Innholdsfortegnelse for January-February 2018 Vol. 54 No.1 i Film Comment

WE ALWAYS NEED GOOD movies, but last year, we really needed them. We went to see them because they helped us forget the variety of turmoils affecting the country and world, and we turned to them because they helped us make sense of the mess. And we also saw them because they were just plain good. Whatever the case, 2017 had a way of focusing our attention on the creative and original voices that the magazine has a tradition and a track record of championing. Our annual poll of contributors, showcased in a special section of this issue, features films by newcomers alongside veteran directors in what amounts to a time capsule of the year’s best. The race went to the swift this time, with the forward momentum of Good…

There’s never a shortage of films spring-loaded with messages and takeaways and just oodles of relevance. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is one of this year’s selection, and it’s fitting that a film so insistent on emblazoning its themes across the screen centers on provocations writ large across actual billboards. With Edgy Dialogue scripted to inflame by director Martin McDonagh, it’s a movie about small-town recriminations that barely seems to exist in an actual place, despite the conscientious title, and that pours on the calculated outrages and mindless motivations. The unimpeachable Frances McDormand provides more integrity than the picture deserves, but more characteristic is Sam Rockwell’s putupon Deputy Doofy. Another crowd-pleaser of the season is little more than an advertisement for itself: James Franco’s The Disaster Artist, about the making…

Coco Lee Unkrich “The way the figure of Ernesto de la Cruz changes contains more emotional complexity than any prestige TV drama with a ‘complex’ male lead.”—VL The Disaster Artist James Franco “Franco’s thin semi-spoof of The Room is centered on a fitfully amusing imitation, with no point of view on the material.”—ND Downsizing Alexander Payne “This large movie about small people shows Payne’s art both at its most restrained (first half) and most overwritten (second half).”—MYM A Fantastic Woman Sebastián Lelio “The fizzy and furious heroine comes to us not as a noble victim but whole and human and layered with fun, longing, and fighting talk as needed.”—ET Foxtrot Samuel Maoz “Austere beauty, brutal realism, and the surreal go hand in hand in Maoz's unsparing skewering of the absurdities of Israel at war.”—ET…

Ashley Clark 1. BPM (Beats Per Minute) 2. Nocturama 3. Mudbound 4. Good Time 5. The Shape of Water 6. The Work 7. God’s Own Country 8. Get Out 9. Lady Bird 10. Motherland Jordan Cronk (Avant-Garde) Autumn (Ernie Gehr) Barbs, Wastelands (Marta Mateus) El mar la mar (Joshua Bonnetta & J.P. Sniadecki) Fantasy Sentences (Dane Komljen) Good Luck Ouroboros (Basma Alsharif) PROTOTYPE (Blake Williams) Saint Bathans Repetitions (Alexandre Larose) Streetscapes [Dialogue] Turtles Are Always Home (Rawane Nassif) Nick Davis 1. Get Out 2. Last Men in Aleppo 3. Good Time 4. Starless Dreams 5. Félicité 6. The Ornithologist 7. Whose Streets? 8. The Salesman 9. Atomic Blonde 10. The Lost City of Z Haden Guest 1. Zama 2. The Day After 3. Western 4. Ex Libris: The New York…

Director: Michael Haneke Country/Distributor: France/Austria/ Germany, Sony Pictures Classics Opened: December 22 After the poignant tenderness of The White Ribbon (2009) and Amour (2012), Austria-based master of cruelty Michael Haneke teams back up with the Devil in Happy End, his eagerly awaited but coldly received take on modern technology and the European migrant crisis. As topical as it is, Haneke’s latest exercise in cynicism and violence unfolds in a string of clichés about bourgeois dysfunction and malaise, littered with contrived characters whose privileged status only partially explains their lack of dramatic depth. Rooted in the filmmaker’s interest in capitalism and colonialism, Happy End offers an indictment of Western hypocrisy on refugees through the story of a self-absorbed industrialist French family in the immigrant hub of Calais. The subdued narrative charts…

Director: Maysaloun Hamoud Country/Distributor: Israel/France, Film Movement Opening: January Early in Maysaloun Hamoud’s debut feature, outspoken lawyer Salma (Sana Jammelieh) and erratically employed Leila (Mouna Hawa) stiffly welcome a third roommate into their Tel Aviv apartment: a hijab-wearing university student named Noor (Shaden Kanboura). The stage appears set for a standoff between self-consciously emancipated and more “traditional” Arab women. Indeed, the wavering relations of long-standing regional customs to modern, more Westernized attitudes is the “in between” designated by Hamoud’s title. Refreshingly, though, she doesn’t need to pit women against each other to explore these issues of gender and culture. Instead, the primary conflicts arise via the women’s sexual and romantic partners: a bullying patriarch, a new-in-town lesbian, and a liberal Palestinian man less comfortable with female autonomy than he pretends.…

By Andrew DeGraff; Essays by A.D. Jameson Quirk Books, $29.99 Instead of compiling set design blueprints or behind-the-scenes photos, Cinemaps reinterprets film worlds by crafting them into cohesive wholes. In this series of 35 hand-painted maps, illustrator Andrew DeGraff finds lively ways to organize a film’s flurry of locations into legible geography, onto which he traces characters’ narrative journeys with colorcoded arrows. He notes in the introduction that this process sometimes requires 50 rewatches, and it shows—peering into intricate Indiana Jones maps must be the Spielbergian equivalent of squinting at a Rembrandt etching. DeGraff infuses his array of blockbusters and pop classics with detail-oriented warmth; he condenses the intergalactic sprawl of Star Wars into pastelcolored hemispheres, charts Clueless’s character paths as a chaotic tangle on hot-pink ground, and folds in…

WE READ THE ACCOUNTS LEFT BY KHRUSHCHEV AND Svetlana, Stalin’s daughter, and a few other people at the time about the events of Stalin’s death, and his behavior. They all lived in fear, but they had to do terrible things to each other or to each other’s families just to get to that inner circle. And yet they all lived close to each other, in these apartments that Stalin put them in. So it’s a strange kind of social club, as well as a gang of politicians. Larry Sanders is my all-time favorite comedy show—it’s that sense of the one guy at the center who is flawed and holds that kind of power. If Larry goes, then everyone else goes as well. There’s an office politics that goes on, except…

ALTHOUGH VALESKA GRISEBACH REMAINS, INTERNATIONALLY, ONE OF THE lesser-known filmmakers associated with the celebrated Berlin School, she has recently begun to be recognized as an innovative and alternate voice of that loosely defined yet useful category, which was invented by German critics. Together Grisebach’s three features to date vigorously renew the promise of the early Berlin School films of Thomas Arslan, Christian Petzold, and Angela Schanelec to define a critically engaged national cinema able to rigorously debate the vexing question of German-ness and able, moreover, to scrutinize the stakes and means of a national cinema itself. With her breakthrough work Longing (2006), Grisebach proved herself fully up to this task with a remarkable documentary-style portrait of tragic love in a small town that reoriented the general style and approach shared…

Nicolas Rapold The Death of Louis XIV (A) Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (B) Faces Places Get Out Good Time mother! Mudbound On the Beach at Night Alone Phantom Thread A Quiet Passion Rep Pick: Stars in My Crown (1950) Laura Kern 1. A Ghost Story (C) 2. Patti Cake$ (D) 3. I, Tonya 4. Land of Mine 5. Killing Ground 6. Crown Heights 7. The Devil’s Candy 8. Beatriz at Dinner 9. The Lure 10. mother! Michael Koresky BPM (Beats Per Minute) (E) By the Time It Gets Dark (F) A Ghost Story The Human Surge The Lost City of Z Personal Shopper Phantom Thread The Post A Quiet Passion Wonderstruck Violet Lucca Tie: Twin Peaks: The Return (G) / Phantom Thread (H) / Zama Rest of…

EVERY GRAND NARRATIVE NEEDS its symbolism. And as far as signifiers go, the wall remains as convenient a metaphor as any for encapsulating China’s past and present, both as they appear in the eyes of foreigners and as they shape-shift within the nation’s own self-image. Of course there’s that famous wall you can spot from outer space, an emblem of former glory that, historians tell us, was actually pretty lousy at keeping out invaders. There’s the digital one that blocks Google, Facebook, and Twitter but that savvy netizens have grown adept at circumventing. And then, on a more local level, there’s the turtle-shaped structure that encircles the old town of Pingyao; the Ming Dynasty relic became one of the most haunting backdrops in modern cinema when Jia Zhangke used it…

78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene Alexandre O. Philippe, USA, 2017; Shout! Factory An Actor’s Revenge Kon Ichikawa, Japan, 1963; The Criterion Collection Claude Autant-Lara—Four Romantic Escapes from Occupied France: Douce, France, 1943; Lettres d’amour, France, 1942; Le mariage de Chiffon, France, 1942; Sylvie et le fantôme, France, 1946; Criterion Eclipse Deathdream Bob Clark, Canada/UK/USA, 1974; Blue Underground Félicité Alain Gomis, France/Belgium/Senegal/ Germany/Lebanon, 2017; Strand Releasing G.W. Pabst x 2: Westfront 1918, Germany, 1930; Kameradschaft, Germany/France, 1931; The Criterion Collection The Hero Satyajit Ray, India, 1966; The Criterion Collection He Walked by Night Alfred Werker, USA, 1948; ClassicFlix The Hospital Arthur Hiller, USA, 1971; Twilight Time The Killing of a Sacred Deer Yorgos Lanthimos, UK/ Ireland/USA, 2017; Lionsgate Letter from an Unknown Woman Max Ophüls, USA, 1948; Olive Signature mother! Darren Aronofsky, USA, 2017;…

Better equipped for The Boston Strangler than Doctor Dolittle, the tough-minded Richard Fleischer was an unlikely choice to take on such frothy fare as The Happy Time. First a novel, then a hit play, and later a musical, it tells the zippy, engaging, Ottawa-set story of a boy (Bobby Driscoll) approaching his sexual awakening surrounded by not-so-stellar role models: a roguish grandfather (Marcel Dalio) and uncle (Louis Jordan), another uncle (Kurt Kasznar) who fills his watercooler with wine and believes that women should be the breadwinners, and a rather sadistic principal (Jack Raine). Only his father (Charles Boyer) is a stand-up guy, very much true to his wife and family, and it’s quite moving to see him explain to his son that desire without love is meaningless. The 1952 screen…

FUELED BY THE BOUNTIFUL SLATE OF 4K RESTORATIONS AND 35mm rep-house revivals, there has been quite a resurgence of theatrical re-release posters in recent years. One of my favorites of 2017, devised for the glorious Janus Films restoration of Stalker by Hungarian designer Tamas Horvath, pairs an arcane geometric diagram with an unfamiliar but very Tarkovskian image to create a design that has the shorthand but not the glibness of most minimalist movie posters. Janus had many of the best re-release one sheets of the year, another highlight being Sean Phillips’s comicbook rendering of Night of the Living Dead. For the less canonical Funeral Parade of Roses, re-released by Cinelicious Pics, Dylan Haley designed this mesmerizing piece (in addition to illustrating a delightful series of posters for Buster Keaton restorations…

1. Good Time Good Time, blanked by the Cannes jury and spurned by late-summer audiences, has filmmaking chops that shame most of this fall’s award contenders. The Safdies’ typically intrepid sound design amplifies narrative tension while also evoking psychological turmoil that the brilliant performers must occasionally suppress. The cinematography shifts among black light, neons, and sooty nocturnes at no cost to visual coherence. The editing hurtles forward with aggressive cuts while affording pauses that build characterization as well as suspense. Such consummate scenebuilding and formal brio handily sustain repeat viewings. More surprising, perhaps, is how this grotty genre exercise—utterly disinclined to chase the zeitgeist or pander to audience sympathies—nonetheless distills this gangrenous era in American life. Few New York movies so utterly evade geographic clichés or encompass such demographic sweep;…

FLIPPING THROUGH THE NEW-fangled ticket kiosk at the venerable Da Guan Lou cinema in central Beijing, the thumbnail poster graphics showed off a diverse bill of fare. On one day early last summer, alongside native products—Special Encounter, a romance funded by the monolithic Wanda Group corporation, and Wine Wars, an actioner directed by Cantopop star Leon Lai—I could buy a ticket to Passengers, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, and Dangal, an Aamir Khan movie about a young female wrestler and the first Indian production to be number one at the box office since the Chinese joined in the international sport of obsessing over such figures. Opened on Qianmen Street in in 1903, the Da Guan Lou is on the books…

Director: Jaume Collet-Serra Country/Distributor: USA, Lionsgate Opening: January 12 Compressing a decade of off-to-work routine into a single harrowing opening montage, The Commuter largely takes place on a commuter train on an embellished version of the Metro-North Hudson Valley Line northbound from Grand Central. Cash-strapped, newly unemployed Liam Neeson has been forced into participating in a sporadically violent hide-and-seek contest involving the unmasking of an anonymous witness, vying with fellow wage slaves for a stack of dirty dollars. The movie’s setting is an America still traumatized by the Great Recession, a place where corruption is endemic and the dollar the root of all evil. “If you want to know what God thinks of money, look at the people he gives it to,” quoth Neeson, just before flicking off a former…

Director: Daniela Thomas Country/Distributor: Brazil/Portugal, Music Box Films Opening: January 12 Daniela Thomas’s studious black-and-white historical drama unfolds in Minas, Brazil, in 1821: Portuguese plantation owner António (Adriano Carvalho), after losing his wife and child, has married Beatriz (Luana Nastas), the beautiful daughter of a bankrupt mine-owner. As António anxiously awaits Beatriz’s first menstruation, he satisfies his sexual needs with a slave, yet resumes his extensive travels once his marriage is consummated. Disillusioned and lonely, Beatriz wanders the fields in ragged dresses, like a phantom figure from the Brontës—a picture of childish rebellion, transmuted into melancholy. In spite of its Victorian air, Vazante still caused offense to those Brazilian viewers who questioned its take on race. Indeed, while Thomas depicts the white child in all her humanity, little is granted…

Director: François Ozon Country/Distributor: France, Cohen Media Group Opening: February 14 The indefatigable François Ozon has evolved into something like a movie twerp version of Claude Chabrol, churning out genre exercises with as much rehearsed bad-boy twinkle as the contemporary European middlebrow can allow for. The difference is that Chabrol was a character-first filmmaker— one rarely finishes a Chabrol film without wondering where its people are headed— while Ozon always seems to start with concept, each film (with the exception of his still-career-best Under the Sand) a self-contained contraption. There is nevertheless occasional fun to be had, especially when he deigns to go full trash, as in Double Lover, a Joyce Carol Oates adaptation that sounds like a mid-’90s quick-to-video bodice ripper starring, say, Mädchen Amick and Jason Patric. Instead,…

Ava Léa Mysius, France, 2017; MUBI Before I Wake Mike Flanagan, USA, 2016; Netflix Black Cat, White Cat Emir Kusturica, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia/ France/Germany/Austria/ Greece, 1998; Amazon Cat & Mouse Paul Rotha, UK, 1958; FilmStruck The Challenge Milton Rosmer & Luis Trenker, UK, 1938; FilmStruck Chaos, Disorder Nadine Khan, Egypt, 2012; Filmatique Impolex Alex Ross Perry, USA, 2009; FilmStruck Metamorphoses Christophe Honoré, France, 2014; Netflix & Amazon Mimosas Oliver Laxe, Spain/Morocco/France/Qatar, 2016; grasshopperfilm.com & Fandor My First Highway Kevin Meul, Belgium, 2016; Festival Scope My Happy Family Nana Ekvtimishvili & Simon Groß, Germany/Georgia/ France, 2017; Netflix The Reincarnate Dan Haldane, Canada, 1971; Amazon Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles Jon Foy, USA, 2011; Amazon & Sundance Now Road North Mika Kaurismäki, Finland, 2012; Amazon Sam Was Here…

Hank and Jim: The Fifty-Year Friendship of Henry Fonda and James Stewart By Scott Eyman, Simon & Schuster, $29 THE MEETING OF HENRY FONDA AND JAMES STEWART WAS not like a scene from a movie—at least, not a particularly dramatic one. Stewart, a sophomore at Princeton studying architecture, attended a drama club performance that featured a visiting actress named Margaret Sullavan; Fonda, her ardent admirer and cohort in the fledgling University Players, did not appear in the play but journeyed there to keep an eye on her. The two men met, shook hands, and parted ways. But by the end of Fonda’s life in 1982, the pair had achieved cultural immortality, with nearly a century of acting experience between them and a friendship dating back to when they shared a…