Among the myriad reasons we could call the Criterion Channel the single greatest streaming service is its leveling of cinematic snobbery. Where a new World Cinema Project restoration plays, so too does Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight. I think about this looking at November’s lineup and being happiest about two new additions: a nine-film Robert Bresson retro including L’argent and The Devil, Probably; and a one-film Hype Williams retro including Belly and only Belly, but bringing as a bonus the direct-to-video Belly 2: Millionaire Boyz Club. Until recently such curation seemed impossible.
November will also feature a 20-film noir series boasting the obvious and the not. Maybe the single tightest collection is “Women of the West,” with Johnny Guitar and The Beguiled and Rancho Notorious and The Furies only half of it. Lynch/Oz, Irradiated, and My Two Voices make streaming premieres; Drylongso gets a Criterion Edition; and joining...
November will also feature a 20-film noir series boasting the obvious and the not. Maybe the single tightest collection is “Women of the West,” with Johnny Guitar and The Beguiled and Rancho Notorious and The Furies only half of it. Lynch/Oz, Irradiated, and My Two Voices make streaming premieres; Drylongso gets a Criterion Edition; and joining...
- 10/24/2023
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
A lot of articles exist on the internet listing the movies Martin Scorsese considers to be the best films of all time, but he’s not actually in favor of such rankings. Speaking to Time magazine for a video interview (see below), the “Taxi Driver” and “The Departed” icon said he is generally against top 10 best lists.
“I’ve tried to make lists over the years of films I personally feel are my favorites, whatever that means,” Scorsese said. “And then you find out that the word ‘favorite’ has different levels: Films that have impressed you the most, as opposed to films you just like to keep watching, as opposed to those you keep watching and learning from, or experiencing anew. So, they’re varied. And I’m always sort of against ’10 best’ lists.”
Scorsese gathered his favorite films into a list as recently as last December, when he participated...
“I’ve tried to make lists over the years of films I personally feel are my favorites, whatever that means,” Scorsese said. “And then you find out that the word ‘favorite’ has different levels: Films that have impressed you the most, as opposed to films you just like to keep watching, as opposed to those you keep watching and learning from, or experiencing anew. So, they’re varied. And I’m always sort of against ’10 best’ lists.”
Scorsese gathered his favorite films into a list as recently as last December, when he participated...
- 9/13/2023
- by Zack Sharf
- Variety Film + TV
HBO has long been considered the leader in prestige television programming, and, over the last five months, the 51-year-old cable network has fully reinforced this belief with the critically acclaimed first season of "The Last of Us" and the perfectly pitched conclusions of "Succession" and "Barry." But while we're still buzzing over the finales of those last two shows, you can't help but look ahead and wonder how the King of Peak TV rides this wave of hosannas to the next must-watch triumphs.
The jury is out as to whether Sam Levinson's "The Idol" will draw as many eyeballs as his wildly popular teen melodrama "Euphoria," but, judging from the critical reaction thus far (and the behind-the-scenes controversy), the series promises to be a supercharged hot-take generator. The show stars Lily-Rose Depp as an out-of-control pop star whose instability and sexual desirability is wantonly exploited to launch her to diva immortality.
The jury is out as to whether Sam Levinson's "The Idol" will draw as many eyeballs as his wildly popular teen melodrama "Euphoria," but, judging from the critical reaction thus far (and the behind-the-scenes controversy), the series promises to be a supercharged hot-take generator. The show stars Lily-Rose Depp as an out-of-control pop star whose instability and sexual desirability is wantonly exploited to launch her to diva immortality.
- 5/31/2023
- by Jeremy Smith
- Slash Film
Humor, it seems, has returned to the Main Competition at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. After a few days of mostly serious dramas about Nazis and terrorists and sweatshops, a lighter touch has emerged from a couple of expected sources: first Todd Haynes, a filmmaker with a great range but also a real touch for pulpy material that he shows in “May December,” and now Aki Kaurismäki, the Finnish master of comedy so deadpan that it can take an audience half the movie to figure out that it’s Ok to laugh.
They figured it out when Kaurismaki’s “Fallen Leaves” premiered in Cannes on Monday. With a brisk one-hour-and-21-minute running time, the film is a wry delight whose very restraint is part of the joke. Jonathan Glazer’s Cannes standout “The Zone of Interest” might be a movie without a single closeup, but “Fallen Leaves” is pretty much a...
They figured it out when Kaurismaki’s “Fallen Leaves” premiered in Cannes on Monday. With a brisk one-hour-and-21-minute running time, the film is a wry delight whose very restraint is part of the joke. Jonathan Glazer’s Cannes standout “The Zone of Interest” might be a movie without a single closeup, but “Fallen Leaves” is pretty much a...
- 5/22/2023
- by Steve Pond
- The Wrap
Cinematographer Alexander Dynan got to know director Paul Schrader working on “First Reformed” and an earlier film, “Dog Eat Dog.”
Dynan developed a shorthand with Schrader and with colorist Tim Merick that helped him light and color Schrader’s “The Card Counter,” which is in cinemas now.
Told in an urgent, immersive style, the film follows William (Oscar Issac), a lonely and tortured man who once served at Abu Ghraib. He exists in a kind of purgatory, so the drab and monotonous backdrop of casinos mirrors his conflicted soul. Flipping between the drab suburban landscape of the present and hallucinatory visions of the prison, Dynan turned to inspirations from Schrader’s lodestar, Robert Bresson, to VR videos to Caravaggio to help deliver Schrader’s vision.
This is your third collaboration with Paul, can you share a little about your shorthand and how that works?
On “First Reformed,” we really established a visual language.
Dynan developed a shorthand with Schrader and with colorist Tim Merick that helped him light and color Schrader’s “The Card Counter,” which is in cinemas now.
Told in an urgent, immersive style, the film follows William (Oscar Issac), a lonely and tortured man who once served at Abu Ghraib. He exists in a kind of purgatory, so the drab and monotonous backdrop of casinos mirrors his conflicted soul. Flipping between the drab suburban landscape of the present and hallucinatory visions of the prison, Dynan turned to inspirations from Schrader’s lodestar, Robert Bresson, to VR videos to Caravaggio to help deliver Schrader’s vision.
This is your third collaboration with Paul, can you share a little about your shorthand and how that works?
On “First Reformed,” we really established a visual language.
- 9/12/2021
- by Jazz Tangcay
- Variety Film + TV
I’m a sucker for card-sharp movies, and I’m not alone. The allure of films like “The Cincinnati Kid” or “California Split” or “Rounders” is that the poker games have the quality of athletic showdowns: the kind of hand-to-hand, eyeball-to-eyeball aggression we associate with a contest taking place in a gladiatorial arena. But in a card movie, it’s all done sitting in chairs, with mental acuity (and fate!) as the only weapon. Great poker scenes, in their slyly civilized cards-close-to-the-vest way, formalize the desire to destroy your opponent, but they’re also layered with a drive to psych him out that most combat scenes don’t have. To me, the single greatest movie card sequence is the Texas hold ’em tournament at the center of “Casino Royale.” It’s a little movie unto itself, and the currents of strategy and malevolence and sheer nimble play that pass between...
- 9/2/2021
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
France’s Robert Bresson’s theory about a ‘pure’ cinema defies basic rules of the movie mainstream — like, ‘no acting allowed.’ But his movies remained faithful to his creed, even as they became increasingly pessimistic. This story of an unloved and abused young girl is considered one of Bresson’s masterpieces. The theme is human suffering in the void left by the absence of faith, and the tone is unrelentingly pitiless.
Mouchette
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 363
1967 / B&w / 1:66 widescreen / 81 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date December 8, 2020 / 39.95
Starring: Nadine Nortier, Jean-Claude Guilbert, Maria Cardinal, Paul Hebert, Jean Vimenet, Marie Susini, Suzanne Huguenin, Marine Trichet, Raymonde Chabrun.
Cinematography: Ghislain Cloquet
Film Editor: Raymond Lamy
Original Music: Jean Wiener
Written by Robert Bresson from the book Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette by Georges Bernanos
Produced by Anatole Dauman
Directed by Robert Bresson
The first time one sees Robert Bresson speak, we...
Mouchette
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 363
1967 / B&w / 1:66 widescreen / 81 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date December 8, 2020 / 39.95
Starring: Nadine Nortier, Jean-Claude Guilbert, Maria Cardinal, Paul Hebert, Jean Vimenet, Marie Susini, Suzanne Huguenin, Marine Trichet, Raymonde Chabrun.
Cinematography: Ghislain Cloquet
Film Editor: Raymond Lamy
Original Music: Jean Wiener
Written by Robert Bresson from the book Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette by Georges Bernanos
Produced by Anatole Dauman
Directed by Robert Bresson
The first time one sees Robert Bresson speak, we...
- 1/26/2021
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie. Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1951) is showing May 4 - June 2, 2020 in the United Kingdom.A pattern of loneliness extends throughout the concise and remarkably consistent cinema of Robert Bresson. Afflicting the young and old, rich and poor, the sinners and saints—this insular, often confused condition leaves characters to autonomously endure the anxieties of an exacting environment. Both complicating and enriching this recurrent theme, however, is the fact few of these individuals are ever literally alone. They are almost always engaged, to varying degrees, with a perpetual circle of personified kindness, cruelty, and indifference. Such is the case with Claude Laydu’s priest of Ambricourt, the eponymous cleric of Bresson’s 1951 meditation on tested faith and crippling anguish, Diary of a Country Priest. Whether he is...
- 5/11/2020
- MUBI
A central figure in French cinema, Bertrand Tavernier has an encyclopedic knowledge of the craft of filmmaking akin to the likes of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. The sense of history he possesses is seen in both his narrative and documentary, the latter of which is perhaps best exemplified in his recent film My Journey Through French Cinema. Clocking in at 3.5 hours, that 2016 documentary has now received a follow-up expansion with an eight-part series and we’re pleased to debut the U.S. trailer.
Titled Journeys Through French Cinema, the director-writer-actor-producer explores the filmmakers that most influenced him, how the cinema of France changed when the country was German occupation, the unknown films and filmmakers he admires (with a focus on female directors), and much more. From better-known filmmakers such as Jacques Tati, Robert Bresson, and Jacques Demy to ones in need of (re)discovery such as Raymond Bernard, Maurice Turner,...
Titled Journeys Through French Cinema, the director-writer-actor-producer explores the filmmakers that most influenced him, how the cinema of France changed when the country was German occupation, the unknown films and filmmakers he admires (with a focus on female directors), and much more. From better-known filmmakers such as Jacques Tati, Robert Bresson, and Jacques Demy to ones in need of (re)discovery such as Raymond Bernard, Maurice Turner,...
- 12/27/2019
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
The duo of Sergio da Costa and Maya Kosa has garnered attention for their previous film, Rio Corgo (2015). Now, they are back with their new film, Bird Island, which brilliantly mixes documentary and fiction in a Swiss bird shelter. It follows a new employee (Antonin Ivanidze) as he interacts with and learns from the shelter's three employees: Paul Sauteur, who breeds the rats that are fed to the recovering birds, and two employees who care for the birds themselves, Emilie Bréthaut and Iwan Fasel.We interviewed the directors about Bird Island at its world premiere as part of the Filmmakers of the Present competition at the 72nd Locarno Film Festival.Notebook: How did you learn about this place and how the idea for the film came about? Sergio Da Costa: In 2013 we found a wounded bird on the road and brought it to this ornithological center. This place particularly...
- 8/22/2019
- MUBI
In a perfect world, the versatile and hard-working (172 acting credits on IMDb!) Dutch actor Rutger Hauer, who has died in the Netherlands from cancer, would have had a film or even a franchise that capitalized on his range and the blonde good looks of his early years. After early stardom in his home country, he ventured into Hollywood and international films, delivering outstanding, timeless work. Yet his charisma, depth, and daring never translated into a career as a major European leading man in the same way as earlier Euro icons like Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon and Marcello Mastroianni.
By the time Christopher Nolan’s “Batman Begins” (2005) came along, the vibrant warrior prince of the 1980s had become a sturdy character player in his sixties.
But although younger film buffs may know him better for the outre genre fare of his later years with titles like “Hobo With Shotgun” and “Scorpion King 4,” in his heyday,...
By the time Christopher Nolan’s “Batman Begins” (2005) came along, the vibrant warrior prince of the 1980s had become a sturdy character player in his sixties.
But although younger film buffs may know him better for the outre genre fare of his later years with titles like “Hobo With Shotgun” and “Scorpion King 4,” in his heyday,...
- 7/24/2019
- by Steven Gaydos
- Variety Film + TV
A version of this story on Paul Schrader first appeared in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s Oscar magazine.
“I have a conflicted feeling,” said Paul Schrader, the screenwriter of “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull,” who has received the first Oscar nomination of his career for “First Reformed.” “You’ve lived your whole life feeling that awards are not important — but then you get an award and you think, ‘Well, maybe it is important.'”
When Schrader was writing those classic films for Martin Scorsese, or directing work like “American Gigolo” and “Hardcore,” though, the awards landscape was far different.
“This Oscar mania is a post-Harvey Weinstein thing,” he said. “I remember I went to the Oscars for ‘Taxi Driver’ [which was nominated for Best Picture, but not for its screenplay], and I didn’t feel well, so I got up and left in the middle. There were no parties afterwards, there was nothing. And now Oscar is a three-month event.
“I have a conflicted feeling,” said Paul Schrader, the screenwriter of “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull,” who has received the first Oscar nomination of his career for “First Reformed.” “You’ve lived your whole life feeling that awards are not important — but then you get an award and you think, ‘Well, maybe it is important.'”
When Schrader was writing those classic films for Martin Scorsese, or directing work like “American Gigolo” and “Hardcore,” though, the awards landscape was far different.
“This Oscar mania is a post-Harvey Weinstein thing,” he said. “I remember I went to the Oscars for ‘Taxi Driver’ [which was nominated for Best Picture, but not for its screenplay], and I didn’t feel well, so I got up and left in the middle. There were no parties afterwards, there was nothing. And now Oscar is a three-month event.
- 2/14/2019
- by Steve Pond
- The Wrap
If the 76th Golden Globe Awards provided a wakeup call for awards season with major victories for “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Green Book,” then the 2019 New York Film Critics Circle Awards served as an essential reminder that 2018 really was a great year at the movies. Any awards show that begins with Martin Scorsese honoring Paul Schrader and ends with Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma” being named Best Picture is not just a success but a testament to the enduring strength of independent and foreign cinema.
Schrader, whose work scripting “First Reformed” failed to get nominated by the Writers Guild of America earlier in the day, bounced back into the awards conversation with help from his longtime friend and collaborator Scorsese. After discussing how their shared love of John Ford’s “The Searchers” and Robert Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest” made them fast friends, Scorsese championed “First Reformed”: “I was...
Schrader, whose work scripting “First Reformed” failed to get nominated by the Writers Guild of America earlier in the day, bounced back into the awards conversation with help from his longtime friend and collaborator Scorsese. After discussing how their shared love of John Ford’s “The Searchers” and Robert Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest” made them fast friends, Scorsese championed “First Reformed”: “I was...
- 1/8/2019
- by Zack Sharf
- Indiewire
We've gathered together a wide array of recent titles for home video fans, divided into areas of interest: indie, foreign, documentary, grindhouse, classics and television. Feast on the buffet below! New Indie First Reformed (A24/Lionsgate) definitely sees writer-director Paul Schrader tipping his hat to one of his major influences – Robert Bresson’s minimalist classic Diary of a Country Priest – but it’s no empty homage. Ethan Hawke gives one of the best performances in his storied career as a conflicted, alcoholic cleric who starts asking hard questions about himself and his commitment to his community when he gets close to a troubled woman (played by Amanda Seyfried) in his parish. Schrader also gets a terrific supporting performance from...
- 9/18/2018
- by Alonso Duralde
- Movies.com
Paul Schrader’s austere, intense thriller is billed as a return to the director’s ‘transcendental’ roots, although we suspect he never really left them at all. Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried and Victoria Hall immerse us in a country pastor’s dreadful impulse to act on spiritual values and strike back against evil.
First Reformed
Blu-ray
Lionsgate
2017 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 108 min. / Street Date August 21, 2018 / 24.99
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Cedric Antonio Kyles, Victoria Hill, Philip Ettinger, Michael Gaston, Bill Hoag.
Cinematography: Alexander Dynan
Film Editor: Benjamin Rodriguez Jr.
Original Music: Brian Williams
Produced by Jack Binder, Greg Clark, Gary Hamilton, Victoria Hill, David Hinojosa, Frank Murray, Deepak Sikka, Christine Vachon.
Written and Directed by Paul Schrader
No Spoilers.
Paul Schrader begins his commentary on the new Blu-ray of First Reformed practically spelling out my review criticism — he says his movie is made from pieces of other movies, a truth that...
First Reformed
Blu-ray
Lionsgate
2017 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 108 min. / Street Date August 21, 2018 / 24.99
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Cedric Antonio Kyles, Victoria Hill, Philip Ettinger, Michael Gaston, Bill Hoag.
Cinematography: Alexander Dynan
Film Editor: Benjamin Rodriguez Jr.
Original Music: Brian Williams
Produced by Jack Binder, Greg Clark, Gary Hamilton, Victoria Hill, David Hinojosa, Frank Murray, Deepak Sikka, Christine Vachon.
Written and Directed by Paul Schrader
No Spoilers.
Paul Schrader begins his commentary on the new Blu-ray of First Reformed practically spelling out my review criticism — he says his movie is made from pieces of other movies, a truth that...
- 9/4/2018
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Somehow, it is now late summer 2018. While the release of films like Solo: A Star Wars Story and Avengers: Infinity War seems long ago, they are represented in this latest rundown of books connected to the world cinema. But there is plenty else, including a classic from Paul Schrader, a juicy look at the Sumner Redstone empire, and a must-buy for fans of Clint Eastwood. Note that this summer also saw the release of David Lynch’s Room to Dream, a memoir co-written with journalist/critic Kristine McKenna. Nick Newman covered the insightful and surprisingly comprehensive book in June, and explains why Dream’s “enlightened restlessness” is so appropriate.
Transcendental Style in Film by Paul Schrader (University of California Press)
With First Reformed still making critical waves and Taylor Swift concert pics going viral, we are in the midst of a Paul Schrader renaissance. (A Schrenaissance!) It is an ideal time,...
Transcendental Style in Film by Paul Schrader (University of California Press)
With First Reformed still making critical waves and Taylor Swift concert pics going viral, we are in the midst of a Paul Schrader renaissance. (A Schrenaissance!) It is an ideal time,...
- 8/14/2018
- by Christopher Schobert
- The Film Stage
Film critic Dave Kehr is now a curator in the film department of the Museum of Modern Art, but in 2011 he published a reviews collection, “When Movies Mattered.” It mostly covered movies of the ’70s and ’80s, years that saw film and criticism elevated to more serious consideration. I have been thinking of his book with A24’s release of Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed.” Now in its third weekend, it’s passed the $1 million mark in just 91 theaters.
That’s promising, but it’s not the gross that interests me most. What’s compelling is the combination of critical attention and theatrical response, which represents a victory for the increasingly endangered world of specialized film.
Here’s are are some reasons why the film could mean so much more than a modest box-office success.
It doesn’t fit the mold of what gets made, or what gets audience attention.
That’s promising, but it’s not the gross that interests me most. What’s compelling is the combination of critical attention and theatrical response, which represents a victory for the increasingly endangered world of specialized film.
Here’s are are some reasons why the film could mean so much more than a modest box-office success.
It doesn’t fit the mold of what gets made, or what gets audience attention.
- 6/6/2018
- by Tom Brueggemann
- Indiewire
The writer-director Paul Schrader has gotten some of the most ecstatic reviews of his career for “First Reformed,” and though I’m not in the rapturous/masterpiece camp about it, I agree with the praise more than not. The movie, which stars Ethan Hawke as an upstate New York minister who is undergoing a crisis of faith/health/isolation/midlife woe, is an austerely unabashed and compelling oddball, a pastiche of “Diary of a Country Priest” and “Winter Light” and what you might call the Schrader Paradigm, the one derived from “The Searchers” that he used (and made iconic) in his screenplay for “Taxi Driver,” and then in “Hardcore” and “Light Sleeper”: the loner who goes down a blood trail of redemption, trying to rescue a ravaged maiden who was taken by the forces of sin but remains, in his mind, unspoiled.
That said, there’s an additional component to “First Reformed” that,...
That said, there’s an additional component to “First Reformed” that,...
- 5/28/2018
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
Before he wrote and directed movies, Paul Schrader was a film critic, best known for his book “Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer.” Director Robert Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest” has always been a key film for Schrader, with Bresson’s ascetic Catholicism mirroring Schrader’s fully-absorbed Calvinism. And now Schrader has made “First Reformed,” a film that even freshman film students will be able to easily connect to this influential earlier movie.
“First Reformed” is about a country priest, and he keeps a diary. And, like the hero of Bresson’s film (and the Georges Bernanos novel on which it is based), he’s got stomach cancer.
There’s more than homage going on here, though. As Schrader’s hero takes a bleaker look at life, and considers committing an extreme act as a desperate attempt to find resonance and morality in the world, he stands...
“First Reformed” is about a country priest, and he keeps a diary. And, like the hero of Bresson’s film (and the Georges Bernanos novel on which it is based), he’s got stomach cancer.
There’s more than homage going on here, though. As Schrader’s hero takes a bleaker look at life, and considers committing an extreme act as a desperate attempt to find resonance and morality in the world, he stands...
- 5/16/2018
- by Alonso Duralde
- The Wrap
There are powerhouse movies that knock you for a loop and take weeks to recover from – and then there is Paul Schrader's First Reformed. Not only is this faith-in-crisis drama one of the legendary writer-director's most incendiary films ever, it's one of the year's very best – a cinematic whirlwind that leaves you both exhilarated and spent. Like the screenplays he wrote for Martin Scorsese (notably Taxi Driver) and the tormented works he's made about the wages of sin (Hardcore, American Gigolo, The Comfort of Strangers, Auto Focus), Schrader – raised...
- 5/16/2018
- Rollingstone.com
Hong Sang-soo has a reputation for being a tricky interview, and he knows it. In Claire’s Camera, one of his three films that premiered in 2017, a Korean director who’s in Cannes to promote his latest movie tries to back out of the two press engagements on his schedule. “You need to do that much,” his sales agent cajoles him. “It’s not that much.”Hong, likewise, has been known to cancel or reschedule interviews and to give terse and seemingly disinterested answers. He tends to talk about his production methods in the most straight-forward terms and dismisses questions about authorial intent. Asking him to interpret his own work is a fool’s errand. “I get up at 4:00, I smoke, and something I didn’t expect comes to me,” he told me. I met Hong in the bar of the Loews Regency on October 9th, the afternoon after his other two new films,...
- 11/15/2017
- MUBI
Paul Schrader with Kent Jones on Martin Scorsese casting Albert Brooks in Taxi Driver: "Whenever he had a bad role, he put a comic in it." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
The Film Society of Lincoln Center's New York Film Festival's added sneak preview of Paul Schrader's First Reformed as a Special Event, starring Ethan Hawke and Cedric the Entertainer with Philip Ettinger and Amanda Seyfried was presented by the director at Alice Tully Hall. Director of Programming and Selection Committee Chair Kent Jones joined Schrader on stage for a post-screening discussion.
The influence of Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean-Luc Godard, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Ingmar Bergman, Ethan Hawke's character coming from Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest, Ida director Pawel Pawlikowski's encouragement, and what Martin Scorsese's casting of Albert Brooks in Taxi Driver had to with Cedric the Entertainer being in First Reformed were confessed by Paul Schrader.
The Film Society of Lincoln Center's New York Film Festival's added sneak preview of Paul Schrader's First Reformed as a Special Event, starring Ethan Hawke and Cedric the Entertainer with Philip Ettinger and Amanda Seyfried was presented by the director at Alice Tully Hall. Director of Programming and Selection Committee Chair Kent Jones joined Schrader on stage for a post-screening discussion.
The influence of Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean-Luc Godard, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Ingmar Bergman, Ethan Hawke's character coming from Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest, Ida director Pawel Pawlikowski's encouragement, and what Martin Scorsese's casting of Albert Brooks in Taxi Driver had to with Cedric the Entertainer being in First Reformed were confessed by Paul Schrader.
- 10/11/2017
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Paul Schrader has been open about the original intentions for his most famous work, the screenplay to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Writing it in the vein of Robert Bresson films like Diary of a Country Priest or Pickpocket, it was his full intention for the film to be directed in a similarly austere fashion. This writer perhaps doesn’t need to further recount what actually happened in the end result of one of the most famous American films of all-time, but nonetheless the multiple authors involved put it in a different direction.
It seems that some of Schrader’s own directorial efforts, be it American Gigolo or Light Sleeper, were certainly an attempt to complete the “Transcendental” experience to one degree or another. Yet four decades later, First Reformed — which, should be mentioned, also seems to be taking from Bergman’s Winter Light and Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice in the...
It seems that some of Schrader’s own directorial efforts, be it American Gigolo or Light Sleeper, were certainly an attempt to complete the “Transcendental” experience to one degree or another. Yet four decades later, First Reformed — which, should be mentioned, also seems to be taking from Bergman’s Winter Light and Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice in the...
- 9/18/2017
- by Ethan Vestby
- The Film Stage
Gary Oldman plays Churchill, and a revitalized Paul Schrader gives Ethan Hawke one of his best roles
“Did Jesus worry about being liked?” The unexpected surprise of this year’s Tiff turned out to be Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (Grade: B+), a grotesque dual homage to Diary Of A Country Priest and Winter Light in which the alcoholic rector of a nearly empty church in upstate New York is asked to hide a suicide bomb…
Read more...
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- 9/15/2017
- by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
- avclub.com
Dear Kelley and Fern,As you both noted earlier, John Woo’s Manhunt was a thrilling, tongue-in-cheek compendium of the director's best qualities. This kind of masterful self-reflexivity may rub some the wrong way—remember, at the time, the hostility to De Palma’s Femme Fatale and Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. as if they were only Directors' Greatest Hits?—but when done smartly this is no mere masturbation, but a celebration and self-questioning, honed to deft precision, of an artist’s perennial themes.Such is the case with one of the few great feature films I've seen here in Toronto, Paul Schrader’s First Reformed. In remarkable contrast to his last film, the coked-up cartoon Dog Eat Dog, it is is a self-consciously austere drama of a wearied priest (a tremendous, hollowed-out Ethan Hawke) of a minuscule congregation housed in the oldest church in America, one dismissively dubbed the ‘souvenirs shop’ by the newer,...
- 9/15/2017
- MUBI
The Telluride Film Festival is about a lot more than Oscars. Co-directors Tom Luddy and Julie Huntsinger certainly set out to program the year’s likeliest Oscar contenders, including Joe Wright’s Gary Oldman vehicle “Darkest Hour,” Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird,” starring Saoirse Ronan, Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water,” starring Sally Hawkins, and “Battle of the Sexes,” starring a luminous Emma Stone as real-life hero Billie Jean King.
But Telluride was also a crucible for conversations about the state of the motion picture industry throughout the weekend, as Netflix and Amazon threw parties and checked out several high-profile movies without distribution — including Francis Ford Coppola’s musically-enhanced “The Cotton Club Encore” — that banked on the festival boosting their critical and audience cred before top buyers.
Here’s what we learned over the Labor Day weekend:
1. Christian Bale is fat.
The subject of two well-deserved weekend tributes...
But Telluride was also a crucible for conversations about the state of the motion picture industry throughout the weekend, as Netflix and Amazon threw parties and checked out several high-profile movies without distribution — including Francis Ford Coppola’s musically-enhanced “The Cotton Club Encore” — that banked on the festival boosting their critical and audience cred before top buyers.
Here’s what we learned over the Labor Day weekend:
1. Christian Bale is fat.
The subject of two well-deserved weekend tributes...
- 9/4/2017
- by Anne Thompson
- Thompson on Hollywood
The Telluride Film Festival is about a lot more than Oscars. Co-directors Tom Luddy and Julie Huntsinger certainly set out to program the year’s likeliest Oscar contenders, including Joe Wright’s Gary Oldman vehicle “Darkest Hour,” Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird,” starring Saoirse Ronan, Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water,” starring Sally Hawkins, and “Battle of the Sexes,” starring a luminous Emma Stone as real-life hero Billie Jean King.
But Telluride was also a crucible for conversations about the state of the motion picture industry throughout the weekend, as Netflix and Amazon threw parties and checked out several high-profile movies without distribution — including Francis Ford Coppola’s musically-enhanced “The Cotton Club Encore” — that banked on the festival boosting their critical and audience cred before top buyers.
Here’s what we learned over the Labor Day weekend:
1. Christian Bale is fat.
The subject of two well-deserved weekend tributes...
But Telluride was also a crucible for conversations about the state of the motion picture industry throughout the weekend, as Netflix and Amazon threw parties and checked out several high-profile movies without distribution — including Francis Ford Coppola’s musically-enhanced “The Cotton Club Encore” — that banked on the festival boosting their critical and audience cred before top buyers.
Here’s what we learned over the Labor Day weekend:
1. Christian Bale is fat.
The subject of two well-deserved weekend tributes...
- 9/4/2017
- by Anne Thompson
- Indiewire
Here’s what we’ve learned after one day at the Telluride Film Festival, which draws folks from all over the world to indulge in a Labor Day Weekend ritual of film gorging. Before boarding the Delta charter plane from Lax to Montrose, Colorado, the new Academy president, cinematographer John Bailey, admitted he hasn’t seen Telluride co-director Tom Luddy, or director Paul Schrader, since Schrader’s 1985 film “Mishima.” Schrader’s rigorously elegant “First Reformed,” starring Ethan Hawke in his update of Robert Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest,” is looking for a buyer, and distributors are eager to check it out here.
At the high-altitude opening day patron’s brunch, Rebecca Miller cheered on her “Maggie’s Plan” star Greta Gerwig, who is making her directorial debut with “Lady Bird.” Miller is at Telluride with a documentary about her father, playwright Arthur Miller.
After the brunch, so many...
At the high-altitude opening day patron’s brunch, Rebecca Miller cheered on her “Maggie’s Plan” star Greta Gerwig, who is making her directorial debut with “Lady Bird.” Miller is at Telluride with a documentary about her father, playwright Arthur Miller.
After the brunch, so many...
- 9/2/2017
- by Anne Thompson
- Thompson on Hollywood
Here’s what we’ve learned after one day at the Telluride Film Festival, which draws folks from all over the world to indulge in a Labor Day Weekend ritual of film gorging. Before boarding the Delta charter plane from Lax to Montrose, Colorado, the new Academy president, cinematographer John Bailey, admitted he hasn’t seen Telluride co-director Tom Luddy, or director Paul Schrader, since Schrader’s 1985 film “Mishima.” Schrader’s rigorously elegant “First Reformed,” starring Ethan Hawke in his update of Robert Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest,” is looking for a buyer, and distributors are eager to check it out here.
At the high-altitude opening day patron’s brunch, Rebecca Miller cheered on her “Maggie’s Plan” star Greta Gerwig, who is making her directorial debut with “Lady Bird.” Miller is at Telluride with a documentary about her father, playwright Arthur Miller.
After the brunch, so many...
At the high-altitude opening day patron’s brunch, Rebecca Miller cheered on her “Maggie’s Plan” star Greta Gerwig, who is making her directorial debut with “Lady Bird.” Miller is at Telluride with a documentary about her father, playwright Arthur Miller.
After the brunch, so many...
- 9/2/2017
- by Anne Thompson
- Indiewire
Before he wrote and directed movies, Paul Schrader was a film critic, best known for his book “Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer,” and Robert Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest” has always been a key film for Schrader, with Bresson’s ascetic Catholicism mirroring Schrader’s fully-absorbed Calvinism. And now Schrader has made “First Reformed,” a film that even freshman film students will be able to easily connect to this influential earlier movie. “First Reformed” is about a country priest, and he keeps a diary. And, like the hero of Bresson’s film (and the novel by Georges Bernanos on which.
- 8/30/2017
- by Alonso Duralde
- The Wrap
Paul Schrader's roots are showing, assertively and self-consciously, in First Reformed. In this grimly serious tale of a solitary holy man in modern New England whose loneliness, past tragedies and military background draw him toward violence, it's easy to detect one of the writer-director's biggest influences, Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest. It's his most effective work as a director since Auto Focus 15 years ago, but it's a direly bleak affair that will struggle for every viewer it can find.
The material here is ground-zero Schrader: a man of the cloth in an empty old...
The material here is ground-zero Schrader: a man of the cloth in an empty old...
- 8/30/2017
- by Todd McCarthy
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
For 40 years, Paul Schrader has made movies about serious, driven men isolated by deep-seated philosophical conflicts. From “American Gigolo” to “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” to “Affliction” — not to mention the “Taxi Driver” screenplay for which he’s best known — Schrader’s stone-faced protagonists are guided by a spiritual sense of purpose that reflects his Calvinist upbringing. With “First Reformed,” that obsession takes center stage in an absorbing late period achievement that brings Schrader’s talent back into focus.
“First Reformed” consolidates the decades of bubbling guilt and frustration experienced by so many Schrader protagonists into a single enraged priest, played with brilliant layers of guilt and discontent by Ethan Hawke. It’s the best work in years for both men, a fascinating meditation on inner turmoil in which doing the right thing can lead down many wrong directions.
Read More:Paul Schrader’s Last Stand: How a...
“First Reformed” consolidates the decades of bubbling guilt and frustration experienced by so many Schrader protagonists into a single enraged priest, played with brilliant layers of guilt and discontent by Ethan Hawke. It’s the best work in years for both men, a fascinating meditation on inner turmoil in which doing the right thing can lead down many wrong directions.
Read More:Paul Schrader’s Last Stand: How a...
- 8/30/2017
- by Eric Kohn
- Indiewire
Paul Schrader's roots are showing, assertively and self-consciously, in First Reformed. In this grimly serious tale of a solitary holy man in modern New England whose loneliness, past tragedies and military background draw him toward violence, it's easy to detect one of the writer-director's biggest influences, Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest. It's his most effective work as a director since Auto Focus 15 years ago, but it's a direly bleak affair that will struggle for every viewer it can find.
The material here is ground-zero Schrader: a man of the cloth in an ...
The material here is ground-zero Schrader: a man of the cloth in an ...
- 8/30/2017
- The Hollywood Reporter - Film + TV
Paul Schrader's roots are showing, assertively and self-consciously, in First Reformed. In this grimly serious tale of a solitary holy man in modern New England whose loneliness, past tragedies and military background draw him toward violence, it's easy to detect one of the writer-director's biggest influences, Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest. It's his most effective work as a director since Auto Focus 15 years ago, but it's a direly bleak affair that will struggle for every viewer it can find.
The material here is ground-zero Schrader: a man of the cloth in an ...
The material here is ground-zero Schrader: a man of the cloth in an ...
- 8/30/2017
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Welcome to the final film of the aesthetically precise, rigorously austere Robert Bresson, an adaptation of a fateful tale by Leo Tolstoy visualized in Bresson’s frequently maddening personal style. An extreme artist makes a fascinatingly unyielding show: as with the classic paintings that Bresson admires, appreciation requires special knowledge.
L’argent
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 886
1983 / Color / 1:85 anamorphic 16:9 / 85 min. / Money / Street Date July 11, 2017 / 39.95
Starring: Christian Patey, Vincent Risterucci, Caroline Lang, Sylvie Van den Elsen, Báatrice Tabourin, Didier Baussy.
Cinematography: Pasqualino De Santis, Emmanuel Machuel
Production Designer: Pierre Guffroy
Film Editor: Jean-Francois Naudon
Written by Robert Bresson from a short story by Leo Tolstoy
Produced by Antoine Gannagé, Jean-Marc Henchoz, Daniel Toscan du Plantier
Written and Directed by Robert Bresson
Some movies need disclaimers, and many of the pictures of Robert Bresson could use a caption reading, ‘not for beginners.’ Bresson’s filmography includes the spiritually mysterious Diary of a Country Priest...
L’argent
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 886
1983 / Color / 1:85 anamorphic 16:9 / 85 min. / Money / Street Date July 11, 2017 / 39.95
Starring: Christian Patey, Vincent Risterucci, Caroline Lang, Sylvie Van den Elsen, Báatrice Tabourin, Didier Baussy.
Cinematography: Pasqualino De Santis, Emmanuel Machuel
Production Designer: Pierre Guffroy
Film Editor: Jean-Francois Naudon
Written by Robert Bresson from a short story by Leo Tolstoy
Produced by Antoine Gannagé, Jean-Marc Henchoz, Daniel Toscan du Plantier
Written and Directed by Robert Bresson
Some movies need disclaimers, and many of the pictures of Robert Bresson could use a caption reading, ‘not for beginners.’ Bresson’s filmography includes the spiritually mysterious Diary of a Country Priest...
- 7/1/2017
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
The latest installment in the filmmaker's series of journal-films combining iPhone footage and sounds and images from movies. A diary penned with cinema.Journal (6.6.16 - 1.10.17)feat. additional footage from Masha Tupitsyn and Isiah MedinaMy journal-film series (of which this is the third installment) came to be as a means of resolving the points of convergence and departure amongst the environments I occupy and those which I encounter in cinema. I like to view these films as a method of managing the images that take up my thoughts and memories into a new continuity, one in which the distinction between images seen on-screen and those personally experienced is no longer absolute. In dissolving this partition, these films provide a vector for the animation conceptual concerns through cinema - montage fulfilling that which language can only formally describe and vice versa. The following essay outlines some of the concerns this film attempts...
- 3/20/2017
- MUBI
We’re introduced to the protagonist of Son of Joseph as he silently observes the tortured of a trapped rat. Two of his schoolmates jab thin steel pins at the frightened rodent. “Try to poke one of its eyes out” one urges. “I can’t, he’s too clever,” the other replies. Our hero promptly leaves, finding himself to have more in common with the rat than his supposed friends.
If you’re unfamiliar with the work of Eugène Green you have a weird road ahead of you. He’s an American-born French filmmaker with a tendency towards brain numbingly glacial pacing, intentionally monotone performances, compositions static to the point of fossilization and characters who generally end scenes by gazing blankly into the lens. His style is definitely an acquired taste, catering for those with reservoirs of patience and the ability to tolerate some pretty artsy fartsy filmmaking.
Our lonely...
If you’re unfamiliar with the work of Eugène Green you have a weird road ahead of you. He’s an American-born French filmmaker with a tendency towards brain numbingly glacial pacing, intentionally monotone performances, compositions static to the point of fossilization and characters who generally end scenes by gazing blankly into the lens. His style is definitely an acquired taste, catering for those with reservoirs of patience and the ability to tolerate some pretty artsy fartsy filmmaking.
Our lonely...
- 1/12/2017
- by David James
- We Got This Covered
What’s happened to Filmmaker’s “Recommended on a Friday” series? Just three columns in and our mix of picks consists largely of repertory and home viewing choices. If you’re in New York, there are several series going on worth your attention, first and foremost Bam’s “Bresson on Cinema” series that features several Bresson titles — Pickpocket, Diary of a Country Priest and A Man Escaped, among them — alongside films that Bresson’s work was somehow in dialogue with. The latter includes a diverse group of classics including Bicycle Thieves and Battleship Potemkin. Bresson’s precise, ascetic style and his work’s near devotional […]...
- 11/5/2016
- by Scott Macaulay
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
Aux quatre coinsOrigins in art are forever in doubt. Popular culture seems to imagine that what we now call the French New Wave emerged from thin air with François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960), but that blinkered narrative ignores features ranging from Agnès Varda’s Le pointe courte (1955) and Claude Chabrol’s Le beau Serge (1958) to Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras’s Hiroshima, mon amour (1959). Even before these, the filmmakers we associate—through later fame, scandal, obscurity, venerability, and legend—with the New Wave made short films, a medium encouraged by the theatrical practice, now long gone in France, of regularly exhibiting dramatic and documentary short films in cinemas. Early shorts by Jacques Demy, Chris Marker, Truffaut, Godard, and others reach back into the mid-50s, but only two of the New Wave’s anointed truly began their filmmaking at the halfway point of the 20th century: Eric Rohmer,...
- 10/17/2016
- MUBI
What's it all about, Alfie? The master of suspense goes in an unusual direction with this murder mystery with a Catholic background. And foreground. Actually, it's a regular guidebook for proper priest deportment, and it's so complex that we wonder if Hitchcock himself had a full grip on it. Montgomery Clift is extremely good atop a top-rank cast that includes Anne Baxter and Karl Malden. Rated less exciting by audiences, this is really one of Hitch's best. I Confess Blu-ray Warner Archive Collection 1953 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 94 min. / Street Date February 16, 2016 / available through the WBshop / 17.95 Starring Montgomery Clift, Anne Baxter, Karl Malden, Brian Aherne, Roger Dann, Dolly Haas, Charles Andre, O.E. Hasse. Cinematography Robert Burks Art Direction Edward S. Haworth Film Editor Rudi Fehr Original Music Dimitri Tiomkin Written by George Tabori, William Archibald from a play by Paul Anthelme Produced and Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson...
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson...
- 1/24/2016
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
It's a TV movie graduated to feature status, with four imagination-challenged tales of terror. The script has lots of variety -- a video game possessed by the devil, a truck possessed by the devil, and lastly, a rat possessed by the devil! But the roster of actors is attractive -- Cristina Raines, Emilio Estevez, Lance Henricksen, Veronica Cartwright and Richard Masur. Nightmares Blu-ray Scream Factory 1983 / Color / 1:78 widescreen + 1:33 TV flat / 99 min. / Street Date December 22, 2015 / 29.99 Starring Cristina Raines, Anthony James, Lee Ving; Emilio Estevez, Moon Unit Zappa, Billy Jayne, Gary Carlos Cervantes; Lance Henriksen, Tony Plana, Timothy Scott; Richard Masur, Veronica Cartwright, Bridgette Andersen, Albert Hague. Cinematography Mario DeLeo, Gerald Perry Finnerman Film Editor Michael Brown, Rod Stephens Production Design Dean Edward Mitzner Original Music Craig Safan Written by Christopher Crowe, Jeffrey Bloom Produced by Christopher Crowe Directed by Joseph Sargent
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Nightmares is a low-wattage '...
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Nightmares is a low-wattage '...
- 1/4/2016
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Soak up the Sun: Pialat’s Palme d’Or Winning Spiritual Anguish
As part of Cohen Media Group’s Maurice Pialat retrospective, perhaps the most significant title showcased in the lineup is his infamous 1987 title, Under the Sun of Satan. Instantly reviled after winning the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival (with a jury made up of such heavy-hitters as Elem Klimov, Jerzy Skolimowski, Theo Angelopoulos, and Norman Mailer), where Pialat was jeered by a disapproving crowd, the title quickly lapsed into obscurity following a continually tepid critical reception.
Perhaps Pialat’s austere and increasingly deliberate examination of mental and spiritual anguish told through the perspective of a bumbling priest whose blasphemous predicament proves only the presence of Satan rather than God was as simultaneously too old fashioned as it was inconveniently provocative. Based on a 1927 novel by French author Georges Bernanos, Pialat’s treatment does seem...
As part of Cohen Media Group’s Maurice Pialat retrospective, perhaps the most significant title showcased in the lineup is his infamous 1987 title, Under the Sun of Satan. Instantly reviled after winning the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival (with a jury made up of such heavy-hitters as Elem Klimov, Jerzy Skolimowski, Theo Angelopoulos, and Norman Mailer), where Pialat was jeered by a disapproving crowd, the title quickly lapsed into obscurity following a continually tepid critical reception.
Perhaps Pialat’s austere and increasingly deliberate examination of mental and spiritual anguish told through the perspective of a bumbling priest whose blasphemous predicament proves only the presence of Satan rather than God was as simultaneously too old fashioned as it was inconveniently provocative. Based on a 1927 novel by French author Georges Bernanos, Pialat’s treatment does seem...
- 9/29/2015
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
Touring festival to show Cannes titles and spotlight Resnais, Truffaut and Tati.
The touring French Film Festival UK (Nov 5 – Dec 4) will host Cannes titles including Mathieu Amalric’s The Blue Room (La Chambre Bleue), Jean-Luc Godard’s 3D trip Goodbye to Language (Adieu Au Langage), and Camera d’Or winner Party Girl, directed by Marie Amachoukeli.
The festival, which travels to cities between Inverness and London, will open with Belgian director Lucas Belvaux’s Not My Type (Pas mon genre), the cultural and social divide romantic comedy with Emilie Dequenne and Loïc Corbery.
There will be tributes to the late Alain Resnais, with screenings of a restored copy of his first feature Hiroshima Mon Amour and the director’s last film Life of Riley, as well as films from François Truffaut and Jacques Tati.
The festival’s First World War focus revolves around a screening of the 1931 classic Wooden Crosses (Les Croix de Bois) by Raymond Bernard.
Cannes...
The touring French Film Festival UK (Nov 5 – Dec 4) will host Cannes titles including Mathieu Amalric’s The Blue Room (La Chambre Bleue), Jean-Luc Godard’s 3D trip Goodbye to Language (Adieu Au Langage), and Camera d’Or winner Party Girl, directed by Marie Amachoukeli.
The festival, which travels to cities between Inverness and London, will open with Belgian director Lucas Belvaux’s Not My Type (Pas mon genre), the cultural and social divide romantic comedy with Emilie Dequenne and Loïc Corbery.
There will be tributes to the late Alain Resnais, with screenings of a restored copy of his first feature Hiroshima Mon Amour and the director’s last film Life of Riley, as well as films from François Truffaut and Jacques Tati.
The festival’s First World War focus revolves around a screening of the 1931 classic Wooden Crosses (Les Croix de Bois) by Raymond Bernard.
Cannes...
- 8/15/2014
- by andreas.wiseman@screendaily.com (Andreas Wiseman)
- ScreenDaily
Trials of Faith Without Error; Glesson’s Good Priest Suffers for Sins of the Fathers
Two years after The Guard, the most commercially successful Irish film of all time, writer-director John Michael McDonagh and actor Brendan Gleeson return with considerably darker arthouse fare. Part Two of the unfinished “Glorified Suicide Trilogy”, Calvary begins inside a shadowy confessional with the announcement, “I first tasted semen when I was seven years old”. To the voice behind the lattice, Gleeson’s priest replies, “Certainly a startling open line” – speaking, more or less, on behalf of Calvary’s wrong-footed audience. The recollection of sexual abuse precedes a heavy dose of theological and moral insight, but lively, quick-witted dialogue will sweeten the pill.
In McDonagh’s words, it’s “Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest with a few gags thrown in”. To give a sense of these gags – Father Timothy Leary (David Wilmot) inquires...
Two years after The Guard, the most commercially successful Irish film of all time, writer-director John Michael McDonagh and actor Brendan Gleeson return with considerably darker arthouse fare. Part Two of the unfinished “Glorified Suicide Trilogy”, Calvary begins inside a shadowy confessional with the announcement, “I first tasted semen when I was seven years old”. To the voice behind the lattice, Gleeson’s priest replies, “Certainly a startling open line” – speaking, more or less, on behalf of Calvary’s wrong-footed audience. The recollection of sexual abuse precedes a heavy dose of theological and moral insight, but lively, quick-witted dialogue will sweeten the pill.
In McDonagh’s words, it’s “Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest with a few gags thrown in”. To give a sense of these gags – Father Timothy Leary (David Wilmot) inquires...
- 7/30/2014
- by Caitlin Coder
- IONCINEMA.com
And here we are. The day after Easter and we’ve reached the top of the mountain. While compiling this list, it’s become evident that true religious films just aren’t made anymore (and if they are, they are widely panned). That being said, religious themes exist in more mainstream movies than ever, despite there being no deliberate attempts to dub the films “religious.” Faith, God, whatever you want to call it – it’s influenced the history of nations, of politics, of culture, and of film. And these are the most important films in that wheelhouse. There are only two American films in the top 10, and only one of them is in English.
courtesy of hilobrow.com
10. Andrei Rublev (1966)
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
A brutally expansive biopic about the Russian iconographer divided into nine chapters. Andrei Rublev (Anatoly Solonitsyn) is portrayed not as a silent monk, but a motivated artist working against social ruin,...
courtesy of hilobrow.com
10. Andrei Rublev (1966)
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
A brutally expansive biopic about the Russian iconographer divided into nine chapters. Andrei Rublev (Anatoly Solonitsyn) is portrayed not as a silent monk, but a motivated artist working against social ruin,...
- 4/21/2014
- by Joshua Gaul
- SoundOnSight
As the various Playlist team members assemble like Voltron in Park City, we're looking at our list of the 30 Most Anticipated Films Of The 2014 Sundance Film Festival, eager to start making a dent into it. And one movie that we'll surely be getting to is "Calvary." Director John Michael McDonagh re-teams with Brendan Gleeson, and assembles a nice supporting cast including Chris O'Dowd, Aidan Gillen, Dylan Moran and Kelly Reilly, to tell the blackly funny story of a priest in a small country town, whose life is threatened, who continues to minister to his congregation despite personal woes and colleague not as committed to the cloth. "It’s basically Bresson’s 'Diary of a Country Priest' with a few gags thrown in," McDonagh said in a statement. And as this first clip shows, it's a pretty balanced mixture of laughter and drama, finding the sweet, tough spot right...
- 1/16/2014
- by Kevin Jagernauth
- The Playlist
Above: Birdsong.
At the outset of Albert Serra's Birdsong (2008), the Three Wise Men, caught in a sudden rainstorm and retreating into a cave to wait it out peruse the boulders around them. One of the Magi declares, “If you look close enough, you can see a lot of things. Sometimes what we see is so beautiful it petrifies us,” perfectly, if unwittingly, encapsulating the director’s method of operation. As the trio literally dissolves into a backdrop of majestic landscapes, the Biblical plot also withdraws from the foreground: a maneuver not unfamiliar to those who have seen Serra’s previous feature, Quixotic/Honor de Cavelleria (2006), a less than faithful adaptation of de Cervantes's Don Quixote. Calling it an adaptation, however, should be taken with a grain of salt insofar as Serra deliberately emptied the canonical chivalric novel of all its contents save the two lonely souls at its core,...
At the outset of Albert Serra's Birdsong (2008), the Three Wise Men, caught in a sudden rainstorm and retreating into a cave to wait it out peruse the boulders around them. One of the Magi declares, “If you look close enough, you can see a lot of things. Sometimes what we see is so beautiful it petrifies us,” perfectly, if unwittingly, encapsulating the director’s method of operation. As the trio literally dissolves into a backdrop of majestic landscapes, the Biblical plot also withdraws from the foreground: a maneuver not unfamiliar to those who have seen Serra’s previous feature, Quixotic/Honor de Cavelleria (2006), a less than faithful adaptation of de Cervantes's Don Quixote. Calling it an adaptation, however, should be taken with a grain of salt insofar as Serra deliberately emptied the canonical chivalric novel of all its contents save the two lonely souls at its core,...
- 10/24/2013
- by Vladimir Lukin
- MUBI
James Gray's reception in North America is a little bewildering, regardless of which side you stand on. To some, including this author, Gray's qualities as a filmmaker are obvious. Decidedly at odds with the trends of contemporary cinema since he made his debut with Little Odessa in 1994 (something discussed in the following interview), Gray's so-called "classical" style is invested in things seemingly forgotten in American movies. He stands outside of the present, yet it is far too simple to say he comes out of the past. Aside from Clint Eastwood, is there another director working in Hollywood making subtle, emotional, expertly-crafted dramas while also maintaining a delicately mannered mise en scène? Because of this, Gray seems out of place. Maybe that explains the lack of Cannes awards on his shelf (despite four trips to the festival's competition), the dissenting reviews (which don't even appear to be written on the...
- 10/6/2013
- by Adam Cook
- MUBI
Camille Claudel 1915
Written and directed by Bruno Dumont
France, 2013
Camille Claudel 1915 is a 3-day portrait of great sculptress Camille Claudel and her life in an institution. A rarity in art history, Claudel found success during her lifetime and was often exhibited alongside male contemporaries. Emblematic of larger issues plaguing art history and criticism, academically, she is most often referred to in relation to sculptor Auguste Rodin, rather than on the merits of her own work. His lover, muse, and student for over a decade, her relationship with him was a source of great inspiration and turmoil over the course of her life. An incredibly emotive and imaginative artist and sculptor, she was heralded by famous art critic Octave Mirbeau, Claude Debussy was passionate about her work, and Henrik Ibsen apparently based one of his plays on her tumultuous relationship with Rodin.
Standing the test of time, her art remains powerful and raw.
Written and directed by Bruno Dumont
France, 2013
Camille Claudel 1915 is a 3-day portrait of great sculptress Camille Claudel and her life in an institution. A rarity in art history, Claudel found success during her lifetime and was often exhibited alongside male contemporaries. Emblematic of larger issues plaguing art history and criticism, academically, she is most often referred to in relation to sculptor Auguste Rodin, rather than on the merits of her own work. His lover, muse, and student for over a decade, her relationship with him was a source of great inspiration and turmoil over the course of her life. An incredibly emotive and imaginative artist and sculptor, she was heralded by famous art critic Octave Mirbeau, Claude Debussy was passionate about her work, and Henrik Ibsen apparently based one of his plays on her tumultuous relationship with Rodin.
Standing the test of time, her art remains powerful and raw.
- 9/6/2013
- by Justine Smith
- SoundOnSight
I became a film critic to celebrate the movies I love — to spread the word about them, to talk about why they enthrall, why they matter, what they mean. And really, what could fulfill that desire more completely than spreading the word about the greatest movies you’ve ever seen? It’s like organizing the ultimate banquet: one perfect, sublime, exquisitely tasty dish after another. That said, how does one choose? In putting together EW’s list of the 100 All-Time Greatest Movies, I figured, at first, that it would be easy. Working with my fellow critics Lisa Schwarzbaum and Chris Nashawaty,...
- 7/2/2013
- by Owen Gleiberman
- EW - Inside Movies
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