RECOMMENDED

(Light After Darkness) Mexican intellectual-naturist-mysticist-pictorialist-diplomat Carlos Reygadas takes a non-professional cast, including his daughter, into a verdant yet dangerous world very much like his own. An urban family with money has moved to the countryside, a beautiful place that gives itself over to lightning storms, flurries of animal madness and a bright red demon with horns and tail that goes door to door with a toolbox. (While the film reveals little, Reygadas says this is his own home and property.) “I watch lots of movies, and I truly appreciate the directors that don’t try to lead me by the hand through their stories. I want to be considered one of them,” the director of “Japón,” “Battle in Heaven” and “Silent Light” has written. Carlos: with your fourth feature, you win at art-house again. Read the rest of this entry »

Shane Carruth/Photo: Ray Pride

By Ray Pride

“Love, love Amy Seimetz’s pixie cut. Love,” I wrote on Twitter directly after the press and industry screening of Shane Carruth’s “Upstream Color” at Sundance 2013. I meant those words as a kind of high praise: the remarkable Seimetz is as central to the film as women in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s late films, like Irène Jacob in “Three Colors: Red” and ”The Double Life of Véronique”  or Juliette Binoche in ”Three Colors: Blue.” The Pole’s project was always to make the indelible prompt the ineffable. Carruth’s ambition, after a decade in the weeds unable to make his epic “A Topiary” script, rises to Kieslowskian ambition in its insistence on sensations of the body and eruptions of memory and the tactile artifacts of the material world: consciousness is broken apart for the viewer to reconstruct. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

(Les contes de la nuit, 2011) Six folk tales from around the world comprise the new caravan of silhouette animation from the animator of “Kirikou and the Sorceress” and “Azur & Asmar.” The genteel “Tales of the Night”‘s most striking passages evoke an endearingly imperfect variation on Indonesian shadow puppetry, but the boldly, incautiously colored animation has a flat sameness over the duration of adventures, which may not have been the case in its original 3D production format. Students of Lotte Reiniger’s painstaking films like “The Adventures Of Prince Achmed” will also find things to admire. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

The Sanskrit word, “Samsara,” in my laptop’s dictionary, is defined as “the cycle of death and rebirth to which life in the material world is bound.” I like “Farrago” better, defined as “a confused mixture.”

In Ron Fricke’s follow-up to his 1992 picture-fest “Baraka” (or, “blessing”), we’re treated to a free-associative montage, or flow, of the beauty of nature and the bad, bad, bad, bad, bad things that man does to the planet and to each other. It’s grating, grandiloquent work: it’s also bad, bad, bad, rising to the level of a gratuitously good-looking, promiscuously photographed tract rather than the feat of filmmaking it aims toward. It’s as pretty as a succession of postcards: having a great time, wish you were coherent. Or, you’re having a great time, wish I were stoned. Read the rest of this entry »

Director Yorgos Lanthimos, Reykjavik 2009, by Ray Pride.

RECOMMENDED

(Alpeis) Something is rotten in the state of Greece. A country of just over eleven million, currently in its latest phase of being wrung dry by the European Union, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (or, “the troika”) after the ruinous 2004 Olympics, among other setbacks, Greece’s cultural output has largely come to a standstill, and the future of its film industry is in question. Some of the more interesting filmmakers work in other countries, often in commercials, to make the micro-budgeted features still being made, like the delirious, weird and seductive examples of Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Dogtooth,” “Dogtooth” co-producer Athina Rachel Tsangari’s “Attenberg” and Babis Makridis’ “L,” co-written by “Dogtooth” screenwriter Efthymis Filippou. While these filmmakers have worked together, and there’s a similar deadpan to all these films, including a suspicion of language and its received or accepted meanings, crisp, often clinical framing, dance bits that are theatrically stylized, as well as Brecht-like devices that include startling bursts of absurd violence, the filmmakers have all been quick to point out there is no “Greek new wave.” They’re making do with what they can. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

There’s a murky ancient VHS edition as well as unofficial DVD copies of “Celine and Julie Go Boating” (1974), Jacques Rivette’s playful, indelible haunted house of theater, cinema and larky lady magicians in one inexhaustible encyclopedia cornucopia. But, rather than relying on memory (or the rotten copies), I’d hoped the film would be available for preview before press time, but alas. From me, here’s a strong recommendation: I didn’t want to spoil my exposure to the fresh 35mm print, and I’ll be seeing it later this week with what I expect to be at least one very attentive audience.   Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

A feverish feat of studied immersion and unrelenting design, Panos Cosmatos’ “Beyond the Black Rainbow,” set in 1983, is both otherworldly and innerworldly in its hallucination of futurisms past. A seemingly telepathic woman is held captive in a clinic called “Arboria”: the treatments we see are probably not going to help her get any better. It’s all a matter of mood and tone, or taste, and would likely drive many potential admirers out into the open even before the main title appears at ten minutes into the film. The style-savvy Cosmatos at least dazes, if not dazzles, with his SF simulacrum’s aggressive array of close-ups and immersive use of film stocks, filters, anachronistic typefaces and an analog synthesizer score by Jeremy Schmidt of Black Mountain. Read the rest of this entry »

Udo Kier

RECOMMENDED

The first question that comes from watching most Guy Maddin films, “What on earth?” should actually be, “Where on earth?” The usual answer is Winnipeg; the correct one is “in this man’s mind.” “Keyhole,” (2011) his tenth feature, also takes place in a haunted house, and in a cracked black-and-white simulacrum of a 1930s gangster feature. Maddin, like few others, understands that the criminally under-used Jason Patric was meant to be a noir leading man. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In five silent “sketch” films, introduced by San Francisco morning’s newspaper and its date, Japanese filmmaker Tomonari Nishikawa assembles single-frame constructions of cityscapes, of walks down streets, which take on their own quietly spastic frenzy even while evoking other things, such as the many-eyed camera of a Google Street View street car gone into a drunken, propulsive swoon. Lines, circles, numbers, windows, doorways, oval windows and buildings that persist only as angled precipice. Fragmentary glimpses are patterned to create an illusion of persistence of vision, but they are shards upon shards. Weirdly, the effect is both limpid and soothing. Read the rest of this entry »