All for an Idea
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Slated to premiere in Venice, Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door will be the Centerpiece presentation of this year’s New York Film Festival. The adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through stars Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton as friends catching up after having lost touch with each other over the years, and for NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim, it’s “a wise, exquisitely acted, achingly beautiful film that feels perfectly calibrated to this moment.” Running from September 27 through October 14, the festival’s sixty-second edition will open with RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys and close with Steve McQueen’s Blitz.
McQueen’s WWII-set drama will first see its world premiere as the opening film of the BFI London Film Festival (October 9 through 20). London’s sixty-eighth edition will close with the UK premiere of Morgan Neville’s Piece by Piece, the story of the life and career of Pharrell Williams rendered in Lego animation. The supporting cast includes Jay-Z, Missy Elliot, Gwen Stefani, Busta Rhymes, and Snoop Dogg—all of them, like Williams, Lego-ized.
One more festival update before we turn to this week’s highlights: Hashimoto Ai, Enyedi Ildikó, Chiara Mastroianni, and Johnnie To will join the jury presided over by Tony Leung in Tokyo (October 28 through November 6).
- The new issue of Senses of Cinema features a whopping dossier on El Pampero Cine, the Argentinian filmmaking collective founded more than twenty years ago by Laura Citarella, Mariano Llinás, Agustín Mendilaharzu, and Alejo Moguillansky. “Their films stand out for their unique blend of and deep respect for literature, theater, dance, music, photography, and painting,” writes guest editor Hamed Sarrafi. “This broad celebration of artistic magic is precisely what the contributors to this dossier have sought to highlight.” Issue 110 also offers profiles of Patricio Guzmán, Muriel Box, and Jack Nicholson as well as festival reports, interviews, and articles on work by Jenni Olson, Alex Garland, and Elizabeth Price.
- On the Criterion Channel, we’re featuring the three films director Michael Roemer is best known for, Nothing but a Man (1964), The Plot Against Harry (1969), and Vengeance Is Mine (1984). In 1954, when Roemer was twenty-six, he and his new wife traveled to Copenhagen to spend a few days with Carl Theodor Dreyer, and as he tells Edward McCarry and Graham L. Carter at Film Comment, it was “a very meaningful experience.” Dreyer spoke about the film he was working on, Ordet (1955), and eventually gave Roemer the screenplay for a film about Jesus that he never got to make. Now ninety-six, Roemer carries on writing but hasn’t been able to direct a film for forty years. “If I hadn’t been able to write these screenplays,” he says, “I would have been very unhappy. But the response to them was always the same: nobody understood them. They still don’t. Dreyer was a very inward person, you know. I’m not. Maybe he was more at peace with being misunderstood.”
- New York’s Metrograph is presenting a series of works this weekend by James N. Kienitz Wilkins (Still Life) and has paired him with Gabriel Abrantes (Diamantino)—they were art students together around twenty years ago—to discuss Wilkins’s place just outside both the film industry and the art world. “I think one can be sort of non-committal to movements, modes, techniques,” says Wilkins. “Promiscuous, even, and take what’s needed. Maybe the result is that there’s a poking fun at [form], but also a respect.” When Abrantes suggests that he’s “sort of a mashup” between Frederick Wiseman and David Lynch, Wilkins says, “I’ll take that.” His first feature, Public Hearing (2012), will screen at Anthology Film Archives next Friday, and at Screen Slate, Cosmo Bjorkenheim finds it “incredibly compelling.”
- The new restoration of No Fear, No Die (1990) screens at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through the weekend, and for the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, this is Claire Denis’s “first masterwork, and it set the tone for her best work to come.” For Screen Slate, Steve Macfarlane talks with Denis and one of the film’s stars, Isaach de Bankolé, about shifting the setting from Berlin to Paris, protecting roosters from harm during cockfights, and drawing inspiration from Jean-Michel Basquiat. “There was no built-in audience for this film,” says Denis. “I was proud of it.” But the French “have their own lives, and they don’t want to notice the lives of, say, Black people who are living in France, if they don’t have to. More than racism or apartheid, it’s a kind of oblivion, an obliviousness about the world. But all of us knew, in our hearts, that the film had value. We were not desperate! We were happy to have made the film. It was precious to us.”
- “What if The Silence of the Lambs happened at a Taylor Swift concert?” That’s M. Night Shyamalan’s pitch for Trap, which opens today. For Nick Newman at the Film Stage, it’s “arguably the purest piece of entertainment he’s ever made.” The Atlantic’s David Sims traces a wild career trajectory: Massive success at the age of twenty-nine with The Sixth Sense (1999), followed by an infamous slump (The Last Airbender) and then a revival with lean and mean, occasionally OTT but always self-aware thrillers (Split, Old). “I think I have a thing where I want everyone to like me and I want to please everybody,” Shyamalan tells Sims. “There’s that side of me, which maybe isn’t a great side of me. And then the other side of me, which is: I’ll burn down the house for an idea, no problem, without blinking. Those two sides are always a little bit at war within me.”
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