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Distant Constellation
When the producer Shelly Grizim mentioned in a Q&A following Shevaun Mizrahi’s DISTANT CONSTELLATION that only two shots in it used a moving camera, I started. It was something I hadn’t noticed, so alive and full of motion the film had been. There is nothing static about this most unusual of documentaries: its very stillness…
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Hermia & Helena
HERMIA & HELENA opens in a New York that might, until the clues cohere, be Buenos Aires. Flowers that could be in any garden, fulgent with color. The echo of drumming on the avenues. A city park – where? The impression depends, to be sure, on a sense of both cities. The Argentine director Matías…
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Personal Shopper
PERSONAL SHOPPER is a great film by Olivier Assayas and Kristen Stewart is great in it. It follows upon Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria, also with Stewart, a great film too and parallel in structure. PERSONAL SHOPPER swaps out the fictional for the supernatural or implies, perhaps, that the two are one and the same.…
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Kedi
A Turkish friend has told me that her greatest culture shock upon coming to New York from Istanbul was the absence of street cats as a part of daily life – cats, she said, that people take it on themselves to care for, but who come and go independently, with no real sense of “masters”…
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Julieta
At the start of JULIETA, the folds of a red cloth expose a recognizable lushness. This is “Un film de Almodóvar.” The cloth belongs, when the shot pulls back, to a dressing gown worn by Julieta, played by Emma Suárez, no less luminous now than she was in the Julio Medem films in which I…
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Manifesto
MANIFESTO is an installation by Julian Rosefeldt of 13 short films in simultaneous play in the darkened space of the Park Avenue Armory. More than one, but never all, of the screens are visible from a given point. Cate Blanchett, playing different roles in each film, delivers lines taken from some 55 manifestos (most artistic,…
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Nocturnal Animals
NOCTURNAL ANIMALS is a dig through sedimentary layers of style. This is no surprise from designer-cum–director Tom Ford, whose previous film was the brilliant and controlled A Single Man. The excavation starts, during the credits, at the level of outré contemporary art, with a display of flesh that confronts stock ideas of ugliness, then delves…
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American Honey
AMERICAN HONEY is as close to guileless as film can be, in its shots, its editing, its acting, its casting. It shakes you awake with its freshness. Sasha Lane, plucked off a beach by the director Andrea Arnold to play the lead, is an instinctive talent whose craft seeps from her bones on its own…
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The Shallows
THE SHALLOWS may not be deep, but it is about something, and, to boot, smartly ironic. Blake Lively makes her way, as the generically named surfer “Nancy,” a med school student re-evaluating her life, to a secluded Mexican beach. She is solo, as her girlfriend travel companion is laid up from a bender the night…
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ma ma
I am avoiding the obvious word to describe Penélope Cruz in MA MA, but so be it if by saying that she illumes the screen I call the cliché to mind. Magda is among her finest creations, a great screen performance. It is no surprise that Julio Medem, the most illuminative of contemporary directors, elicited…