Reverse Shot

In 1799, Étienne-Gaspard Robertson premiered the phantasmagoria, a moving magic lantern projection hidden behind a screen, to a crowded audience gathered at a Parisian convent. Though he tried to present himself as a scientist exposing the tricks of the trade (of both magicians and the Church) to foster superstitious belief, the wildly spectacular nature of his performance, with its ghoulishly materializing and receding figures, only confirmed his status as supernatural conjurer. Robertson’s entertainment was like all horror stories that begin in skepticism: thrill and fright trump our sense of knowing better. Time and again we see teenagers challenging each other…

The Milk of Sorrow begins with the sound of an old woman singing over a black screen. The melody is gentle, but her lyrics are brutal, a recollection of the violence she witnessed—and endured—during the internal conflict that broke out in Peru in the early Eighties. She sings about how she was raped, while pregnant with her daughter, then forced to eat the gunpowder-seasoned penis of her dead husband. Director Claudia Llosa (Madeinusa) holds the blackness for most of the song—well over a minute—before cutting to a close-up of the woman, the mother of the film’s protagonist, Fausta (Magaly Solier).…

Rumor has it that the film rights to the life story of Jacques Mesrine, France’s most notorious and popular tabloid criminal, were first offered to Jean-Luc Godard, shortly after the subject’s violent death in 1979. Godard supposedly didn’t want to make a film about Mesrine, but rather one about an actor who wanted to play Mesrine. In a typically Godardian flight of fancy he had envisaged Jean-Paul Belmondo sitting in a chair reading Mesrine’s autobiography out loud to the camera and . . . well, not much else. Belmondo, unsurprisingly, told him to forget it. After 243 minutes of film,…

The use of the word narrative to designate fictional films as opposed to documentary ones is problematic. Narrative will show up in footage taken by an unmanned surveillance camera or a satellite, not to mention when there are humans deciding what’s in the frame and for how long, and what ends up on the cutting-room floor. And the documentary films of Amir Bar-Lev are doubly occupied by narrative; as divergent as his subjects have been, his theme is always in some sense the stories that people create in order to civilize the wilderness of their own experience, the stories they…

International culture-clash movie narratives used to be about bridging gaps, language barriers, righting wrongs, learning, healing. How times have changed. Today, global discontent has bred a severe alteration in such portraiture, resulting in an endless flow of grim scenarios that are no less myopic for being harrowing and unresolved. The smaller our world has grown, the tighter our financial, social, and political concerns have become, the more distrustful the narratives. Two or more disparate civilizations coming together onscreen is now often the catalyst for distrust, melancholy, and often, finally outright disaster. As evidenced by films such as Babel and Mammoth,…

Actress Chiara Mastroianni and host Eric Hynes take a stroll through Central Park to talk about her breakthrough performances in Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale and Christophe Honoré's latest, Making Plans for Lena (opening this week), before touching on motherhood, divorce, and the difficulties of being a modern woman.

Watching Mao’s Last Dancer, Bruce Beresford’s adaptation of Chinese-Australian ballet star Li Cunxin’s memoir, you might find yourself forgetting that ballet is an art. We meet the young Cunxin as an unremarkable 11-year-old mountain villager in the late Seventies, plucked by the fates to join the prestigious Beijing Dance Academy and undergo years of grueling training to become a ballerino. In these early scenes, dance is introduced as an escape from a life of poverty and obscurity, not as a medium that might provide emotional release in an era of Maoist oppression. From then on, the film maintains a consistently…

German-Turkish director Fatih Akin’s penchant for over-peppering his plots with contrivance and forced convolution would seem to have found the perfect fit in the high-decibel comic confection Soul Kitchen. Appropriately broad (as opposed to his prior film, The Edge of Heaven, which could have been sketched with more subtlety to make its its we-are-connected narrative glibness at all persuasive), Akin’s new one, concerning a young man’s desperate attempts to keep his roadside restaurant open and thriving amidst many setbacks, is overstuffed, more than a little too pleased with itself, and only occasionally winning. As far as European comedies go, it’s…

Inspired by Peter Kerekes's fascinating documentary Cooking History (screened as part of "Eat This Film!" in July), acclaimed culinary writer and chef Betty Fussell shops the greenmarket and discusses the meaning of food while cooking up a massive rib-eye. Don't miss The Tree of Wooden Clogs this Wednesday at 7:00 p.m. at 92Y Tribeca.

The next screening in the summer series "Eat This Film!," presented by Reverse Shot and New York food magazine Edible Manhattan, takes place this Wednesday, August 11, at 92YTribeca. For this installment of "Eat This Film!," which looks at our relationship to food via the moving image with a unique selection of timely and timeless international features and documentaries, we present Ermanno Olmi's stunning 1978 Palme d'or winner The Tree of Wooden Clogs, with an introduction by celebrated chef Marco Canora (Hearth, Terroir). The show begins at 7 p.m. Click here for ticket info. And read Kristi Mitsuda's essay on…

Manoel de Oliveira’s Eccentricities of a Blonde Hair Girl, huggable at 64 minutes, occupies the filmmaker’s by-now familiar nether-Lisbon, in which lives are lived simultaneously in 1609, 1909, and 2009. Oliveira’s a filmmaker at which the adjective urbane could be lobbed equally as praise or slight depending on your tolerance for his scarily coherent (especially of late) body of work. And there aren’t too many surprises to be found within the scant boundaries of Eccentricities, except of course those inherent in any Oliveira film: the depth of investigation (narrative and philosophical), range of references, steely control over aesthetics, and, yes,…

Canadian writer-director Ruba Nadda’s Cairo Time, like her last feature, Sabah: A Love Story, superficially explores Arab and Western relations on a microcosmic scale, as played out in a romance between a man and woman gazing at one another from across the cultural divide. In this case they’re Tareq (Alexander Siddig) and Juliette (Patricia Clarkson); the former picks up the latter from the airport upon her arrival in Egypt after her husband, Mark (Tom McCamus), is waylaid in Gaza due to his work with the U.N., derailing a long-planned vacation together. For the first third of the film at least,…

So, yeah, Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right is fine.  The massive buzz left us suspicious: could the creator of Laurel Canyon possibly have churned out something worthy of so much hyperbole?  Well, no, but in this dolorous summer of movie tedium (Inception . . . zzzzz), it stands out.  Even if it has a distinctly uncinematic aesthetic (read: just past sitcom-level visual acuity), The Kids Are All Right features a nicely assembled screenplay that generously provides room for all its major characters to shine and be shitty by turns, which Cholodenko’s cast of skilled performers clearly relishes.  She…

Lebanon is the latest in the long line of films reliant on confined spaces and/or confined perspective gimmicks (The Lady in the Lake, Lifeboat, etc.). While on its very thin surface Samuel Maoz's feature debut takes Israel’s ill-considered 1982 invasion of Lebanon as its subject, the film is more Rear Window than Platoon, and gives new meaning to the phrase “theater of war”: Maoz evokes combat largely through first-person point of view, emphasizing battle as something to be processed through perception. Since it takes place almost entirely inside a tank, what we see of the mostly urban battlefields of Lebanon…

What would you do?!

Get Low is based on a true account of a 79-year-old Tennessee bachelor who, in the 1930s, publicly staged his own funeral. According to Sony Pictures Classics’ press package, the “classic American yarn” about Felix Bushaloo Breazeale’s funeral is “an American folktale passed down by storytellers for decades, spreading across distance and time to take on a larger-than-life legend.” I’m not familiar with this tale (or with the existence of any great oral tradition in the modern South), but a Google search affirms that Breazeale was profiled in several newspapers in 1938 and invited as a guest on Ripley’s Believe…

It isn’t surprising that filmmakers have largely avoided adapting Virginia Woolf’s novels. The ellipses and fragmentary perspectives that characterize masterworks like To the Lighthouse and The Waves might lend them a certain “cinematic” quality—at the level of narrative structure, they are suggestive of montage—but the books resolutely foreground interiority while eliding incident. Her plots are often banal or hopelessly obscure, but the thoughts and feelings of Woolf’s characters, conveyed in stream-of-consciousness prose, reflect and sometimes critique their social, political, cultural, and historical circumstances. Her books are journeys of the mind particularly unsuited to the very literal medium of narrative cinema,…

This August 6 will mark the 65th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima by the American Air Force in an effort to end the Second World War in one fell swoop. The bomb not only eviscerated Hiroshima—where as many as 200,000 people eventually died—but disturbingly symbolized man’s entrance into the atomic age, where he now possessed the ability to “become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” That quote comes from Manhattan Project director J. Robert Oppenheimer, referencing the Bhagavad Gita upon witnessing a test of the bomb in the New Mexico desert. A clip of his sobering…

When I call to mind images from the films of Robert Bresson, it is not an actor’s face or a definitive sequence that emerges from what feels like ancient memory, but rather a series of disconnected close-ups drawn at random from the filmmaker’s body of work. Hands, mostly, those vessels for depicting soulful inquiry (a heretic; a country priest) or iniquity (a pickpocket, a killer, a wicked chorister) that proliferate in his sublime vision of humanity exalted yet estranged from itself, reckoning with dual impulses, negotiating varied proportions of choice and chance. But there are other images, too: instances of…

Great artists are also, necessarily, predictable artists. Novelty is very rarely the stuff that canons are made of; “greatness,” whatever it may be, is most often accorded an artist on the basis of a cohesive body of work (even if it is still in formation) and an identifiable assortment of thematic and stylistic traits. This doesn’t mean that familiar artists can’t still surprise us, but that surprise is predicated upon—and past that initial disruption of expectations, swallowed back into—that same familiarity. On a certain level, what we search for in those art works and artists that matter to us is…