Film & Arts - Film Festival Traveler

the traveler's resource guide to festivals & films
a FestivalTravelNetwork.com site
part of Insider Media llc.

Connect with us:

You are here: Home

Film & Arts

Reviews

Bacewicz' "Overture" With The Juilliard Orchestra

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 07 November 2024 16:21; Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Claudio Papapietro

At Lincoln Center’s superb Alice Tully Hall on the night of Monday, October 28th, I had the considerable pleasure to attend an excellent concert presented by the Juilliard Orchestra, under the distinguished direction of Daniela Candillari.

The event opened admirably with an effective account of Grażyna Bacewicz fine Overture from 1943. In a useful program note by Noémie Chemali, she provides an apt description of the piece that I could scarcely improve upon:

Despite Bacewicz's assertion that music “simply expresses itself” rather than conveying extramusical meanings, her Overture pulses with vitality. Its syncopated rhythms and bold orchestration contrast seamlessly with more lyrical passages, creating a dynamic, tension-filled work marked by neoclassical precision. The Overture showcases Bacewicz's rhythmic intensity and structural clarity, traits that would define her compositional voice for the remainder of her career.

A remarkable soloist, Sophia Werner, then entered the stage for a rewarding performance of Samuel Barber’s magnificent Violin Concerto, Op. 14, from 1949. The initial Allegro begins in song-like fashion and builds in intensity; melodious as the movement is, it is not without astringency or dramatic conflict. The Andante that follows is more subdued, with an almost elegiac quality; it becomes more passionate before ending quietly. The Presto in moto perpetuo finale is propulsive and spiky, concluding suddenly.

The second half of the evening was comparable in power, consisting of a compelling realization of Dmitri Shostakovich’s imposing Symphony No. 10 in E Minor, Op. 93, from 1953. The annotator aptly comments:

The first movement, Moderato, is expansive and brooding, setting a somber tone from the start. The music unfolds slowly, with haunting melodies that some interpret as expressing Shostakovich's long-suppressed inner torment.

That movement finishes softly while the ensuing Allegro is forceful and brisk and ends abruptly. The succeeding Scherzo, marked Allegretto, has moments of levity alternating with music more stern in mood, and closes gently. Chemali correctly avers:

The final movement, Andante—Allegro, begins with a slow, reflective introduction, reminiscent of the first movement's darker mood. The music soon shifts to a more optimistic and triumphant conclusion. Many interpret this as Shostakovich's expression of survival, resilience, and creative freedom after years of censorship and persecution.

The artists deservedly received a very enthusiastic ovation.

November '24 Digital Week I

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Wednesday, 06 November 2024 19:10; Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

Blink Twice

(Warner Bros)

In Zoë Kravitz’s stylishly derivative directorial debut, which she cowrote with E.T. Feigenbaum, several women are invited to a private island by tech billionaire Slater King and his friends—one of the women, Frida, discovers unsettling things going on, including her own friend Jess’ disappearance (but no one else remembers her being there), and the realization that Slater and his buddies aren’t benevolent.

Kravitz directs with a sure hand that’s held down by her oppressive visuals and enervating storyline that’s another in the “the elites do nasty things to each other” subgenre, like The Menu, Don’t Worry Darling and Infinity Pool. The twisty but nonsensical ending reminds us that Rod Serling did this sort of thing far better in half-hour Twilight Zone episodes. The film’s hi-def transfer looks immaculate; no extras.

The Mad Bomber

(Severin)

In this little known 1972 police drama, Chuck Connors hams it up entertainingly as William Dorn, the berserk title character whom detective Geronimo Minnelli (Vince Edwards) is urgently tracking down before he can do more damage to people and property in Los Angeles. Director Bert I. Gordon’s effectively grimy atmosphere complements the chases as well as Connors’ persuasively crazed performance, especially in his final, desperate moments.

The hi-def image looks good; extras comprise a commentary by author Kier-La Janisse and retired bomb squad detective Mike Digby; isolated score; audio interview with Gordon; interviews with Gordon’s daughter Patricia and actress Cynthia MacAdams; locations featurette; and the TV cut of the film.

In-Theater Releases of the Week

Breakfast of Champions

(Shout Studios)

Alan Rudolph has always been a hit-or-miss director—mostly miss—and he called a “loose” 1999 adaptation of a typically sardonic Kurt Vonnegut novel is an utter mess, trying and failing to replicate Vonnegut’s offbeat tonal changes while looking like an amateurish, incoherent movie that was made on the cheap.

Performers as disparate as Bruce Willis, Nick Nolte, Barbara Hershey and the usually indestructible Glenne Headley are reduced to mere stick figures, while Rudolph gives a demonstration in how not to ruin solid source material.

Chasing Chasing Amy

(Level 33)

This personal documentary is a labor of love for director Sav Rodgers who, as a queer 12-year-old, watched Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy over and over again—years later, Rodgers questions not only the film’s premise (a lesbian is “won over” by the perfect straight guy) but also his own relationship to it and how he feels now compared to when he was a confused youngster.

Rodgers actually gets Smith himself to discuss Amy’s legacy, and they become friends; Guinevere Turner, who co-wrote and starred in the breakthrough lesbian film Go Fish when Smith made his film, refreshingly gives her witty take on it, while Amy star Joey Lauren Adams opens up more candidly than maybe even she thought.

Lost on a Mountain in Maine

(Blue Fox Entertainment)

Donn Fendler’s account of his ordeal, at age 12 in 1939, alone on a treacherous mountain how he survived nine days alone with no food or shelter has become an inspirational if somewhat mechanical feature by director Andrew Boodhoo Kightlinger and screenwriter Luke Paradise, who adapted Fendler’s memoir.

Donn’s lonely journey is effectively dramatized, and if at times it feels like an afterschool special done at a snail’s pace, the leading role are taken most persuasively by a trio of superb actors: Caitlin Fitzgerald (mother), Paul Sparks (father) and Luke David Bloom (Donn). Less helpful are new interviews with the actual participants (brother, mother, rescuer, Donn himself), integrated more crudely that necessary.

4K/UHD Release of the Week

Trap

(Warner Bros)

M. Night Shyamalan has mined similar territory for decades, spinning his wheels with vaguely Twilight Zone-ish subjects that he explores as superficially as possible, but his latest is his most actively unpleasant: a doting dad takes his teenage daughter to an arena pop concert, where he notices a large police presence that signals his possible unmasking as a serial killer.

The lazy storyline makes one realizes the movie was made so the director could cast his daughter, Saleka Shyamalan, as pop icon Lady Raven, who assumes a larger role as the movie plays out. Josh Hartnett invests as much humanity as he can into an impossible role; poor Alison Pill is mercilessly wasted as his wife. Be warned: the final scene paves the way for an unwanted sequel. The UHD image looks excellent; extras include interviews and featurettes.

DVD Release of the Week

On the Wandering Paths

(Distrib Films)

Jean Dujardin gives a subtly affecting performance as Pierre Girard, a writer who, after recovering from a near-fatal fall, decides to across France, in Denis Imbert’s engrossing drama that follows Pierre as he makes the odd human connection while for the most part sticking to his plan of walking alone.

Interspersing flashbacks to his previous happy-go-lucky life, falling in love with a young woman named Anna (luminous Joséphine Japy) and leading to his accident, Imbert’s film lays bare the psychology of one man—Dujardin narrates Pierre’s written-down thoughts—as well as the country he’s traveling through, all set against stunning natural landscapes ravishingly photographed by Magali Silvestre de Sacy.

CD Release of the Week

Adèle Hugo—Songs

(Alpha Classics)

Adèle Hugo, troubled daughter of the great novelist Victor Hugo, might be best known through French director François Truffaut’s intimate 1975 biopic, The Story if Adèle H., which propelled 19-year-old actress Isabelle Adjani to international stardom. But Adèle was also a composer, as this lovely survey of vocal works discovered decades after her death demonstrates. If her songs resemble those of composers like Chausson and especially Fauré, they have their undeniable charms, as do several short instrumental pieces for which she never set words.

This disc contains 14 songs orchestrated by Richard Dubugnon and played arrestingly by the Orchestre Victor Hugo under Jean-François Verdier and beautifully sung by an array of estimable voices: sopranos Sandrine Piau, Axelle Fanyo and Anaïs Constans, mezzos Karine Deshayes and Isabelle Druet and baritone Laurent Naouri.

October '24 Digital Week IV

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Friday, 01 November 2024 03:08; Written by Kevin Filipski

In-Theater Releases of the Week

Black Box Diaries

(MTV)

This startlingly sorrowful yet ultimately optimistic documentary by Shiori Itō, a Japanese journalist, recounts her struggle after accusing legendary journalist Noriyuki Yamaguchi of a 2015 sexual assault—her bravery is in stark contrast to Japan’s buttoned-down social, sexual and political reticence.

Itō bares herself emotionally and psychologically dealing with the slowly turning wheels of justice: the MeToo movement gives her traction, but she must push herself to keep going amid a countersuit by Yamaguchi, who was very close to then prime minister Shinzo Abe. Propelling this incredibly intimate account is Itō’s unflinching honesty as both filmmaker and subject.

Magpie

(Shout Studios)

Daisy Ridley is credited with the idea for this story of marital betrayal—Ridley plays Anette, who’s married to Ben (Shazad Latif) and whose young daughter Matilda (Hiba Ahmed) is cast in the role of beautiful movie star Alicia’s (Matilda Lutz) daughter in a new film. One parent must accompany Matilda while on the set at all times; when Ben does, he begins a relationship with the glamorous Alicia—or does he?

Director Sam Yates and writer Tom Bateman have made an efficient by-the-numbers thriller that leads to an obvious but satisfying twist that justifies sitting through the 90-minute buildup. The uniformly excellent cast is led by Ridley’s frazzled but always protective mother and wife.

Your Monster

(Vertical)

Poor Melissa Barrera—the breakthrough star of In the Heights and Scream VI is now stuck in a one-note rom-com/Beauty and the Beast mashup. Yes, you read that right: after a cancer diagnosis, Laura is dumped by her longtime boyfriend Jacob (Edmund Donovan) and soon finds herself with a new roommate, the beastly Monster (Tommy Dewey, looking like Ron Perlman in the 1980s TV series), who’s a manifestation of her simmering anger over her current predicament.

What could have been a perfectly good short is drawn out by writer-director Caroline Lindy into a repetitive and often risible 95-minute feature; even the usually charming Barrera is misdirected into being as annoying, even enervating, as possible, which is obviously not Lindy’s intention.

4K/UHD Release of the Week

Borderlands

(Lionsgate)

This latest attempt to translate the mindlessness of playing a video game into a big-screen adventure with actual characters and an interesting plot doesn’t work simply because it’s too reminiscent of the post-apocalyptic elements of the Mad Max series, which does this sort of thing far better.

The cast, comprising big names like Cate Blanchett, Gina Gershon, Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Hart, is game but turned into a routine and flattened crew by cowriter-director Eli Roth, who at least stages a series of impressive action sequences that, nevertheless, become stale after awhile. The UHD transfer accentuates the stunning visuals; extras include several making-of featurettes.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

The Beast Within

(Well Go USA)

In this intriguing variation on the werewolf theme, young Willow (Caoilinn Springall, giving a miraculously mature performance) and her mom Imogen (Ashleigh Cummings) live in a walled-off compound deep in the forest with her dad Noah (Kit Harington), who undergoes a scary physical transformation that Willow is first traumatized, then increasingly empowered, by.

Director Alexander J. Farrell and co-writer Greer Ellison rely more on atmosphere than originality, but the film does have an effective ambiguous ending that makes one look at the previous 100 minutes in a different light.

Creature with the Blue Hand/Web of the Spider

(Film Masters)

If you want to see a couple of early features starring the Polish enfant terrible, actor Klaus Kinski, this double bill is for you: 1967’s Creature with the Blue Hand and 1971’s Web of the Spider feature Kinski in relatively subdued mode. In the strangely inert Creature, based on an Edgar Wallace story, Kinski plays an escaped mental patient who might be committing several murders, while Web has him playing none other than Edgar Allan Poe in a stylish haunted house tale.

Both films have been resurrected with decent hi-def transfers and an array of extras, including commentaries on each feature; a bonus feature, 1987’s The Bloody Dead, related to the original Creature, with a commentary; and featurettes on Wallace and Kinski.

Don’t Change Hands

(Severin)

Corsican director Paul Vecchiali, who has been nearly forgotten—if he was remembered at all when he died last year at age 93—made this enjoyably sleazy softcore (with hardcore inserts) comic mystery in 1974—it follows Melinda (the great French actress Myriam Mézières), a private detective who’s hired by an heiress who’s being blackmailed with X-rated flicks starring her estranged son.

It’s as goofy as it sounds, but Mézières is always delectable and Vecchiali’s directorial hand is light, even in the plentiful and often amusing sex scenes. The film looks good on Blu; extras include new interviews with Mézières, actor Jean-Christophe Bouvet and screenwriter Noel Simsolo, an appreciation by director Yann Gonzalez and a featurette on Vecchiali’s career.

Made in England—The Films of Powell and Pressburger

(Cohen Media)

For three decades and 20 films, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made some of the most enduring works in British cinema, which include many indelible images, from those of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and Black Narcissus (1947) to The Small Back Room (1948), The Red Shoes (1949) and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951). David Hinton’s informative documentary dissects their partnership and why it ended (Powell made films himself, including the overrated cult item Peeping Tom, in 1960).

Then there’s Martin Scorsese, an unabashed Powell and Pressburger fan, who not only narrates but acts as our on-camera host, even comparing what he did in some of his films with what they did in their pictures (a word he loves). Scorsese is always a terrific raconteur and knowledgeable commentator on film history, but Made in England needs a little less Marty and a little more Powell and Pressburger. There’s a solid hi-def transfer, with many of the P&P excerpts newly restored.

Juilliard Orchestra Evoke Chinese Poetry at Lincoln Center

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Wednesday, 30 October 2024 14:21; Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Claudio Papapietro

At Lincoln Center’s Peter Jay Sharp Theater on the night of Monday, October 7th, I had the great pleasure to attend a marvelous concert presented by the remarkable musicians of the Juilliard Orchestra under the accomplished direction of Ken Lam, who is Tianjin Juilliard's director of orchestral studies and resident conductor of the Tianjin Juilliard Orchestra.

The event began brilliantly with a dazzling rendering of Juilliard graduate Zhou Tian’s splendidly orchestrated, vivid and often exuberant Gift, from 2019. About it, the composer said, “I wanted to create a reminder of the joy of music-making, and along the way explore my own musical identity after 18 years of living abroad.” According to the useful commentary by program annotator Carys Sutherland, “The title comes from a fifth-century Chinese poem, Music as a Gift of Decency.” She also provides an accurate description of the work:

The piece’s main motif is introduced [ . . . ] by the horns, which set the tone for the big-band orchestral texture to follow. A brassy, bright fanfare is accompanied by sparkling xylophone and sweeping glissades in the strings [ . . . . ] An eerie, neo-Impressionist interlude in the middle of the piece leans into the composer’s Chinese background with pentatonic scales in the woodwinds before leading into a rousing con fuoco section. The buildup to the piece’s epic conclusion evokes a maximalist John Adams in its repetitive rhythms [ . . . . ]

A superb soloist, Jamie Yoojin Lee, then entered the stage for a masterly performance of the beautiful, underappreciated Oboe Concerto in D Minor, Op. 20, of English composer Ruth Gipps, from 1941. The initial movement, which opens somewhat dramatically but acquires a more reflective ethos, is astringent if not harshly dissonant and concludes gently. The ensuing, exquisite Andante—which is redolent of the English Romanticism of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Frederick Delius et alia—is quietly lyrical but builds in intensity before its subdued close. The finale is jaunty, playful and charming for most of its length—although its second theme has a solemn character—and ends abruptly and emphatically.

The second half of the evening was maybe even more memorable, starting with an enchanting account of Richard Strauss’s delightful tone-poem from 1894, Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, Op. 28., which is preponderantly ludic but acquires a certain gravity towards its finish even as it concludes humorously. The concert closed magnificently with a confident reading of Benjamin Britten’s wonderful The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, Op. 34, from 1946, narrated by actor Luk Rosario. The artists deservedly were enthusiastically applauded.

Reviews

Bacewicz' "Overture" With The Juilliard Orchestra

November '24 Digital Week I

October '24 Digital Week IV

Juilliard Orchestra Evoke Chinese Poetry at Lincoln Center

More Articles...

Newsletter Sign Up

Upcoming Events

Tweets!