AFI Fest: “Ray Gunn” misfires while “Queen at Sea” reigns supreme

by Brian Rector

Late in the festival season, AFI Fest often brings an opportunity for Los Angelinos to catch up on titles that received buzz earlier in the year while bringing a few new films to the forefront. For instance, Brad Bird’s new animated movie Ray Gunn had its west coast red carpet premiere on the final day of the festival. On the otheer hand, Lance Hammer's Queen at Sea followed from its Berlin Film Festival debut, where it won a cadre of Silver Bears, including for its director and the Best Supporting Acting trophy for two of its performers, Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall...

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Review: “Wildwood” is the stop-motion fantasy epic LAIKA has been working toward all along

by Cláudio Alves

The history of Laika is one of classic nepotism by way of Maecenas-like patronage to the arts. It’s the story of how Nike’s owner, Phil Knight, took the Will Vinton Studios from their namesake and presented it to his son, Travis, who was originally one of Vinton’s animators. Some see this as a coup, others as the way studios are always formed in good ol’ Tinsel Town. Not that Laika has its headquarters anywhere near Hollywood. Instead, they’re up in Oregon, in the Portland metropolitan area, pushing out some of the most mind-boggling works of stop-motion feature animation the world has seen for the best part of the last twenty years. There’s a lot of creative freedom and technical innovation when profit isn’t a chief concern for the studio head.

It started with Selick’s Coraline, an early magnum opus, and then came the terrific ParaNorman by Fell and Butler. Annable and Stacchi’s The Boxtrolls felt, in some ways, like a step back, but, looking back, it was more like the studio taking a deep breath before releasing their most ambitious project yet into the world. With Kubo and the Two Strings, Travis Knight became a feature director in his own right, delivering a Japanese folklore-inspired fantasy adventure whose ideas on storytelling are still some of the studio’s most complex conceptual gambits. Missing Link saw Butler return and a more modest play, because, once more, a greater epic was on the horizon, more than a decade in the making. In some ways, it has all led to this, to Wildwood…

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TIFF 51: Latin American Gems, Part III – The Everlasting Return

by Cláudio Alves

Last but not least, in this miniseries of Latin American highlights from the 51st Toronto International Film Festival, we have a quartet of films that ponder return, whether to a place or a time, perchance a cultural root or the depths of literary history.

You have Lisandro Alonso’s Double Freedom, premiered at Cannes to rave reviews and which, effectively, marks a sequel, quasi-remake of the director’s quarter-century-old debut. The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs considers the work of Sara Flores, a Peruvian painter from the Amazon, while Life of Jorge Luis Borges is another madcap proposition from El Pampero Cine, focusing on director Mariano Llinás’ investigation into the titular writer. Also, it’s five and a half hours long and the funniest film at TIFF 51. Finally, Where the River Begins follows three youths in contemporary Bogotá as they leave behind their lives of urban misery and return to the Indigenous riverside village of their past, their shared legacy, their dreams…

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NYFF 64: Beatrice Gibson's "At Night" is a dreamy exploration of womanhood

by Joanna Sodeman-Taylor

There’s nothing like writing about the premier selections of the New York Film Festival... at night. Speaking of, let’s talk about Beatrice Gibson’s debut feature At Night, a delicate, hypnotic city symphony that premiered to great reviews at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, where she won the Best Emerging Director Award, before being programmed into NYFF's Currents program. At Night stars Gibson as a filmmaker named B who’s scouting locations in Paris for an upcoming project. Being so far from her partner and her child has made her melancholic.

These explorations lead her to encountering former friend and artistic collaborator Didi (Diocuda Diaoune), a Black immigrant and single mother trying to make ends meet while living in social housing. Rather than dichotomizing their experiences, At Night frames their duet as part of a larger, porous pursuit for commonality among women, especially those who make up the city’s night life. The film’s attention sprawls to encompass six other figures of different backgrounds and occupations to be its stewards, artists and poets and sex workers and laborers...

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NYFF 64: “London” and “The Loneliest Man in Town” blur the line between fact, fiction and portraiture

by Cláudio Alves

When one’s engagement with cinema happens mostly through mainstream productions, it’s easy to fall into the false belief that narrative and documentary film are two strictly separated categories. However, almost since the medium's birth, the line between the two has been blurred, the barrier porous and permeable. One might go as far back as the Lumières’ artificial staging for their shorts, or perhaps relitigate the authenticity of Flaherty’s Nanook of the North for the millionth time since it hit theaters in 1922. Perchance we might reflect on the cinematic traditions of Portuguese post-revolution cinema, or the Iranian auteurs who kept pushing boundaries with their hybrid works in the 80s, 90s, and beyond. At the 64th New York Film Festival, many films fell between the binary of fact and fiction, with two doing so by appealing to the portrait as a cinematic model.

They’re both Austrian projects that vied for the Golden Berlin Bear earlier this year – Sebastian Brameshuber’s London and Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel’s The Loneliest Man in Town…

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