Innholdsfortegnelse for January-February 2020 Vol. 56 No.1 i Film Comment

SO LONG, 2010S—WE HARDLY knew you. I’m only half-kidding: one noticeable fact about the past 10 years is that they haven’t taken a precise shape in the minds of many moviegoers. They don’t seem to conjure the same ready-made (and admittedly reductive) conceptions as the 1970s, or the 1940s, or the 1990s for that matter. Accordingly, the issue you are holding is our attempt to make sense of the 2010s in cinema—to identify some of the key films, trends, and artists that changed the movies (for the better, mostly). We’ve recruited an illustrious cast of critics, programmers, and filmmakers to share their favorite films and their observations on the decade, leading off with essays by Dennis Lim, Amy Taubin, Devika Girish, and R. Emmet Sweeney. All of which is accompanied…

Bow down, worthless earth-lings. In case you weren’t already feeling oppressed enough, here come media conglomerates to finish the job. It’s been a slow build, but in just the last year, the entertainment-industrial complex has projected the evolution of mainstream culture into one hydra-headed, artistically uniform product. Disney, Apple, and Netflix are pros at giving us what we think we want, dangling enough shiny baubles to distract from the dramatic decline in interesting, risk-taking movies and television. Do you find yourself dreading the inevitable question: “What are you watching these days?” It might be because with the onslaught of content coming down the conveyor belt, we’ve all become Lucy Ricardo, trying to stuff new products into our hats—or queues—for safe-keeping, hoping to devour them at some later, never-to-come date. But…

1. Zama Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/Brazil/Spain, 2017 2. Toni Erdmann Maren Ade, Germany, 2016 3. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/UK/France, 2010 4. Holy Motors Leos Carax, France, 2012 5. No Home Movie Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France, 2015 6. The Tree of Life Terrence Malick, USA, 2011 7. The Master Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2012 8. Phantom Thread Paul Thomas Anderson, USA/UK, 2017 9. Moonlight Barry Jenkins, USA, 2016 10. Boyhood Richard Linklater, USA, 2014 11. Under the Skin Jonathan Glazer, UK/USA, 2014 12. Carol Todd Haynes, UK/USA, 2015 13. Margaret Kenneth Lonergan, USA, 2011 14. Leviathan Véréna Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor, France/UK/USA, 2012 15. The Turin Horse Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky, Hungary, 2011 16. Inside Llewyn Davis Joel & Ethan Coen, USA, 2013 17. Mysteries…

2010 ROBOT Androids Assemble Proof that South Indian cinema could compete on the same level as Bollywood, this mind-bending sci-fi spectacular directed by S. Shankar, with stunt choreography by Yuen Woo-ping, is a robot-gone-bad Tamil blockbuster starring ageless Superstar Rajinikanth and Aishwarya Rai Bacchan. The centerpiece is a cops-vs.-evil-robot battle in which the android, now replicated into hundreds of clones, arranges himself into different murderous shapes, including a ball of guns, a bullet-spitting snake, a drill, and its final form: a skyscraper-sized giant who flips off the scientist who created him. It is a sequence of joyful, surreally mischievous destruction. 2011 FAST FIVE Vault Heist After Fast & Furious, director Justin Lin decided to ease back on CGI and put the emphasis on more practical car stunts. Wily veteran choreographer…

PARASITE Bong Joon Ho’s film explodes any lingering notion that great art must bear some relation to subtlety, as well as any presumption that unsubtle art is, by extension, uncomplicated. What might have served as subtexts of Bong’s diabolical class critique—the tenacity of patriarchy, the imminence of climate cataclysm, the baseless aura conferred on all things American—emerge very much as text. The fearsome machine that is Parasite keeps rotating, flaunting different faces of its argument and intricacies of its engineering, somehow coaxing us toward frequent cheers or laughs despite its devastating diagnosis: it has so got all of our numbers. I’m wary of the reflex to elevate immaculate form over provocative mess, but coming off two prior Bong features, Snowpiercer and Okja, that uneasily balanced competing impulses toward precision and…

MY FAVORITE MOMENT IN CITIZEN KANE HAS nothing to do with deep focus or low angles or antique sleds. It’s the scene where Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane), Kane’s kindhearted business manager, recalls a day in 1896 when he spotted a girl with a white parasol on a ferry about to dock as his own was pulling away. “I only saw her for one second,” he muses. “She didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.” Bernstein is an incurable romantic, but he’s learned—as only one can, the hard way—that a momentous encounter doesn’t need a lot of time, or a lot of talk, or even a shred of context, to become enshrined in the memory. Sometimes one…

3 Faces Jafar Panahi, Iran, 2018; Criterion Atlantics Mati Diop, France/Senegal/Belgium, 2019; Netflix Burning Cane Phillip Youmans, USA, 2019; Netflix Dawson City: Frozen Time Bill Morrison, USA, 2016; Ovid/Kanopy Dolemite Is My Name Craig Brewer, USA, 2019; Netflix An Elephant Sitting Still Hu Bo, China, 2018; various Experimenter Michael Almereyda, USA, 2015; Hulu Her Smell Alex Ross Perry, USA, 2018; HBO GO Honeyland Tamara Kotevska & Ljubomir Stefanov, Macedonia, 2019; various In Fabric (Unrated) Peter Strickland, U.K., 2018; Amazon The Irishman Martin Scorsese, USA, 2019; Netflix Journeys Through French Cinema Bertrand Tavernier, France, 2020; Cohen The Juniper Tree Nietzchka Keene, Iceland, 1990; Criterion Knives Out Rian Johnson, USA, 2019; Amazon The Limey Steven Soderbergh, USA, 1999; Lionsgate Marriage Story Noah Baumbach, USA, 2019; Netflix The Portrait of a Lady Jane…

THE BEST REPERTORY POSTERS OF THE DECADE BOOKENDED BY TWO VERY DIFFERENT POSTERS FOR JANUS releases of 1970s television series by R.W. Fassbinder—World on a Wire and Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day—the past decade has seen an explosion of revival key art fueled by art prints and fan-created designs, as well as the popularity of the 4K restoration and the milestone anniversary re-release. The Fassbinder posters were designed and illustrated by two different Sams: Smith and Hadley. Some of the most memorably quirky and delightful rep work of the 2010s has come from New Zealand–based Dylan Haley (Mutual Appreciation) for Arbelos and Kino Lorber, while Glasgow-based Jen Davies has produced a decade’s worth of stylish quad posters—including the above stunner for Playtime—for U.K. revival house Park Circus (for which…

COMPOSER NICHOLAS BRITELL IS STEADILY SHAPING THE SOUND OF MODERN American storytelling, one project at a time. Britell is probably best known as the composer who scored Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, both of which netted him Oscar nominations. In 2019, he was named Film Composer of the Year by the World Soundtrack Academy for If Beale Street Could Talk. Two years earlier, the same organization named him Discovery of the Year. Britell is the intangible presence who takes the sensitive, heartfelt work of director Barry Jenkins and translates its tender emotion into sound. He’s presently collaborating with Jenkins again on the director’s limited-series adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel The Underground Railroad. “The process is very experimental and it starts from that first moment of sensitivity,” Britell…

OPAL H. BENNETT (POV, PBS) Shorts: All Inclusive Black to Techno Brotherhood Green Guaxuma In the Absence Kanari Nightcrawlers St. Louis Superman Stay Close ANDREW CHAN (The Criterion Collection) 1. Parasite 2. Asako I & II 3. 3 Faces 4. Too Late to Die Young 5. Atlantics 6. Us 7. Black Mother 8. A Faithful Man 9. Ash Is Purest White 10. Pain and Glory ASHLEY CLARK (BAM) 1. Ray & Liz 2. The Souvenir 3. Transit 4. Atlantics 5. Babylon 6. One Child Nation 7. Uncut Gems 8. América (Erick Stoll, Chase Whiteside) 9. American Factory 10. Cold Case Hammarskjöld JORDAN CRONK (Acropolis Cinema) Experimental film: 2008 (Blake Williams), Austrian Pavilion (Philipp Fleischmann), the eyes empty and the pupils burning with rage and desire (Luis Macías), The Giverny Document…

FILM HISTORY IS VERY YOUNG—AS OLD AS TWO LIFETIMES, and not even particularly long ones at that. And year after year, living linkages to certain discrete eras in film history are snipped. What follows are brief eulogies to individuals, organized by year of death, but also eulogies to the film-historical moments or the particular qualities that they exemplified. It does not pretend to be a comprehensive roll call of the departed, nor could such a thing be possible, but should be taken instead as an idiosyncratic history of the 2010s as seen through the people lost, and what went with them. 2010 The deaths this decade of George A. Romero, Tobe Hooper, and even Herschell Gordon Lewis and his carny-barker producer David F. Friedman were widely noted, but the culling…

AND THEN WE DANCED Director: Levan Akin Country/Distributor: Sweden/Georgia/France, Music Box Films Opening: February 7 Levan Akin’s Swedish-Georgian co-production is a handsome, engaging, but predictable graft of familiar genres: the passion play of a young dancer, craving a spot in the company, and the queer coming-of-age parable, amidst repressive forces of family and tradition. Akin’s script fuses these conflicts by devoting his hero Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani) to the art of Georgian dance, where projections of virility and “masculine” comportment have grown only more sacrosanct with time. The best thing going for the film is its athletic camera, weaving around and between characters’ bodies, observant of their dynamism while evoking, too, their roiling ambitions and unvoiced yearnings. Gifted cinematographer Lisabi Fridell, who similarly enlivened the much edgier 2014 gender-fluid romance Something…

Disney+, Apple TV+, and the streaming hustle THE PROLIFERATION OF ORIGINAL STREAMING CONTENT creates the illusion of choice, but what we have instead is—for the most part—a new era of risk-free, market-tested products. This won’t abate, especially with recent twin launches of Netflix’s highest-profile challengers yet. Both services are so unbelievably extra that they have pluses in their names: November 1 heralded the start of Apple TV+, followed by Disney+ 11 days later. Disney reported 10 million sign-ups for their streaming service on the first day (according to The Economist it hopes to break even by 2024, once it reaches 60 to 90 million subscribers); Apple TV+’s numbers are harder to parse, since all customers with new Apple devices get the service free for the first year—though it’s predicted to…

By Leila Taylor, Repeater, $14.95 Leila Taylor’s first book weaves observations about the gothic and about black history through a memoir of growing up as a black goth, in both the white suburbs of Ohio and in the blackest of cities, Detroit. Initially influenced by bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cure, she struggled to find her place in the pale, black-lipsticked, Morticia Adams prototype of the numerous multilayered goth subcultures that became commodified, even as she was deemed not black enough by African-American classmates. A graphic designer and creative director, Taylor is also a horror movie fan. She discusses the mainstays of uncanny gothic literature, many of which were adapted to films, and threaded throughout Darkly are analyses of canonical African-American horror movies relished by black horror…

DAVID LEAN’S THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS (1949) is both a companion piece to his better-known Brief Encounter (1945) and in many ways its antithesis. In the earlier film, a fleeting, chastely thwarted love affair between two married people plays out amid the drab austerity of railway station tearooms and suburban streets. The later film spans many years, following a couple whose enduring passion is reignited every time their paths cross, and moves between the glorious peaks of the Swiss Alps and the burnished interiors of upper-crust London homes. Where Brief Encounter sets up a straightforward conflict between love and duty, The Passionate Friends has a troubling riddle at its heart. It never satisfactorily explains why Mary (Ann Todd) refuses to wed her true love, Steven (Trevor Howard), instead choosing a comfortably…

“When Vitalina played her part in Horse Money, where she tells the story of her arrival in Lisbon, I had the immediate feeling that she could go much further, and she wanted to, even if only to occupy herself. She was not afraid of this work; she gave it her all, body and soul.” EARLY IN PEDRO COSTA’S 2014 FILM HORSE MONEY, a Cape Verdean woman named Vitalina recounts in detail the heartrending story of her late arrival to her estranged husband’s funeral in Lisbon. It’s an unforgettable moment in a film that, while centered primarily on Costa’s frequent lead Ventura, announced an unexpectedly vital new figure in the Portuguese director’s work. Indeed, five years on, it’s Vitalina’s presence and performance that linger most in the mind. Costa’s new feature,…

NETA ALEXANDER Critic, Haaretz Top 10 Films (ranked) Holy Motors, Toni Erdmann, Girlhood, Margaret, The Act of Killing, Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, Moonlight, Get Out, Boyhood, Fire at Sea Best New Filmmaker Jordan Peele INA DIANE ARCHER Filmmaker; Conservator, Smithsonian Top 10 Films (ranked) Moonlight, Get Out, 12 Years a Slave, Us, Flight, Black Panther, Fences, I Am Not Your Negro, Precious, BlacKkKlansman Top 10 Horror Films (ranked) Berberian Sound Studio, The Babadook, Under the Skin, Let Me In, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, It Follows, The Witch, Raw, Mother, Melancholia Film of the Decade Moonlight: I felt like I had never seen a movie before. ARI ASTER Director, Midsommar Films of the Decade (unranked) 45 Years, Amour, Another Year, Behind the Candelabra, Beyond the Hills,…

NICOLAS RAPOLD Bacurau First Cow The Irishman Little Women Marriage Story (A) Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (B) Parasite Portrait of a Lady on Fire (C) The Souvenir Uncut Gems New Old Pick: Hajka (1977) CLINTON KRUTE 1. Uncut Gems (D) 2. First Cow 3. Bacurau 4. Marriage Story 5. High Life (E) 6. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story 7. The Souvenir (F) 8. Atlantics 9. Peterloo 10. The Irishman STEVEN MEARS 1. The Irishman (G) 2. Marriage Story 3. Parasite 4. Transit 5. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood 6. The Souvenir 7. Ash Is Purest White 8. Ray & Liz 9. The Image Book (H) 10. Knives Out DEVIKA GIRISH 1. Transit 2. Atlantics 3. Bacurau 4. Uncut Gems 5. Synonyms 6. Little Women (J)…

Asako I & II Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Japan/France, 2018; Grasshopper Film Chained for Life Aaron Schimberg, USA, 2018; Kino Lorber Cobra Woman Robert Siodmak, USA, 1944; Kino Lorber Crooklyn Spike Lee, USA, 1994; Kino Lorber Fail Safe Sidney Lumet, USA, 1964; Criterion Give Me Liberty Kirill Mikhanovsky, USA, 2019; Music Box The Great McGinty Preston Sturges, USA, 1940; Kino Lorber The Lighthouse Robert Eggers, USA, 2019; Lionsgate The Mysterious Mr. M Lewis D. Collins & Vernon Keays, USA, 1946; VCI Old Joy Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2006; Criterion One Missed Call Trilogy Takashi Miike, Renpei Tsukamoto & Manabu Aso, Japan, 2003-2006; Arrow Pain and Glory Pedro Almodóvar, Spain, 2019; Sony Parasite Bong Joon Ho, South Korea, 2019; Universal Paris Is Burning Jennie Livingston, USA, 1990; Criterion The Point Fred Wolf, USA, 1971;…

When George Michael died in 2016, I was gripped by a need to revisit him at his absolute acme: as a golden-haired pop ambassador in Lindsay Anderson’s Foreign Skies: Wham! in China. Peppy, intimate, but never intrusive, Anderson’s 1986 documentary follows Michael and bandmate Andrew Ridgeley on an especially auspicious tour, when Wham! beat out Queen for the privilege of becoming the first Western group to perform in communist China. Foreign Skies could have been little more than a casually orientalist trip behind “enemy lines,” but Anderson focuses on the border-dissolving power of megahits like “Young Guns (Go for It)” and the now-iconic, proto-Cantopop sax-fest “Careless Whisper.” Between montages of Michael and Ridgeley ambling through Tiananmen Square, or rubbing elbows at a lawn party for foreign dignitaries, Anderson turns the…