Turning Points
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The trailer has racked up nearly six million views and become an instant meme. Codirected by Nathan Fielder (The Rehearsal) and Lance Oppenheim, whose Primetime has premiered in Venice to mixed-to-positive reviews, You Can See Everything was the big surprise screening at Telluride last weekend and is now the latest addition to the lineup of this year’s New York Film Festival.
In 2022, Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors in her health-tech company Theranos, and one month before she began serving an eleven-month sentence in the summer of 2023, she gave Fielder, Oppenheim, and their small crew wide-open access to her home. “What begins as a fascinatingly intimate portrait of a deluded or disingenuous scammer reveals as something even wilder, more ambitious, and less predictable, until we’re left to ponder what value a personal truth has at all,” writes Angie Han in the Hollywood Reporter.
Around halfway into the three-hour running time of You Can See Everything, Holmes is off to prison, and “controlling partner Billy Evans takes center stage, along with the real star of the film, a celebrated actress that Fielder recruits to help him in his inquiry,” notes Glenn Whipp in the Los Angeles Times. Moderating the Q&A after the premiere at Telluride, Emma Stone, Fielder’s costar in The Curse, “called this section of the movie a ‘rom-com caper’ and she’s not far off.”
As Venice heads into its final weekend, Toronto has opened with Being Heumann, starring Ruth Madeley as disability-rights activist Judy Heumann and directed by Siân Heder, whose Coda (2021) won four top awards at Sundance and three Oscars. Heder lets Being Heumann “get shaggy, which appropriately captures the smoky, late-’70s vibe of these hippy-ish protesters,” writes Richard Lawson for the Guardian. “Heder’s ensemble, perhaps the largest cast of disabled actors this critic has ever seen, grooves on this energy, having poignant fun with the anarchy of it all. Eventually, though, things have to get more serious, because these are serious matters, and Heder’s film flattens into something far more generic.”
We’re in Toronto, too—not with the Criterion Mobile Closet this year but with our first brick-and-mortar store. You’ll find Cinema Cellar at 129 John Street, not far from TIFF Lightbox and the Scotiabank Theatre. Elsewhere, the Los Angeles Silent Film Festival is on through the weekend, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is presenting Alternative Visions through November 18. João César Monteiro, Poet-Provocateur is on at the Harvard Film Archive through October 30, and the Yale Film Archive is hosting Man of Vision: Andrzej Wajda Centenary Film Series through December 17.
Andrei Ujică, “one of contemporary cinema’s finest film essayists,” is being celebrated with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through Wednesday just as Meridian, a collection of Claudia Nedelcu Duca’s interviews with Ujică, is coming out from Sticking Place Books. There are also series on in New York dedicated to the work of the late Anja Breien, and in conjunction with the publication of Music Sets You Free, composer Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Sight and Sound is republishing its 1970 interview with Claude Chabrol as his films screen at BFI Southbank and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. ICA will also host the UK premiere of Robert Wilson and the CIVIL warS (1987) and screen two more films by Howard Brookner as well as Aaron Brookner’s 2016 tribute, Uncle Howard. And in Vienna, the Austrian Film Museum is presenting The Early Spring of Chinese Cinema 1922–1964 through October 22.
Before turning to this week’s highlights, let’s note that, with TCM, we’re copresenting a new season of The Plot Thickens, the podcast hosted by Ben Mankiewicz. Stanley Kubrick, an eleven-episode series, begins on September 24.
- “Iranian cinema in the second half of the twentieth century inevitably calls to mind poetry, stillness, contemplation, nature, and illumination,” writes Ali Farahmand in the new Brooklyn Rail. “From Sohrab Shahid Saless to Abbas Kiarostami, from Amir Naderi to Bahram Beyzaie, and across much of post-Revolutionary Iranian filmmaking, one encounters a common faith in omission and narrative economy—a faith that strips the image of immediate spectacle to create space for reflection.” But in the twenty-first century, films by such directors as Jafar Panahi, Asghar Farhadi, and Mohammad Rasoulof share “a common impulse: a movement away from metaphor and toward lived reality . . . In a world where the street, the prison, violence, and death continually intrude upon everyday life, can metaphor still remain the privileged path to truth, or must the poet inevitably become a witness?”
- Mark Asch has a terrific piece in the Baffler on films about researchers delving into archives. “Shot in large part in the Gothic environs of academic libraries,” writes Asch, Jack Auen and Kevin Walker’s Chronovisor “chases a nagging, marginal query into the dimmest parts of the stacks, where a narrative is reanimated for posterity, page by page.” The “satire of academia” in Ricky D’Ambrose’s Notes on an Appearance (2018) is “more acid,” while an “on-screen academic’s feeling of communion with the past, and commensurate anxiety over her obligation to it, is also a major component of a series of films made by the director Sofia Bohdanowicz and star Deragh Campbell,” including Veslemøy’s Song (2018) and MS Slavic 17 (2019).
- Taking Steven Shaviro’s new book Neptune Frost: Movies Minute by Minute as an inspiration and guide, Charles Tonderai Mudede writes in the new e-flux Journal about “the most important Afrofuturist work of this decade, poet Saul Williams and playwright Anisia Uzeyman’s 2021 film . . . What Neptune Frost—and Shaviro’s analysis—make clear is that for an interpretation of technological development to be meaningful, it must not be universalized but specific to capitalism. Advanced technologies do not come from the stars (Black Panther) nor from the distant past (Sun Ra), but from ‘blood, sweat, and tears’ in an economic system that came into existence four hundred years ago. If this fact is missed, then the future, and therefore science fiction, is also lost. And if the future is lost, then Afrofuturism as a movement is worthless. Our battles are in front of us, not behind us.”
- When Alan Jacobs reads James Agee, David Thomson, or Pauline Kael, it “doesn’t matter, it never matters, whether I agree with them.” Jacobs’s essay in the Hedgehog Review on the critics he returns to most often focuses primarily on Kael: “Twenty-five years after her death in 2001, and thirty-five after she retired from writing reviews, it is clear that Kael wasn’t a film critic at all. She didn’t write reviews, or even essays; rather, each of her ‘reviews’ was a chapter in her autobiography—an autobiography written over decades and built not on a narrative arc but rather a long series of occasions. For Kael, movies become the occasions for writing the story of one’s life.”
- At Defector, Vikram Murthi looks back on three summer hits, all of them tinged with horror and made by extraordinarily young men. Curry Barker’s Obsession attempts “to critique misogyny while playing up ‘crazy girlfriend’ clichés for shocks or laughs,” while Kane Parsons’s Backrooms “fares slightly better with regards to subtext, but its obliquely creepy vibes run headfirst into a trite pop-psychology framework and some insipidly unreal monsters. In sharp contrast,” the “allegorical surface” of Alexander Ullom’s It Ends, in which four recent graduates find themselves stuck on a seemingly endless road to nowhere, “allows for multiple universal and generation-specific interpretations.” Murthi notes that in a 2024 Filmmaker profile, Ullom remarked: “The promise of a future or nuclear family is dead, so enter the world and form your own moral system, and good luck.”
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