Fruit Chan

1. Made in Hong Kong (1975)
2. Durian Durian (2000)
3. The Longest Summer (1998)
4. The Midnight After (2014)
5. Little Cheung (1999)

1. Made in Hong Kong (1975)
2. Durian Durian (2000)
3. The Longest Summer (1998)
4. The Midnight After (2014)
5. Little Cheung (1999)

La chimera First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Alice Rohrwacher's cinema occupies a unique place in the festival landscape, part pleasingly familiar and part bracingly daring, especially in the context of her relatively meteoric rise. After her debut Corpo celeste played in Director's Fortnight 2011, her second film The Wonders won the Grand Prix at Cannes 2014, Happy as Lazzaro won general acclaim in 2018 at Cannes and stands as one of the most unexpected Netflix acquisitions ever, and her short film "Le pupille" from last year somehow even garnered her an Oscar nomination. This has all come as her style and concerns have remained consistent, a melding of a general Italian neorealist heritage with a disarmingly casual approach to magical realism, all caught on rough-hewn textured images as shot by Hélène Louvart. As Rohrwacher's body of work has grown, her films have increasingly taken on a mythic dimension, signaled sharply by the mid-film time jump of Happy as Lazzaro, and her newest feature, La chimera, moves several steps forward. Set sometime in the 1980s, it follows Arthur (Josh O'Connor), a moody Englishman who has just finished a prison sentence in central Italy as he returns to the rural town where two groups vie for his attention: the denizens of the decaying estate where the mother (Isabella Rossellini) of his lost love Beniamina holds court, and the members of his gang of tombaroli (tomb raiders). He is the focal point of this latter group, using a seemingly innate connection to the earth and ad hoc dowsing rods to sense the locations of Etruscan graves, whose underground passageways and chambers are as much a promise of profit and liberation to Arthur's brethren as they are an externalization of his inchoate desire to be reunited with his lover. La chimera is powered by such cycles of excavation and potential rebirth, during which Rohrwacher's approach constantly shifts, jumping between three shooting formats and corresponding aspect ratios — 1.66:1 super 16mm, the primary medium; 1.33:1 16mm, used for brief shots that may be flashbacks, may be dreams; and 1.85:1 35mm, used seemingly at random — and throwing in direct address and scenes of sped-up motion that resemble silent comedy. The effect is one of instability, where everything about Arthur's situation feels tenuous, most of all his mercurial nature and wavering feelings about his profession, exacerbated by a potential new love in the suggestively-named Italia (Carol Duarte). O'Connor anchors this all with a marvelously beleaguered demeanor, using his relatively towering stature and rumpled suits with a forcefulness entirely different from the sanguine lead in Happy as Lazzaro. The beauty of La chimera lies in its grace notes, its unexpected invocations and subterranean motifs. Though nearly all involved suffer a tangible, realistic downturn in their fortunes, with Rohrwacher's sister Alba providing a cameo as a multi-lingual antiques fence that stands in for all the wider economic and cultural forces chipping away at these hapless paisans, it is romance and myth that governs the day, in loaded images such as frescoes slowly oxidizing when the underground seal is broken, a swirling flock of birds seemingly flying at random, and a red thread that invokes the myth of Ariadne and the labyrinth. Arthur's quest, in the end, relies equally on the machinations of man and seemingly divine intervention, and Rohrwacher's film is expansive and wondrous enough to incorporate both with an overwhelming grace.

Perfect Days First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

When Wim Wenders's Perfect Days was announced to play in competition at this year's Cannes Film Festival, his first since 2008's totally forgotten Palermo Shooting, it established multiple, willfully contradictory narratives in a manner almost unheard of. Few filmmakers still active today have endured a fall from prominence as marked as Wenders has; while his documentary work has continued to enjoy a certain recognition in the past few decades, it can be conceivably argued that, reclamation drives for previously underrated works aside, the German director has not received widespread praise for one of his fiction works since his epochal Wings of Desire, all the way back in 1987. Thus, advance expectations ran along two likely outcomes: that this was the unexpected resurrection of a great poetic filmmaker making a late period triumph, or that this was a token inclusion of a mediocre film from a festival notorious for its loyalty to its aging favorite auteurs. The answer, as is typically the case, lies somewhere in the middle. Perfect Days — Wenders's first fiction feature set entirely in his beloved Japan, where he filmed the documentary Tokyo-Ga (1985) about Yasujiro Ozu and shot a significant section of Until the End of the World with Chishu Ryu himself — confines its focus solely to Hirayama (the always dependable and poised Koji Yakusho), a middle-aged man living in Tokyo who works as a public toilet cleaner, charting his existence over the course of what appears to be a few weeks. He is, above all, a taciturn man of solitary and routine pleasures: listening to classic rock cassette tapes while driving to work, drinking several tall glasses of shochu at a bar on his day off, taking photos with his Olympus film camera, reading a book before falling asleep each night, and so on. During the course of the film, these tendencies are both tested and bolstered alike by the people he encounters, including his mildly irritating younger coworker and his niece who stays with him for a spell after running away from home. All of these are delivered in decidedly unemphatic ways, which gets to both Perfect Days's greatest strength and limitation: it is no more and no less than a simple observation piece that portrays its central character's day-to-day life without diving much deeper than the surface. On the one hand, this avoids some of the narrative devices that even the most forthrightly quotidian films fall into: there is no grand crisis, no existential threat to Hirayama's way of life that might feel contrived; each supporting character's segment is neatly siloed into its own self-contained storyline; and while there are hints here and there about our man's past, there is blessedly no big reveal, only a touchingly oddball encounter that serves as a sort of subdued emotional climax. On the other, that leaves the viewer to contemplate Perfect Days's surfaces, for which mileage will certainly vary. To be blunt, the viewer must be able to appreciate at least a little unironically the comically obvious and frequent songs that Wenders chooses to play: this is a film where "House of the Rising Sun" is heard not just as the first cue, but during a bar scene where the owner sings it in Japanese while accompanied by acoustic guitar. Yes, Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" is played after an especially surprising and euphoric moment for Hirayama. As for the charges of Orientalism/exoticism that have been levied against this film, to my eyes Wenders takes his surroundings at face value, but the unadorned nature of much of the film renders it something of an odd Rorschach test, where something as simple as Hirayama's constant gazes upwards at nature might register as satisfaction, resignation, or even a simple-mindedness that could be read as condescending. Perfect Days, for its own part, is simple in ways that largely render it likable. While Wenders's editing style may be a bit too choppy to allow the more pleasingly procedural scenes of scrubbing and cleaning to settle, there is still a clipped efficiency that gradually accumulates in moments of tension and release, giving way to the gorgeous black-and-white superimposition interludes that stand in for the hero's impressionistic dreams; the film is shot in in vogue Academy ratio without feeling like too much of an affectation. Often, behavioral detail (Hirayama's penchant for taking his photos of a tree at lunch without looking through the viewfinder) and societal detail (the wildly varied designs of Tokyo's public toilets, including an all-glass unit that automatically tints when the door is locked) alike carry the day. The fact that the well-acted and wisely held long close-up in the final scene of Perfect Days is scored to a song that literally spells out everything that is happening on screen is, in keeping with this film's rhythms, entirely expected, and to be honest, at least a little cherished.

Yui Kiyohara First Draft

Complete first draft for Screen Slate.

The eponymous dwelling of Yui Kiyohara's feature debut, 2017's Our House, provides a useful synecdoche for the Japanese director's two films to date: an unassuming concrete exterior gives way via an opaque plastic sliding door to an interior full of tatami mats, creaking wooden beams, and shoji that serves as the site for tranquility, eeriness, mystery, and restoration all at the same time. Such contradictory sensations feel intrinsic to this small yet fascinating body of work, which is complemented by 2022's Remembering Every Night; both were shown during the Berlinale Forum, and both will be receiving a theatrical release courtesy of KimStim beginning today, with the 2-for-1 double feature pricing at Film at Lincoln Center offering a unique opportunity to delve into these works. Kiyohara's films are, first and foremost, centered around the structure of their narratives and the attendant influence on characters and setting. Running a slender 80 minutes, Our House interweaves the stories of two duos of women — a daughter and her mother and two women who meet by chance, one of whom is suffering from amnesia — who, in what appears to be a case of parallel realities, live in the same space. The 115-minute Remembering Every Night opts for both an expansion and a simplification of this concept: taking place in Tama New Town, a satellite city of Tokyo that ranks as the nation's largest housing project, the film follows three women from different generations over the course of a day as their paths glancingly intersect: an unemployed visitor approaching middle-age, a gas meter inspector trying to help out an elderly man, and a university student commemorating the anniversary of a childhood friend's death. Kiyohara's work thrives on such glancing connections, on carefully chosen parallels that match less in similarity of events than in an abiding spirit of curiosity and discovery. Accordingly, these take on different forms, with the divergences going some way in detailing the dexterity and adaptability of Kiyohara's style to her different narratives. On the one hand, Our House verges into the vaguely paranormal, as the parallel worlds often intersect with phantom sounds and objects. It is worth noting that it served as her graduation film at Tokyo University of the Arts, where she studied under Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and the steadiness of tone between realities and the overlapping climaxes of the film approach the thrilling calm of his work. Meanwhile, the delight of chance encounters in Remembering Every Night leads to a more overtly dynamic and unpredictable experience, where the initial hand-off moments between the three protagonists are triggered by the oldest woman's endearingly clumsy moments of free activity. Sudden flourishes and shifts of emphases rule the day, epitomized most beautifully in a montage of home movie birthday celebrations assembled by a tertiary character. It is here that the title comes to apply to this film that unfolds over a single day, expanding the focus to encompass an even greater swath of shared human experience in a way that thrums with emotional resonance. Remembering Every Night retracts after this, yet in a way that, like the final scene and perfectly timed cut-to-black of its predecessor, further pierces the already porous boundaries between storylines and the women that populate them. In the opening scene of Our House, a euphoric dance between young teenagers is interrupted by an unseen presence; in a closing scene of its successor, the visitor observes a youthful sparkler display, close enough to reach out but precluded by propriety and generation gaps to join in. This is the great generosity of Kiyohara's cinema: even if direct contact between narratives isn't possible, it is palpable and deeply felt all the same.

All-Time Favorites 9/12/23

Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (Lumière)
Fantômas (Feuillade)
Les Vampires (Feuillade)
Tih-Minh (Feuillade)
Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (Lang)
Greed (Stroheim)
The General (Keaton & Bruckman)
Napoléon (Gance)
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (Murnau)
The Docks of New York (Sternberg)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer)
Spione (Lang)
M (Lang)
Shanghai Express (Sternberg)
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Lang)
Ruggles of Red Gap (McCarey)
Rose Hobart (Cornell)
The Awful Truth (McCarey)
Only Angels Have Wings (Hawks)
The Rules of the Game (Renoir)
His Girl Friday (Hawks)
Citizen Kane (Welles)
The Magnificent Ambersons (Welles)
Meet Me in St. Louis (Minnelli)
The Big Sleep (Hawks)
Canyon Passage (Tourneur)
Notorious (Hitchcock)
Fort Apache (Ford)
Letter From an Unknown Woman (Ophuls)
Spring in a Small Town (Fei)
The Heiress (Wyler)
Late Spring (Ozu)
Diary of a Country Priest (Bresson)
Duck Amuck (Jones)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Hawks)
Tokyo Story (Ozu)
Rear Window (Hitchcock)
Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi)
Seven Samurai (Kurosawa A.)
A Star Is Born (Cukor)
The Night of the Hunter (Laughton)
A Man Escaped (Bresson)
Night and Fog (Resnais)
Pyaasa (Dutt)
Vertigo (Hitchcock)
The 400 Blows (Truffaut)
Imitation of Life (Sirk)
Rio Bravo (Hawks)
Breathless (Godard)
Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais)
La Jetée (Marker)
The Birds (Hitchcock)
High and Low (Kurosawa A.)
The Love Eterne (Li)
Muriel, or the Time of Return (Resnais)
Gertrud (Dreyer)
The Gospel According to Matthew (Pasolini)
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Demy)
Woman in the Dunes (Teshigahara)
Yearning (Naruse)
Pierrot le Fou (Godard)
All My Life (Baillie)
Au hasard Balthazar (Bresson)
The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo)
Persona (Bergman)
La Collectionneuse (Rohmer)
Dragon Inn (Hu)
PlayTime (Tati)
Wavelength (Snow)
Week-end (Godard)
The Young Girls of Rochefort (Demy)
Death by Hanging (Oshima)
L'Amour fou (Rivette)
Zorns Lemma (Frampton)
The Devils (Russell)
A New Leaf (May)
(nostalgia) (Frampton)
Out 1: Noli me tangere (Rivette)
A Touch of Zen (Hu)
Two English Girls (Truffaut)
Out 1: Spectre (Rivette)
The Mother and the Whore (Eustache)
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder)
Céline and Julie Go Boating (Rivette)
Femmes Femmes (Vecchiali)
Lancelot du Lac (Bresson)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper)
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Akerman)
India Song (Duras)
Moses and Aaron (Straub & Huillet)
Nashville (Altman)
News From Home (Akerman)
The Devil, Probably (Bresson)
Eraserhead (Lynch)
Days of Heaven (Malick)
Perceval le Gallois (Rohmer)
The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (Lau)
Dirty Ho (Lau)
Legend of the Mountain (Hu)
The Marriage of Maria Braun (Fassbinder)
Simone Barbès or Virtue (Treilhou)
The Aviator's Wife (Rohmer)
Tree of Knowledge (Malmros)
Blade Runner (Scott)
L'Argent (Bresson)
Sans soleil (Marker)
That Day, on the Beach (Yang)
Paris, Texas (Wenders)
Shanghai Blues (Tsui)
Stop Making Sense (Demme)
Wheels on Meals (Hung)
Taipei Story (Yang)
Blue Velvet (Lynch)
Bound for the Fields, the Mountains, and the Seacoast (Obayashi)
Manhunter (Mann)
Peking Opera Blues (Tsui)
Terrorizers (Yang)
My Neighbor Totoro (Miyazaki)
Beijing Watermelon (Obayashi)
A City of Sadness (Hou)
Do the Right Thing (S. Lee)
The Killer (Woo)
Pedicab Driver (Hung)
Close-Up (Kiarostami)
Days of Being Wild (Wong)
Trust (Hartley)
A Brighter Summer Day (Yang)
Once Upon a Time in China (Tsui)
Hard-Boiled (Woo)
The Rocking Horsemen (Obayashi)
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (Lynch)
Naked (Leigh)
Ashes of Time (Wong)
Chungking Express (Wong)
A Confucian Confusion (Yang)
La Cérémonie (Chabrol)
Heat (Mann)
Comrades: Almost a Love Story (Chan)
Mahjong (Yang)
Neon Genesis Evangelion: Take care of yourself. (Anno)
Cure (Kurosawa K.)
The End of Evangelion (Anno)
Happy Together (Wong)
The River (Tsai)
Flowers of Shanghai (Hou)
The Hole (Tsai)
Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick)
Outer Space (Tscherkassky)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (A. Lee)
In the Mood for Love (Wong)
Platform (Jia)
Yi Yi (Yang)
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (Spielberg)
Millennium Mambo (Hou)
Mulholland Dr. (Lynch)
Pulse (Kurosawa K.)
Spirited Away (Miyazaki)
Café Lumière (Hou)
Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai)
Los Angeles Plays Itself (Andersen)
Lost in Translation (Coppola)
PTU (To)
Before Sunset (Linklater)
Throw Down (To)
Tropical Malady (Apichatpong)
2046 (Wong)
L'Enfant (Dardenne)
Election 2 (To)
Inland Empire (Lynch)
Miami Vice (Mann)
Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong)
The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (Curtis)
Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony (Zhang)
Night and Day (Hong)
Sparrow (To)
Oxhide II (Liu)
Certified Copy (Kiarostami)
Meek's Cutoff (Reichardt)
Mysteries of Lisbon (Ruiz)
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong)
The Day He Arrives (Hong)
Don't Go Breaking My Heart (To)
The Tree of Life (Malick)
Like Someone in Love (Kiarostami)
Passion (De Palma)
Manakamana (Spray & Velez)
Stray Dogs (Tsai)
Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2 (To)
Goodbye to Language (Godard)
The Grand Budapest Hotel (W. Anderson)
Hill of Freedom (Hong)
Inherent Vice (P. T. Anderson)
Horse Money (Costa)
Jauja (Alonso)
Phoenix (Petzold)
The Assassin (Hou)
Blackhat (Mann)
Carol (Haynes)
Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong)
Mountains May Depart (Jia)
Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong)
Silence (Scorsese)
Yourself and Yours (Hong)
Twin Peaks: The Return (Lynch)
Asako I & II (Hamaguchi)
Grass (Hong)
La Flor (Llinás)
Long Day's Journey Into Night (Bi)
Transit (Petzold)
Martin Eden (Marcello)
Drive My Car (Hamaguchi)
Memoria (Apichatpong)
Pacifiction (Serra)
Walk Up (Hong)

Auteurs with multiple entries include: Feuillade (3), Lang (4), Sternberg, Dreyer, McCarey, Hawks (5), Welles, Hitchcock (4), Ozu, Bresson (6), Kurosawa A., Resnais (3), Truffaut, Godard (4), Marker, Demy, Rohmer (3), Hu (3), Rivette (4), Frampton, Fassbinder, Akerman, Lynch (6), Malick, Lau, Yang (7), Tsui (3), Hung, Obayashi (3), Mann (4), Miyazaki, Hou (5), Woo, Kiarostami (3), Wong (6), Anno, Kurosawa K., Tsai (4), Jia, To (6), Apichatpong (5), Hong (7), Petzold, Hamaguchi

New York Film Festival Spotlight

1st (2020/58th):
Hopper/Welles (Orson Welles)
The Monopoly of Violence (David Dufresne)
All In: The Fight for Democracy (Lisa Cortés & Liz Garbus)
On the Rocks (Sofia Coppola)
The Human Voice (Pedro Almodóvar)
David Byrne's American Utopia (Spike Lee)

2nd (2021/59th):
Belle (Hosoda Mamoru)
The Souvenir (Joanna Hogg)
Marx Can Wait (Marco Bellocchio)
The Lost Daughter (Maggie Gyllenhaal)
Red Rocket (Sean Baker)
The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun (Wes Anderson)
C'mon C'mon (Mike Mills)
Dune (Denis Villeneuve)
Jane by Charlotte (Charlotte Gainsbourg)

3rd (2022/60th):
Till (Chinonye Chukwu)
Exterior Night (Marco Bellocchio)
Bones and All (Luca Guadagnino)
A Cooler Climate (James Ivory & Giles Gardner)
The Kingdom: Exodus (Lars von Trier)
Is That Black Enough for You?!? (Elvis Mitchell)
The Super 8 Years (Annie Ernaux & David Ernaux-Briot)
"Sr." (Chris Smith)
Women Talking (Sarah Polley)
Solaris - 50th Anniversary Screening With Live Musical Accompaniment (Andrei Tarkovsky)
Personality Crisis: One Night Only (Martin Scorsese & David Tedeschi)
She Said (Maria Schrader)

4th (2023/61st):
The Pigeon Tunnel (Errol Morris)
Strange Way of Life (Pedro Almodóvar)
Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project (Joe Brewster & Michèle Stephenson)
Foe (Garth Davis)
Occupied City (Steve McQueen)
The Boy and the Heron (Miyazaki Hayao)
*Maestro (Bradley Cooper)
Hit Man (Richard Linklater)
Bleat (Yorgos Lanthimos)
The Taste of Things (Trần Anh Hùng)
Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros (Frederick Wiseman)
AGGRO DR1FT (Harmony Korine)%
Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection (David Cronenberg)%
The Sweet East (Sean Price Williams)
Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus (Sora Neo)
The Curse (Nathan Fielder & Benny Safdie)
The Killer (David Fincher)

5th (2024/62nd):
Rumours (Guy Maddin & Evan & Galen Johnson)
Apocalypse in the Tropics (Petra Costa)
Maria (Pablo Larraín)
Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard)
TWST/Things We Said Today (Andrei Ujică)
Elton John: Never Too Late (R.J. Cutler & David Furnish)
It's Not Me (Leos Carax)
Scénarios (Jean-Luc Godard)%
Exposé du film annonce du film “Scénario” (Jean-Luc Godard)%
Pavements (Alex Ross Perry)
Union (Brett Story & Stephen Maing)
The Friend (Scott McGehee & David Siegel)
Afternoons of Solitude (Albert Serra)
A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg)
*Queer (Luca Guadagnino)
I'm Still Here (Walter Salles)

6th (2025/63rd):

New York Shorts

• Doomed and Famous (Bingham Bryant)
• Nervous Energy (Eve Liu)
• February Omen (Mary Rose McClain)
• Carol & Joy (Nathan Silver)
• Turtle Sandwich (David Cardoza)

Spotlight Shorts

• Index (Radu Muntean)
• Arguments in Favor of Love (Gabriel Abrantes)
• Cairo Streets (Abdellah Taïa)
• Fragments for Venus (Alice Diop)

Anemone (Ronan Day-Lewis)
*Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (Scott Cooper)
Blue Moon (Richard Linklater)
Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater)
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk (Sepideh Farsi)
Mr. Scorsese (Rebecca Miller)
Pillion (Harry Lighton)
Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost (Ben Stiller)
A Private Life (Rebecca Zlotowski)
Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie)
Scarlet (Hosoda Mamoru)
The Perfect Neighbor (Geeta Gandbhir)
La grazia (Paolo Sorrentino)

7th (2026/64th):

Iron Boy (Louis Clichy)
*Godzilla Minus Zero (Yamazaki Takashi)
Making Marie Antoinette (Eleanor Coppola)
Bucking Fastard (Werner Herzog)
Joy of Joys (Jonathan Glazer)
You Can See Everything (Nathan Fielder & Lance Oppenheim)
Edward Said: Between Worlds (Maiken Baird)
Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall (Paul Thomas Anderson)
A Statement (Tom McCarthy)
Club Kid (Jordan Firstman)
One More Time (Cindy Kleine & André Gregory)

Spotlight Shorts

• South of Tehran (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
• Masao Adachi Takes a Passport Photo (Kamal Aljafari)
• A Stolen Movie (Camilo Restrepo)
• Torino Shadow (Jia Zhangke)
• Screening Room (Morgan Fisher)

Fjord (Cristian Mungiu)
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York (Noah Segan)
The Debut (Jesse Eisenberg)

New York Shorts

• The People's Beach (J. Wortham)
• ee (Heather Landsman)
• The House Call (Eliza Barry Callahan)
• A Woman's Place Is Everywhere (Fanny Texier)
• New York Never Let Me Down (Charlotte Wells)

Sixteen Moments of My Life (Albert Serra)

Sofia Coppola

1. Lost in Translation (2003)
2. Marie Antoinette (2006)
3. The Virgin Suicides (1999)
4. Priscilla (2023)
5. On the Rocks (2020)
6. The Bling Ring (2013)
7. The Beguiled (2017)

1. Lost in Translation (2003)
2. Marie Antoinette (2006)
3. The Virgin Suicides (1999)
4. Priscilla (2023)
5. On the Rocks (2020)
6. The Bling Ring (2013)
7. The Beguiled (2017)