IFC presents Mia Hansen-Løve’s Cannes entry Bergman Island, Film Movement brings Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy to the arthouse this weekend, as A24’s surprise hit Lamb and Greenwich Entertainment’s The Rescue go wider week two after a strong open. It’s early days but a nascent specialty revival may be in the works ahead of a stream of potential hits from The French Dispatch to Spencer to Belfast.
Icelandic horror folktale Lamb moves from 500 to over 800 screens after viewers – can we say flocked? – to the Ari Aster-ish genre pic (Hereditary in 2018 was also from A24). Adventure documentary The Rescue, by the directors of Free Solo, where intrepid divers save a Thai boys soccer club trapped in a remote flooded cave, expands from five screens to 552.
“Is there hope? Yes” said Howard Cohen, co-president of Roadside Attractions, which is opening Hard Luck Love Song. “There have to...
Icelandic horror folktale Lamb moves from 500 to over 800 screens after viewers – can we say flocked? – to the Ari Aster-ish genre pic (Hereditary in 2018 was also from A24). Adventure documentary The Rescue, by the directors of Free Solo, where intrepid divers save a Thai boys soccer club trapped in a remote flooded cave, expands from five screens to 552.
“Is there hope? Yes” said Howard Cohen, co-president of Roadside Attractions, which is opening Hard Luck Love Song. “There have to...
- 10/15/2021
- by Jill Goldsmith
- Deadline Film + TV
When Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi made his return to fiction after time away in the realm of documentary, he dispensed with the idea that stories must conform to feature length. “Happy Hour,” the sprawling ensemble drama that sparked interest in him among cinephiles, ran more than five hours, and while his latest, “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” boasts a conventional enough running time of 121 minutes, the film is actually composed of three short stories, stitched together and somewhat arbitrarily presented as a single package.
The vignettes are, by the director’s own description, explorations of “coincidence and imagination” — the first three of what he conceived as seven stories, pointing toward what might have been another epic-length project. Audiences tend not to take well to coincidence in drama, which can feel unrealistic when handled clumsily. In Hamaguchi’s hands, however, lucky (or unlucky) twists don’t feel so much like manipulation...
The vignettes are, by the director’s own description, explorations of “coincidence and imagination” — the first three of what he conceived as seven stories, pointing toward what might have been another epic-length project. Audiences tend not to take well to coincidence in drama, which can feel unrealistic when handled clumsily. In Hamaguchi’s hands, however, lucky (or unlucky) twists don’t feel so much like manipulation...
- 3/11/2021
- by Peter Debruge
- Variety Film + TV
One of the few things that may be keeping Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 2015 film Happy Hour from being recognized as one of the great films of the 2010s is its length: At over five hours, its drama of mid-30s women wrestling with their place in life is undoubtedly imposing, regardless of the fact that Hamaguchi’s style is clean and crisp, underscored by shadows of mystery, with none of the arduous challenge usually presented by lengthy art films. Possibly if it had been presented in the format of a multi-episode series, its audience would have easily found it. Hamaguchi’s follow-up, Asako I & II, broke things up cleverly by segmenting its Vertigo-esque story of lovers lost and found into two parts. Now, the Japanese director’s latest, the sly and intriguing portmanteau Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, which is premiering in Berlin's main competition, helps the audience by being...
- 3/4/2021
- MUBI
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