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Reviews
Two Gala Screenings Highlight New York Film Festival
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- Parent Category: Film Festivals
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 15 October 2012 00:28
- Written by Jack Angstreich
For those like myself who are mystified by the Film Society of Lincoln Center's (70 Lincoln Square #4, New York, NY) steadfast dedication to the middlebrow efforts of Ang Lee, opening the New York Film Festival (September 28 - October 14, 2012) with the latest opus by that director might be taken as an inauspicious sign. The festival centerpiece, however — Not Fade Away, the first theatrical feature written and directed by the lionized television impresario, David Chase — proved to be a delightful surprise, with far more visual coherence and panache than some of the episodes of The Sopranos that he directed. A semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age narrative about rock-'n'-roll-loving youth set in 1960s, suburban New Jersey, the film features an attractive cast of mostly unknowns along with James Gandolfini, both hilarious and touching as the protagonist's father. The screenplay by Chase is predictably well-written while the entire enterprise is further enlivened by memorable period music.
Of the directorial protégés of Stephen Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, despite numerous accolades and awards, has attracted significantly less attention from auteurists than his counterpart, Joe Dante — with the signal exception of critic extraordinaire Dave Kehr, who has for decades championed Zemeckis as a major talent just as he has praised this filmmaker's latest work, Flight, the closing night presentation of this year's festival. Flight represents a departure from Zemeckis's multiple forays into expensive animated features and a return to a more character-centred approach to narrative epitomized by one of his strongest films, Cast Away. Like that work, Flight revolves around a sterling main performance, in this case given by Denzel Washington, one of the finest actors in Hollywood. The film is the tale of redemption of an alcoholic commercial pilot who's conduct becomes the focus of investigation around a tragic airplane crash. Zemeckis has assembled a remarkable array of outstanding actors in support of Washington, including John Goodman, Melissa Leo, Don Cheadle, and the underrated Robert Greenwood, who all do first-rate work here. Flight is an exceedingly accomplished example of classical filmmaking but, almost inevitably, some of the lustre of its achievement is diminished by the digital format — the bane of contemporary motion picture production — that here typically fails to attain the visual splendor of 35-millimeter.
For more info, go to: http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2012
New York Film Festival 2012
September 28 - October 14, 2012
Film Society of Lincoln Center
70 Lincoln Center Square, #4
New York, NY
"Holy Motors" Blasts into The 50th NY Film Fest
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- Parent Category: Film Festivals
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 10 October 2012 03:45
- Written by Laura Blum
Early word on Holy Motors was that it's seriously loopy. But little could prepare New York Film Festival-goers for this latest hallucination from director Leox Carax. It's a doozy. More than a decade has elapsed since the French auteurist last regaled -- or bedeviled -- us with a feature film.
And now the creator of such titles as Pola X, The Lovers on the Bridge and Bad Blood has come back with a science fiction so rangy and lycergic, it curdles into a mash of surrealism and Comic Con.
Two Music Docs at 49th New York Film Festival Are Moving Portraits
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- Parent Category: Film Festivals
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 07 August 2012 03:09
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Two films showcased at this year's New York Film Festival offer very different approaches at investigating or celebrating their seminal subjects -- the late Beatle George Harrison and the late great writer/singer of the Brazilian popular song, bossa nova, Antonio Carlos Jobim.
For four decades one of the most significant Hollywood directors, Martin Scorsese is generally more of a craftsman than an artist in making his many documentaries, as is the case with his latest one, George Harrison: Living in the Material World. It is constructed very much along the lines of his equally impressive Bob Dylan opus, Crossroads. As in the Dylan film, Scorsese's assemblage manages to be consistently engrossing and ultimately quite moving across a span of three and a half hours of fascinating footage, presented in a handsome, high quality digital format.
Another luminary, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, one of the legendary figures of cinema novo, also comes to the festival with a powerful music documentary, The Music according to Antonio Carlos Jobim, devoted to one of the greatest composers within the realm of the popular song.
The film is essentially a compilation of classic performances of Jobim's songs by an extraordinary gallery of artists including Gal Costa, Henri Salvador, Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis, Jr., Judy Garland, Errol Garner, Mina, Diana Krall, Oscar Peterson, Sarah Vaughan, Jane Monheit, and Stacey Kent. And there's a highlight -- in two outstanding duets with the composer himself Frank Sinatra is heard and seen.
With the film's admirable abstraction, Pereira comes closer than Scorsese does in approaching true artistry, remarkably conveying the sheer timelessness of Jobim's achievement; the filmmaker is hampered, however, by the inferior visual quality of most of the original footage, obstructing the creation of a satisfying imagistic poem.
George Harrison: Living in the Material World
The Music according to Antonio Carlos Jobim
Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th Street
New York, NY 10023
German Crime Trilogy, Dreileben, Captivates at 49th New York Film Festival
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- Parent Category: Film Festivals
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 07 August 2012 02:54
- Written by Jack Angstreich
The 49th New York Film Festival presents a trilogy of feature-length German films set in the vicinity of a small Thuringian town and linked together by the search for an escaped convict hiding out in the area. The potential in such a project is here diminished by the decision to assign each of the features to a different director, preventing the emergence of a unified vision across the series. However, the films, unified as Dreileben, succeed in being stand-alone single features, if less resonantly so.
The first work in the trilogy is also the strongest, Beats Being Dead by Christian Petzold, who had directed the outstanding Jerichow, which also was recently given its New York premiere by the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
The story is a sad and moving one, exploring the romance between an ambitious young nurse, who works at the hospital from which the convict escapes, and a Slavic immigrant maid at the hotel where the criminal briefly takes refuge.Shot and screened in a high quality digital format, Beats Being Dead has the most rigorously accomplished visual style in the series, as well as the greatest degree of self-sufficiency as a stand-alone feature; Petzold and his director of photography display a considerable understanding of the limitations governing how to shoot in high-definition video.
The second work, Don't Follow Me Around by Dominik Graf, which looks to have been shot in a different, "grainier" format, is less satisfying and less controlled as a whole, but nonetheless absorbing. It centers on a psychologist who is employed in aiding the police to catch the convict, and her relations with an old girlfriend and her husband, with whom she is temporarily staying as the case unfolds.
The final feature, One Minute of Darkness by Christoph Hochhäusler, which looks to have been shot in the same format as Beats Being Dead, has the closest relation to generic structures, cross-cutting between the escapee and a tenacious detective pursuing the case. This film too manages to be gripping and proceeds to an effectively chilling, mournful conclusion.
Dreileben Trilogy
49th New York Film Festival
Walter Reade Theatre
165 West 65th Street
New York, NY 10023
