Jan 27
RECOMMENDED
Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s last released feature was 2002′s “Morvern Callar”; among the heartbreaks along the way was “The Lovely Bones” being wrested away from her for a directorial project for Peter Jackson, whose strange, cruel, bloated adaptation pleased no one. The Criterion edition of Ramsay’s 1999 “Ratcatcher” also holds her shorts “Gasman,” “Kill the Day” and “Small Deaths,” two of which were rewarded with Cannes honors. Simply, she’s a great, bravura, visual, sensual director. Even if you’ve never seen one of her films, you’ve missed her: she’s the kind of intelligent, unsparing filmmaker we could use a dozen of. Read the rest of this entry »
Oct 12
Crazy Horse
By Ray Pride
No matter even if you truly wanted to, there’s no way a single viewer could give you an overview of an international film festival with more than a hundred events: you can surmise all you want, based on what festival films have played or have been reviewed at already, or the filmmakers’ reputation. Even festival programmers miss out on sections they’re not part of. I’ll be curious to see statistics after this year’s CIFF to see how many programs the average, but dedicated moviegoer, is able to attend. It’s tough even if you’ve been to a few prior festivals, seen a fistful of advance screeners, availed yourself of advance screenings. But, as luck, fortune or programming may have it, Chicago International has more programs of note in its second week, and a growing number of them have further distribution in the near future. (Disclosure: I was a program consultant for this year’s Docufest section.) Read the rest of this entry »
Oct 05
Goodbye, First Love
By Ray Pride
After summer’s somersaults, autumn through Christmas is when the grownup movies come out to play, and the forty-seventh edition of the Chicago International Film Festival has a lot to celebrate. In this rundown, I’ll keep “great” as a random adjective to a minimum. (Disclosure: I was a program consultant for this year’s Docufest section.)
From the highlights of the program, it seems like it’s going to be a strong season for good, solid movies in coming months. The range of films being shown that have been submitted for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award seem to be uncommonly strong as well. While there may well be other discoveries to be made, most of the films recommended here will show up in commercial or art-house release. Screenings can sell out in advance, which may partly be due to the capacity of the smaller screens at River East. The festival is keeping a running tally of shutouts on their Facebook page. Read the rest of this entry »
Sep 28
RECOMMENDED
Writer-director-shooter-editor Lynn Hershman Leeson draws from almost forty years of her own observation (and filming) of makers of feminist art to compile her personal secret history since the 1960s, the genial overview that is “!Women Art Revolution.” Less interested in critique than in celebration via talking heads, Leeson, whose films include at least three collaborations with Tilda Swinton—”Strange Culture,” “Conceiving Ada,” and “Teknolust”—covers a lot of ground. The roster of figures, which calls out more for the luxury of a Ken Burns-style extended treatment than a dense, sometimes baggy feature like this, includes Miranda July, Judy Chicago, B. Ruby Rich, Rachel Rosenthal, Dr. Amelia Jones, Martha Wilson, Faith Ringgold, Judith Baca, Miriam Schapiro, Hannah Wilke, Eleanor Antin, Nancy Spero and the Guerrilla Girls. Read the rest of this entry »
Dec 21
The Social Network
Top 5 Domestic Films
“The Social Network,” David Fincher
“Winter’s Bone,” Debra Granik
“Ghost Writer,” Roman Polanski
“Exit Through the Gift Shop,” Banksy
“Inception,” Christopher Nolan
— Ray Pride
Top 5 Foreign Films
“Carlos,” Olivier Assayas
“Everyone Else,” Maren Ade
“Dogtooth,” Yorgos Lanthimos
“Father of My Children,” Mia Hansen-Løve
“I Am Love,” Luca Guadagnino
— Ray Pride
Top 5 Films
“Animal Kingdom,” David Michôd
“Enter the Void,” Gaspar Noé
“Inception,” Christopher Nolan
“Lourdes,” Jessica Hausner
“Monsters,” Gareth Edwards
—Bill Stamets
Top 5 Documentary Films
“Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno,” Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea
“Sweetgrass,” (no director credited) [Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor]
“The Oath,” Laura Poitras
“Videocracy,” Erik Gandini
“Rembrandt’s J’Accuse,” Peter Greenaway
—Bill Stamets Read the rest of this entry »
Jun 23
RECOMMENDED
As Milan is dusted with late winter snow, the first pulsations of music under the credits of Sicilian director Luca Guadagnino’s sumptuous, scrumptious “I Am Love” (Io Sono L’Amore)—a passage from “Nixon in China,” like the rest of the score from John Adams’ back catalogue of operas (ransacked profitably as Michael Nyman’s was for “Man on Wire”)—you cannot but sigh at a melodramatic confidence that would be nothing more than arrogance and swagger if it were not so generous in its visual and aural delights. The atmospheric European art film lives. Shot in Italian, it’s a decade-long project for the director and Tilda Swinton. A generational story of a wealthy Russian family with textiles woven into their history, transplanted to Italy, has evoked comparisons to Visconti’s late, magisterial examinations of his own class, but I swoon to a velocity and lush texture that suggests the style of Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Conformist” or late Douglas Sirk, with a tincture of Antoni-ennui. (He’s a greedy and knowing student.) Read the rest of this entry »
Dec 28
Top 5 U.S. Films
“The Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow
“The Limits of Control,” Jim Jarmusch
“A Serious Man,” Joel and Ethan Coen
“Two Lovers,” James Gray
“The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” Wes Anderson
—Ray Pride
Top 5 Foreign Films
“Summer Hours,” Olivier Assayas
“The Headless Woman,” Lucrecia Martel
“35 Shots of Rum,” Claire Denis
“You, the Living,” Roy Andersson
“Night and Day,” Hong Sang-soo
—Ray Pride Read the rest of this entry »
Jun 30
RECOMMENDED
Erica Zonca made an indelible impression with his “Dreamlife of Angels” (1998) but managed only to produce one other feature since. In his erratic but fascinating “Julia,” Tilda Swinton is center screen as a 40-year-old alcoholic and liar who’s lousy at con jobs and lousier at life. Coming from an actress who’s avowedly teetotal, the sense, and almost the scent, of dissolution and despair is ever-present. (A child-kidnapping plot that goes multiply awry adds to the dread.) While the narrative lurches, Swinton ably captures states of drunkenness and disregard, disorientation and self-degradation. It takes the film’s exhausting but often-exhilarating duration to cycle through self-abasement to self-awareness and perhaps even hope. With Saul Rubinek, Kate del Castillo, Adam Gould. 144m. 35mm. (Ray Pride)
May 05
By Ray Pride
There’s a lovely, lovely comic harrumph from Preston Sturges’ “Sullivan’s Travels”: “Nothing like a deep-dish movie to drive ‘em out in the open!” Sturges adored both the patrician and the philistine in human nature and made comic hey-hey out of both. Jim Jarmusch’s latest, the glorious, gleaming, controlled-in-the-service of repetition-compulsion “The Limits of Control” managed in its first weekend in New York and Los Angeles to drive a raft of nay-saying critical minds out into the open, and it’s a bit of a sorrow to read so many resistant to its hypnagogic pull. The Wall Street Journal’s smart Joe Morgenstern’s review read, in total, “Jim Jarmusch’s Dada meander, shot by Christopher Doyle, is empty and excruciating—that’s really all you need to know.” This may not be your cup of cinema, but cinema it is, and it’s dreamy. And if you love movies, it’s aromatic, deep-dish as all get-out. Read the rest of this entry »
RECOMMENDED
