At some point, it became fashionable to dislike films sight unseen.
The internet is awash in trailers, and studios don’t help by dripping out details, arriving eventually at the ludicrous end-game of the trailer-for-a-trailer. We’ve all been rooked by this. One unfortunate consequence is the heightening of expectations, and our weird desire to see those expectations undermined.
Quality horror films rarely make a huge amount at the box office, at least since the grindhouse days. Word-of-mouth only counts for so much, and many movies we now recognize as genre classics have had to wait for their cult followings.
For the near-entirety of its 80 minute running time, Blue Jay is a resolutely understated affair, more interested in partially-concealed longing and lingering, unspoken hurt than emotional fireworks.
Alex Lehman‘s character study comes pretty close to blowing this tone in its final moments, as we’re treated to outbursts we didn’t ask for and the film doesn’t need, but up until that point, it’s a lovely portrait of two people navigating their shared pasts and conflicted presents.
Moonlight is a genuine cinematic event. It’s the best movie of the year.
This is starting to seem like received wisdom, as Moonlight picks up awards and accolades. Good. Barry Jenkins’ film is a rebuke — the tenderest imaginable — to normative assumptions about who should be on screen, and why, and how those stories should unfold.
The tradition of updating Rudyard Kipling’s classic The Jungle Book every 25 years or so continued in 2016, with Jon Favreau’s very beautiful, decidedly dark and tense take on the story, new to Netflix this week. Although Bill Murray gets some laughs as Baloo and belts out “Bare Necessities”, this Jungle Book mostly finds the young Mowgli in crouched peril or running for his life, which allows for lots of impressive set-pieces but also begs the question who this thing is supposed to be for.
It is impossible to talk about G.W. Pabst’s 1929 masterpiece Pandora’s Box without talking about Louise Brooks. Brooks’ innocent, irrepressibly pansexual Lulu isn’t merely the heart of the film but the film itself. The story itself dates back much further, and Pabst is one of the great Weimar directors, but Brooks’ image — both the public’s perception of her at the time and the literal image of her face — animates everything about it, then and since.
Peter Middleton and James Spinney began with a relatively modest, if challenging, objective: to render cinematic the blind experience of snowfall. Years later, the result is their remarkable film Notes on Blindness, which premiered at Sundance and screened at festivals across the country (including SFIFF, where I was fortunate enough to catch it), picking up awards and accolades along the way.
Aaron and Pete, the good folks at the We Love To Watch podcast, once included me in their complicated love-fest for Predator 2. Like a couple of Danny Glovers, trying to give Bill Paxton the benefit of the doubt, they invited me back on to discuss Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves for their 90’s nostalgia month.
A stern judge, obsessed with questions of lineage and social order, casts out his pregnant wife for supposed infidelity. A fatherless child born to the slums falls in love with a girl impossibly out of his league, only to meet her again under much different circumstances as an adult.
It’s relatively rare for a film to begin with a mission statement, but Man With A Movie Camera — Dziga Vertov’s 1929 Constructivist ode to man, machine, and revolution — is not an ordinary film.
Before Vertov presents a dizzying, self-reflexive montage of a day in the life of post-Revolutionary Russia, he informs the viewer:
THIS FILM PRESENTS AN EXPERIMENT IN THE CINEMATIC COMMUNICATION OF VISIBLE EVENTS
WITHOUT THE AID OF INTERTITLES
WITHOUT THE AID OF A SCENARIO
WITHOUT THE AID OF THEATER
THE EXPERIMENTAL WORK AIMS AT CREATING A TRULY INTERNATIONAL ABSOLUTE LANGUAGE OF CINEMA BASED ON ITS TOTAL SEPARATION FROM THE LANGUAGE OF THEATER AND LITERATURE.