the traveler's resource guide to festivals & films
a FestivalTravelNetwork.com site
part of Insider Media llc.
Connect with us:
Reviews
The American Ballet Theater Mixes Things Up
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 20 July 2022 19:10
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Scene from Single Eye. Photo: Marty Sohl.
I had the privilege of attending the marvelous American Ballet Theater matinee performance on Saturday, July 9th—at the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center—of this season’s excellent Mixed Repertory program, which upheld the impressively high standard of the current season as a whole.
The program reached its pinnacle with its opening presentation, an exquisitely realized version of the magnificent Theme and Variations, choreographed by the titanic George Balanchine and set to the enchanting eponymous movement of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Orchestral Suite No. 3–here splendidly conducted by David LaMarche—and with attractive scenery and gorgeous costumes designed by Zack Brown–it seems certain that no more perfect masterpiece could be encountered in performances by this company during this season. The work is one of the greatest of Balanchine’s highly formalized, gracefulhommagesto the vanished world of the Imperial Russian Ballet.
The fabulous cast was led by a brilliant Herman Cornejo—who with the recent departure of David Hallberg is surely the finest male principal at Ballet Theater—and an astonishing Skylar Brandt, who has ascended to the first rank of ballerinas in the company. The secondary cast included Zimmi Coker, Zhong Jing-Fang, Breanne Granlund, Luciana Paris, Patrick Frenette, Cameron McCune, Garegin Pogossian, and Luis Ribagorda. The dancers were admirably supported by the sterlingcorps de ballet.The artists deservedly drew enthusiastic applause.
Less immediately accessible, but featuring some engaging choreography by Alonzo King, and conveying at least the impression of an ultimate expressive unity, was A Single Eye—a new Ballet Theater commission here receiving its local premiere—set to a contemporary score by Jason Moran, with appealing costumes by Robert Rosenwasser. The accomplished primary cast included: Christine Shevchenko, who was memorable this season in the lead role of Alexei Ratmansky’s new Of Love and Rage; Thomas Forster who also was notable as the other lead in Of Love and Rage, as well as in Swan Lake, as Prince Siegfried; Calvin Royal III; and Devon Teuscher.
More charming was the ebullient Zig Zag—which premiered at Lincoln Center last year during the fall season and held up well on a second viewing—choreographed by the talented Jessica Lang, set to songs performed by Tony Bennett, with delightful costumes by Wes Gordon. As to what the songs are that are featured, I quote here, with slight emendation, from my review of the original presentation:
“What the World Needs Now” by Burt Bacharach with lyrics by Hal David; the signature “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”; "Fascinating Rhythm" by George and Ira Gershwin; “Spring in Manhattan”; Cole Porter’s “It's De-Lovely,” a duet with Lady Gaga; "Just One of Those Things,” also by Porter; “Smile” by Charlie Chaplin, from the theme to his classic late feature,Limelight; “Blue Moon” by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart; Duke Ellington’s "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)”; and "How Do You Keep the Music Playing?" with music by Michel Legrand and lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman.
The alluring main cast included: Teuscher and Paris again, Jarod Curley, Blaine Hoven, Cassandra Trenary, and Joo Won Ahn, who was outstanding in the lead role of Don Quixote, in the opening week this season. The dancers were again rewarded with a standing ovation.
The current season will close with a final week of performances of Kenneth MacMillan’s superb ballet of Sergei Prokofiev’s glorious Romeo and Juliet.
July '22 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 20 July 2022 14:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week
Marx Can Wait
(Strand Releasing)
In this new documentary from Italian master Marco Bellocchio—who has made indelible films for the past six decades, from 1965’s Fists in the Pocket to 2019’s The Traitor—the director turns his camera on his own family, specifically his twin brother Camillo, who killed himself at age 29 in 1968.
That devastating event still has reverberations for the entire family, as Bellocchio interviews his surviving siblings—two sisters and two brothers—and, amid relevant clips from his films (several of which present fraught mother-son relationships), we discover that his entire career has been one long, penetrating psychological study of family complexities.
(Greenwich Entertainment)
This artful documentary by Christophe Cognet is a different kind of Holocaust film, exploring a series of photographs taken by death camp inmates themselves, which sparks a subtle recounting of how these surreptitious photographs are vital evidence into brutal torture and murder.
Some might find it difficult to watch these clinically fascinating explorations, especially the horrifically indelible opening and closing sequences of bone fragments, but this is an important addition to the necessary body of films that preserve such history.
Girls to Buy
(VMI Worldwide)
In Maria Sadowska’s playful black comedy reminiscent of The Wolf of Wall Street, Paulina Galazka gives a star-making performance as Emi, a young woman from a small Polish town who becomes wealthy running an exclusive escort service for rich and powerful men.
At 135 minutes, the movie wears out its welcome, repeatedly dramatizing debauched parties and the emotional difficulties and physical distress of the women: again, the obvious role model is the Scorsese film’s morally fuzzy display of immoral behavior as glorious, until it isn’t (and Galazka does look like Margot Robbie). But Scorsese did more with his story than Sadowska ultimately does with hers.
(Abramamora)
The pivot toward natural winemaking is the focus of Lori Miller’s illuminating documentary chronicle of four wine producers in California who decide that natural—using whatever grapes are grown annually, no additives, no pesticides, using traditional methods—is preferable and, it’s hoped, profitable.
There are harrowing moments as wildfires come very close to destroying crops and even buildings, but there’s an underlying hope that climate change might be mitigated by the ways these wine producers are handling their businesses.
4K/UHD Release of the Week
Raging Bull
(Criterion)
Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro’s cinematic collaborations reached their apogee with the underrated The King of Comedy, but their previous film together, this 1980 biopic about boxer Jake LaMotta, got all the love, including an Oscar for DeNiro as best actor. However—and I know this is heresy—for all the technical brilliance on display, from the B&W camerawork to the razor-sharp editing and the towering performances by DeNiro and then-newcomers Joe Pesci and Cathy Moriarty, there remains a hollowness at its core, a cipher in search of illumination.
Still, it certainly looks spectacular in all its gritty and grainy glory on this new Criterion 4K/UHD disc; there’s an accompanying Blu-ray disc and many extras including three audio commentaries, archival interviews and featurettes as well as new video essays.
The Frisco Kid
(Warner Archive)
Despite a sparkling pedigree—director Robert Aldrich, stars Gene Wilder and Harrison Ford and a great storyline—this 1979 western, about a Polish rabbi circa 1850 who comes to the U.S. to assume a San Francisco congregation but who falls in with a bank robber, misadventures ensuing, is fairly mild both comically and dramatically.
There’s engaging byplay between Ford and Wilder (Wilder is a gem in a role that could have easily been a dull caricature) but Aldrich rarely coalesces the whole thing into a satisfying buddy story. There’s a superior hi-def transfer.
Summertime
(Criterion)
In David Lean’s gorgeously-shot 1955 Technicolor romance, Katharine Hepburn gives a winning portrayal of a single, middle-aged American who doesn’t expect to find love while in Venice but who falls for a local antique shop owner, played charmingly by Rossano Brazzi.
Lean’s ravishing use of color and Venice locations, along with Hepburn and Brazzi, make this far more entertaining and uplifting than one would expect. The colors of the film and of the Veneto shimmer on Blu-ray; extras include a 1963 Lean interview, 1988 audio interview with cinematographer Jack Hildyard and a new interview with historian Melanie Williams.
Yellowjackets—Complete 1st Season
(CBS/Paramount)
While its premise is interesting—the survivors of a plane crash involving a girls’ high school soccer team are revisited more than two decades later—the execution of this series’ first season unearths seemingly every cliché imaginable, particularly the antagonisms between the characters that exist for mere purposes of dramatic irony.
Although the cast is unbeatable—Christina Ricci, Melanie Lynskey and Juliette Lewis head the adult cast, while Sammi Hanratty and Sophie Nélisse superbly play the Ricci and Lynskey characters as teens—but the script and direction of these 10 episodes lacks originality and invention. Extras are two behind-the-scenes featurettes.
July '22 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 13 July 2022 21:35
- Written by Kevin Filipski
4K/UHD Releases of the Week
Downton Abbey—A New Era
(Universal)
The second big-screen drama from the popular PBS series plays like the earlier film, as a two-hour episode of the show, but creator-writer Julian Fellowes adds enough wrinkles and variations to make it more enjoyable: there’s a trek to the south of France, where Robert Crawley (Hugh Bonneville) might discover a surprise about his paternity; and the family has allowed a film crew to shoot a silent feature at Downton (it’s 1928) to help fund needed mansion upkeep.
The large cast is perfect, as always, with a sardonic Maggie Smith, in her swan song as matriarch Dowager Countess, leading the way. The mansion and its grounds look spectacular in ultra hi-def; extras include on-set featurettes and interviews, along with director Richard Curtis’ chatty commentary.
(Warner Bros)
I doubt I’m the first to label Doug Liman’s 2014 Tom Cruise vehicle as a sci-fi Groundhog Day: Cruise is part of a conscripted army slated to fight an extraterrestrial invasion force that’s annihilating Earth’s human population, and he must replay the training for the battle with the toughest soldier (played by Emily Blunt).
It’s flashily done, and quite exciting at times, but there’s a sense that, even at a lean 110 minutes, it spins its wheels at about the hour mark; Liman, Cruise and Blunt keep pushing until it finally reaches the finish line. There’s an excellent 4K transfer; the accompanying Blu-ray includes the original extras from the initial release: featurettes, interviews and deleted scenes.
Streaming/In-Theater Releases of the Week
Dreaming Walls—Inside the Chelsea Hotel
(Magnolia)
Using an elliptical, visually eccentric style that mirrors the many famous and infamous inhabitants (from Dylan Thomas to Bob Dylan) of the hallowed Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street in Manhattan, directors Maya Duverdier and Amélie van Elmbt have created an impressionistic, dream-like documentary about an indelible part of 20th century arts and pop culture.
We also hear from several current residents, who are dealing with the hotel renovations going on through amusing interactions with some of the workers. It all adds up to a lovely if melancholic journey through ghosts of the past and present.
(Dark Star Pictures)
This 1986 action flick harkens back to the exploitative B movies of the ‘70s like Jackson County Jail and Gator Bait, as a young woman must handle a trio of brutish male attackers, showing her wiles (and curves) as she does.
Director Mario Andreacchio, in his feature debut, has made a sleazy, silly adventure that displays the charms of leading lady Cassandra Delaney, who does the usual risible genre things but manages to fend off the men, who are even dumber than she. That Quentin Tarantino loves this movie tells you all you need to know about his taste.
Hallelujah—Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song
(Sony Classics)
Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” has become a sort of all-purpose hymn, sung at memorials for everyone from celebrities and politicians to mass shooting victims—but, as directors Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine demonstrate in this intriguing biography, the song is just one part of Cohen’s long artistic journey.
By following Cohen’s life and career, Hallelujah becomes a lot more than just an exploration of a single song, and that is the filmmakers’ finest achievement, using archival interviews with Cohen over decades as well as with friends, colleagues and to present a full-bodied portrait.
(Cohen Film Collection)
Another elegant, tense character study by French director Patrice Leconte, this 1989 chamber drama, based on a story by the great Belgian writer Georges Simenon, follows a loner who spies on his attractive female neighbor later finding himself a suspect in the murder of another young woman.
With Leconte’s stylish direction and sublime acting by Michel Blanc and Sandrine Bonnaire, you nearly forget that this minutely detailed film is just a 79-minute shaggy-dog story that hinges on an implausible plot point. Here's hoping that we also get re-releases of Leconte’s dazzling followup features, The Hairdresser’s Husband and The Perfume of Yvonne.
Rubikon
(IFC Midnight)
It’s the year 2056, and the earth has suddenly become largely uninhabitable due to a toxic fog, and those onboard an orbiting space station must decide whether to return and search for survivors or stay onboard and safe.
Director Magdalena Lauritsch and her cowriter Jessica Lind set up their ambitious but derivative sci-fi adventure nicely, but although the characters populating the movie are interestingly differentiated (and well-acted by the cast), there’s soon nowhere to go—literally and figuratively.
Monstrous
(Screen Media)
In Chris Sivertson’s tantalizing but ultimately frustrating horror flick, Christina Ricci beautifully gives it her all as a woman who, escaping an abusive husband, takes her young son to try and start a new life—but the monster her son sees, and her own unsettling visions, make her question whether she can.
Siverton and writer Carol Chrest have made an unusually intimate thriller that measures a woman’s instability in the face of grief but too often takes half-measures that are only intermittently powerful—and the ending is easily guessed by anyone who’s seen similar movies. The film looks superb on Blu.
DVD Release of the Week
Summers with Picasso
(Icarus Films)
This disc pairs documentaries about Pablo Picasso in the south of France, where he spent summers with famous and not so famous friends, fellow artists and his muses: Francois Levy-Kuentz’s On the French Riviera with Man Ray and Picasso recounts a 1937 trip to Mougins, and Christian Tran’s Picasso and Sima, Antibes, 1946 is set in another resort town nine years later.
Both films give rare glimpses of Picasso that are unusually intimate, a mixture of artistry and frivolity, with sympathetic portraits of mistresses Dora Maar (in 1937) and Francoise Gilot (who is interviewed for the Antibes film). There’s a plethora of stunning vintage photos, home movies and—most importantly—glimpses of colorful art. The lone extra is Guernica, Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens’ 1949 short about Picasso’s incendiary painting, also available on an Icarus Blu-ray with other Resnais shorts.
Boundless—Pablo Barragan and Sophie Pacini
(SWR2)
Spanish clarinetist Pablo Barragán and German pianist Sophie Pacini join forces for an illuminating, often exhilarating journey through 20th century chamber music. Each composer made the genre his own, from Leonard Bernstein’s jazzy 1941-2 work and Mieczysław Weinberg’s klezmer-inflected 1945 sonata to Francois Poulenc’s elegant, witty 1964 entry.
Sergei Prokofiev’s 1943 flute sonata—transcribed for clarinet by Barragán and Kent Kennan—is filled with the great Soviet composer’s inventiveness and memorable melodies. Unsurprisingly, Barragán and Pacini sound spectacular together, both of them obviously at home in this music.
Coleridge-Taylor—Chamber Works
(Chandos)
Finally published nearly a century after the composer’s untimely death at age 37 from pneumonia, these chamber works by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor were written in 1893-94 while he was a student at the Royal College of Music in London.
All three works—a piano trio, a piano quintet, and a nonet for piano, strings and winds that’s subtitled ‘Gradus ad Parnassum’—are indebted to Brahms and Schumann, but are no less attractive for that. They are performed with vigor and warmth by members of the versatile Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, bringing their most charming musical qualities to the fore.
The American Ballet Theater & "Swan Lake"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 06 July 2022 15:12
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Scene from Swan Lake. Photo: Gene Schiavone.
On the evening of Thursday, June 30th, at the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, a thus far terrific season for the superb American Ballet Theater continued marvelously with an ultimately thrilling realization of the magnificent, exceedingly popular Swan Lake, with gorgeouschoreography by retiring Artistic Director, Kevin McKenzie, after that of the immortal Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov of the Imperial Russian Ballet. The glorious score is by Peter Tchaikovsky, which was ably conducted here by David LaMarche. The splendid sets and costumes were designed by Zack Brown, with beautiful lighting by Duane Schuler.
A fabulous cast was headed by Gillian Murphy—maybe the finest ballerina in the company—who was simply dazzling in the celebrated dual role of the Princess Odette and Odile, von Rothbart’s daughter. Her excellent partner—who was also effective as the male lead in the previous week’s remarkable Alexei Ratmansky production, Of Love and Rage—was Thomas Forster, who again succeeded as a matinee idol. Duncan Lyle and Jarod Curley were impressive as von Rothbart, the evil sorcerer. Sung Woo Han shone as Benno, the prince’s friend, as did his counterparts in the first act’s Pas de Trois: Sunmi Park and Chloe Misseldine. Equally fabulous, in the mesmerizing second act, were the four Cygnettes—Léa Fleytoux, Hannah Marshall, Erica Lall, and Rachel Richardson—and the Two Swans: Zhong-Jing Fang—who was stunning in the season’s opening week production of Don Quixote—and Paulina Waski, who also played the Spanish Princess in the third act.
The admirable dancers of the third act included: Emily Hayes as the Hungarian Princess; Virginia Lensi as the Italian Princess; Kathryn Boren as the Polish Princess; and Betsy McBride and Kento Sumitani, who executed the Czardas.The two couples of the Spanish Dance were Courtney Lavine with João Menegussi and Scout Forsythe with Patrick Frenette, while the Neapolitan dance was performed by Cameron McCune and Jonathan Klein. The corps de ballet was enchanting. The artists deservedly received an unusually enthusiastic ovation.
More Articles...
Newsletter Sign Up
Upcoming Events
No Calendar Events Found or Calendar not set to Public.