What to make of the deeply strange Vox Lux? Actor turned writer/director Brady Corbet centers on the tragedy-strewn life of a female pop star to explore celebrity, sisterhood, motherhood, and terrorism. But while his sophomore effort is wildly ambitious, it’s more confounding than captivating, and ultimately underwhelming. [Read more…]
Clara’s Ghost Is A Twisted Family Affair
Reviewed by Kristy Puchko
There’s a unique kind of horror found within families. Inside jokes can become a cozy place to nestle insults. Old wounds and deepening resentments can be papered over with any new bit of family gossip or for any get together. But in the horror-comedy Clara’s Ghost, a brush with the potentially paranormal pushes a mild-mannered mom to lash out against the family that’s tradition is casually berating her. [Read more…]
Mary Queen of Scots is a Messy But Marvelous Bit Of Feminist Fan (Non)Fiction
A legendary beauty with a string of dead lovers and a dangerous claim to the English throne, Mary Stuart is a figure who has long fascinated historians. She has been painted as a murderer, a traitor, and a slut. But Mary Queen of Scots reconsiders this bad reputation and reconstructs her as a proto-feminist heroine who was condemned for her ambition, her beauty, and for trying to have it all. [Read more…]
In Search Of Lost Time In Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma
As time moves forward we find ourselves attempting to recover its fragments. In the earliest youth time can lose its very meaning, but as the years accumulate we then look back, as if trying to find photographs in a vast galaxy of memories. Alfonso Cuaron wants to use the very essence of cinema to recover the past in Roma. His first feature film for Netflix is also one of the year’s best — a haunted, detailed, personal rendering of his memories growing up in 1970s Mexico. A serene rush of recollections, sights, sounds and sensations, it is a thriving example of the artist attempting ever so thoroughly to render for us what he experienced as a child. In its grander scope it is a tapestry of a society in a specific moment of time, at a more intimate level it conjures that sensation we feel when attempting to remember how the air smelled during a trip to the desert, how the night glowed when we were lost in the woods, or what her eyes looked like when you found her weeping on the balcony. [Read more…]
Shoplifters Delivers A Defiantly Joyful Drama About An Unusual ‘Chosen Family’
“Chosen family” is a term most often associated with the LGBTQA+ community. It’s used to describe a close circle of friends who love each other like family, though there is no shared blood between them. Chosen families are how many queer people find community, comfort, and home after their biological relatives have offered them rejection, scorn, or outright ostracizing. Acclaimed Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda creates a unique and heart-warming tale of such a family with Shoplifters. [Read more…]
Director Nathaniel Khan Talks About The Price Of Everything
Few ever dream of owning a masterpiece; even fewer know the intrinsic value of an art piece in today’s hyper inflated art market. Brilliantly directed by Nathaniel Khan, The Price of Everything is a fascinating journey into the personalities at the forefront of this phenomenon, from high-end investors to auctioneers, historians, art critics, collectors and artists. [Read more…]
The Farce of Imperial Pageantry In Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite
We begin with an evening walking through the artificial cities of the Fox Studios lot, accompanied by a Turk who can read a star map, graced with a name that has a royal origin. She inevitably helps us find our way among the maze of this place. It is but a day after the republic has cast its vote in another election embodying well these mad times. We walk through the false New York streets of the lot, nestled within the west side of Los Angeles. Like power, the city within this city is but an illusion. Such are the perfect conditions to enter the world of The Favourite, the new film by Greek enfant terrible Yorgos Lanthimos. Like his ancestors, Luis Bunuel, Tristan Tzara and other practitioners of the surreal arts, Lanthimos captures this era in civilization better than almost any other director. This new work reaches back into the past, yet has a timeless force in its dissection and sheer mocking of the pageantry of empire. [Read more…]
Twilight of the Idol: Orson Welles’s Long Lost The Other Side of the Wind
What beautiful fragments the gods leave from their unfinished visions. Orson Welles was cursed with having entered the arena of the cinema by immediately reaching its peak. In 1941 he made Citizen Kane, that grand work of cinematic biography- taking the story of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst and transforming it into a reverie of immortal imagery. Welles was merely 24 at the time and it would be his fate to fall while leaving beautiful trails behind. He would direct titles like Touch of Evil, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai, all butchered by the studio system, yet all considered masterful. His 1948 Macbeth is one of the great underappreciated Shakespeare adaptations, a work of brimstone and gothic poetry. [Read more…]
The Horror Of Our Seed: Revisiting David Lynch’s The Grandmother
If there is ever a core idea behind our modern-day celebration of Halloween it is the need to escape. We run from ourselves into masks and costumes, for one night becoming that which we wish we had been. Sometimes we choose the face of a monster, only because we as mere humans are the most monstrous creations of all. Fear of oneself is essentially fear of your seed, of your origins. No filmmaker has captured the very psychology of America like David Lynch, and even in his early student and short film work, one finds an artist digging into the depths of his psychic plane, and our own. [Read more…]
You’re Not Prepared For The Genre-Bending Romance In Border
You might think yourself a savvy cinephile. Perhaps you’ve heard that Border won Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival and is Sweden’s submission for Best Foreign-Language Film for the upcoming Academy Awards. So you hear the premise of a customs officer who forms an unexpected bond with a stranger she investigates, and assume you have a solid idea of the drama and romance that will unfurl. You’re wrong. Even if you know Border is adapted from a short story from Let The Right One In author and screenwriter John Ajvide Lindqvist, you can’t possibly conceive of the wild, disturbing yet beautiful story that’s lies within. And better yet, its unnerving surprises are just part of what makes this movie absolutely marvelous. [Read more…]
A Time of Monsters: An Updated Suspiria For Our Dark Age
There are several ways of remembering a nightmare. Interpreting a classic work always requires a true sense of daring. When literature has become canon or a film a cultural staple, updating a story for a new age will bring with it the baggage of decades. For our new era of ghouls and menacing shadows, director Luca Guadagnino has decided to conjure his own interpretation of Dario Argento’s 1977 Suspiria. This new version, nearly 3 hours in length, is not worthy of the label “remake.” Guadagnino has taken Argento’s pulpy, color-strewn cult object and transformed it into a work of an almost occult power. It is a film set in the very decade of the original, but it seems to be channeling our own, present sense that dark forces at work in the world. To compare the two versions is to compare two eras and mindsets, two interpretations of the extreme and satanic. [Read more…]
Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite Is Ferociously Funny And Delightfully Subversive
With The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, director Yorgos Lanthimos has chiseled out a reputation for crafting comedies out of the darkest corners of human experience. Loneliness, jealousy, betrayal and death are his pathways to startling hilarity. Thus, the laughs he earns burst forth as shocked guffaws and obscene barks, as if our joy in the face of such misery is a rude jolt to even ourselves. Admirers of Lanthimos’ twisted humor have new reason to revel. With his most captivating cast yet, he’s created The Favourite, a deranged look at sex and politics within the court of Queen Anne. [Read more…]
Nicole Kidman Slays In The Gritty Thriller Destroyer
There are secret shames we tuck away, bury deep into the darkest corners of our souls in hopes of forgetting them. But that shame doesn’t disintegrate. It festers. It poisons. It twists us into horrible things. That is the dark lesson lying within of Destroyer, a challenging crime-drama from director Karyn Kusama. [Read more…]
The Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs Offers Whimsy But No Risks
With No Country For Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen brought the Western into a brutal, modern territory. With their remake of True Grit, they dusted off an American classic and polished it with star power, a dash of whimsy, and a mean sheen of menace. Now, the Coen Brothers revel in their love of the genre with the ambitious anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. As a big admirer of both their previous Westerns, I anticipated I’d be an easy mark for loving their latest. But while it’s stuffed with charming stars, colorful characters, and tales of life in the Wild West, this cowboy collection is clunky, indulgent, and ultimately underwhelming. [Read more…]
Agnieszka Smoczynska’s Daring and Brilliant Fugue
at Fantastic Fest, Austin
Review by Kristy PuchkoIn 2016, Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska made a splash with her directorial debut The Lure, a heady horror-musical about man-eating mermaids. For her latest, Smoczynska has left behind the spectacle of blood, monsters, and burlesque numbers. But her biting brand of observational humor makes the daring drama Fugue a fitting and fantastic follow-up. [Read more…]
Visions of Fire and Fury In Panos Cosmatos’s Mandy
The mythological still channels our innermost desires. Myths crystalize what we wish to be, or how we would like to divide the world in terms of good and evil, with a simplicity that is crystalline. This same mythic power fuels Mandy, a wild and haunting cinematic creation. A hallucinatory film with the logic of a nightmare, it manages to combine camp, horror and moments of profound drama in a bizarre yet beautiful canvas. Director Panos Cosmatos announces himself here as an original talent on par with other recent masters of trippy cinema like Nicolas Winding Refn or Guy Maddin. Yet while Cosmatos may bask in the kind of outrageous, visceral creativity more common in post-modern experimentation, his film is a myth forged out of deep fires. It is not an exaggeration to call it Homeric, for it is a journey that feels classic even as it takes place in a modern world. Completing this film’s strange power is Nicolas Cage, who delivers a performance of astounding fury, as if he were a fanatic engaged in holy war. There is a lot of blood in Mandy, as well as chainsaws, burning buildings, drugs and even animation, but it’s never shallow or stale. [Read more…]
Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable
![Garry Winogrand. Park Avenue, New York, 1959 [monkey in car, vertical]](https://i2.wp.com/www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/GARRY-WINOGRAND-image-3.jpg?resize=275%2C413&ssl=1)
2018 / 90-minutes
A Greenwich Entertainment Release
at Film Forum, NYC
When Garry Winogrand died unexpectedly in 1984, he left behind over 2,500 undeveloped rolls of film. Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable, directed by Sasha Waters Freyer, is a fascinating documentary that examines the quiet life of one of America’s most prominent postwar photographers, setting that in contrast to the professional career he had been most known for. As a stringer who worked primarily for mass-print magazines such as LOOK and LIFE, Winogrand has long been associated with prominent subjects such as Marilyn Monroe, Mohammed Ali and John F. Kennedy. However, this film’s vast number of interviews — which include his first wife Adrienne Lebeau, Thomas Roma, Jeffrey Fraenkel, Todd Papageorge, Jeffrey Henson Scales, Shelley Rice, Laurie Simmons and Matthew Weiner — show Winogrand as someone who enjoyed his own invisibility while rendering serendipitous inconsistencies. [Read more…]
Streaming Strange Consciousness, And Glorious Cataclysms, In Blake Williams’s Prototype
One cannot simply write a review of Blake Williams’s immersive, hypnotic experimental film Prototype. It is more appropriate to comment on this film as the description of an experience. Whether taken in as a 3D experience or as a standard, 2D film, Protoype attempts to create an environment with the very idea of cinema itself. Cinema in its most primal form is a collection of images, rushing one after the other, weaving a tapestry. Williams’s work has a kinship with the early avant-garde cinema which experimented with the marriage of image and narrative, producing works which today have a dreamlike intensity. This intensity comes from the passage of time, because now these films can feel like a transmission from some other age or world. Herman G. Weinberg’s 1931 “film poem,” Autumn Fire, is such a film, with its silent black white imagery of nature, a wandering man in silhouette, a daydreaming woman and breezy waters. As modern pop culture came to be in the 1960s, artists like Andy Warhol would push the very boundaries of what cinema as an art form even meant. His 7-hour Empire is simply one still shot of the Empire State Building. [Read more…]
The Bawdy Colette Is Provocative And Fun
Her novels were a cultural sensation that sold out printing after printing, spurred sprawling merchandise and plays, and inspired a generation of young women to boldness. But Colette (formerly known as Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette) was long regarded the muse of the Claudine novels, while her husband Henry Gauthier-Villars was celebrated as their author. His nom-de-plume “Willy” graced the books’ covers and his bawdy brand was used to launch the novels he’d mentored her to ghostwrite. But it was her observations and insights into the sensational and sometimes salacious experience of being a young woman that made them a phenomenon. It would take years and great personal pain for Colette to get the credit she deserved. The rebellious and passionate biopic Colette celebrates the woman and the artist who poured her self onto the page, sharing her fire and brilliance with the ages. [Read more…]
Swaggering Portraits Of American Masculinity In The Sisters Brothers
The fantasy of the cowboy is one of liberty and power that is distinctly American. We imagine him riding high on a saddle, the Wild West his to explore and dominate. His hat makes for a striking silhouette as his hips swing with a masculine swagger. His gun outstretched to bend the wilderness and wickedness to his will. He is a folk hero, a good guy with a gun, a legend who refuses to play by the rules of a society he nonetheless defends selflessly. But not every guy with a gun is good. And not every cowboy is a hero. [Read more…]