performance, the true north for Abbasi’s genre-driven momentum. A NEON release.

The Wild Pear Tree
Dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey, 2018, 188m
The gorgeous backdrop of rolling country and idyllic farmland are cold comfort to the frustrated hero of The Wild Pear Tree. Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) captures the wrenching struggles of a bright literary graduate, Sinan (Aydın Doğu Demirko), who is trying to take flight in a world he can’t entirely accept. Ceylan revives a deeply humanist cinema of ideas in tracking Sinan’s path through the more urgent questions of youth, romance, religious orthodoxy, and shaking off the burdens of your family—without ennobling the all-too-human Sinan. Often shooting in unbroken takes, Ceylan compellingly “renders the frustrations of this young man as so much misplaced passion” (Kent Jones, Film Comment). A Cinema Guild release.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/WW3.jpg
The Wild Pear Tree

[Chris Knipp]

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/ffyn2.jpg (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37130#post37130)

NYFF 2018 Festival Coverage thread.

This NYFF 2018 (56) Festival Coverage thread is getting set up now, with titles and images and intros to the films I'm pretty sure to be seeing. Check it out here: CLICK (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018).

[Chris Knipp]

The FSLC poster for NYFF 56.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/o89p.jpg

2018 NYFF Festival Coverage Thread (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018)

[Chris Knipp]

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/y651t.jpg

About the poster. It resulted from a spontaneous collaboration between the cinematographer Ed Lachman (left), a regular at Film Society of Lincoln Center screenings (when he is not working), and JR (right), the community-participation French photographer who made Faces, Places with Agnès Varda recently.


On the partnership and thought process behind this year’s poster, Ed Lachman explains, "Being at the Festival is the highlight of the year for me, when I’m not working. It’s a place to meet, share, and experience what cinema can be. The opportunity to create the poster for the New York Film Festival and collaborate with JR was a formidable experience and similar to filmmaking, where one works with other visual artists to create a project. I’ve had the greatest respect and admiration for his work over the years, both visually and how he engages communities he’s portraying within a social context, which I think is so important in today’s world, to find how we're all connected, rather than separated and divided."

According to Lachman, "The idea came together using JR’s emblematic eyes . . . What is cinema without the mind, the heart, and the eyes of the filmmakers? Using the director’s eyes can symbolize the creative force behind the images and the stories that the Festival has championed and represented to New York over the years, supported by the audience holding the placards of their eyes, and what can be more New York than our alleyways?"

A revered and award-winning cinematographer, Ed Lachman has shot more than 100 narrative, experimental, and documentary titles in the United States and internationally. He is known for his collaborations with Todd Haynes, Steven Soderbergh, Robert Altman, Paul Schrader, Todd Solondz, Sofia Coppola, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff, Ulrich Seidl, and Jean Luc-Godard, among others .

Lachman’s work has garnered him numerous honors including Academy Award nominations for his work on [I]Carol (2015) and Far from Heaven (2002), as well as an Emmy nomination for the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce (2011). He has been honored with the American Society of Cinematographers Lifetime Achievement Award, Telluride Medallion Award, Gotham Award, and this year at Cannes with the 2018 Angenieux ExcelLens in Cinematography Award. Lachman is also known as a visual artist who has had installations, videos, and photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, the Ludwig Museum in Germany, and many other museums and galleries throughout the world.

JR exhibits freely in the streets of the world, catching the attention of people who are not typical museum visitors. In 2006, he created Portrait of a Generation, images of suburban "thugs" that he posted in huge formats in the bourgeois districts of Paris. In 2007, with Marco, he made Face 2 Face, large portraits of Israelis and Palestinians standing facing each other in eight Palestinian and Israeli Cities, considered the biggest illegal exhibition ever. In 2011, he received the TED Prize. Later that same year, he created Inside Out, a global participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into works of art. As of September 2017, over 350,000 people from more than 140 countries have participated, through mail or gigantic photo booths.

His recent projects include a collaboration with New York City Ballet; the feature documentary Faces Places, co-directed with Nouvelle Vague legend Agnès Varda; seemingly “erasing” the pyramid outside of the Louvre; giant scaffolding installations at the 2016 Rio Olympics; an exhibition on the abandoned hospital of Ellis Island; and a gigantic installation at the U.S.-Mexico border fence. As he remains anonymous and doesn’t explain his enlarged full-frame portraits, JR leaves the space empty for an encounter between the subject/protagonist and the passerby/interpreter.

A special thank you to photographers David Godlis and Julie Cunnah for their photo contributions to the poster. Chantal Akerman photo courtesy of Kenneth Saunders/The Guardian.

These limited-edition posters will be available for purchase during the festival at filmlinc.org/merch. NYFF will also be holding a contest: the person who correctly identifies the most director eyes will receive a pair of festival tickets and a signed poster. See a poster key here and enter the contest here. Ed Lachman will speak to NYFF audiences about the poster concept and creative process at a free NYFF Live talk during the festival, details to be announced. - FSLC press release.
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/o8911p.jpg
2018 NYFF Festival Coverage Thread (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018)

[Chris Knipp]

SORRY ANGEL/PLAIRE, AIMER, ET COURIR VITE (Christophe Honoré 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37131#post37131)

In a coming of age epic Honoré for the first time (in his eleventh feature) directly confronts his own experience of being French and gay in the age of AIDS. Three characters, who interact, stand in for him as a young man in Brittany who eventually movies to Paris (Vincent Lacoste), a somewhat successful writer he falls in love with who has AIDS (Pierre Deladonchamps) and an older man who must be content with prostitutes (Denis Podalydès). At times harsh, poetic, or funny, Sorry Angel is a brave and accomplished film, and a lot to take in at one sitting.

[Chris Knipp]

A new press release about a surprise NYFF screening: Jonah Hill's directorial debut feature.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/99iu.jpg


New York, NY (October 1, 2018) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center reveals the NYFF secret screening as Jonah Hill’s Mid90s, making its New York premiere at the 56th New York Film Festival (September 28 – October 14).

Jonah Hill’s directorial debut is a frank, intimate, and emotionally layered reflection on an unlikely coming-of-age in the world of 90s L.A. skate culture. Thirteen-year-old Stevie (Sunny Suljic), growing up with a loving but largely absent mother (Katherine Waterston) and a resentful brother (Lucas Hedges), seeks refuge with older kids who hang out (and barely work) at a Los Angeles skate shop. The energy between Stevie and his crew, played by Ryder McLaughlin, Olan Prenatt, Gio Galicia, and Na-kel Smith, fuels a film that is at once lyrical, hilarious, terrifying, and just…real.

The 17-day New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema, featuring works from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. The selection committee, chaired by Kent Jones, also includes Dennis Lim, FSLC Director of Programming, and Florence Almozini, FSLC Associate Director of Programming.

Tickets for Mid90s are on sale now and are $25; $20 for students and Film Society members

[Chris Knipp]

Click here for thumbnail New York Movie journal revies of five more NYFF Main Slate films: Tamara Jenkins' Private Life,, Olivier Assayas' Non-fiction/Doubles vies, Ying Liang's A Family Tour, Lee Chang-dong's Burning, and Claire Denis' High Life. (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4561-NEW-YORK-MOVIE-JOURNAL-(Sept-Oct-2018)&p=37161#post37161)

[Chris Knipp]

PRIVATE LIFE (Tamara Jenkins 2018). (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37132#post37132)

Eleven years since Jenkins' last film, Savages, this one seems still focused on the narrow aim of (affectionately) satirizing a hip white middle class demographic. Kathryn Kahn and Paul Giamatti play a couple in their forties, literary types living in the Lower East Side, going nuts trying with the help of a fancy fertility clinic to have a baby. Warmly received by the NYFF audience.

[Chris Knipp]

NON-FICTION/DOUBLES VIES (Olivier Assayas 2018). (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37133#post37133)

A witty, fast-paced, smartly edited incarnation of traditional French farce, focused on two criss-crossing couples (and some others), with Juliette Binoche, Guillaume Canet, Vincent Macaigne and Pascal Greggory, and a lot of debating of entertainment, media, and the current cyber world vs. print. The result is both exhilarating and calming. Another feather in the cap of the versatile Olivier Assayas.

[Chris Knipp]

A FAMILY TOUR (Ying Liang 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37134#post37134)

Things have changed since I watched Ying's mini-budget Taking Father Home with Travis Kirby in 2006 and Travis reviewed it disapprovingly in the Festival Coverage section. The director's subsequent films so angered the repressive Mainland Chinese regime that Ying was forced into exile with his wife and small child in Hong Kong. This film, his first since their exile began sic years ago, depicts with sad precision an experience they had meeting furtively with family members by joining a strict Mainland-run guided tour of Taiwan. Visa problems in Hong Kong prevented him from being present for the small NYFF screening. This was painful and even sometimes boring to watch but also very true and sometimes poetic and delicate, and fans of Chinese cinema need to see Ying's films.

[Chris Knipp]

BURNING / 버닝 (Lee Chang-dong 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37135#post37135)

Sexual frustration, class, mystery, envy and revenge in a masterful spinoff of a 1992 Haruki Murakami story blended with Faulkner. One of the 2018 NYFF's true masterpieces.

[Chris Knipp]

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/0u9.jpg
A traumatic early scene in Never Look Away

Preview: a fine new German film (not in the festival)
Never Look Away (Florian Henckel von Donnersmark)

Another great movie I just saw a couple days ago (Sony Pictures Classics): NEVER LOOK AWAY (written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck of The Lives of Others). Three hours long and starring Tom Schilling of A Coffee in Berlin (Jan Ole Gerster: A Coffee in Berlin (2012)), it traces the life of an artist in Germany from the Thirties to the Sixties and relates to the careers of a number of artists, particularly to Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter. I have to hold my review for theatrical release, either the end of November or early 2019. It is the German entry for Best Foreign Oscar, and it's flawed in a few ways but still great - a splendid film whose treatment of the life of art and the art of the postwar period is worlds beyond the next tumultuous Van Gogh saga, or story of Picasso's women. It's surprising and gratifying to see the great events of the Twentieth Century drawn from the point of view of an important post-war German artist. It's subject is nothing less than modern art's fractured search for meaning in a world of exhausted ideas and shattered feelings.

[Chris Knipp]

An introduction to the 56th NYFF from A.O. Scott of the New York Times

Read it here: CLICK (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/movies/new-york-film-festival-highlights.html).

A quote. Why should people attend this festival? he asks. Well, because. . . "We are too easily lulled into complacency by pretentious prestige television, Oscar-thirsty biopics and presold franchises. We need reminders of strangeness and daring, films that don’t just confirm what we already thought we knew. Above all we need to be inoculated against the temptations of nostalgia, to recognize the golden age of right now. . .What I’m saying is that the presence in the New York festival lineup of new work by Claire Denis, Jia Zhangke, Alfonso Cuarón, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Lee Chang-dong and Olivier Assayas is news."

On Olivier Assayas' Non-Fiction/Doubles vies (reviewed in Filmleaf's Festival Coverage already: "Mr. Assayas’s “Non-Fiction” is in effect a series of arguments — lofty debates about the impact of digital technology on French politics and culture conducted by sophisticated Parisians who occasionally pause from their discourses for a nice meal or a bit of adultery. A French movie, in other words, almost to the point of deliberate and sly self-parody."

But Juliette Binoche plays it completely straight and relaxed. What about her Claire Denis' High Life, which Binoche is also prominent in? (and which was also just reviewed on this site? It's "a mind-bending science-fiction allegory elegantly accoutered with sex, violence and metaphysical speculation. Genre movies are something of a rarity in the main slate, but Ms. Denis’s daring, dialectical sensibility, her shrewd fusion of the visceral and the cerebral, transcend genre." Which he more or less says, is what good directors always do. Don't they?

[Chris Knipp]

HIGH LIFE (Claire Denis 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37136#post37136)

Her first sci-fi film and first in English stars Juliette Binoche and Robert Pattinson, with squalling babies in space,rape and revenge, masturbation of a lady with very long hair, cryogenic bodies tossed away in space. Typically it is earthy sexy and violent and not like any other.

ROMA (Alfonso Cuarón 2018). (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37137#post37137)

Cuarón's brilliant and shattering black and white autobiographical portrait of a well off family and their live-in maids in Mexico City's "Roma" district in 1970-71.

[Chris Knipp]

A FAITHFUL MAN/L'HOMME FIDÈLE (Louis Garrel 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37138#post37138)

Garrel's second outing as director (and star) throws caution to the winds and freely adopts French New Wave mannerisms, voiceovers, Paris settings, cafes, apartments, love affairs - and it works delightfully, thanks to a kid who manipulates the adults (Joseph Engel), and the appeal of the three adult stars, Laetitia Casta, Lily-Rose Depp, Louis Garrel. This goes forward from the young men fighting over a woman in Garrel's first film The Two Friends and deals with a widow and a disappointed man, and a girl who's become a woman and gives in to a crush. Garrel was on hand for a lively Q&A, talking a blue streak in his somewhat makeshift but highly articulate English. Almost as good as the film, as can happen, but doesn't always.

SHOPLIFTERS (Hirakazu Koreeda 2018). (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37139#post37139)

This relates to NOBODY KNOWS and Kurosawa's DODESKADEN because it's about Tokyo poverty and desperation and kids, but its focus is on an ersatz family of marginal people that grows warm and real, but hangs by a thread. It came from behind to win the top award, the Palme d'Or, at this year's Cannes. Subtle and insinuating. Certainly one of Koreeda's best - and Japan's Best Foreign Oscar entry. No Q&A. Koreeda sent only a brief subtitled video intro from Tokyo.

[Chris Knipp]

ASH IS PUREST WHITE (Jia Zhang-ke 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37141#post37141)

A very impressive reworking of romantic themes from Jis's earlier Unknown Pleasures and Still Life, always with the upheavals of 21st-century China in the present, with gangsters, and jianghu codes referenced in the Chinese title, and Jia's muse and wife Zhao Tao more central and powerful than ever, notably paired with Liao Fan as her man. One of the director's masterpieces, fusing his many elements with virtuoso skill.

[Chris Knipp]

ASAKO I & II (Ryosuke Hamaguchi 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37152#post37152)

Hamaguchi's story about a young woman torn between two identical men, a dashing wild one and a practical hard working one, is too conventional and silly to justify its choice for Cannes Competition this year. He needs to do more to live up to the international reputation the five-hour Happy Hour (his seventh film) got him three years ago. But there are delicate or surprising moments, and it's fun to watch the handsome young actor Masahiro Higashide reinvent himself in two contrasting characters, with the same shy baby-faced young woman. She's not quite worth our time.

[Chris Knipp]

TRANSIT (Christian Petzold 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37153#post37153)

Petzold's eccentric version of Anna Seghers' German 1942 novel about entanglements of refuges in Marseille leaves out World War II and the Holocaust, adds Kafkaesque complexities. It's a disorienting watch, and lacks the director's muse Nina Hoss, but there are haunting passages that reminded me of Patrick Modiano.

THE TIMES OF BILL CUNNINGHAM (Mark Bozak 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37154#post37154)

Another film about the legendary cycling, blue FRench workman jacketed street fashion photographer whose observations were published in the New York Times every Sunday, who died at 87 three years ago. The reason is a lengthy film interview with Bill from 1994 by Bozak, plus Bozak's access to full Bill visual archives through his niece. His contribution is legendary. His austerity was zen-like.

[Chris Knipp]

Filmleaf coverage of the 2018 New York Film Festival.

Links to Reviews:

Asako I & II/寝ても覚めても (Ryūsuke Hamaguchi 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37152#post37152)
Ash Is Purest White/江湖儿女 (Jia Zhang-ke 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37141#post37141)
At Eternity's Gate (Julian Schnabel 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37230#post37230)
Ballad of Buster Scruggs, The (Joel, Ethan Coen 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37227#post37227)
Burning/Beoning /버닝 (Lee Chang-dong 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37135#post37135)
Cold War/Zimna wojna (Paweł Pawlikowski 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37140#post37140)
Faithful Man, A/L'homme fidèle (Louis Garrel 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37138#post37138)
Family Tour, A/自由行(Ying Liang 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37134#post37134)
Favourite, The (Yorgos Lanthimos 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4565-LONDON-FILM-FESTIVAL-2018-a-quick-glance)
High Life (Claire Denis 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37136#post37136)
If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37245#post37245)
Monrovia, Indiana (Frederick Wiseman 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37174#post37174)
Non FictionNon-Fiction/Doubles vies (Olivier Assayas 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37133#post37133)
Private Life (Tamara Jenkins 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37132#post37132)
ROMA (Alfonso Cuarón 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37137#post37137)
Shoplifters/万引き家族 Manbiki Kazoku (Hirakasu Koreeda 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37139#post37139)
Sorry Angel/Plaire, aimer et courir vite (Christophe Honoré 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37131#post37131)
Times of Bill Cunningham, The (Mark Bozek 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37154#post37154)
Transit (Christian Petzold 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37153#post37153)
Wildlife (Paul Dano 2018 (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37225#post37225))

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/o89p.jpg

[Chris Knipp]

WILDLIFE (Paul Dano 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37225#post37225)

(Finally caught it on its last day at Shattuck Berkeley.)

So low keyed at times you may not realize what a fine package it is, in all aspects, book, acting, images. An adaptation by Dano with Zoe Kazan of the Richard Ford novel set in the early Sixties about a little family that comes apart when the man (Jake Gyllenhaal) loses his job and goes off to fight wild fires in the mountains while the wife (Carey Mulligan) and 14-year-old son (discovery Ed Oxenbould) must desperately fend for themselves. A splendid debut for Dano.

[oscar jubis]

I liked Paul Dano's movie too; reminds me of something like "Kramer vs Kramer" or "Ordinary People".

Your headline about the new Coen Bros' movie is applicable to their output, generally speaking. I'm not quoting you verbatim here but the idea is fine craft in the service of nihilism, which is something of little value to me. I was mildly entertained by the film, particularly with the use of language or the wordplay in a couple episodes.

I'm anxious to see "Roma" because it depicts a world I know quite intimately. I may be too tough a judge of it; too close to the subject.

"The Other Side of the Wind" is so rich with all kinds of film-history references a lot of (young?) people will totally miss. This movie also has more meaning to me than it does to the average audience. I absolutely love the wat Welles plays near the hazy boundary between fiction and documentary; drama and comedy. Just brilliant film!

[Chris Knipp]

I agree Wildlife is a very fine film. I think, though, that you are wrong to dismiss the Coens' output so summarily (there is great variety in their work) and you underrate The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, especially the penultimate episode, "The Gal Who Got Rattled," which everybody likes and has tenderness, great attention to period, and fine acting before its dark finale.

Just found Mike D'Angelo's two tweets on Buster. First (https://twitter.com/gemko/status/1063677561773817856):

Mixed on BUSTER SCRUGGS but "The Gal Who Got Rattled" is my film of the year. Just note-perfect. Then he says something I was thinking, how Bill Heck stands out.
Is it just me or is this Bill Heck fellow in BUSTER SCRUGGS very quietly sensational? Last time I felt such a strong star-is-born feeling was Mackenzie Davis (also opposite Zoe Kazan, come to think of it). Heck plays the wagon train leader Billy Knapp who becomes the heroine's would-be savior and suitor. There is nothing cold or nihilistic about that sequence. It's sweet, and a treatise on old-fashioned manners and decency. Sometimes angry and bitter artists (Jonathan Swift, for instance) harbor a passionate tenderness and caring. Would you call Samuel Beckett nihilistic? If so, you'd be wrong.

Many including Justin Chang seconded D'Angelo's tweet (https://twitter.com/gemko/status/1063665663279980544) in praise of Bill Heck. Might be good also to listen to Film Comment's podcast (https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/film-comment-podcast-ballad-coen-brothers/) on this film.

It is necessary to see The Other Side and the documentary about it before saying anything, and you're not kidding when you say kids may miss many references, adults too. They have immense fun in the documentary with elaborate references and recollections and asides. After all this, I don't know if I like Orson Welles after all. Of course I do, but I wouldn't want to have to deal with him, and you can see why he had trouble getting his movies financed, or finished. He had to be grand (studio) but he was too indie, he didn't fit. Should write about these for the NYFF coverage but it's a lot to take on.

[Chris Knipp]

THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS (Joel, Ethan Coen 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37227#post37227)

Six episodes made for Annapurna Television, then sold to Netflix for internet streaming and limited theatrical release, all in a Western mode, with many of the clichés of the genre, grasping prospectors, gunslingers, frontier towns, a wagon train, attacking Indians, a stagecoach and ladies in need of a man, in varied style but presented as stories from a storybook (mostly written by the Coens over a period of many years, but one by Jack London and one by another writer). They are mostly dark or grim, but one, the longest, is also memorably sweet. Beautifully crafted, like miniatures, with splendid landscapes and fine actors, this film is one of the Coens' best in recent years, and its Metascore is 78; only six other of their films rank higher on this scale. They are Inside Llewyn Davis (93), No Country for Old Men (91) Fargo 85, Blood Simple 81, True Grit 80, A Serious Man 79. (Barton Fink is 69; these don't all make sense.)

[Chris Knipp]

Lincoln Center's important Christian Petzold retrospective opens Fri. 30 Nov. 2018

[press release]
Christian Petzold: The State We Are In Starts Tonight!
Don't miss our highly anticipated showcase of the acclaimed German master, who joins us in person this weekend for the largest U.S. retrospective of his work to date.

Weekend highlights include:
An opening-night sneak preview of NYFF56 hit Transit, featuring a pre-screening reception and director Q&A to follow • Petzold's remarkable debut feature The State I Am In • The critically acclaimed post-WWII drama Phoenix • Berlin Film Festival prizewinner Yella • and much more!


Get Tickets (https://www.filmlinc.org/series/christian-petzold-the-state-we-are-in/?utm_source=wordfly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2018_11_30_Newsletter&utm_content=version_A#films)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/nh.jpg
Nina Hoss in Barbara

[Chris Knipp]

IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK (Barry Jenkins 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37245#post37245)

Barry Jenkins' third feature, adapting the James Baldwin novel about two young lovers in Harlem in the early 1970's, seemed to me (and some others) a little too beautiful and sweet to be true. But it's still moving and still a must-see. It came out in theaters on Christmas Day.

[Chris Knipp]

NYFF 2018 Main Slate films not seen yet (still quite a few):

3 Faces
Dir. Jafar Panahi

La Flor
Dir. Mariano Llinás

Grass
Dir. Hong Sangsoo

Happy as Lazzaro / Lazzaro felice
Dir. Alice Rohrwacher

Her Smell
Dir. Alex Ross Perry

Hotel by the River
Dir. Hong Sangsoo

Image Book, The
Dir. Jean-Luc Godard

In My Room
Dir. Ulrich Köhler

Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Dir. Bi Gan

Ray & Liz
Dir. Richard Billingham

Too Late to Die Young
Dir. Dominga Sotomayor
These are the "hardest" to see, except that Happy as Lazzaro / Lazzaro felice is on Netflix.

[Chris Knipp]

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/ouy6.jpg
Bi Gan's Long Day's Journey Into Night

Additions to Filmleaf's 2018 NYFF Main Slate coverage.

HAPPY AS LAZZARO (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37268#post37268) (from Netflix) was added soon after the last post.

IN MY ROOM (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37273#post37273) Was added 12 Apr. via the San Francisco Film Festival. Coming shortly will be another addition,

LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT A review will appear on Filmleaf shortly. It's soon to be released in San Francisco and Berkeley. It's a big one, much discussed and admired.

That's it for now.
__________________________________

HER SMELL is now showing in San Francisco, but but hard for me to get to right now. No doubt to be seen if only for Elizabeth Moss's performance and it's sure to be available online soon.

3 FACES Us release by Kino Lorber but we missed both its NYC and San Francisco playdates (Mar.-Apr.). It will be available online soon no doubt.

RAY & LIZ will be playing in Baltimore (9 May) in the Maryland Film Festival but US release is uncertain.

HOTEL BY THE RIVER is US released by Cinema Guild and will have limited distribution in 2019.

GRASS came out in NYC 19 Apr. Unfortunately, Filmleaf there.

So: progress. But three out of eight ain't great. Just goes to show you why it's important to attend film festivals - and why it's unfortunate Filmleaf isn't covering the NYFF as press anymore. When we were, seeing and reviewing the entire Main Slate was a given.

[Chris Knipp]

LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT/ (Bi Gan 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37580#post37580)

Another journey back to Kaili by the young talent of KAILI BLUES (ND/NF 2016). An awesome talent. With the rapturous evocations of Wong Kar-wai and a second half that's an over-an-hour continuous take in 3D. Bi Gan may be better when he feels less need to prove his mastery. But this is reportedly the biggest art house success the China mainland has ever had.

Now in US theatrical release by Kino Lorber, I got to screen it because it comes out in the Bay Area shortly.

Watch the FSLC trailer H E R E (https://www.filmlinc.org/films/long-days-journey-night-bi-gan/).

[Chris Knipp]

Back to Louis Garrel's A FAITHFUL MAN/L'HOMME FIDÈLE (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37138#post37138): I'm rewatching the Lincoln Center Q&A with Garrel. He gives a simple explanation of the odd plot. He and Jean-Claude Carrière - who are about 50 years different in age, and differed in their cinematic taste - wrote the screenplay a little like a surrealist cadavre exquis (exquisite corpses) where successive artists completed drawings without seeing the parts the others had added. Each new scene was a surprise from Garrel or Carrière in turn, with Carrière contributing the "dry" scenes and Garrel adding "sentimental" ones. He doesn't say which scenes were his, but Carrière did the first one, where the protagonist gets the rude shock from his girlfriend. Obviously the boy's story that his mother killed his father is one of the deliberately shocking turnarounds - just when Marienne and Abel were getting back together. It's a playful method that Garrel unifies with the classic and conventional Paris setting, even the Eiffel Tower in the opening shot. It's so shematic that it works, and it's conventional yet strange - which is true also of Chabrol.

See the Q&A with Garrel HERE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ6ZWHntbAo).

[Chris Knipp]

At last US theatrical release of THE TIMES OF BILL CUNNINGHAM (Mark Bozak 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=37154#post37154) has been announced. The film will open at New York’s Angelika Film Center and Cinemas 1, 2 & 3 on Friday, February 14 with a national expansion to follow (including Los Angeles on February 21).

[Chris Knipp]

RAY & lIZ (Richard Billingham 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4556-New-York-Film-Festival-2018&p=38201#post38201)

The celebrated photographer's BAFTA-nominated feature debut is a memoir of his and his younger brother Jason's miserable neglected childhood in the Midlands. You'd expect miserabilism, perhaps, but instead, this is a sweet and forgiving portrait of his disastrous parents and his poor brother that's splendid and original filmmaking. With images that have an intimist sutlety and are a delight to the eye.

Watched as a preview of the digital and on demand release, this will be available to all starting April 14, 2020. Highly recommended.