Autumn Lights (2016) A Film by Angad Aulakh

"Anyone who’s spent some time on Vimeo in the last few years should be familiar with a certain surge in fawning Icelandic tourism videography, the tropes of which are immediately recognizable, from time-lapse footage of waterfalls to leisurely pans of glaciers, all accompanied by sub-Sigur Rós post-rock. If a mark of distinction can be conferred upon the Icelandic-American production Autumn Lights, it’s that writer-director Angad Aulakh more or less skirts these conventions. Save for the occasional pillow shot of a distantly viewed snowcapped mountain or a glassy lake surface, the filmmaker keeps most of his story’s action confined to interiors, and when his characters do venture into the great outdoors, they spend most of their time in dense pine groves that effectively block off Iceland’s picturesque vistas."

Full review at Slant.

Gabe Klinger Interview

I interviewed writer/director/critic Gabe Klinger at the Zurich Film Festival for Filmmaker Magazine, in which we discussed his new film Porto, its unique use of various film gauges, and its debt to Manoel De Oliveira, among other things. Here's one of my favorite bits:

"Klinger: When I’ve been in romantic relationships and they’ve run their course, I think there’s still a little bit that you can salvage from whatever’s left. You always ask the person, 'don’t you remember the good moments?' But more often than not, the bad things cloud those things. And it works the other way around, too. The irrational side of us always wants things to stay as they are, but if you’re not in love anymore, you can take the rational posture, which is also kind of irrational, because love isn’t a coherent thing. So the person who wants to stay in the relationship becomes the crazy person and the person who wants to leave the relationship because it’s 'for the best' becomes the rational one, but actually you’re both irrational. There’s no clear-headed way to summarize what happened to you."

Zurich Film Festival

"It's generally agreed upon that one should allow themselves a few hours of decompression and acclimation when first landing in a faraway city, but as I drowsily touched down for the 12th annual Zurich Film Festival after an arduous 10-hour flight, time was not on my side, so I rushed instead to a film that captures something ineffable about the frazzled traveler's mindset. Gabe Klinger's Porto, my first taste of the festival at an evening showing, is about bemusedly roaming in half-light through a foreign city while periodically drifting in and out of recollections of a potent recent relationship gone sour."

I attended the Zurich Film Festival and covered it across two dispatches for the House Next Door.

Dispatch #1: On Porto, La Reconquista, Lady Macbeth, and Two Lottery Tickets
Dispatch #2: On Vanatoare, Europe, She Loves, Einfach Leben, Sketches of Lou, The Eremites, Misericorde, El Invierno

Contesting History – The Films of Oliver Stone

"Regarded as a politically radical firebrand nearly as often as he’s discussed for his filmmaking, Oliver Stone is one of the monolithic voices of contemporary Hollywood—a figure about whom opinion tends to be divided starkly between derision and adulation, with little room for ambivalence in between. As a veteran of the Vietnam War whose Bronze Star and Purple Heart belie a profound disillusionment with his experience there, Stone has spent a considerable chunk of his directorial career depicting the events of the 1960s and 70s, paying particular attention to the ways in which the era’s tensions and contradictions act as barometers for more enduring problems in American politics. His overarching thesis as a filmmaker—that passive faith in one’s nation leaves one blind to the fact that the interconnected forces of government and national media construct digestible narratives for their citizenry in ways that protect their own interests—doubles as a call to action, which therefore brands Stone as an activist working within the entertainment business, a perch from which he wields a rare influence."

The Harvard Film Archive is hosting a small survey of Oliver Stone's political filmmaking this fall. They generously asked me to contribute the introduction and, with the exception of the blurb on Snowden, all of the program notes for the series, which can be viewed here.

Richard Linklater: Dream is Destiny (2016) A Film by Louis Black and Karen Bernstein

"'He kinda has to create another world to express how he feels about this one,' enthuses Boyhood star Ellar Coltrane of director Richard Linklater during the procession of admiring quotes that opens Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny, the third recent release to offer a peek into the life of the Texan filmmaker and the second to do so in the style of a conventional expository documentary. Such an awe-strikingly general statement (about what director could this not be said?) isn't exactly a surprise from a young actor, but it's also not really the kind of sound bite that primes a viewer to expect critical rigor, and in placing it right at the head of their film, directors Louis Black and Karen Bernstein set an unfortunate precedent that's seldom surpassed. In fact, Coltrane's quote isn't even the flimsiest inclusion: At one point, longtime Linklater editor Sandra Adair declares that “he knows his characters so well and he understands the kinds of films he's making.”

Full review at Slant.

Indignation (2016) A Film by James Schamus

"Schamus's debut feature is impressive for how its tamped-down style and the coming-of-age narrative work so confidently in tandem, with the filmmaking's sedate professionalism increasingly reflecting a milieu in which decorum is paramount, and any behavioral deviation stands out. Marcus's decision, egged on by his vigilantly cautious parents, to attend Winesburg College while his peers ship off to the Korean War is itself a deviation, and it sets into motion a slowly dawning realization for the young man to the limited pathways allowed by the conservative society he's been raised in. If Newark feels to him like a hermetically sealed mini-universe lorded over by his paranoid father (Danny Burstein) and orbiting around only the prospect of the small-time family butchering business, then Winesburg, with its mandatory sermons and rigidly compartmentalized campus social groups, is just another trap."

Full review here.

For the Plasma (2014) A Film by Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan

"Among the films to emerge in recent years to exhibit the influence of Jacques Rivette, Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan's For the Plasma wears its reverence for the French director most transparently. It gives us a coastal Maine setting vibrating with an air of the unreal; two female protagonists who, while tasked initially with one project, gradually become embroiled in other clandestine pursuits signifying some slippery conspiracy; a chain of scenarios involving mapping, tracing, and analyzing; and well-dressed businessmen with apparent connections to a larger, just-out-of-reach intrigue. The film's two leads resemble Rivette muses of yesteryear, with frizzy-haired, monotone Rosalie Lowe evoking Bulle Ogier and the boyish Anabelle LeMieux inviting comparisons to Juliet Berto circa Out 1. Eventually, one even goes boating."

Review continues here.

Cafe Society (2016) A Film by Woody Allen

"More than any of his numerous recent films, Woody Allen's Café Society conveys the enormity of life's experience, and it does so using the most direct means possible: by simply piling up incidents. While the 80-year-old filmmaker's speedy rate of production continues to be laudable, the velocity of his recent work is equally notable. These days, Allen's screenplays carom from one plot point to the next with a highly selective regard for what to bother picking through the implications of, and Café Society bears that tendency out in the extreme. Here's a film in which the protagonist's mafia-involved brother is put to death at one point and all that's allocated to the passing is a curt establishing shot of ash-spreading before a cut to a wailing nightclub crooner jars the film back into its jazzy swing."

Full review continues here.

Men Go to Battle (2015) A Film by Zachary Treitz

"Shot on quasi-grainy digital at close range and evenly lit in autumnal tones, Zachary Treitz's Civil War-set Men Go to Battle lacks the polish and bombast of much costlier historical dramas. Evoking the cloistered rawness of Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights and Robert Eggers's The Witch, the film aims for revelatory intimacy within a commonplace past, but while its simulacrum of 1860s Kentucky is impressively textured in spite of a shoestring budget, Treitz's preference for arm's-length characterizations renders a convincingly made-over ensemble little more than another ornament on the landscape."

Full review here.

Dark Night (2016) A Film by Tim Sutton

"The first four images of Dark Night, Tim Sutton's contemplation of civilian gun violence in America, have a fragmentary precision that's gutting. First, a girl's eye is studied in close-up as red and blue light—seemingly the incandescence of either a movie screen or fireworks—flashes over it. Then, streaks of refracted red light blink rhythmically across the top of a dark frame, forcing us to reconsider the source of the initial glow as potentially that of a police siren, followed by a shot of a larger red smear, underneath which a distant American flag slowly waves. This sequence is capped off by a wider angle of the girl, who's sullenly slumped on some grass at the side of a road as the unfocused legs of onlookers bob in the background and ambulance sirens creep into the otherwise hushed soundscape."

Full review here.

The Shallows (2016) A Film by Jaume Collet-Serra

"For four films in a row now, Jaume Collet-Serra has placed modern image-capturing devices—a security feed in Unknown, smartphone cameras in Non-Stop and Run All Night, and now a GoPro in The Shallows—into his plots as carriers of empirical evidence that in some way click the narratives into place. It's an auteurist quirk that's getting increasingly difficult to write off as merely a techie fetish or an act of pandering to his touch-screen-savvy audience, especially since the wildly popular matchbox-sized HD machine at the heart of The Shallows permits Blake Lively's embattled surfer to record a soulful message to geographically distant loved ones that might otherwise have gone unexpressed. The camera also literally acts as the savior of the story, floating into her vicinity just when it seems all hope is lost." Review continues here.

Robert Aldrich Retrospective

The Harvard Film Archive is hosting "...All the Marbles (The Complete Robert Aldrich)" this summer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'm proud to say I contributed the introduction, as well as program notes on Kiss Me Deadly, World for Ransom, Ten Seconds to Hell, The Legend of Lylah Clare, Attack!, The Longest Yard, Big Leaguer, Apache, The Last Sunset, The Choirboys, The Dirty Dozen, Kiss Me Deadly, The Prowler, Sodom and Gomorrah, Too Late the Hero, The Grissom Gang, 4 for Texas, Hustle, The Southerner, The Angry Hills, The Frisco Kid, Emperor of the North, and The Big Knife.

Here's an excerpt of the intro:

"In many ways, Aldrich came out of the gate with a will to impress and a sensibility largely formed. In the first three years of his career alone, he directed Apache, one of the first Hollywood Westerns to center on a Native American protagonist (despite a bronzed Burt Lancaster playing him) and treat the subject of the white man’s colonization of the West bluntly; Vera Cruz, a financially triumphant vehicle for Lancaster and Gary Cooper; Kiss Me Deadly, a cause célèbre for the tough-to-please Cahiers du Cinéma clique and a sly retooling of the film noir genre; and The Big Knife, a scalpel sunk deep into the charade of a movie industry founded on duplicity and authoritarianism. These were films that aimed to make a mark, upturning expectations for the genres in which they worked and casting a view of society as inherently broken, a wall against which principled men must relentlessly push. They laid down the archetype that would course through Aldrich’s entire body of work. In his words, 'It’s the same character in a number of pictures that keeps reappearing…a heroic figure, who understands that the probabilities are that he’ll lose.'"

The Alchemist Cookbook (2016) A Film by Joel Potrykus

"Joel Potrykus's last film, Buzzard, placed its loafer protagonist in a crushingly dull middle-American milieu until he went berserk, with the donning of Freddy Krueger fingers and Halloween-store masks crudely symbolizing the rejection of a status-quo existence while also staying well within the bounds of realism. His new film, the beguiling The Alchemist Cookbook, begins where Buzzard left off, with the numbing social context a thing of the past and the hero, like some metamorphosing movie monster of yesteryear, transforming hastily into something beyond (or sub) human." Full review of The Alchemist Cookbook, which plays as part of BAMCinemaFest, continues here.

The Other Side (2015) A Film by Roberto Minervini

"An artist of herculean empathy turns his camera on a narrow-minded community in The Other Side, Italian director Roberto Minervini's fourth cinematic sojourn in the American South. Nearly every moment in this Bayou-set docu-fiction hybrid engenders a tricky twofold reaction: The words and actions of the people on screen often trigger revulsion, anger, or pity, even as Minervini's camera tenderly cozies up to its subjects, examining them in intimate proximity until the root causes and emotional justifications for their destructive behaviors become impossible to ignore." Review continues here.

The Holcroft Covenant (1985) A Film by John Frankenheimer

"Noel Holcroft (Michael Caine) doesn't know how to use a gun when The Holcroft Covenant begins. By the film's conclusion, not only can he hold one with the kind of cool poise expected of spy heroes, but he's also sharp with pistol disassembly and reassembly. This education dovetails with a plot that finds Holcroft, an honest New Yorker in the commercial construction business, becoming the victim of a transnational terror scheme and ultimately learning enough about it to singlehandedly upend its fulfillment of a prospective Fourth Reich. The year is 1985 (“Now,” as a title urgently informs us), a time in which the United States was still using counterintelligence to sniff out Soviet influence. Yet director John Frankenheimer and writer George Axelrod look at espionage and find the very concept a destructive breach of privacy and a route to anarchy, something for which active resistance—in this case, prowess with a firearm—must come into play." Full review here.

Green Room (2015) A Film by Jeremy Saulnier

"Bigotry ends up playing little direct role in the reckless murderous corruption that advances the plot of the locked-room thriller Green Room. Still, Jeremy Saulnier bluntly sets the record straight, early and often, that the thugs who run the exclusionary heavy metal club in the backwoods of Oregon where the film is set and who cover up crimes on their own premises are wretched, loathsome pieces of shit undeserving of a space on this planet. When our heroes, a woebegone punk quartet called the Ain't Rights, arrive in the titular backstage lair before a gig they've taken in the express interest of some much-needed cash, the background of every shot is littered with a cornucopia of advertisements for modern history's most oppressive institutions: swastika wall scribbles, Confederate flags, and all kinds of shiver-inducing decals advocating for the supremacy of the straight white male." Review continues at Slant.

Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) A Film by Richard Linklater

"Just as Magic Mike XXL cast aside threatening social realities to occupy a utopia of its own volition, Everybody Wants Some!! luxuriates in a world that's the platonic ideal of youthful indulgence. It pictures an undergraduate atmosphere bursting at the seams with the usual vices (excessive drug use, dick-first thinking, hazing rituals), yet palpably lacking any sense of menace or predation. Female behinds are ogled, and always by both characters and camera (yet significantly always in that order), but the guys remain goofs longing for affection, while the girls are equally eager to find a companion. Indeed, everybody wants some." Full review of Linklater's latest gem at Slant Magazine.

The Trip (1967) A Film by Roger Corman

"Roger Corman's The Trip is exactly what one would anticipate an exploitation film made in 1967 about an LSD experience to be, offering its only pretext for its psychedelic indulgences during a madcap credit sequence where hack commercial director Paul Groves (Peter Fonda) is visited on a beachfront set by his wife, Sally (Susan Strasberg), with whom he's going through a divorce. Despite nearly being swallowed up by a jagged Electric Flag fusion number blaring away on the soundtrack and interfered with by title cards set against what looks like swirling colored molasses, the brief exchange between the couple is lovely in its understatement, with currents of regret and longing coursing implicitly through their shared glances as lines of communication are interrupted by the chaos of the shoot." Review continues at Slant.

I Saw the Light (2016) A Film by Marc Abraham

"Of course, this being a biopic in the most hackneyed mold, meaning one whose every scene is dictated by a slavish subservience to biography at the expense of psychological exploration or aesthetic experimentation, I Saw the Light also features various musical performances of Williams's most famous ditties. Some play out in Bible Belt recording studios, where typically cantankerous producers incite contractual quarrels, and others occur under golden stage lights, with hypnotized audiences singing along (look closely, though, and the extras in the crowd seem shaky on the lyrics). Rarely, however, does the film evince the pleasure Williams took in performing music. Whether he's scanning the auditorium for his next one-night stand, visibly fuming over a sarcastic remark delivered by a bandmate prior to the count off, or wading into cryptic pre-song banter while drifting off in a morphine-induced high, the performances scan as perfunctory stop gaps between the contrived depictions of a troubled man's descent into oblivion." Full review at Slant.

The Vikings (1958) A Film by Richard Fleischer

"Christians and heathens. Two shorelines and a black, foggy sea. Organized hierarchies behind stone barricades and drunken hysteria in the ocean mist. The Vikings, an underappreciated relic from the heyday of 70mm super-productions and about as rollicking a good time as can be had at the movies, is cut with the bifurcated simplicity of a folk tale: A virginal princess-to-be is kidnapped by barbarians, in turn stoking a rivalry between two bastard brothers as well as clan warfare. It’s a film of thick impasto brushstrokes, unremorseful in its indulgence in broad contrast. Ritualistic ceremonies honoring new unions within British royalty are juxtaposed against Rabelaisian revelries fueled by frothy tubs of ale and testosterone. And the sniveling, saurian King of civilized Northumbria of course receives the most extreme foil: the booze-swilling, ass-grabbing, giddily amoral paterfamilias of the Vikings." Reviewed a new Kino Lorber Blu-Ray release of this film over at Slant.