Written and directed by first-time filmmaker Céline Sciamma, Water Lilies feels remarkably assured in its handling of emotion and desire, never resorting to overly emphatic trauma or snarky anti-emotionalism... [The film] lingers on its characters’ hesitations and empathizes with the overbearing sense of risk and self-doubt so symptomatic of adolescence.
Ballast (Lance Hammer, 2007) 96 min. Gorgeously filmed on 35mm using only natural lighting, Ballast recalls Nestor Almendros’ photography for Claire’s Knee and Days of Heaven transplanted to the Mississippi Delta. Its story, of how a mother and son cope with their estranged father’s suicide, is seductively bleak.
"Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate, a corporate-corruption-neo-noir, could be imagined as Michael Clayton with a sexy, drug smuggling femme fatale in the lead role. But that would be overly emphasizing the corporate context of the story – an aspect that even the protagonist, Sandra, doesn’t fully comprehend at the film’s end – and denying the visceral desolation and emotional malaise that lies at the film’s core."
"Georges Franju opens his 1958 short La Première Nuit with an epigraph that could easily preface any of his other films with equal insight and justification: 'It only requires a little imagination for the most ordinary action to become imbued with disquieting meaning, for the décor of everyday life to engender a fantastic world.' The division between reality and fantasy is not so much highlighted as blurred: Franju imbues the fantastic with a quotidian casualness and uncovers the dormant nightmares in our everyday life."
"Amos Vogel is arguably the person most responsible for contemporary New York City film culture. Before Anthology Film Archives, Film Forum, the IFC Center or Two Boots were around to introduce audiences to the latest in independent, foreign, documentary or experimental cinema — before there was even much of an inkling such films existed — there was Vogel’s Cinema 16, a film society that introduced audiences to a whole new way of looking at not only movies but also the world around them."
"What makes Baby Face Harrington stand out is not its clever satirizing of gangster movies, nor its status as a mid-period film of director Raoul Walsh, nor its cast that reads like a 'Who’s Who' list of underappreciated character actors, but that its very premise is about the elevation of these 'character actors' to star status: the foregrounding of what is normally merely background ephemera."
"The Signal is an apocalyptic amalgamation of several far better films — Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and especially Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie — each of which already investigates the same major theme of The Signal: the breakdown of our existing social order."
"Pere Portabella’s The Silence Before Bach is one of the most exciting and unprecedented musical films in recent years and conveys more understanding of music than a dozen Walk the Lines could ever hope to."
'From its indelible opening scene, in which a neo-statuesque Dylan stands in an alley holding up cue cards with words from “Subterranean Homesick Blues” while the song plays over the soundtrack, Pennebaker’s cinema verite-styled film challenges traditional music documentaries... [The] fractured relationship between “the artist” and society is Pennebaker’s central theme: accessible enough to make the film appeal even to non-Dylan fans, yet crucial enough to make the film resonate loudly forty-one years later.'
"Perhaps only the person seated at the piano is privy to such an intimate look at the dance of the piano keys, and perhaps even he isn’t allowed as bare and stripped-down an examination as Portabella has filmed. Creating exciting, new contexts for Bach’s work is at the heart of The Silence Before Bach: not so much reinvigorating the music, but placing it in unfamiliar territory so as to emphasize its deep and varied nuances."
"Serbian director Goran Paskaljevic prefaced a screening of Midwinter Night’s Dream by saying that it is “perhaps my only film without humor.” A modest statement, if also accurate considering its dismal subject of post-war, post-Milosevic Serbia, but so much of Paskaljevic’s humor comes from his humanism, something Midwinter Night’s Dream is severely not lacking in."
Note: Originally I had ten movies in numerical order. Then, after realizing I had left Waitress off the list, I decided to make it number eleven and, in not wanting to go back and re-think the order, just alphabetize them.
Repertory Picks
If there’s anything to be learned from Preminger’s movies, it is that nothing is as it seems: from his early tour de force Laura (1944) to the late masterpiece Bunny Lake is Missing (1965), Preminger’s films are preoccupied with illusory truths and shifting façades. The premises of both these films — a murdered woman in the former and a missing child in the latter— are shattered midway through, challenging everything the audience has learned up to that point.
"If all you know John Sayles from is the incredible Lone Star (1996), you might not be prepared for Honeydripper, which seems destined for high-school history classrooms."
It’s a source of daily frustration that the films of Max Ophuls are not more widely available, and BAM’s extensive retrospective comes like a long-awaited oasis of rare and incomparable cinema. At the moment, only Lola Montes (1955), Ophuls’ final film and only one in color, is available on DVD. The film is the perfect culmination of a career dedicated to illicit affairs and turbulent passions; tortured women caught between their desires and society’s strict mores; and a swirling, mobile camera that expresses life’s fatalistic merry-go-round unlike anyone else’s before or since.
With echoes of Faulkner, Shotgun Stories tells the story of a deep-seated feud between two different families — familes that shared the same father and who were raised to despise one another. After the father dies, both families’ sons become progressively vengeful and violent. Produced by David Gordon Green (George Washington), this is the debut of writer/director Jeff Nichols. He expresses the same poetic sensibility of his producer, yet distinguishes himself with an almost Viscontian sense of epic tragedy.
A father and professor of psychology at a local university, Bob Bechtel’s secret is that in 1955, he committed one of the earliest school shootings in America while at Swarthmore University: He killed one fellow student before turning himself in. Macky Alston’s perceptive direction does its best to break Bechtel’s seemingly impenetrable mask, which makes The Killer Within all the more compelling and unforgettable.
“In 1994, at age 40, Pastor Richard Gozowsky saw his first movie.” This title card provides the genesis for Michael Jacobs’ fascinating, infuriating and uncomfortably funny documentary Audience of One. Within one year, Gozowsky received a message from God — “I want you to be the Rolls Royce of filmmaking” — and began production on Gravity: The Shadow of Joseph, a biblical sci-fi epic described as “Star Wars meets The Ten Commandments.”
