Tag: nyff
New York 2024 Review: PAVEMENTS Has Great Fun Selling Out
In the romanticizing of 90s indie music, it's oft said that no band better epitomized the rock & roll slacker ethos of rebelling against establishment/commercialism/‘whatever else ya got’/etc. than Pavement. If true enough, then how exactly do you make a...
New York 2024 Review: A TRAVELER'S NEEDS, Living Life Truthfully
The second collaboration of Hong Sangsoo and Isabelle Huppert is a delight.
New York 2020 Review: ON THE ROCKS, Sofia Coppola and Bill Murray Reunite
Sofia Coppola’s films are imbued with a bratty strained independent punk rock aesthetic that often riffs on generic genres and themes with a strong focus on characters that refuse to conform. On The Rocks is a distant memory of this...
Interview: Zoe Kazan Talks THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS
In the Coen brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Zoe Kazan plays Ms. Alice Longabaugh, the title character of ‘Chapter V. The Gal Who Got Rattled’. Alice is the vulnerable young sister of Gilbert, a business failure whose latest hair-brained...
THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS Interview: Tim Blake Nelson
In the days after I first saw the highly anticipated, long time coming anthology Western from the brothers Coen at The New York Film Festival, the most common thing I’d overhear when eavesdropping on the many Scruggs conversations ensuing around...
New York 2018 Interview: Jim Jarmusch, Eleanor Friedberger, and Rick & Cindy Talk CARMINE STREET GUITARS
I cannot rave enough about Ron Mann's new film, Carmine Street Guitars. I first fell in love with the film when I caught it at the Vancouver Film Festival, where I had the pleasure of hanging out with Ron for...
New York 2018 Interview: Jonah Hill Looks Back on MID90S
Jonah Hill’s directorial debut may be called Mid90s, but that doesn’t mean you need to consider the decade the object of your specific nostalgia to feel this film deeply. As it happens, the film does speak to my exact zeitgeist,...
Interview: Screenwriter Phyllis Nagy On Adapting CAROL
Two years before Patricia Highsmith would earn acclaim with the release of her 1950 suspense novel, Strangers on a Train, she was working as a shopgirl selling dolls at a department store. Legend goes that one day an elegant, beautiful...
New York 2015 Review: BRIDGE OF SPIES, A Thrilling Throwback To An Earlier Era
The New York Film Festival's transition in the past few years from being more or less purely a showcase for the crème-de-la-crème of world cinema (which it still largely is) to being an increasingly prominent stop on the way to...
New York 2015 Review: The Tranquil Insanity of JUNUN
Paul Thomas Anderson has finally given the world a film that won't send its audiences into fits of over-thought analysis. By no means is this meant to imply that ruminating on PTA films isn't a source of great cinematic joy,...
New York 2015 Review: MIA MADRE Is An Elegant And Deeply Personal Film
Nanni Moretti's latest film, Mia Madre, is elegant, understated, and discreetly moving. A personal, if not autobiographical film, Mia Madre chronicles the slow death of a filmmaker's mother as the director struggles to complete her movie. Moretti experienced the hospitalization...
New York 2015 Review: LES COWBOYS, Wild West Tensions In Modern France
Thomas Bidegain's film, Les Cowboys, begins in a strange key, with a nuclear French family spending the day at an American Western-themed rodeo (not that there's any other real kind). It's clearly no casual affair for them, but a practiced...
New York 2014 Review: BIRDMAN, A Visual and Comedic Feast For The Eyes and Mind
This year's New York Film Festival came to a satisfying conclusion with one of its best selections, Birdman, or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), the oddly titled (and punctuated) fifth feature by acclaimed Mexican filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Returning in...
New York 2014 Review: CITIZENFOUR, The Chilling Story Behind Edward Snowden's Explosive Revelations
In this year's New York Film Festival there were two gripping thrillers, both receiving their world premieres at the festival, and, intriguingly enough, both featuring moodily effective scores by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. One was David Fincher's novel adaptation...
New York 2014 Review: In MISUNDERSTOOD, A Little Girl Contends With A Family From Hell
Leo Tolstoy famously opened his classic novel Anna Karenina with this statement: "Happy families are all alike. But all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way." You'd be hard pressed to find a family much unhappier than the one...
New York 2014 Review: EDEN, An Ambitious Yet Personal Look at 90s Electronic Dance Music Scene
The other day, I saw a college kid wearing a T- shirt that said, "In school now just to be a wage slave later." I seriously considered giving the kid a hug. And I could've easily regarded it as some...
New York 2014 Review: TIMBUKTU Is A Strong Condemnation Of Religious Extremism
Timbuktu, that faraway place, the end of the world, is an actual city in Northern Mali in Africa. It was once a bustling trade town in sub-Saharan Africa and now famous for its fabulous architecture, libraries and scholars. Abderramane Sissako...
New York 2014 Review: GONE GIRL, Meticulously Crafted And Unabashedly Trashy
Gone Girl, David Fincher's latest, and New York Film Festival opener, based on the bestselling novel by Gillian Flynn, begins with a close-up of its central married couple, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) and Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike). Nick is gently...
New York 2014 Review: THE BLUE ROOM Shows Off Mathieu Amalric's Directing Chops
Mathieu Amalric's The Blue Room is a hard film to like-- its tone is cold and distant. But it is precisely designed that way to accompany in showing the mind of its passive protagonist. Based on the book of the...
New York 2014: Festival's Main Slate Includes Godard In 3D, And Many Of The Usual Suspects
Jean-Luc Godard in 3D highlights the main slate of the New York Film Festival, which announced its selections today. As we've come to expect, the 52nd edition includes many of the usual suspects, with the latest films by David Cronenberg,...
