Bertrand Bonello’s last film, a Yves Saint Laurent biopic, followed the famed 20th century designer from enfant terrible into the 2000s and his doddering old age. Saint Laurent’s fashion may have changed the world, but that world is now being changed by forces far more radical than any of his designs. The enfants terrible of Paris in Bonello's latest movie, Nocturama, aren’t provocative artists but rather a gang of 20-something Parisian terrorists. Shockingly, despite the ties to radical Islam of the attacks in France over the last year and a half, the terrorism of Nocturama’s youths seem to be enacted without explanation, as if in a cultural vacuum. When originally conceived, this cinematic possibility of Bonello’s clearly had the aim of presenting an abstract action. But since the real world has yet again surpassed the cinema by realizing the horrors originally considered on the silver screen,...
- 9/22/2016
- MUBI
NocturamaDear Fern,296 feature films, 101 shorts—are you ready? Could anyone be? I can assure you, as someone lucky enough to travel to several other festivals this year before Toronto, there are many, many great films here, among them Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, Paul Verhoeven’s Elle (as you've already discovered), Albert Serra’s The Death of Louis Xiv, Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, and Terence Davies’s A Quiet Passion. All easily among the year’s most surprising, most beautiful, most complex works of cinema. Don’t miss them. But what I’ve already seen is a drop in the bucket, and I have the bounty of the short films of the adventurous Wavelengths section (which Michael Sicinski has wonderfully and extensively covered for us) to come; along with not one but two Terrence Malick films (really two cuts of the same film), not one but two Werner Herzog movies...
- 9/11/2016
- MUBI
This article accompanies the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s dual retrospective of the films of Jacques Rivette and David Lynch and is part of an ongoing review of Rivette’s films for the Notebook, in light of several major re-releases of his work.“I’m going to the movies!” — Pauline Kael In Céline and Julie Go Boating Jacques Rivette takes the stuff of living—quite literally documentary shots of Paris in summertime 1973—and makes it a kind of mock-backdrop to a world of psychedelic fiction. The opening scene, built from criss-crossing point-of-view shots, takes routine images of parkgoers milling around on a warm day and whips them into a particular perspective, that of curious, cooing librarian Julie (Dominique Labourier), who sedately watches the goings-on while leafing through her book of magic. In documenting Julie’s subsequent pursual of Juliet Berto’s ragtag Céline, an impulse-effort to return shedded belongings...
- 12/30/2015
- by Christopher Small
- MUBI
During the editing (which is when I really start to see the film), I saw that it was Hitchcock who had guided us through the writing and Lang who guided us through the shooting: especially his last films, the ones where he leads the spectator in one direction before he pushes them in another completely different direction, in a very brutal, abrupt way.
—Jacques Rivette on his Secret défense (1998), fro http://www.jacques-rivette.com/
Long before the much-vaunted, high-concept ‘mind-game movies’ like Memento (2000), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) or Inception (2010), there was Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door… (1947). The film is like a broken puzzle at every level, virtually begging us to rearrange its pieces and find its key. Indeed, one almost needs to formulate a ‘hypothesis of the stolen film,’ Ruiz-style, since the movie we have before us is not quite the one Lang and his talented writer Silvia Richards (Possessed,...
—Jacques Rivette on his Secret défense (1998), fro http://www.jacques-rivette.com/
Long before the much-vaunted, high-concept ‘mind-game movies’ like Memento (2000), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) or Inception (2010), there was Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door… (1947). The film is like a broken puzzle at every level, virtually begging us to rearrange its pieces and find its key. Indeed, one almost needs to formulate a ‘hypothesis of the stolen film,’ Ruiz-style, since the movie we have before us is not quite the one Lang and his talented writer Silvia Richards (Possessed,...
- 9/1/2014
- by Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin
- MUBI
Note: This is our first review in a smaller series of coverage from the 2010 San Francisco International Film Festival.
One of my favorite living film directors is Jacques Rivette. Rivette was once part of the original "French New Wave," a group of film critics for Cahiers du Cinema that decided to turn director and make their own films. The group also included Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol. The other four achieved some measure of fame, but Rivette was always the "outcast" of the group. He was the most "experimental." He completed three "New Wave" style films in the 1960s, the latter of which, L'amour fou (1968), ran over four hours. and followed them with his monumental Out 1 (1971), which ran nearly 13 hours. (The film has rarely been shown, and I keep hoping for a DVD box set someday soon.)
After that came arguably his most beloved film, though...
One of my favorite living film directors is Jacques Rivette. Rivette was once part of the original "French New Wave," a group of film critics for Cahiers du Cinema that decided to turn director and make their own films. The group also included Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol. The other four achieved some measure of fame, but Rivette was always the "outcast" of the group. He was the most "experimental." He completed three "New Wave" style films in the 1960s, the latter of which, L'amour fou (1968), ran over four hours. and followed them with his monumental Out 1 (1971), which ran nearly 13 hours. (The film has rarely been shown, and I keep hoping for a DVD box set someday soon.)
After that came arguably his most beloved film, though...
- 4/25/2010
- by Jeffrey M. Anderson
- Cinematical
I saw in the news the other day that China is producing the second most scientific research the world right now. As a source of national pride and a new cadre and class of workers, I wonder why these scientists aren't the subject of more films, if at least in the crypto-thriller model of Rivette's Secret défense. I don't much travel the festival circuit, but I assume the genre of feckless, barely employed, malaise-ing youth such as those featured in Heng Yang's second feature Sun Spots are a convention well past its expiration date, and perhaps relevancy. Yet few films so precisely and deliberately, almost stubbornly and most certainly stunningly frame their youthful clichés in as stoic and minimal a grandeur as Yang's epic digital theater. Actors and objects are mostly stuck in Sun Spots' foreground, with the world, flat and looming, nearly overpowering the three-dimensional aspect, minute in comparison,...
- 1/29/2010
- MUBI
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