Welcome to the 20th annual declaration of the Golden Age of Documentary Filmmaking. Or is it the 25th annual? The moniker has been invoked intermittently for roughly this last fifth of the history of film exhibition.
The dialectic between the two characters aptly captures the internal schisms of the 1970s western left, but von Trotta never reduces the women or their relationship to an intellectual exercise. This is a film of ideas with a wounded human heart.
For those of you who can’t get enough of his 1995 film Heat, widely and reasonably regarded as his masterpiece, well, now there’s Heat 2, a gritty, vivid, 468-page second helping that delivers the goods and also goes to surprising new places.
Go-motion itself was but a small part of the films it was deployed in, used to complement other techniques and props. It makes sense that such puppets would be deployed as a special effect in fantasy films that flirt with the macabre, go-motion becoming a sort of necromancy itself.
The neoliberal present demands a new mode of realism, adequate to those structures of control that are cloaked by economic and informational avenues utterly inaccessible to all but the highest echelons of technocratic power.
Sara Driver’s film feels more beholden to the work of Maya Deren and Jean Cocteau than the coming wave of American independent movies that would transform the decade.
The brilliance of Modern Romance lies in how Brooks, as the film’s co-writer, conflates the comedic and horrific implications of its romantic premise until they are indistinguishable from one another. The film is funny because it’s kind of disturbing, not despite that fact.
Is the act of sort-of-remaking, sort-of-updating the niche property Irma Vep an idiosyncratic riff on the IP regurgitation machine of today? Sure, but Assayas only ever seems half interested in Borgesian conceits. He is too earnest an artist.
Francine is holding on for dear life as her nuclear family falls into disarray with a cheating porno theater-owning husband, a fetishistic teenage son who gains local notoriety for stomping on feet, and a rebellious daughter with an unplanned pregnancy. Francine is unloved, ignored, and routinely humiliated.
It is a movie about making movies at the same time that it is a movie about how we consume them. It is a somber commentary on the ways black people try to grasp greased rungs on a ladder to temporary success while also an indictment of the ways people of color try to mold themselves into torturous shapes in order to fit in.
The Fox and the Hound belongs to what has been unofficially deemed the Dark Ages of the studio, those 18 years that commenced shortly after Disney’s death and proved, with some exceptions, generally less popular, either critically or financially.
Made at the height-to-date of the New York crisis of violence, it responds with a story steeped in simplistic moralism and frank bloodlust. It is black and white and red all over, like the front page of the New York Post, that eternal foot soldier in the culture war.
Part of its dark power inheres in its slippery, tentacular relation to its own genres and themes. Repeatedly, the film lunges at an idea or stakes out a tone, each offering plenty to chew on, but then pounces just as fiercely in some transverse direction.
The sweltering love affair at the center of Body Heat is one of both bodily and economic exchange. Each person, it turns out, wants something more from the other than meets the eye: not just a mistress but a loaded one; not just a boyfriend but a patsy.
Despite the extensive tampering of its producer, Orion Pictures, Wolfen should be considered one of the most remarkable and visually innovative Hollywood films to be released in 1981.