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…]
Freaks Is A Sly Sci-Fi Alive With Surprise And Sentiment
Her shirt. It snagged my eye as strange, but I couldn’t immediately identify why. It doesn’t suit a seven-year-old somehow. Then I saw the snaps dangling just below her belly, and noticed the details on the shoulder. It’s a onesie, the kind that fastens snuggly around infants. At first, it’s a curious costuming choice. But as writers/directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein peel back the layers of their intimate and intense sci-fi thriller, the secrets spill out, and curious details transform into clues that reveal a world marvelous and monstrous. [Read more…]
Ferocity And Longing In The Chimerical Madeline’s Madeline
There are films that reject your cozy thirst to love them. Films that want not to comfort you, but to crawl under your skin and make it itch. They make you feel a deep, drowning unease. They submerge you in their story through sensation and leave you begging for release, for salvation. They leave your nerves raw and your mind rattled. Josephine Decker’s coming-of-age drama, Madeline’s Madeline, is such a film. [Read more…]
Tigers Are Not Afraid Is A Riveting Fantasy About A Real World Nightmare
When reality is too grim, fantasy can be a blessed escape. For the 11-year-old heroine at the heart of the modern fairy tale, Tigers Are Not Afraid, fantasy becomes her rocky path to salvation. It guides her through a Mexican city overrun by a merciless drug cartel that cages kids, pays off cops, and murders without consequence. When her mother goes missing, brave little Estrella (Paola Lara) goes on a quest to find her. Along the way, she’ll discover whispering phantoms, a tiny dragon, and a deep inner strength that might pull this spirited survivor through the most dangerous turns unscathed. [Read more…]
Musical Mayhem in LOUDER! Can’t Hear What You’re Singin,’ Wimp!
Imagine Marilyn Manson going on a madcap adventure with Carly Rae Jepson and the Three Stooges. That is the astonishing blend in the Japanese musical-comedy LOUDER! Can’t Hear What You’re Singin,’ Wimp!, which made its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival. Vocal-chord scouring rock music collides with toe-tapping pop and gleefully silly slapstick to make a movie that’s wonderfully bonkers and totally unpredictable. [Read more…]
Lifechanger Is A Sophisticated And Richly-Disturbing Shapeshifter-Horror
at Fantasia International Film
Reviewed by Kristy Puchko
Making its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival, Lifechanger is a lean, mean, and intense dose of shapeshifter horror with a chilling message perfectly suited to the complex conversations of the Me Too era. Written and directed by Canadian filmmaker Justin McConnell, Lifechanger follows a mysterious “skin-walker” who steals the form, memories, and lives of his victims, leaving behind a withered husk of a corpse. This creepy crime premise might have you expecting the movie would follow a cagey detective who is on this cruel creature’s trail. But McConnell offers something far more surprising, sophisticated, and richly disturbing. [Read more…]
A Short Gem Out Of Santa Monica College: Like a Rolling Stone
In the rapidly changing landscape of modern cinema, where streaming, the internet and television are fast becoming the dominant mediums, the art of the short film is becoming more than a mere calling card for aspiring filmmakers. Like collections of short stories, short films are as powerful and satisfying these days as full features, if only because media is making time itself feel as if it is hurtling forward. A short music video such as This is America, by Childish Gambino, will ignite passions about race relations in America faster than any feature film. Yet this is not a particularly new phenomenon to storytelling. With few exceptions, the great literary minds of the last two centuries have flourished in the art of the short story. From Roberto Bolano to William Faulkner, smaller narratives have encapsulated powerful ideas. [Read more…]
Under The Silver Lake Is A Twisted Love Letter To Hollywood
“Jesus and the Brides of Dracula. Hipster pirate. Topless bird-lover. Paddleboat stalking. Literally barking mad women. Hobo king with a cardboard crown.” The notes that I scrawled while watching Under The Silver Lake at its North American Premiere at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival look like the scribbles of a madman. That madman is writer/director David Robert Mitchell, who won wild praise for his art-house horror hit It Follows, and now has returned with a wildly ambitious, unapologetically bizarre, and intriguingly polarizing stoner-noir. [Read more…]
Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade Is Exquisitely Excruciating
I was not prepared for Eighth Grade. Since its rave-rousing Sundance premiere, stand-up comedian turned writer/director Bo Burnham’s debut feature has been gaining buzz as a great coming-of-age tale. I knew my peers thought it was “so good,” and I assumed that meant captivating and fun with occasional streaks of agonizing secondhand embarrassment. Basically, I imagined Lady Bird Jr. But Eighth Grade is not a bittersweet romp. It is not fun. It’s less a movie, and more a cringe-inducing, full-body flashback to the exquisite excruciation of being an adolescent.
Leave No Trace Is A Ruthlessly Intimate Coming-Of-Age Drama
It’s in the clicks, a soft double-click sound made by the tongue of a thirteen-year-old girl. It’s a secret code to tell her father she’s near and she loves him. Leave No Trace is rich with details like this, which deftly paint its central father-daughter relationship without a word. It’s clear in their comfort, the way she falls into sync with his humming of a half-remembered tune. In their efficiency in building a fire, scavenging for wild mushrooms, and casually shooing away wild dogs, you learn this isn’t just a camping trip. This shelter of tarps and tents in the midst of a lush park in Portland, Oregon, is their home, humble but happy. However, once the authorities discover them, this simple bliss will be shattered, forcing the two to come to a brutal decision. [Read more…]
The Agency Of Imagination In Olivier Babinet’s Swagger
In the 2016 film Swagger (newly out on Mubi), by Parisian filmmaker Olivier Babinet, an undercurrent of fictionalized plotlines pulls the story through the surface of reality. As a storyteller, Babinet has developed a potent strategy to render the lives of children and teenagers—who recall events with exaggeration and fervent emotion—by building out their imaginative tales. His approach presents a novel documentary methodology, one that can truly illuminate the way we depict the world. [Read more…]
The Shocking Doc Three Identical Strangers Is Vexing Yet Undeniably Fascinating
Their spectacular story scored them a slew of newspaper headlines. Their charming chemistry made them coveted guests on the talk show circuit, the toast of New York’s nightclub scene, and quirky celebrity cameos in Desperately Seeking Susan who were handpicked by Madonna herself. They were three strapping young men, with broad smiles, meaty hands, curly hair, and the same damn face. Robert “Bobby” Shafran, David Kellman, and Eddy Galland were triplets separated at birth, adopted into three different families, and 19 years later reunited by chance. Their reunion was a warm and wonderful story that captured the public’s curiosity and hearts. But what happened next was dark and disturbing, and is revealed in the fascinating and frustrating documentary Three Identical Strangers. [Read more…]
Cheeky And Challenging, Damsel Won’t Play By The Rules
The Wild West is a place of fantasy long divorced from any truth that inspired its folklore. Movies have painted a gorgeous yet ferocious world of vast and vivid mesas and plains, inhabited by mysterious natives, dainty damsels in distress, black-hatted outlaws, and gruff but noble cowboys who ride high, like knights of this treacherous terrain. In our imagination, The West is a place ripe with opportunities to be a hero; the dangers are just part of that adventure. But in the sharply witty Western Damsel, buying into this fantasy means buying into deadly delusions of grandeur. Here, every man wants to think he’s the hero of this story, and every one is wrong. [Read more…]