The Eclectic Continuum
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The deaths of Robert Duvall and Frederick Wiseman hit more than hard enough, but a few days later, we learned that weâd lost Tom Noonan as well. âIf often considered a cult figure for roles in Manhunter, Last Action Hero, RoboCop 2, and The Monster Squad (among sundry similar), Tom Noonan is perhaps most deserving of praise for his fiercely intelligent, emotionally lacerating, masterfully composed work as a writer-director,â wrote Nick Newman in the introduction to his 2021 interview for the Film Stage.
Noonanâs What Happened Was . . . (1994), the winner of a Grand Jury Prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance, âbegan its life as an off-Broadway show about a surreally disastrous first date between two longtime colleaguesâa seriocomic, fully neurotic cringe fest about modern metropolitan mating rituals set entirely in one location and pressurized in real time,â writes Adam Nayman. âThereâs a rare and real pleasure in movies that are ready equipped for shape-shifting, and What Happened Was . . . is as unpredictable from moment to moment as any American movie of its era.â
This weekâs highlights:
- Steven Soderbergh has selected one film from each of the past nine decades to present at the Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn each Wednesday through April 15. At Letterboxd, he talks to Isaac Feldberg about the impact of Do the Right Thing (1989) and the entirety of Spike Leeâs career on American cinema, âpeak Lubitsch,â and what he drew from Joseph Loseyâs The Servant (1963) when making sex, lies, and videotape (1989). For Brooklyn Magazine, Abe Beame asks Soderbergh about the nixed Star Wars movie he was going to make with Adam Driver and the status of his deep dive into the making of Steven Spielbergâs Jaws (1975). âWell, itâs done,â says Soderbergh, âand it was a book, but now itâs an app.â
- Film at Lincoln Center and TIFF Cinematheque are copresenting a series of films by the great documentarian Raymond Depardon, which opens today in New York and runs from February 28 through March 31 in Toronto. âBy contrast with the work of other documentary filmmakers of similarly observational ardor,â writes the New Yorkerâs Richard Brody, âDepardonâs method is rugged. Where Frederick Wisemanâs attention is analytical and the Maysles brothersâ attention is dramatic, Depardonâs is a tree trunkâblunt, rough, heavy, a raw thing to hew that keeps its rings of history even after shaping and trimming. His patience as a documentarian is that of the longue durĂ©eâof a childhood spent under the fourteenth-century gates of his parentsâ property. He keeps the camera in place long enough that it seems to grow roots and draw strength from the earth. The beauty of his images, amid unnatural constraints, isnât a matter of style but of natural force.â
- In his latest piece for the New Left Review, Leo Robson takes Richard Linklaterâs âshrewd and absorbingâ Nouvelle Vague (2025), which focuses squarely on the making of Jean-Luc Godardâs Breathless (1960), as a springboard from which to delve into the critical back-and-forth going on at the time in the offices of Cahiers du cinĂ©ma. By 1958, Godard was expressing âa newfound preference for openness over control, forâas if conceding defeat to the Bazinian aestheticâRossellini and Welles over Hitchcock and Lang. He took every opportunity to praise the ethnologist-filmmaker Jean Rouch, whose docudrama about Nigerian immigrants in the Ivory Coast, Moi, un noir (1958), he called âthe great French film since the Liberation.â This wasnât a recantation but a broadening. If Godard initially combatted Bazinâs essentialism with a version of his ownâcinema isnât all about realism, itâs about constructionânow he was arguing that all techniques existed on a continuum.â
- A program currently touring the UK well into the summer, The Consummate Professional: John Schlesinger at 100, naturally includes Billy Liar (1963), Darling (1965), and Midnight Cowboy (1969). âThe films are familiar but the name doesnât ring a bell for people,â Claire Nicolas, one of the producers of the season, tells Ryan Gilbey in the Guardian. âEclecticism may be partly to blame,â suggests Gilbey. âA director whose rĂ©sumĂ© includes a scabrous study of Hollywood decadence and immorality (The Day of the Locust), a gentle wartime love story (Yanks), and a vulgar big-budget comedy featuring car crashes and a waterskiing elephant (Honky Tonk Freeway) will always be a challenge to pigeonhole or commodify. âI think he contained a few too many multitudes,â says Nicolasâs co-curator, Marc David Jacobs. âLuca Guadagnino is a great modern parallel. Heâs another director who makes very different films, some of which click and some donât. And without Sunday Bloody Sunday, you wouldnât have a film like Challengers.ââ
- Letâs wrap with pointers to two short films that have just come online. Mona Fastvold (The Testament of Ann Lee) has directed Discipline for Miu Miu Womenâs Tales, and she talks to Nolan Kelly (Mastermind) and Daisy Woodward (AnOther) about her work on it with Amanda Seyfried, composer Daniel Blumberg, and choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall. And Ricky DâAmbroseâs The Sky Is Clear and Blue Today (2019) features Caroline Luft, A. S. Hamrah, and Glenn Kenny in a fragmented narrative that draws wry comedy from the aftermath of 9/11. âCovering items as disparate but interconnected as the childrenâs book George W. Bush read aloud while the attack took place and an advertising photo taken at the exact same moment,â wrote Adrian Martin when The Sky Is Clear screened at the Viennale, âthe film gazes into the dizzy vertigo of historyâs simulacra.â
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