Wednesday, October 19, 2011

NYFF Review #6: SHAME


SHAME infuriated me. I can't blame this on the film's lead, Michael Fassbender, who delivers an undeniably physical performance as an NYC executive who's disinterested in anything that doesn't involve the stroking of his cock (and, in case you're interested, Fassbender has quite the member). I often blanched in fury at his blank stares, but I have to admit, Fassbender's quite good in this

NYFF Review #5: A DANGEROUS METHOD


There's a moment in David Cronenberg's A DANGEROUS METHOD in which Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (a transformed Viggo Mortensen) are on a steam ship approaching that longtime home of all things neurotic, New York City, where they will unveil their "talking cure," called psychoanalysis, at a prestigious doctor's conference. Freud puffs on his ubiquitously phallic cigar and,

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

NYFF Review #4: MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE


The writer/director of my favorite movie title of 2011, MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE, is named Sean Durkin, and he's a newfound wunderkind of disorientation. In his debut feature, he puts us right in the dizzied headspace of his film's title character, played with giggly, goggled, shell-shocked charisma by Elizabeth Olsen. From scene to scene, he makes it difficult to determine where we are in the

NYFF Review #3: WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN


Don't be fooled: Nicholas Ray's final directorial effort, 1976's WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN, is not really a Nicholas Ray film.

Yes, he's in it (playing himself), and yes, he spent too many minutes from his emeritus years trying to make sense of it in the editing room. And yet the film--largely shot and performed by some bombed-out film students of his at Syracuse's Binghamton University--is an

NYFF Review #2: 4:44: LAST DAY ON EARTH

Though the ominous title of Abel Ferrara's newest movie is partially self-evident, it's really a film about living fully in the present. Willem Dafoe and Shanyn Leigh play a May-December (or at least November) couple, ensconced in their Lower East Side NYC apartment, making copious love, meditating, being creative, watching TV, and talking to far away loved ones via Skype as they await the

New York Film Festival Review #1: PINA


Shot in a bright, vibrant 3D, Wim Wenders' tribute to the works of German choreographer Pina Bauch is suitably called PINA, and it's a real hoot. Wenders and Bauch closely collaborated on the piece during the years before her recent death, and it's not only the best 3D film out there, but also takes its place among the greatest dance films ever produced. It's only nominally a documentary, as