criterionforum.org

This is the home for general discussion of the year in film, especially for those films that don't have dedicated threads of their own.

It looks like there will be plenty of reasons to venture to the cinema this year, including:

- Martin Scorsese’s loooooooong-awaited Silence
- As many as three(!) new Malick films
- Fiction and non-fiction films by Jarmusch
- Fiction and non-fiction films by Herzog
- The Coens doing a screwball comedy set in “Old Hollywood”
- Zhang Yimou doing a 3-D fantasy adventure starring Matt Damon and Andy Lau
- The return of Kenneth Lonergan
- Todd Solondz resurrecting Dawn Weiner in the form of Greta Gerwig
- Whit Stillman adapting Jane Austen
- Warren Beatty’s first film 14 years
- Rick Linklater’s “spiritual sequel” to Dazed and Confused
- Jeff Nichols channeling John Carpenter
- A WWII spy thriller with Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard from Robert Zemeckis
- Natalie Portman playing Jackie O. for Pablo Larraín
- Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women: Michelle Williams, Laura Dern, and Kristen Stewart
- Pedro Almodóvar, who says he is also returning to “the cinema of women”
- Shane Black looking to be back in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang territory
- Clint Eastwood’s first collaboration with Tom Hanks
- Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in a musical comedy from Damien Chazelle
- A Star Wars heist film about stealing the plans for the Death Star
- A feast for comic book fans with two massive superhero slapfights, plus outings for The X-Men, Suicide Squad, Dr. Strange, and Daredevil
- The reunion of Jason Bourne and Paul Greengrass
- Steven Spielberg taking on a Roald Dahl classic and Melissa Mathison’s last screenplay
- Reboots of childhood faves like Ghostbusters and Pete’s Dragon
- A Harry Potterish something
- New takes on The Jungle Book, Tarzan, and King Arthur
- Sequels for Star Trek, Finding Nemo, Zoolander (plus lots of horrible-sounding and unlikely things)

Plus new stuff from Ang Lee, Duncan Jones, Paul Verhoeven, Nicolas Winding Refn, Taika Waititi, Tom Tykwer, Derek Cianfrance, John Hillcoat, Tim Burton, J.C. Chandor… and many others that I'm forgetting!

From the Romanian front, I'm expecting to see at Cannes premieres for both Cristian Mungiu's latest film, "Family Photos" and Cristi Puiu's "Sieranevada". Interesting enough both films are family dramas with a doctor as a main protagonist.

I'm excited for Bruno Dumont working with Juliette Binoche again. Supposedly this is Dumont going with a comedic edge again.

Peter Greenaway's EISENSTEIN IN GUANAJUATO (his first film to receive theatrical distribution in North America since 8 1/2 WOMEN)

Atom Egoyan's REMEMBER (I keep holding out hope for him)

new Leos Carax (2017?)

Shunji Iwai's THE CASE OF HANA & ALICE and RIP VAN WINKLE NO HANAYOME

Please don't forget George Lucas's much-anticipated, long-awaited "Small, Personal Film"... oh wait.

Terence Davies's A Quiet Passion, his Emily Dickinson biopic starring Cynthia Nixon. With Sunset Song out last year (and coming to my local cinema next month - I've told Mrs Amicus I'm out that night) he seems to making up for lost time.

Rob Burnett, co-creator of Ed, brought a film starring that other likable everyday guy, Paul Rudd, to Sundance. It sounds old hat, but if anyone can take a hoary premise and make it work, it's going to be the genius behind Stuckeyville

domino harvey wrote:Rob Burnett, co-creator of Ed, brought a film starring that other likable everyday guy, Paul Rudd, to Sundance. It sounds old hat, but if anyone can take a hoary premise and make it work, it's going to be the genius behind Stuckeyville

HollywoodGuy says:
January 23, 2016 at 1:36 pm

If it’s Paul Rudd, I’ll watch it… no questions asked. Not JUST because I’m a white man, and have a real good chance of resonating with the subject matter, OR because Paul Rudd has the ability to both attract higher quality scripts and deliver a good performance (it’s called acting folks). But because of ALL those things, and my preferences to spend my money how I wish rather than having some inferior product pushed down my throat in the name of political correctness. God forbid I should have access to a marketplace which is responsive to my preferences, the world may stop turning. Producers acquire material and cast as they do, because it creates the product the marketplace wants. Take two Chinese actors, put them in the same movie, and watch your box office returns disappear. Why? Because I do not care what happens to those Chinese characters, and I’m not going to be pressed into spending my money on learning to care. I go to the movies to be ENTERTAINED. Not to be forced to watch stories or characters I don’t care about. Political correctness, and the minority outcry for racial diversity in film is a farce. Watching people react to it positively is lip service, and rightly so. The MARKETPLACE is what determines product selection, and producers who ignore it will cease to be producers with power. Take Chris Rock, or Jada whoever away from any production and few will miss them. Add them to any production under consumer duress, and there will be fewer asses in the seats. I predict lower, not higher ratings for the telecast of the Oscars next year, simply because it may be less entertaining.

Well, I'm sold.

Didn't really know where to place this, and depending on your definitions it may not warrant a post in this thread, but Johnny Depp gives a brilliant incognito performance as The Donald in Funny or Die's "short" (it runs close to an hour) The Art of the Deal. It's a great and thoroughly enjoyable piece of parody, and features a list of star cameos obviously enjoying the opportunity to so elaborately roast Trump. It's also an impressive piece of work in that it pretty accurately recreates the awful fuzzy, desaturated look of a 35-year-old VHS you'd find in Goodwill.

Here's the trailer, which is pretty amusing itself.

Didn't see a separate thread so putting it here.

Berlinale 2016
Golden Bear for Best Film: Fire at Sea from Gianfranco Rosi
Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize: Death in Sarajevo from Danis Tanovic
Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize: A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery from Lav Diaz
Silver Bear for Best Director: Mia Hansen for Things to Come
Silver Bear for Best Actress: Trine Dyrholm for The Commune
Silver Bear for Best Actor: Majd Mastoura for Hedi
Silver Bear for Best Script: United States of Love from writer-director Tomasz Wasilewski
Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution: Crosscurrent from Mark Lee Ping-Bing
Best First Feature: Hedi from Mohamed Ben Attia
Golden Bear for Best Short Film: Balada De Um Batráquio from Leonor Teles
Silver Bear Jury Prize (Short Film): A Man Returned from Mahdi Fleifel
Audi Short Film Award: Anchorage Prohibited from Chiang Wei Liang

Rosi has two parts of the European film festivals Triple Crown now. Pretty sure only Altman, Antonioni and Clouzot have won the Golden Palm, Bear and Lion.

Netflix has bought the rights to the animated Little Prince, but despite it grossing over $100 million overseas, they're dumping it straight to streaming

Saw The Program (Stephen Frears) last night.

Stephen Frears films are a strange thing for me, because they're often about subjects I don't care about, yet I end up completely engrossed by them. So The Program was supposed to be different, me being an avid road cyclist. Instead though, it was just ... ordinary.

Honestly, it felt like they just used a Wikipedia entry on the Lance Armstrong scandal as the script. Ben Foster as Armstrong doesn't even have any nuance to him; he comes off more like a comic book villain than a really flawed human being.

The one saving grace are the genuine cyclist scenes (as opposed to the stock footage), but those are too few and far between.

In fact, I think the film, at 103 minutes, may just be too short, since many plot points and characters are just not fleshed out at all.

Details of the next Pixar short, Piper. Of particular note is that this marks the first film to be scored by Adrian Belew, former guitarist/singer for King Crimson (also appeared on numerous records with Frank Zappa, David Bowie and Talking Heads among others).

Asghar Farhadi’s Fireworks Wednesday from 2006 is currently making the rounds in the U.S. (Scroll to the bottom and click drop down on Where To Watch.)
Any fan of About Elly, A Separation and The Past should definitely try and seek it out.

I liked it, but it's not quite up there with those other three for me.

Richard Brody has very high praise for Viktoria. Apparently it had its American premiere at Sundance in 2014 ("the first Bulgarian film to be shown at Sundance and one of the few Bulgarian films to be shown in the United States at all"), but it didn't hit U.S. theaters until now.

hearthesilence wrote:Richard Brody has very high praise for Viktoria. Apparently it had its American premiere at Sundance in 2014 ("the first Bulgarian film to be shown at Sundance and one of the few Bulgarian films to be shown in the United States at all"), but it didn't hit U.S. theaters until now.

Trailer looks pretty intriguing.

kazaam wrote:From the Romanian front, I'm expecting to see at Cannes premieres for both Cristian Mungiu's latest film, "Family Photos" and Cristi Puiu's "Sieranevada". Interesting enough both films are family dramas with a doctor as a main protagonist.

So happy I was right. Can't wait to see them, just a couple more weeks!

I wound up seeing Kaili Blues, the debut feature film from Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan, after reading J. Hoberman's glowing review for it as well as Cinema Scope's. It plays for only a few more days at Metrograph so catch it if you can. It really is quite a unique film - it's approach to chronology and narrative is fascinating and some may find it daunting and obfuscating, but it's pretty incredible to watch. The opening "pre-credit" sequence (you'll get what I mean if you've seen it) has a wonderful way of moving from one image/shot to the next, particularly in the sound design, and the 40-minute take everyone talks about it is an impressive piece of choreography.

A.O. Scott reviews Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker's Unlocking the Cage. The NY Times also gave some thorough coverage to the court cases involved, but this film brings it all together and shows the context that led to the litigation - what may initially seem like an extreme idea begins to make a lot more sense when we see what personhood really entails as a legal classification (for example, they point out that corporations and boats are classified as legal persons within U.S. law, which goes a long way in deflating any misunderstanding of what legal personhood really means).

If anyone wants more on that side issue of corporatons being classed as people under law, The Corporation is well worth watching. Its also the film that tests whether corporate bodies are institutionally built to have inherent psychopathic tendencies!

While I think Ars Technica is overstating its coherence, you can now watch the first film written entirely by an artificial intelligence algorithm, Sunspring. It's less than 10 minutes long, I would recommend it at least as an oddity. It feels like the seeds of something Shane Carruth would make.

The Shallows is no great shakes, but it's absolutely the escapist summer movie that critics are modestly hailing it to be. So get this: a tall, athletic vision of a woman is surfing, and there is a shark in the water. Oh, and imagine that science is totally left by the wayside, so this shark is pissed. Blake Lively carries the film well - she's an underrated acting talent - and sometimes feels like she's channeling a young Uma Thurman or thereabouts.

Add contents, insert unfortunately hokey backstory that makes Gravity's expository dialogue seem like a David Foster Wallace reading, and blend (speaking of great shakes). It isn't winning any awards, but on a night when I also saw The Neon Demon, I thought this was the better film.

I'll second the recommendation for The Shallows, it's a well-made and fun summer thriller. The short running time is a plus and Blake Lively is great (though the seagull stole the show in my opinion).