Pablo Berger's feature animated ROBOT DREAMS goes from simple to complex to unsettling to accepting. Like the stages of grief. It's a fascinating movie that doesn't fully come together and yet. . .it conveys that feeling of finding appreciation for a past relationship that you accept can never be again.
The story follows a lonely single Dog in an alternate reality 1980's New York who purchases a Robot as a companion. The two become fast friends only to have …
Read MoreEuropean limited TV series have yielded some of the greatest cinematic works of all time. And while American TV in the age of cable and streaming has produced its fair share of THE WIRES, BREAKING BADS, TRUE DETECTIVE SEASON 1's, TWIN PEAKS THE RETURN, and so on, it really is a stunner how much critically important cinematic work has come out of European TV.
Ingmar Bergman's SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE and FANNY & ALEXANDER, Kryztof Kieslowski's THE DECALOGUE, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ, Lars Von Trier's THE KINGDOMS I, II, & III, Mike Leigh's NUTS IN MAY among many other TV movies in the 1970's, are just the tip of the iceberg of incredible work.
And so it is with Italian master moviemaker Francesco Rosi's CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI…
Read MoreSome movies you come to right away. Some take half a lifetime to be ready for.
Luchino Visconti's ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS, a masterpiece of Italian post-neorealism, was a movie this writer wasn't ready for until he was 47.
It is a bracing and profound movie. Driven by currents of melodrama and emotion until exploding into a tempest of near-operatic intensity, ROCCO is also intimate-a story of one family trying to keep its head above the raging tides of change, urbanization, and societal judgement.
Visconti, born an Italian aristocrat, is a kind of Franklin Delano Roosevelt of film. Comfortable and understanding of money and the rich yet compelled by the struggle of the poor, Visconti made movies about all the classes struggling in the ever-changing now.
Interestingly…
Read MoreAn inventive documentary set to a jazz beat about the political crisis in the DR Congo just after its independence from Belgian colonial rule in the late 1950's, early 1960's, SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D'ETAT is a complicated piece of movie music.
Belgian filmmaker Grimonprez and his editor Rik Chaubet take footage-American jazz musicians on ambassador tours in the Congo, Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba and the political figures surrounding his struggle, even TV commercial and pop culture footage of that era.
They then cut them into a documentary jazz piece-pulsing, be-bopping, as they tell the story. Quotes, footnotes, images, moments percuss like a great midnight jazz jam.
The effect, at least for this viewer, is…
Read MoreA complex movie that feels like it might not totally work until it does, NICKEL BOYS is that rare species of bird: a movie that works towards a new film language.
Based on the Pulitzer prize winning 2019 novel THE NICKEL BOYS by Colson Whitehead, the movie follows the budding friendship of two black teens-studious Elwood Curtis and pessimistic pragmatic Turner-during their time at the abusive Nickel Academy reform school in Florida.
The innovation here is to frame much of the movie in the filmic first person. We see the story…
Read MoreThis past January, I spent ten days in Amsterdam.
When I was walking one foggy afternoon with my fiance down the gorgeous canals, an advertisement for an exhibit at the Eye Filmmuseum caught my gaze — called INNER LANDSCAPES.
Intrigued by a wide and tall image of a rolling green hill with a silhouette, I leaned in closer and saw an ad for an exhibit curating the work of a filmmaker with whom I was not yet familiar — that of renowned, Palme’Dor winning auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
Discovering a new great filmmaker is always …
Read MoreSome movies you approach with humility.
This writer LOVED this movie. But since it feels so nakedly a satire, a coming of age trans story, a layered comedic takedown of what is "mainstream" and what is "outsider", this writer also feels he has to write with the openness that he most likely missed a lot.
But like Jane Schoenbrun's 2024 trans fable I SAW THE TV GLOW, THE PEOPLE'S JOKER is so intense, so creative, so well made, the moviemakers accomplish one of the essential possibilities in cinema: they communicate a life experience and world view that makes our world a little bigger.
This is a crazy movie and a legal IP nightmare. Basically…
Read MoreThere's a lot going on in Romanian moviemaker Radu Jude's very funny satire Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.
Young gig-worker, TV & commercial production assistant Angela (Ilinca Manolache) drives around traffic-riddled Bucharest filming wounded workers so that an Austrian production company can pick their favorite for a safety helmet commercial.
Angela, exhausted, overworked, makes vulgar Tik Tok videos to pass the time. She uses …
Read MoreMaking a great movie is about more than movies.
It’s about steeping yourself in art, literature, music, history, storytelling, technology, current events, life experience, philosophy, big ideas, little ideas. The odd discovery in the trash. The strange midnight project in the garage.
The songs sung at church. The songs sung at work. The songs sung in houses of ill repute at three am by sailors on leave.
The whole thing.
So every now and then, it makes sense to …
Read More93 minutes. This all-time classic of world cinema is 93 minutes.
In 93 tight, wouldn't cut a thing minutes, Swedish film artist Ingmar Bergman's WILD STRAWBERRIES covers everything. Almost everything.
Life, dreams, fear of death, memories, aging, regret, trauma and dysfunction from parent to child, redemption, love, spiritual questions. . .
The story is simple. The movie is complex…
Read More“I always tell the people that the idea behind the classics and the retrospective screenings is not to show old films. The idea is to show good films.” — Doctor Rainer Rother, Head of Berlinale Retrospectives
I had a few reasons this year to attend the Berlinale. ,the premiere film festival held annually in Berlin, Germany and widely known as one of Europe’s “Big Three” Film Festivals alongside Venice and Cannes.
The first: I’m working in Europe at the moment and shopping two new features I wrote and am attached to direct with the producers of my debut feature at the European Film Market (a meeting place that takes place at Berlinale every year where buyers, studios, and filmmakers intersect in raising financing for feature films and television).
The second: I love watching …
Read MoreThis writer has a frought relationship with moviemaker Peter Bogdanovich. A HUGE fan of 70's freedoms meets John Ford THE LAST PICTURE SHOW. An admirer of PAPER MOON. And a puzzled spectator of much of Bogdanovich's other output.
Peter Bogdanovich is also one THE great writers about movies and a hell of an actor; as evidenced again here where Bogdanovich has a supporting part as a CIA spook. He is also one of American cinema's strange spirits. Wandering between the two worlds like Ethan Edwards and the slain Comanche, Peter Bogdanovich has made classics and he's made a lot of movies that don't work quite as well.
So what a revelation it is to watch…
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