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Thursday, 1 December 2016

John Waters Shares His List of the Top 10 Films of 2016 - 'Krisha' is #1

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Krisha

It's that time again! With the end of the year approaching, everyone begins revealing their own Top 10 best of the year lists. One of our favorite lists that kicks off this time is from filmmaker John Waters' - his Top 10 favorite films from this year. For 2016, Waters has chosen yet another (expected) eclectic mix of films, including Paul Verhoven's controversial Elle, Todd Solondz's divisive Wiener-Dog, as well as David Farrier & Dylan Reeve's outstandingly creepy documentary Tickled, among some other oddball picks. A few years back his top film was Spring Breakers, and last year it was a film titled Helmut Berger, Actor. I always like hearing about Waters' favorites because he has such unique taste and his quick comments are fun to read.

Waters includes a short one/two-sentence explanation with each pick, so head to ArtForum to read all of his thoughts on his Top 10 of 2016. I've included a few of his comments in quotes below for some of the films where he said some interesting things. Without further ado, here are John Waters' Top 10 Films of 2016:

1. Krisha (dir. Trey Edward Shults) "This hilariously harrowing portrait of a family reunion ruined by an alcoholic relative and too many dogs is told with verve and lunacy and features a top-notch performance by Krisha Fairchild, the director’s own aunt. Other people’s hell can sometimes be so much fun."
2. Tickled (dir. David Farrier & Dylan Reeve)
3. Everybody Wants Some! (dir. Richard Linklater) "The best accidentally gay movie ever made by a known heterosexual director features the most talented and sexy ensemble cast of the last decade."
4. Roar (dir. Noel Marshall)
5. Wiener-Dog (dir. Todd Solondz)
6. Elle (dir. Paul Verhoeven) "Do daughters of mass murderers like to get raped? In France they sometimes do, and only Isabelle Huppert could play this hetero-deviant, Claude-Chabrol-meets-Radley-Metzger character with feminist dignity. Isn’t she the best actress in the whole wide world?"
7. Julieta (dir. Pedro Almodóvar)
8. Like Cattle Towards Glow (dir. Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley) "Arty teenage death, Gallic rimming, and a maddening passion for punk penises make this Eric Rohmer–like porno a real French tickler for the fucked-up literary set."
9. Valley of Love (dir. Guillaume Nicloux)
10. A Quiet Passion (dir. Terence Davies) "The grim curse of Emily Dickinson’s poetic talent has never been shown with such depressing clarity. If you can’t enjoy suffering along with her, you should be dead too."

What do you make of Waters' Top 10 list? How many of these has anyone else even seen? As always, his list is full of some of the most oddball picks but nonetheless damn good films. I haven't even heard of a few of these (such as Like Cattle Towards Glow) and a few of them are my favorites as well (such as Everybody Wants Some!). Another one of his very interesting picks is Roar, which is actually a 1981 film with real lions and tigers that was re-released by Alamo Drafthouse last year. Waters explains why he chose it: "I finally got to see Tippi Hedren’s real-life snuff movie starring her entire family that was made in 1981 but not released in the US until 2015. Watch, slack-jawed, as Tippi is scalped and her daughter Melanie Griffith mauled by the wild-animal extras who turn out to be the real stars of this nutcase action film." Hard to argue with that.

Watch: First Trailer for 'The Belko Experiment' Written by James Gunn

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The Belko Experiment Trailer

"All employees - lend me your full attention." BH Tilt + Orion Pictures have released a red band trailer for a film titled The Belko Experiment, which premiered at TIFF this year. This film has a crazy cool premise - a corporate high-rise building is locked down and the workers are forced to play a game of "kill or be killed". It's directed by Greg McLean (of Wolf Creek) and written by James Gunn (of Guardians of the Galaxy); starring John Gallagher Jr, Michael Rooker, Tony Goldwyn, Adria Arjona, John C. McGinley, Melonie Diaz, Owain Yeoman, Sean Gunn, Brent Sexton, and Josh Brener. I heard fantastic things about this out of TIFF, and I'm already planning to see it when it opens. Looks like crazy corporate job fun.

Here's the first official trailer (+ poster) for Greg McLean's The Belko Experiment, direct from YouTube:

The Belko Experiment Poster

In a twisted social experiment, a group of 80 Americans are locked in their high-rise corporate office in Bogata, Colombia and ordered by an unknown voice coming from the company's intercom system to participate in a deadly game of kill or be killed. The Belko Experiment is directed by Australian filmmaker Greg McLean, of the horror films Wolf Creek 1 & 2, Rogue and The Darkness previously. The screenplay is written by fellow filmmaker James Gunn (writer of Dawn of the Dead, Slither, Super, Guardians of the Galaxy). The film first premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2016. BH Tilt & High Top will release The Belko Experiment in US theaters starting March 17th, 2017 in the next few months. How does this look?

Sundance 2017. Lineup

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Person to Person
The lineup for the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, taking place between January 19th-29th, has been announced.
U.S. DRAMATIC COMPETITION
  • Band Aid (Zoe Lister-Jones, USA): A couple who can’t stop fighting embark on a last-ditch effort to save their marriage: turning their fights into songs and starting a band. Cast: Zoe Lister-Jones, Adam Pally, Fred Armisen, Susie Essman, Hannah Simone, Ravi Patel. 
  • Beach Rats (Eliza Hittman, USA): An aimless teenager on the outer edges of Brooklyn struggles to escape his bleak home life and navigate questions of self-identity, as he balances his time between his delinquent friends, a potential new girlfriend, and older men he meets online. Cast: Harris Dickinson, Madeline Weinstein, Kate Hodge, Neal Huff. 
  • Brigsby Bear (Dave McCary, USA): Brigsby Bear Adventures is a children’s TV show produced for an audience of one: James. When the show abruptly ends, James’s life changes forever, and he sets out to finish the story himself. Cast: Kyle Mooney, Claire Danes, Mark Hamill, Greg Kinnear, Matt Walsh, Michaela Watkins.
  • Burning Sands (Gerard McMurray, USA): Deep into a fraternity’s Hell Week, a favored pledge is torn between honoring a code of silence or standing up against the intensifying violence of underground hazing. Cast: Trevor Jackson, Alfre Woodard, Steve Harris, Tosin Cole, DeRon Horton, Trevante Rhodes. 
  • Crown Heights (Matt Ruskin, USA): When Colin Warner is wrongfully convicted of murder, his best friend, Carl King, devotes his life to proving Colin’s innocence. Adapted from This American Life, this is the incredible true story of their harrowing quest for justice. Cast: Keith Stanfield, Nnamdi Asomugha, Natalie Paul, Bill Camp, Nestor Carbonell, Amari Cheatom. 
  • Golden Exits (Alex Ross Perry, USA): The arrival of a young foreign girl disrupts the lives and emotional balances of two Brooklyn families. Cast: Emily Browning, Adam Horovitz, Mary-Louise Parker, Lily Rabe, Jason Schwartzman, Chloë Sevigny. 
  • The Hero (Brett Haley, USA): Lee, a former Western film icon, is living a comfortable existence lending his golden voice to advertisements and smoking weed. After receiving a lifetime achievement award and unexpected news, Lee reexamines his past, while a chance meeting with a sardonic comic has him looking to the future. Cast: Sam Elliott, Laura Prepon, Krysten Ritter, Nick Offerman, Katherine Ross.
  • I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore (Macon Blair, USA): When a depressed woman is burglarized, she finds a new sense of purpose by tracking down the thieves, alongside her obnoxious neighbor. But they soon find themselves dangerously out of their depth against a pack of degenerate criminals. Cast: Melanie Lynskey, Elijah Wood, David Yow, Jane Levy, Devon Graye.
  • Ingrid Goes West (Matt Spicer, USA): A young woman becomes obsessed with an Instagram lifestyle blogger and moves to Los Angeles to try and befriend her in real life. Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Elizabeth Olsen, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Wyatt Russell, Billy Magnussen.
  • Landline (Gillian Robespierre, USA): Two sisters come of age in ‘90s New York when they discover their dad’s affair—and it turns out he’s not the only cheater in the family. Everyone still smokes inside, no one has a cell phone and the Jacobs finally connect through lying, cheating and hibachi. Cast: Jenny Slate, John Turturro, Edie Falco, Abby Quinn, Jay Duplass, Finn Wittrock.
  • Novitiate (Maggie Betts, USA): In the early 1960s, during the Vatican II era, a young woman training to become a nun struggles with issues of faith, sexuality and the changing church. Cast: Margaret Qualley, Melissa Leo, Julianne Nicholson, Dianna Agron, Morgan Saylor. 
  • Patti Cake$ (Geremy Jasper, USA): Straight out of Jersey comes Patricia Dombrowski, a.k.a. Killa P, a.k.a. Patti Cake$, an aspiring rapper fighting through a world of strip malls and strip clubs on an unlikely quest for glory. Cast: Danielle Macdonald, Bridget Everett, Siddharth Dhananjay, Mamoudou Athie, Cathy Moriarty.
  • Roxanne Roxanne (Michael Larnell, USA): The most feared battle emcee in early-’80s NYC was a fierce teenager from the Queensbridge projects with the weight of the world on her shoulders. At age 14, hustling the streets to provide for her family, Roxanne Shanté was well on her way to becoming a hip-hop legend. Cast: Chanté Adams, Mahershala Ali, Nia Long, Elvis Nolasco, Kevin Phillips, Shenell Edmonds.
  • To The Bone (Marti Noxon, USA): In a last-ditch effort to battle her severe anorexia, 20-year-old Ellen enters a group recovery home. With the help of an unconventional doctor, Ellen and the other residents go on a sometimes funny, sometimes harrowing journey that leads to the ultimate question—is life worth living? Cast: Lily Collins, Keanu Reeves, Carrie Preston, Lili Taylor, Alex Sharp, Liana Liberato.
  • Walking Out (Alex Smith & Andrew Smith, USA): Alex Smith, Andrew Smith) — A father and son struggle to connect on any level until a brutal encounter with a predator in the heart of the wilderness leaves them both seriously injured. If they are to survive, the boy must carry his father to safety. Cast: Matt Bomer, Josh Wiggins, Bill Pullman, Alex Neustaedter, Lily Gladstone.
  • The Yellow Birds (Alexandre Moors, USA): Two young men enlist in the army and are deployed to fight in the Gulf War. After an unthinkable tragedy, the surviving soldier struggles to balance his promise of silence with the truth and a mourning mother’s search for peace. Cast: Tye Sheridan, Jack Huston, Alden Ehrenreich, Jason Patric, Toni Collette, Jennifer Aniston.

U.S. DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION
  • Casting JonBenet (Kitty Green, USA/Australia): The unsolved death of six-year-old American beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey remains the world’s most sensational child murder case. Over 15 months, responses, reflections and performances were elicited from the Ramsey’s Colorado hometown community, creating a bold work of art from the collective memories and mythologies the crime inspired.
  • Chasing Coral (Jeff Orlowski, USA): Coral reefs around the world are vanishing at an unprecedented rate. A team of divers, photographers and scientists set out on a thrilling ocean adventure to discover why and to reveal the underwater mystery to the world.
  • City of Ghosts (Matthew Heineman, USA): With unprecedented access, this documentary follows the extraordinary journey of “Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently”—a group of anonymous citizen journalists who banded together after their homeland was overtaken by ISIS—as they risk their lives to stand up against one of the greatest evils in the world today.
  • Dina (Dan Sickles & Antonio Santini, USA): An eccentric suburban woman and a Walmart door- greeter navigate their evolving relationship in this unconventional love story.
  • Dolores (Peter Bratt, USA): Dolores Huerta bucks 1950s gender conventions by co-founding the country’s first farmworkers’ union. Wrestling with raising 11 children, gender bias, union defeat and victory, and nearly dying after a San Francisco Police beating, Dolores emerges with a vision that connects her newfound feminism with racial and class justice.
  • The Force (Pete Nicks, USA): This cinema verité look at the long-troubled Oakland Police Department goes deep inside their struggles to confront federal demands for reform, a popular uprising following events in Ferguson and an explosive scandal.
  • Icarus (Bryan Fogel, USA): When Bryan Fogel sets out to uncover the truth about doping in sports, a chance meeting with a Russian scientist transforms his story from a personal experiment into a geopolitical thriller involving dirty urine, unexplained death and Olympic Gold—exposing the biggest scandal in sports history.
  • The New Radical (Adam Bhala Lough, USA): Uncompromising millennial radicals from the United States and the United Kingdom attack the system through dangerous technological means, which evolves into a high-stakes game with world authorities in the midst of a dramatically changing political landscape.
  • NOBODY SPEAK: Hulk Hogan, Gawker and Trials of a Free Press (Brian Knappenberger, USA): The trial between Hulk Hogan and Gawker Media pitted privacy rights against freedom of the press, and raised important questions about how big money can silence media. This film is an examination of the perils and duties of the free press in an age of inequality.
  • Quest (Jonathan Olshefski, USA): For over a decade, this portrait of a North Philadelphia family and the creative sanctuary offered by their home music studio was filmed with vérité intimacy. The family’s 10- year journey is an illumination of race and class in America, and it’s a testament to love, healing and hope.
  • Step (Amanda Lipitz, USA): The senior year of a girls’ high school step team in inner-city Baltimore is documented, as they try to become the first in their families to attend college. The girls strive to make their dancing a success against the backdrop of social unrest in their troubled city.
  • Strong Island (Yance Ford, USA/Denmark): Examining the violent death of the filmmaker’s brother and the judicial system that allowed his killer to go free, this documentary interrogates murderous fear and racialized perception, and re-imagines the wreckage in catastrophe’s wake, challenging us to change.
  • Trophy (Shaul Schwarz & Christina Clusiau, USA): This in-depth look into the powerhouse industries of big-game hunting, breeding and wildlife conservation in the U.S. and Africa unravels the complex consequences of treating animals as commodities.
  • Unrest (Jennifer Bea, USA): When Harvard PhD student Jennifer Brea is struck down at 28 by a fever that leaves her bedridden, doctors tell her it’s “all in her head.” Determined to live, she sets out on a virtual journey to document her story—and four other families’ stories—fighting a disease medicine forgot.
  • Water & Power: A California Heist (Marina Zenovich, USA): In California’s convoluted water system, notorious water barons find ways to structure a state-engineered system to their own advantage. This examination into their centers of power shows small farmers and everyday citizens facing drought and a new, debilitating groundwater crisis.
  • Whose Streets? (Sabaah Folayan & Damon Davis, USA): A nonfiction account of the Ferguson uprising told by the people who lived it, this is an unflinching look at how the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown inspired a community to fight back—and sparked a global movement.

WORLD CINEMA DRAMATIC COMPETITION
  • Axolotl Overkill (Helene Hegemann, Germany): Mifti, age 16, lives in Berlin with a cast of characters including her half-siblings; their rich, self-involved father; and her junkie friend Ophelia. As she mourns her recently deceased mother, she begins to develop an obsession with Alice, an enigmatic, and much older, white-collar criminal. Cast: Jasna Fritzi Bauer, Arly Jover, Mavie Hörbiger, Laura Tonke, Hans Löw, Bernhard Schütz.
  • Berlin Syndrome (Cate Shortland, Australia): A passionate holiday romance takes an unexpected and sinister turn when an Australian photographer wakes one morning in a Berlin apartment and is unable to leave. Cast: Teresa Palmer, Max Riemelt.
  • Carpinteros (José María Cabral, Dominican Republic): Julián finds love and a reason for living in the last place imaginable: the Dominican Republic’s Najayo Prison. His romance with fellow prisoner Yanelly must develop through sign language and without the knowledge of dozens of guards. Cast: Jean Jean, Judith Rodriguez Perez, Ramón Emilio Candelario.
  • Don't Swallow My Heart, Alligator Girl! (Felipe Bragança, Brazil): In this fable about love and memories, Joca is a 13-year-old Brazilian boy in love with an indigenous Paraguayan girl. To conquer her love, he must face the violent region’s war-torn past and the secrets of his elder brother, Fernando, a motorcycle cowboy. Cast: Cauã Reymond, Eduardo Macedo, Adeli Gonzales, Zahy Guajajara, Claudia Assunção, Ney Matogrosso. 
  • Family Life (Alicia Scherson & Cristián Jiménez, Chile): While house-sitting for a distant cousin, a lonely man fabricates the existence of a vindictive ex-wife withholding his daughter, in order to gain the sympathy of the single mother he has just met. Cast: Jorge Becker, Gabriela Arancibia, Blanca Lewin, Cristián Carvajal.
  • Free and Easy (Jun Geng, Hong Kong): When a traveling soap salesman arrives in a desolate Chinese town, a crime occurs, and sets the strange residents against each other with tragicomic results. Cast: Gang Xu, Zhiyong Zhang, Baohe Xue, Benshan Gu, Xun Zhang.
  • My Happy Life (Nana & Simon, Georgia): Tbilisi, Georgia, 2016: In a patriarchal society, an ordinary Georgian family lives with three generations under one roof. All are shocked when 52-year-old Manana decides to move out from her parents’ home and live alone. Without her family and her husband, a journey into the unknown begins. Cast: Ia Shugliashvili, Merab Ninidze, Berta Khapava, Tsisia Qumsishvili, Giorgi Tabidze, Dimitri Oragvelidze. 
  • God's Own Country (Francis Lee, UK): Springtime in Yorkshire: isolated young sheep farmer Johnny Saxby numbs his daily frustrations with binge drinking and casual sex, until the arrival of a Romanian migrant worker, employed for the lambing season, ignites an intense relationship that sets Johnny on a new path. Cast: Josh O’Connor, Alec Secareanu, Ian Hart, Gemma Jones.
  • The Nile Hilton Incident (Tarik Saleh, Sweden): In Cairo, weeks before the 2011 revolution, Police Detective Noredin is working in the infamous Kasr el-Nil Police Station when he is handed the case of a murdered singer. He soon realizes that the investigation concerns the power elite, close to the President’s inner circle. Cast: Fares Fares, Mari Malek, Mohamed Yousry, Yasser Ali Maher, Ahmed Selim, Hania Amar.
  • Pop Aye (Kirsten Tan, Singapora/Thailand): On a chance encounter, a disenchanted architect bumps into his long-lost elephant on the streets of Bangkok. Excited, he takes his elephant on a journey across Thailand in search of the farm where they grew up together. Cast: Thaneth Warakulnukroh, Penpak Sirikul, Bong.
  • Sueño en otro idioma (Ernesto Contreras, Mexico): The last two speakers of a millennia-old language haven’t spoken in 50 years, when a young linguist tries to bring them together. Yet hidden in the past, in the heart of the jungle, lies a secret concerning the fate of the Zikril language. Cast: Fernando Álvarez Rebeil, Eligio Meléndez, Manuel Poncelis, Fátima Molina, Juan Pablo de Santiago, Hoze Meléndez.
  • The Wound (John Trengove, South Africa): Xolani, a lonely factory worker, travels to the rural mountains with the men of his community to initiate a group of teenage boys into manhood. When a defiant initiate from the city discovers his best-kept secret, a forbidden love, Xolani’s entire existence begins to unravel. Cast: Nakhane Touré, Bongile Mantsai, Niza Jay Ncoyini.

WORLD CINEMA DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION
  • The Good Postman (Tonislav Hristov, Finland/Bulgaria): In a small Bulgarian village troubled by the ongoing refugee crisis, a local postman runs for mayor—and learns that even minor deeds can outweigh good intentions.
  • In Loco Parentis (Neasa Ní Chianáin & David Rane, Ireland/Spain): John and Amanda teach Latin, English and guitar at a fantastical stately home-turned-school. Nearly 50-year careers are drawing to a close for the pair who have become legends with the mantra: “Reading! ’Rithmetic! Rock ’n’ roll!” But for pupil and teacher alike, leaving is the hardest lesson. 
  • It's Not Yet Dark (Frankie Fenton, Ireland): This is the incredible story of Simon Fitzmaurice, a young filmmaker who becomes completely paralyzed from motor neurone disease but goes on to direct an award- winning feature film through the use of his eyes.
  • Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower (Joe Piscatella, USA): When the Chinese Communist Party backtracks on its promise of autonomy to Hong Kong, teenager Joshua Wong decides to save his city. Rallying thousands of kids to skip school and occupy the streets, Joshua becomes an unlikely leader in Hong Kong and one of China’s most notorious dissidents.
  • Last Men in Aleppo (Feras Fayyad & Steen Johannessen, Denmark): After five years of war in Syria, Aleppo’s remaining residents prepare themselves for a siege. Khalid, Subhi and Mahmoud, founding members of The White Helmets, have remained in the city to help their fellow citizens—and experience daily life, death, struggle and triumph in a city under fire.
  • Machines (Rahul Jain, India/Germany/Finland): This intimate, observant portrayal of the rhythm of life and work in a gigantic textile factory in Gujarat, India, moves through the corridors and bowels of the enormously disorienting structure—taking the viewer on a journey of dehumanizing physical labor and intense hardship.
  • Motherland (Ramona Diaz, USA/Philippines): The planet’s busiest maternity hospital is located in one of its poorest and most populous countries: the Philippines. There, poor women face devastating consequences as their country struggles with reproductive health policy and the politics of conservative Catholic ideologies. 
  • Plastic China (Jiu-liang Wang, China): Yi-Jie, an 11-year-old girl, works alongside her parents in a recycling facility while dreaming of attending school. Kun, the facility’s ambitious foreman, dreams of a better life. Through the eyes and hands of those who handle its refuse, comes an examination of global consumption and culture. 
  • RUMBLE: The Indians Who Rock The World (Catherine Bainbridge, Canada): This powerful documentary about the role of Native Americans in contemporary music history—featuring some of the greatest music stars of our time—exposes a critical missing chapter, revealing how indigenous musicians helped shape the soundtracks of our lives and, through their contributions, influenced popular culture.
  • Tokyo Idols (Kyoko Miyake, UK/Canada): This exploration of Japan’s fascination with girl bands and their music follows an aspiring pop singer and her fans, delving into the cultural obsession with young female sexuality and the growing disconnect between men and women in hypermodern societies.
  • WINNIE (Pascale Lamche, France): While her husband served a life sentence, paradoxically kept safe and morally uncontaminated, Winnie Mandela rode the raw violence of apartheid, fighting on the front line and underground. This is the untold story of the mysterious forces that combined to take her down, labeling him a saint, her, a sinner. 
  • The Workers Cup (Adam Sobel, UK): Inside Qatar’s labor camps, African and Asian migrant workers building the facilities of the 2022 World Cup compete in a football tournament of their own. 

NEXT
  • Columbus (Kogonada, USA): Casey lives with her mother in a little-known Midwestern town haunted by the promise of modernism. Jin, a visitor from the other side of the world, attends to his dying father. Burdened by the future, they find respite in one another and the architecture that surrounds them. Cast: John Cho, Haley Lu Richardson, Parker Posey, Rory Culkin, Michelle Forbes. World Premiere
  • Dayveon (Amman Abbasi, USA): In the wake of his older brother’s death, 13-year-old Dayveon spends the sweltering summer days roaming his rural Arkansas town. When he falls in with a local gang, he becomes drawn to the camaraderie and violence of their world. Cast: Devin Blackmon, Kordell “KD” Johnson, Dontrell Bright, Chasity Moore, Lachion Buckingham, Marquell Manning. 
  • Deidra & Laney Rob a Train (Sydney Freeland, USA): Two teenage sisters start robbing trains to make ends meet after their single mother’s emotional meltdown in an electronics store lands her in jail. Cast: Ashleigh Murray, Rachel Crow, Tim Blake Nelson, David Sullivan, Danielle Nicolet, Sasheer Zamata.
  • A Ghost Story (David Lowery, USA): This is the story of a ghost and the house he haunts. Cast: Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara, Will Oldham, Sonia Acevedo, Rob Zabrecky, Liz Franke.
  • Gook (Justin Chon, USA): Eli and Daniel, two Korean-American brothers who own a struggling women’s shoe store, have an unlikely friendship with 11-year-old Kamilla. On the first day of the 1992 L.A. riots, the trio must defend their store—and contemplate the meaning of family, their personal dreams and the future. Cast: Justin Chon, Simone Baker, David So, Curtiss Cook Jr., Sang Chon, Ben Munoz. 
  • L.A. Times (Michelle Morgan, USA): In this classically styled comedy of manners set in Los Angeles, sophisticated thirtysomethings try to determine whether ideal happiness exists in coupledom or if the perfectly suited couple is actually just an urban myth. Cast: Michelle Morgan, Dree Hemingway, Jorma Taccone, Kentucker Audley, Margarita Levieva, Adam Shapiro.
  • Lemon (Janicza, USA): A man watches his life unravel after he is left by his blind girlfriend. Cast: Brett Gelman, Judy Greer, Michael Cera, Nia Long, Shiri Appleby, Fred Melamed.
  • Menashe (Joshua Z Weinstein, USA): Within Brooklyn’s ultra-orthodox Jewish community, a widower battles for custody of his son. A tender drama performed entirely in Yiddish, the film intimately explores the nature of faith and the price of parenthood. Cast: Menashe Lustig. 
  • Person to Person (Dustin Guy Defa, USA): A  record collector hustles for a big score while his heartbroken roommate tries to erase a terrible mistake, a teenager bears witness to her best friend’s new relationship and a rookie reporter, alongside her demanding supervisor, chases the clues of a murder case involving a life-weary clock shop owner. Cast: Abbi Jacobson, Michael Cera, Tavi Gevinson, Philip Baker Hall, Bene Coopersmith, George Sample III.
  • Thoroughbred (Cory Finley, USA): Two teenage girls in suburban Connecticut rekindle their unlikely friendship after years of growing apart. In the process, they learn that neither is what she seems to be—and that a murder might solve both of their problems. 

The Forgotten: Abel Gance's "Austerlitz" (1960)

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The great film historian Kevin Brownlow, who has devoted large sections of his life to restoring Abel Gance's 1927 epic Napoleon, takes a dim view of this one. And indeed Austerlitz, a.k.a. The Battle of Austerlitz, has several strikes against it, belongs to several categories of film maudit all at once. It's a late film by a seventy-one-year-old director whose best work, by universal consensus, was in the silent era; it's a kind of belated sequel, the further adventures of Napoleon Bonaparte; it's a Salkind production.
Incidentally, viewing the lavish sets for this movie, we can see how the Salkinds, those roving multinational mountebanks, ran up the unpaid studio bills in Yugoslavia which kept Orson Welles from building the elaborate vanishing sets he had planned for The Trial (starting realistic, it would have ended up playing in a featureless void), necessitating the repurposing of a disused Parisian railway station. And here's Orson himself, in false nose and false, dubbed voice, playing for once an unassuming, rather apologetic character, trying to sell a prototype submarine to the Emperor. Weirdly, fourteen years later another Salkind feature, The Four Musketeers, would feature another unsuccessful submarine salesman, trying to flog a submersible to the Duke of Buckingham.
Austerlitz certainly isn't the experimental masterpiece Napoleon is: a 1960 movie made in the style of the twenties would have looked radical, but this is mostly staged like a forties film. Gance had been a somewhat plodding, creaky filmmaker for some years now, his work varying between stilted in an early talkie way and fluid but unadventurous in a forties way. But his cinematographer is the great Henri Alekan (La belle et la bête) and so there are moments... When Josephine (Martine Carol, Ophüls' reluctant choice for Lola Montes) draws a diaphanous curtain, unnatural filtered lighting tints it different hues, stretching across the Dyaliscope frame in a manner that harkens back to the Tricolor triptych of Napoleon, in which three separate screens were tinted to match the colors of French flag (in itself, an appallingly vulgar conceit, you would think, only pulled off with such shameless brio that it dazzles and awes).
Mr. Bonaparte, surprisingly, is played by a near unknown, Pierre Mondy, who may have come to the director's attention appearing in a remake of Gance's La roue. While Albert Dieudonne in the silent had been boldly iconic with his angular features and Tiny Tim haircut, Mondy is given a more rounded, human, and some how less interesting Napoleon to play. The movie starts with a joke about his height, so we're definitely in a more populist mode.
It's unfair of me, but I just can't get along with Mondy's face. He has a big, soft forehead, bisected horizontally by a single deep crease, and with that tattered fringe pasted to his crown he looks like a man wearing a Frankenstein monster headpiece. He's a decent actor, though. The trouble is, a young Jean-Pierre Trintignant is also in the film as a minor functionary, and on the few occasions he's given anything to do, he fascinates in a way that Mondy can't. And Trintignant is quite a little chap. It was a missed opportunity.
Gance shows Napoleon cheating on Josephine with Claudia Cardinale and Leslie Caron, flirting with Nelly Kaplan (also Gance's co-writer, second unit director and documentarist, above) and throws in brief bits of a more platonic nature with Vittorio De Sica (the Pope), Rossano Brazzi, Jack Palance and Jean Marais. Grizzled old Michel Simon turns up, and you wouldn't think anybody could upstage him, but the duck in his backpack manages just that, by staring directly into the lens with a serene air of superiority to its surroundings. There are scenes in England, where everybody speaks actual English but some have ludicrous French accents. But what's devastating is the concentration on interiors.
The entire first half of the film transpires indoors, apart from a few moments outside the French windows at night, clearly shot in a studio. These boudoirs and thronerooms and ballrooms are all vast, so we can't say it's claustrophobic exactly, nor is it cheap-looking, but it's definitely rather airless.
Once we hit the battlefield, the blast of reality is invigorating, but for some reason Gance keeps cross-cutting between real exteriors and studio reconstructions. Napoleon even manages to walk from one to the other in a single scene, despite the shortness of his legs.
With a cast of hundreds rather than thousands, there was no way Gance could have equalled the spectacle of his first foray into history, though more dynamic technique would certainly have helped. The lumbering quality of so many widescreen epics of the fifties and sixties descends upon the Croatian battlefield. The trouble is, Gance doesn't have the budget to return to his former triumph or compete with Bondarchuk's astonishing Waterloo (1970), with its 60,000 extras played by the Russian army, and he doesn't have the invention born of desperation of Welles making Chimes at Midnight, conjuring an apocalyptic battle with handheld close-ups. He does briefly detach his camera from its tripod, and the effect, juxtaposed with the stodgy sound-stage reenactments, is immediately thrilling, but moments later we're back to standard locked-off panoramas.
At the end, the film does managed one of its periodic grace notes, in which Napoleon quite legitimately cements his place in history with dialogue predicting the Arc de Triomphe and his statue in the Place Vendome, to be made from the melted enemy cannons.
Though this often feels like a last gasp, Gance would actually return to the subject with Napoleon and the Revolution, a TV series in 1972, so that this is merely a single exhalation from a filmmaker who lived and breathed Napoleonically.
The Forgotten is a fortnightly column by David Cairns, author of Shadowplay.
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