Light Sensitive

More Sundancing

(Kate Hudson and Casey Affleck, in Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me.)

In the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties, following a series of film adaptations of novels by Jim Thompson that helped rehabilitate his reputation, I became deeply interested in his work and read about eight or nine of his novels, pretty much one after the other.

They were a revelation, not just the terseness and electricity of the prose, but the lyrical description of character and the intensely evocative mood and peculiar milieu he sketched with a rabid flurry and formal command.

Personally I thought his strongest works were The Grifters, After Dark, My Sweet, The Getaway and Pop. 1280. His masterpiece, his gravest and most chilling work, was The Killer Inside Me, published in 1952.

It's one of the most unflinching and terrifying first-person novels I've ever read. It balances the nihilism of The Getaway with the treachery and murderous rage of Pop. 1280. In that work, the small town sheriff turns vigilante not only to eliminate the criminal underworld but also achieve redemption against those who mocked and vilified him.

In The Killer Inside Me, the implacable, fiendish Lou Ford, the small town West Texas sheriff whose destructive rage literally annihilates everyone that comes into his path, denotes the unfathomable, but it‘s the lack of affect, the clearness of mind, the soundness of his reason, that is so appalling and brutal.

The French were always way ahead of us on Thompson, just as they were on David Goodis and other American crime specialists. Foreign directors have turned out the strongest Thompson adaptations: Bertrand Tavernier (whose Coup de torchon brilliantly transplants the action of Pop. 1280 to French colonial West Africa), Alain Corneau (his Serie noire is a terrific adaptation of A Hell of a Woman), Stephen Frears' The Grifters (featuring Annette Benning's greatest performance ever). The only American director whose work approaches those is James Foley's superb After Dark, My Sweet.

Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of The Killer Inside Me detonated at the Eccles Theater in Park City Sunday night. The festival's advertising sloganeering has been pushing the notion of "rebelling," or "revolution," to outrageous lengths; here finally was a film that violated the general smoothness of Sundance and the movie was more or less pummeled by the paying crowd and "sponsors," the festival goes out of their way to appease.

It's unflinching and brutal, featuring two extended sequences of women being beaten to a pulp. I'm still putting together a formal review, but my general impression is favorable, with some fairly major qualms.

Winterbottom is prolific; I've said this elsewhere but he's he kind of competent and versatile craftsman who's neither never going to make a great film nor ever make a wholly uninteresting one. His films are wildly uneven. The French sales agent Wild Bunch is apparently the primary financier on the film (which is going to have its international premiere at Berlin next month).

I was favorably impressed by Casey Affleck's work in Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. He's very good here, and so is Jessica Alba, playing the crucial role of the prostitute who sets the deputy's nefarious plot in motion.

Frears' adaptation of The Grifters (shot by the excellent Oliver Stapleton) offered one of the most pungent visual reproduction of fifties Los Angeles I've ever seen. Likewise, the Danish-born Marcel Zyskind achieves some beautiful work with the flat landscapes in the new adaptation of Killer.

Yesterday, I also caught Howl, an interesting though also perplexing analysis of the social, cultural and personal impact of Allen Ginsberg's landmark poem. It held my attention, but I'm not sure that it's really cinema. It's more of an essay film that draws on different forms, animation, period recreation, direct address interview, somewhat in the manner of Todd Haynes' I'm Not There (the great Ed Lachman shot both films). I have more about it here.

Before the Winterbottom, I sat in the balcony for the premiere of The Runaways, video artist Floria Sigismondi's debut movie about Joan Jett and the founding of her seminal seventies band. It's energetic and exceptionally well made; it never quite transcends the structural limitations of the historical biography, even something so recent and fresh as this.

I liked the performances a lot. Kristen Stewart has had her life taken away by the tabloidization of her personal life, but she's been a terrific actor for a long time. She's perhaps inchoate and finding herself off-stage, but she's a presence. That ungainliness and awkward intensity is not an act. Dakota Fanning is also astonishing good as Cherie Currie and Michael Shannon (hardly surprising) is coolly effective as the impresario that helped make and unbreak them. Sigismondi has a perceptive eye for composition and emotional detail, and she finds a poignant, tender quality in her young actresses that I found quite compelling.

 

(James Franco, right, as Allen Ginsberg in Howl.)

Sundance: part one

(The beautiful, exceptionally talented Jennifer Lawrence, in Debra Granik's superb Winter's Bone. All images courtesy of Sundance Film festival.)

In January of 1992, I came into some money and decided to take the trek, via train, to Park City for the Sundance film festival. That was the first time I ever heard of Quentin Tarantino, whose Reservoir Dogs screened in the competition that year. Other films screened that year were Tom Kalin's Swoon, Gregg Araki's The Living End, Alexandre Rockwell's In the Soup (the eventual grand prize winner) and Paul Schrader's Light Sleeper.

And Monster in the Box, Nick Broomfield's adaptation of the monologuist Spalding Gray's performance piece. I interviewed Spalding, with the Super Bowl between the Redskins and Bills playing in the background, and he talked about the one-two punch of that film and his novel, Impossible Vacation, published simultaneously by Knopf.

It was a great, freewheeling interview. Years later, when Spalding took his own life, I always thought of our interview. (Now Steven Soderbergh's new piece on Spalding, And Everything is Going Fine, screens at Slamdance.)

I've been in Park City about a day and a half. The weather has a frightening beauty, with large swaths of blinding white snow falling uninterrupted. It's hell right now to get around, but that makes just want to avoid moving anywhere and just going to the movies.

The festival has a new artistic director, John Cooper, who was replaced Geoff Gilmore. There's already been a lot of conjecture about the festival, about the culture, about the insularity of the selection committee and whether or not they have capitulated too egregiously on the side of the sponsors and commercial interests.

My bigger issue has been the omission of too many significant works. Sundance makes a big deal out of the movies they select, but we always find out, one way or another, films that get lost. My friend Scott Macaulay has a strong piece about the very thing. Sundance has to become more inclusive of a certain brand of filmmaking.

Already, I have concerns.

It's patently ridiculous, for instance, that Aaron Katz, one of the best American directors working today, is premiering his new film Cold Weather at SXSW.

Sundance is the festival that has, in recent years, bypassed David Gordon Green's George Washington, Andrew Bujalski's Funny Ha Ha, Jeff Nichols' Shotgun Stories and Antonio Campos's Afterschool.

That's inexcusable.

The festival opened Thursday night with screenings of two titles in the competition, the narrative drama Howl, about the seminal work by Allen Ginsberg, directed by the documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (The Times of Harvey Milk); and Restrepo, by the filmmaker Tim Hetherington and journalist Sebastian and Junger.

So far, I've seen nine films: Nowhere Boy, Sam Taylor-Wood's disappointingly pedestrian piece about John Lennon's formative year; Restrepo; Obselidia, a first feature by Diane Bell about a smart, square man whose life is jolted by the appearance of a beautiful woman.

Here's my larger consideration of Obselidia. Theoretically I should love any movie that finds a way to reference Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar. It's not without interest, sharply photographed, but the tone is too varied and the hectoring and didactic touches too heavily yoked over the rest of the film to develop much emotional connection to the slimly conceived characters.

I also write about John Wells' The Company Men. (Some friends at mine disagree rather violently with my appraisal of the film.)

The strongest competition film is Debra Granik's Winter's Bone, a hillbilly noir set in the Ozarks, featuring an absolutely stunning performance by Jennifer Lawrence. I liked Granik's Down to the Bone, with Vera Farmiga, which premiered six years ago, but this is really something to see. It mixes styles and tones beautitfully, and it's colored by some beautiful uses of music, folklore and the down low. It's the kind of film where every single performance feels note perfect. I'll have more about it later.

So, an encouraging start. 


(Tommy Lee Jones and Ben Affleck in John Wells' The Company Men.)

Eric Rohmer (1920-2010)

(Eric Rohmer, on the set of his final film, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon.)

 

At Venice in 2001, Eric Rohmer received a career achievement award. He was there with his interesting and complex early digital feature on the French Revolution, The Lady and the Duke. His introspection was legendary, and he made it a condition of the press conference at Venice that no photographs of him be allowed.

 

Rohmer had a great presence. He was a terrific actor, most startling and effective in Jacques Rivette’s great Out 1.

 

No more Rohmer; even worse, no more Rohmer films. Of the five authentic nouvelle vague directors, only Godard, Rivette and Chabrol remain.

 

This is an abridged version of an essay I wrote about Rohmer on the occasion of a Chicago retrospective.

 

“Though he's directed almost three dozen films since his first feature in 1959, Eric Rohmer has often labeled these works as serials. The breadth of these offerings acknowledges the beauty in Rohmer's work. Rohmer was less formally innovative than Jean-Luc Godard or Jacques Rivette, and he lacked the personal engagement that gave Francois Truffaut's best films their most incisive qualities (The Soft Skin, for example, can be seen as Truffaut's critique of his own infidelity and the breakup of his marriage).

 

Rohmer was a generation older than his French New Wave contemporaries, and perhaps this gave his films their almost classical concern with story. But his age may have also contributed to his lack of interest in challenging the conventions of storytelling. And while his characters may reach epiphanies, they're usually denied the liberating possibilities of change.

 

Born Jean-Marie Maurice Scherer, Rohmer taught high school literature during the Nazi occupation and wrote a novel, Elizabeth (1946), under the name Gilbert Cordier. In 1948, he arrived in Paris, where he contributed essays and criticism to several prominent film publications. Along with Godard, Rivette, Truffaut, and Claude Chabrol, Rohmer wrote for the seminal film journal Cahiers du Cinema. In 1951, the same year Cahiers was founded, Rohmer wrote and directed his first short, Charlotte and Her Steak, which showcased Godard as a lone actor attempting to seduce two women who are never shown. He also worked in television and made educational and industrial films.

 

Over the next few years Rohmer wrote and directed several other shorts, reportedly experiments in literary adaptations, that initiated his professional collaboration with Barbet Schroeder, the Iranian-born producer and oil heir who's better known today as a director (Barfly, Reversal of Fortune). He continued to write, collaborating with Chabrol on a superb 1957 study of Alfred Hitchcock, and that same year Rohmer was named editor of Cahiers, a position he held until 1963.

 

Unlike the debut features of Truffaut, Godard, and Chabrol, Rohmer's 1959 The Sign of Leo was ignored by the public and dismissed by the critics. In 1963 Rohmer and Schroeder formed their own production company, Les Films du Losange. Schroeder--a brilliant documentary filmmaker (Idi Amin Dada) as well as an actor and producer (he produced Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating)--plays the lead and narrates the action of The Baker Girl of Monceau (1963), the 23-minute, 16-millimeter, black-and-white short that inaugurates the "Six Moral Tales."

 

Rohmer’s best known films remain My Night at Maud's (1969) and Claire's Knee (1970)--but his earlier works are more revealing, laying out the style and themes he would go on to explore in his later movies.

 

One theme, introduced with The Baker Girl of Monceau, is the impossibility of genuine relationships between men and women. Schroeder is a law student who becomes fixated on a beautiful young Parisienne, Sylvie, whom he frequently passes on the street. Elated at the prospect of their next rendezvous, he grows quickly frustrated when his epic wanderings around her neighborhood fail to bring them together. The man approaches his dilemma rationally, treating love like a mathematical formula.

 

"Dinner took 30 minutes, and my walk 3, so my chances of seeing her were multiplied by ten," he says in the voice-over narration. Making repeated stops at a local pastry shop, Schroeder is beguiled by the counter girl. He arranges a date with her, but the moment is sabotaged when Sylvie turns up. "My choice had been above all, moral," the young man insists. "One represented truth, the other a mistake, or that was how I saw it at the time."

 

The movie established the outline and shape of much of his later work: role playing, class distinctions, the elements of chance and fate, the confusion wrought by love and friendship. Rohmer's stories are concerned with language and manners and the way these affect relationships.

 

The Baker Girl of Monceau anticipates Claire's Knee, where the diplomat played by Jean-Claude Brialy, a month from being married, must resolve his infatuation with two sexually precocious teenage girls, Laura (Beatrice Romand) and Claire (Laurence de Monaghan). Typically Rohmer treats the action as a philosophical inquiry, but as always it's ineffable and elusive. "She aroused in me a real yet undefined desire," he says of Claire. "All the stronger because it's undefined. A pure desire. A desire of nothing." The object of his desire is introduced in precisely the same manner as Haydee Politoff, the self-contained title figure of La collectionneuse (1967)--she's wearing a bikini.

 

With the exception of the first two films, the cinematographer of the "Six Moral Tales" was the excellent Spanish-born Nestor Almendros. With Raoul Coutard and Henri Decae, Almendros is among the notable technical collaborators of the major New Wave directors, having also worked extensively with Truffaut. The formal beauty of these works (the play of natural light, water, and landscape in La collectionneuse and Claire's Knee, the white-on-white compositions in My Night at Maud's) is essential to the vivid sense of place.

 

The stories match the locations, creating a profoundly physical sense of recognition. Stripped of music and camera movement, the movies acquire a tone--droll, ironically detached--that appears to be organic and realistic.

 

With the "Comedies and Proverbs," that tone turns colder and less forgiving, and there is a recurring sense of resignation and defeat. The first two entries of the cycle, The Aviator's Wife (1980) and Le beau marriage (1982), chart the aftermath of a failed affair between a married man and a younger woman.

 

In the first film, a 20-year-old postal worker (Philippe Marlaud) is unconvinced that a handsome pilot has ended his affair with the sophisticated 25-year-old woman (Marie Riviere) the postal worker is nominally involved with. The movie's point of view shifts from Riviere to Marlaud with the inventive use of an iris shot, and the dominant perspective suddenly becomes the fractured, tormented psyche of the young man, who now obsessively follows the pilot (Mathieu Carriere) and his mysterious companion.

 

His tortured state is further complicated by the appearance of another romantic interest, a relaxed and confident young girl (Anne-Laure Meury). The movie turns on a remarkable 30-minute sequence between Marlaud and Riviere inside her cramped apartment where they tentatively unravel the difficulties of their relationship. Rohmer's cinema seems predicated on observation, conversation, and social milieu, but this scene illustrates the rigor and daring of his best work.

 

He constantly finds ways to play off the physical space between them; the cutting and camera movement draw out their fear, regret, and possessiveness. "You're doing nothing but talking, but you're not saying anything," Riviere says.

 

In Le beau marriage, the protagonist, 25-year-old Sabine (Romand), is angered and frustrated by the demands and responsibilities of her married lover, and she promptly ends their relationship. Emboldened, she suddenly announces her desire to marry, and focuses her energy on a 35-year-old bourgeois Paris lawyer (Andre Dussollier), the cousin of her best friend (Arielle Dombasle). The movie is framed by images of Sabine standing before a window--the first time in the house where she meets the lawyer, the second on a train following her last encounter with him at his Paris office.

 

The first shot holds out the possibility of romantic ecstasy. The second is more contemplative, tentative, and rueful. The movie opens against a deep red background with La Fontaine's question, "Can any of us refrain from building castles in Spain?" The final image provides the answer.

 

By contrast, the dark and penetrating Full Moon in Paris (1984) opens with a tracking shot of an industrial suburb, settling on a cold, sterile house, accompanied by a stern warning, in the form of a notorious French saying: "He who has two women loses his soul. He who has two houses loses his mind." The action unfolds from November through February, and the cold, damp look extends from the suburban landscapes to the anonymous buildings and barren concrete of the city's streets. Louise (Pascale Ogier, in a career performance) asserts her sexual independence and freedom from her lover by maintaining a Paris apartment.

 

She rejects the aggressive pursuit of a writer played by Fabrice Luchini ("I can't accept that one aspect of you is beyond my reach," he tells her). But the apartment that suggested sexual escape, freedom, and fulfillment turns into an abject symbol of her loneliness and isolation. Rohmer is less interested in sex than in its consequences. The image of Ogier's naked body in flight from a sexual experience is one of the most unsettling images of exile ever shown.”

 

Few directors were more attuned to the beauty, grace and emotional longing of the human form.

 

Au revoir, monsieur. You will be missed. 

 

Farewell to the great Eric Rohmer.

Best of the decade: part four

(Chloe Sevigny, in Olivier Assayas's Demonlover.)

 

I had a difficult time creating a hierarchal list, so I have grouped my final record of the best films of the decade alphabetically, by director. In cases where a director has more than one title, I list the films in order of their production.

 

 

Robert Altman

Gosford Park

 

Paul Thomas Anderson

Punch-Drunk Love

There Will Be Blood (A joint interview with production designer

Jack Fisk and cinematographer Robert Elswit here)

 

Michelangelo Antonioni

Michelangelo Eye to Eye

 

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Blissfully Yours

Tropical Malady

Syndromes and a Century

 

Darren Aronofsky

The Wrestler

 

Olivier Assayas

Les destinees sentimentale (Cannes review)

Demonlover, Clean, Boarding Gate trilogy (Cannes review)

 

Jacques Audiard

The Beat that My Heart Skipped

A Prophet (Cannes dispatch)

 

Noah Baumbach

The Squid and the Whale

Margo at the Wedding

 

Marco Bellochio

My Mother’s Smile

Good Morning, Night

Vincere

 

(Marina Hands and Jean-Louis Coullo'ch in Pascal Ferran's Lady Chatterley.)

 

Ingmar Bergman

Saraband

 

Shari Springer Berman

Robert Pulcini

American Splendor

 

Catherine Breillat

Fat Girl

The Old Mistress

 

Jonathan Caouette

Tarnation

 

Laurent Cantet

The Class (Cannes report)

 

Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Distant

 

Claude Chabrol

Flower of Evil

Merci pour le chocolate

 

Patrice Chéreau

Intimacy (Sundance review)

Gabrielle

 

Lee Chang-dong

Secret Sunshine (Cannes review)

 

Joel and Ethan Coen

The Man Who Wasn’t There (Cannes review)

No Country for Old Men

A Serious Man Toronto dispatch)

 

(Michael Stuhlbarg in the Coens' A Serious Man.)

 

 

Sofia Coppola

Lost in Translation

Marie Antoinette

 

Pedro Costa

Wanda’s Room

Where Lies Your Hidden Smile?

Ne change rien (Cannes piece)

 

David Cronenberg

Spider

A History of Violence

Eastern Promises

 

Terence Davies

The House of Mirth

Of Time and the City

 

Jonathan Demme

Rachel Getting Married

 

Claire Denis

L’intrus

35 Shots of Rum

White Material 

 

Arnaud Desplechin

Esther Kahn

 

(Summer Phoenix, the eponymous Esther Kahn.) 

 

 

Jacques Doillon

Raja

Anybody Else (Le premier venu)

 

Pascal Ferran

Lady Chatterley (Interview with Marina Hands)

 

David Fincher

Zodiac

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

 

Ari Folman

Waltz with Bashir (Cannes dispatch)

 

Philippe Garrel

Frontier of Dawn

 

Marco Tullio Giordana

The Best of Youth

 

Jean-Luc Godard

Notre musique

 

Michel Gondry

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

 

Paul Greenglass

Bloody Sunday (capsule review)

United 93

 

Jose Luis Guerin

In the City of Sylvia

Photos from In the City of Sylvia

 

Todd Haynes

Far From Heaven

 

Hong Sang-soo

Woman is the Future of Man

Tale of Cinema

Woman on the Beach

Night and Day (Berlin post)

Like You Know It All

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hou Hsiao-hsien

Millennium Mambo

Café Lumiere

Three Times

 

Im Kwon-taek

Chunhyang

 

Jim Jarmusch

The Limits of Control

 

Jia Zhang-ke

Unknown Pleasures

The World

Still Life

24 City

 

Richard Linklater

Waking Life

School of Rock

A Scanner Darkly

 

Ang Lee

Brokeback Mountain

 

Spike Lee

The 25^th Hour

 

Mike Leigh

Vera Drake

 

Kenneth Lonergan

You Can Count on Me

 

Guy Maddin

My Winnipeg

 

Lucrecia Martel

La cienega

The Holy Girl

The Headless Woman

 

Cristian Mungiu

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cannes review and Mungiu talk)  

 

Guy Maddin

My Winnipeg

 

Manoel de Oliveira

I’m Going Home

The Principle of Uncertainty

Word and Utopia

Eccentricities of a Blonde Hair Girl

 

Nagisha Oshima

Taboo

 

Jafar Panahi

The Circle

Crimson Gold

 

Alexander Payne

About Schmidt

 

Corneliu Porumboiu

Police, Adjective

 

Kelly Reichardt

Old Joy

Wendy and Lucy

 

Alain Resnais

Wild Grass

 

 

 

Carlos Reygadas

Japon

Silent Light

 

Jacques Rivette

Va savoir (Cannes review)

Ne touchez pas la hache (The Duchess of Langeais) (Toronto piece)

Around a Small Mountain

 

Eric Rohmer

The Lady and the Duke

Triple Agent

Romance of Astree and Celadon

 

Gus van Sant

Elephant

Paranoid Park

Milk

 

Julian Schnabel

Before Night Falls

Diving Bell and the Butterfly

 

Martin Scorsese

My Voyage to Italy

Gangs of New York

The Departed

 

Ousmane Sembene

Moolaade (Interview)

 

Abderrahmane Sissako

Waiting for Happiness

Bamako

 

Jerzy Skolimowsky

Four Nights with Anna

 

Steven Soderbergh

Che (Cannes piece)

 

Steven Spielberg

AI: Artificial Intelligence

 

Bela Tarr

The Man from London

 

Tian Zhuangzhuang

Springtime in a Small Town

 

Tsai Ming-liang

What Time Is It There?

 

Frederick Wiseman

Domestic Violence

La danse: Paris Opera Ballet

 

Wong Kar-wai

The Hand

2046

 

Zhang Yimou

House of Flying Daggers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Best of the decade, part three

 

 

 

My second list of top films from the decade. I'm cheating and counting the two Lynch films as one piece.

 

Numbers ten to twenty:

 

Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2006): Cannes competition. The complex, sad, moving story of a relationship, marked by some of the most tactile and photo realistic uses of digital photography I’ve ever seen. More on the film here.

 

In Praise of Love (Jean-Luc Godard, 2001): Cannes competition. This supple, elusive portrait of feeling, emotion, and states of being was the master’s best film since Nouvelle vague.

 

Mulholland Dr./Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2001, 2006): This lyrical, dark, poetic diptych views Hollywood as fever dream and nightmare. Inland, Lynch’s digitally shot experimental feature, is given an added jolt by Laura Dern’s mesmerizing performance.

 

 

Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2007): Cannes, Un Certain Regard. Hou’s French-language feature originated as homage to The Red Balloon, and is transformed, by a great director, into a thrilling and personal form of history and autobiography that references the director’s masterpiece The Puppetmaster (1993. It takes the ineffable and makes it concrete and visible. Here’s my original review in Stop Smiling.

 

The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005): Press screening. The film has three versions: the pre-release version, the release version, and now the recently issued director’s cut. Here’s an extract from Screen International review:

 

“Demanding and complex, it possesses extraordinary beauty and comes close to silent cinema, with its emphasis on landscape art, physical gesture and the beauty of the human face. It also marks the strongest and most emotionally effective welding of Malick's philosophical ideas and moral themes to his strong personal style.

 

The film also features the strongestperformance to date by Colin Farrell as the intrepid English explorer John Smith, and an astonishing debut from 15-year-old unknown Q'orianka Kilcher as the expressive Powhatan princess Pocahontas, who dominates the powerful, mournful final act.

 

The New World is a reverie, a poem… Malick's characteristic themes ' doomed love, the death of nature, restrictive social order ' are illustrated visually, with the prowling, constantly moving camera alert to mood, colour and shape.

 

Like the director's earlier features, The New World is a period film that develops a primal, throbbing power not only in the immaculate visuals, but also through an extensive use of voiceover.”

 

Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004): Press screening. A terrific American director renowned for his humanist impulses and observational style achieves his most transcendent effort, greatly aided by the contributions of his excellent actors and scenarists, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke.

 

 

Kings and Queen (Arnaud Desplechin, 2004): Chicago Film festival. Desplechin’s enthralling riff on John Cassavetes’s final masterpiece, Love Streams, about the interconnected fates of two people, brilliantly incarnated by Mathieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Devos.

 

Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa, 2006): Cannes competition. The first Costa film I ever saw, and one that has grown on me enormously since seeing his other work in the interim. It was one of the most hostile Cannes screenings I remember, reflective of a work that is tenacious, uncompromising and thoroughly brilliant.

 

Once (John Carney, 2007): Sundance, World dramatic competition. Great music, tenderly awkward, painfully realistic performances by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová. As I wrote in my Sundance review, the movie binds the loose, spontaneous immediacy of film with the first person expression of the musical. It’s hand-made and roughhewn in the best ways, and no film gave me more pleasure or rapturous excitement. More here.