Pride By Ray PridePride@moviecitynews.com
BOOM FOR REAL: Sara Driver On A Moment Whose Moment Has Come
“Everybody was going to see bands, going to see peoples’ shows. We were all in the same area… I think Luc [Sante in the film] describes him as “impish,” and, yeah, sort of everywhere.”
Read the full article »Premiere: “Raising Bertie” On POV
One of my favorite docs of the year, Margaret Byrne’s long-in-the-works Raising Bertie, is a behaviorally rich and visually ravishing six-year immersion into the largely African-American North Carolina farming community of Bertie County.
Read the full article »FIFTY-PLUS FILMS FOR 2016
In 2016, I saw as many movies as most years (even if when I couldn’t review them all on first release), and I took an additional month to catch up and make room for some second and third look-sees. May the coming year reveal distribution and exhibition creativity to match the grand diversity of movies in 2016.
Read the full article »Pride, Unprejudiced: Sunset Song, Weiner, The Invitation
A high point among so many, flawed only by a small, smoothing cut, is in the Weiner-Abedin kitchen one morning, when Abedin is asked how she’s doing. She pauses, there’s a cut, she says flatly, “It’s like living in a nightmare.” She smiles, all poise and resolve and red lipstick and white teeth and hightails it out of the frame. Second only to that is Weiner turning to his interrogators in the back of his car, “Isn’t the fly on the wall technique, doesn’t that have a little to do with the notion of not being seen or heard, you just kind of pick up what goes on around you?”
Read the full article »Pride, Unprejudiced: LOUDER THAN BOMBS With Joachim Trier
“Gabriel Byrne gave him credit by saying that he had never worked with a cinematographer that was so involved, which means he’s there, he knows the blocking, he’s emoting, Jacob Ihre, I’ve seen in our collaboration both start laughing and start crying during scenes we shot, because he’s very engaged with what’s going on. Which I think he doesn’t laugh too loud or weep too loud But that matters. There is a tradition, you know, this tradition, this kind of close-up esthetic in Scandinavian cinema, from Dreyer through Bergman. On some level, I love being serious about that.”
Read the full article »Pride, Unprejudiced: A Brighter Summer Day; Hail, Caesar!
Its multitude of astonishments include a sure, novelistic mastery of accruing details in an expansive shape that is built upon observation of the smallest moments, gestures, blood-boiling fixations, fetish objects, mortal desires, moral frustrations.
Read the full article »Thirty Favored Features For 2015 (And Twenty More)
Fifty features, a few films out of time and a fistful of shorts.
Read the full article »Fifteen Feature Documentaries For 2015
The Look Of Silence, Amy, Heart of a Dog and twelve more highlights of the 2015 year in documentary.
Read the full article »Pride’s Friday 5: The Walk, Manglehorn, Results, A Brilliant Young Mind, Wenders On Wyeth
When Philippe Petit became Le Pétomane. Two new movies, two new Blu-rays, Wim Wenders capably describing a great painting.
Read the full article »Sundance Seen Part 2: The Cooled Take
Sundance 2015, I told myself, would be a festival of no quick takes, some tweets, lots of movies, interviews, conversations, unforeseen run-ins and path-crossings, hundreds of photographs, and a few more movies. A noble experiment. Time to consider, reflect. Of course, afterwards, I was quickly reminded that there’s good reason for buckling down in the midst of all the sensory input of a film festival and churning copy and burning digital files. What happens once you’re back on the ground? Sure, plant your ass in the chair and type-type-type until all is tidy and done. But not so fast.
Read the full article »Sundance Seen Part 1
The whispering of powder from a dull quiet sky. Snowflakes fall between the screenings. Then the sun is bright and powder dusts off the slopes.
Read the full article »Best of 2014: A Top 40
Against the odds, good and great movies are made. And shown. And seen. And listed numerically, if not wholly ranked. Here’s one critic’s enhanced top forty for 2014.
Read the full article »A Story Of Deep Delight: Talking BOYHOOD With Richard Linklater
A conversation about time, duration, contracts, some parallels between Boyhood and poetry, making a period film in the present tense, and why film “improvisation” doesn’t exist.
Read the full article »Interview: Jonathan Glazer On The Birth Of UNDER THE SKIN
In a rangy interview, we talk to Jonathan Glazer about themes in Under The Skin, sight, the eye, Mica Levi’s inventive score and artistic productivity. (He admires Fassbinder’s output.) There are spoilers.
Read the full article »Interview: Talking JOE And The South With David Gordon Green
The world of David Gordon Green’s Joe is all I ever knew and feared of my upbringing. Not my family, no, but some of my extended-extended family, cousins second- and third-removed, and certainly in the lanes and miles that radiated outward from this small blot on the countryside. I did not come from those people in Kentucky but they lived down the road only a piece.
Read the full article »Picturing Sundance 14: Awards Night
Middle of the week, familiar faces aren’t recurring so often, Sundance theaters are mostly full, but not completely. But the traffic. The traffic never stops. Sundance 2014 was the first festival I’ve been to where what would once have been a workable schedule of screenings went to hell repeatedly because of traffic standstills all around Park City. The good thing about that is three or four films I would never have seen, but saw because they were the next option, half an hour forward, an hour forward, and they were good. I Pollyanna’ed that idea day and night long. Sundance: wherever you are, you’re where you were meant to be.
Read the full article »Picturing Sundance 2014: 7 Looks
Seven first-looks along the streets of sunny Sundance.
Read the full article »Sundance 2014 Review: Locke
“I’m just driving, that’s it,” he says in one way, another, and another. It’s a journey to the end of his soul. “I’m driving,” he says, and the BMW is his cranium, and the voices the voices rocketing within, the car less infernal cage than fevered skull. But it’s not a stunt, no, no, no: all the confinement, the inspired technical legerdemain, it’s all a means to an end, and that end is Locke.
Read the full article »Sundance 2014 Review: Stranger By The Lake
Classically constructed, as rigid in its construction of suspense as any recent thriller, Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake (L’inconnu du lac), is a masterful work, uncluttered yet lush, formally regimented, yet always surprising. (Call it full-frontal Hitchcock.) It also takes its location, its construction of sexuality, as commonplace. Guiraudie’s movie is assuredly part and parcel of queer cinema, but also of the cinema of the quotidian, of the everyday.
Read the full article »Best Of 2013: Nonfiction Features
A list of ten (with some ties), followed by an alphabetical list of another fourteen, from an exceptionally fine year for nonfiction features. I’m equally awestruck by the top three, The Act Of Killing, The Square and Stories We Tell, especially after multiple viewings.
Read the full article »
