“Enemy”, a Canadian film from 2013, knows how to hold the viewer for its hour-and-a-half running time. I caught it on Netflix the other day, and it’s definitely worth seeking out. It is a good illustration of a perennially popular genre film that I call the “psychological puzzler”. Directed by Denis Villeneuve, it stars Jake […]
“Knives Out”, written and directed by Rian Johnson, has an Oscar nomination for Johnson’s original screenplay. The critical and commercial success of this immensely gratifying whodunnit is due, in very large part, to the fact that they don’t make them like this any more. At least not for the big screen. The enormous popularity of […]
Sometimes it’s interesting to see two very different films close together. I have Netflix, and settled comfortably on my sofa to watch “The Two Popes” the other day. The soothing comfort soon made me fall asleep, but “The Two Popes” helped it along. Sorry, but I don’t watch movies for a good rest. But the […]
One of the features from the New Korean Cinema festival at Lincoln Center, Hong Sang-soo’s “The Day a Pig Fell into the Well”, which was his feature debut in 1996, is a grimly absorbing view of sexual relations in modern South Korea (by the way, there is no pig and no well, and it seems […]
Ordinarily, a story that challenges a filmmaker can result in an exhilarating work. There is a sense of breakthrough that the audience can share. Masterpieces as diverse as Terence Malick’s Badlands and Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters can start out confusingly, but feel fully resolved at the end. I don’t think Noah Baumbach’s Marriage […]
The latest film of South-Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho, “Parasite”, is a razor-sharp satire about class warfare in modern society. It concerns the Kim family, which consist of the father, Mr. Kim (Song Kong-he), his wife, their young adult son and younger teenage daughter. We get to know them and, despite committing fraud and causing innocent people […]
I saw five narrative features this year. Here they are in the order I saw them. The Irishman The opening night selection was “The Irishman”, the latest from Martin Scorsese. An epic crime film, organized around the still unexplained disappearance of Teamsters union president Jimmy Hoffa, in 1975, it plays out as perfectly suited to […]
Round up on upcoming films at the Hamptons International Film Festival 2019
Aniara, an ambitious science fiction film from Sweden, takes enormous risks by imagining the end of the world – in fact of human civilization – from a realistic perspective. Written and directed by Pella Kagerman and Hugo Lilja, it was inspired by an epic poem by Nobel Laureate Harry Martinson, which was later turned into an […]
Joanna Hogg has directed and written an openly autobiographical film, “The Souvenir”, about her early career as a filmmaker. One reason it has received a lot of attention is because it stars Honor Swinton Byrne, who is Tilda Swinton’s daughter. One of Hogg’s first short films starred Swinton, who plays her daughter’s mother in this […]
