Perhaps the most amazing thing about Asteroid City is that it actually exists. For the bean counters who fund the movies, eccentricity and experimentation are rarely inspiring motivators to open wallets, as evidenced by the Sisyphean career of Terry Gilliam. But somehow, even though his projects have by no means been consistently successful, Wes Anderson has managed to crack … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A radiant twosome: Coming of age in occupied France, making movies for the sightless
Sometimes, the theme for a View From Home column derives not from a think piece or deep connection on my part but simply from the arbitrary vicissitudes of a distributor’s release schedule. So it was that in my mailbox, within days of each other, I received two foreign-language DVDs from Film Movement that begged to be reviewed together. A Radiant Girl ($20.44) and Radiance … [Read more...]
The View From Home: The bonkers, sex-positive feminism of Imamura’s last film
Still crazy after all these years, Shohei Imamura’s Warm Water Under a Red Bridge premiered in 2001 and would prove to be the Japanese auteur’s final film. Imamura’s oeuvre had spanned 17 features by this point, to say nothing of his television documentaries, but Warm Water is perhaps best appreciated as its own wild animal, divorced from the lurid underworld dramas on which … [Read more...]
‘You Hurt My Feelings’: A comedy of creatives with a profound message
So you married an artist. It may be the absolute perfect union of love and companionship. But what happens when you genuinely don’t like your other half’s work? That’s the pivotal question in Nicole Holofcener’s unassumingly profound seventh feature You Hurt My Feelings, the latest of her piercing comedies about stuck New York creatives. But it’s not the only question in … [Read more...]
‘Wings of Desire’: Wenders’s masterpiece, newly restored, is a humanist monument
Even when New German Cinema maestro Wim Wenders isn’t making literal road movies, his most personal films feel like they’re always on the go, destination unknown. An intuitive filmmaker seemingly driven more by whims and tides and implacable emotions and songs he likes than by the rigid dictates of a script, Wenders’s shambolic approach has yielded its share of masterpieces … [Read more...]
Despite Nike’s fouls, Affleck’s ‘Air’ is a winner
As someone who doesn’t play or follow competitive sports, I’m far from the target audience of Air. On its face, I couldn’t care less about a period piece on the deliberations of the C Suite of Nike Inc. and its struggle to capture a bit more market share from its rivals, Adidas and Converse, in the glass-towered oligopoly of athletic footwear. And yet by the end of Ben … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A ’70s cult classic restored, a bold and sublime Israeli import
A high point in the journeywoman career of writer-director Joan Micklin Silver, 1979’s Chilly Scenes of Winter has finally received the lavish Criterion Blu-ray it deserves ($27.99). A comedy with acidic undertones — or a bitterly funny drama, depending on how you look at it — it stars a never-better John Heard as Charles Richardson, a civil servant pushing paper in Salt Lake … [Read more...]
‘One Fine Morning’: Tender story of decay and love never abandons hope
Anyone who has dealt with a family member suffering dementia can recognize the disease’s telltale signs, no exposition necessary. And so it is with Mia Hansen-Løve’s (Bergman Island, Things to Come) new feature, One Fine Morning, in which Pascal Greggory, through an extraordinary combination of homework and an actor’s intuition, embodies this state of cumulative … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A challenging experimental twofer from Marguerite Duras
Was there a better year for slow cinema and Delphine Seyrig than 1975? That was, most famously, the year Jeanne Dielman, reviewed last month here on ArtsPaper, burrowed into theaters and helped change the way movies could be made. Astonishingly, though, it’s not even the most radical Seyrig vehicle to be released that year. That honor goes to India Song, the novelist Marguerite … [Read more...]
The View From Home: The minimalist perfection of ‘Jeanne Dielman’
“A lonely widow turns to prostitution to make ends meet.” This one-sentence synopsis offered by HBO Max for its presentation of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, is as literally accurate as it as tonally, emotionally, thoroughly misleading. It suggests that Chantal Akerman’s 1977 masterpiece could be a humanist melodrama, the sort of hardscrabble women’s … [Read more...]