Kajillionaire: The Latest from Miranda July

By Abe Friedtanzer

I still remember when I convinced a few high school friends that the next movie for us to watch together should be Me and You and Everyone We Know. I was fully enthralled by the feature directorial debut of writer-director Miranda July, which explored unconventional romances and perspectives, and, to me, was the definition of experimental and arthouse filmmaking at the time. My friends were not quite as amused, and are still probably angry at me for making them watch it if they haven’t fully blocked it from their memories fifteen years later. 

July’s follow-up, The Future, was intriguing but ultimately disappointing. I was nonetheless very much on board to see July’s latest, released a full nine years after her second, when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this past January. For the first time, July doesn’t appear in her film, and it builds on the transition she made between her first two films to feature a more typical narrative. The concepts continue to be totally peculiar, but the way in which the story is presented is actually quite normal...

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NYFF: "Night of Kings"

Our coverage of the New York Film Festival -- you can buy virtual tickets to most of these films -- continues.

by Nathaniel R

The prison movie is its own specific subgenre, holding close to its own tropes, structural familiarity, and character types. Though we've never been imprisoned, we imagined these are culled from reality as much as imagined from collective nightmare. As a general rule, we long for escape from well worn genres, but in some cases it's useful shorthand. Such it is with Philippe LaCôte's Night of Kings, the buzzy Ivory Coast Oscar submission which we suspect might have been too confusing to resonate for Western audiences, were if not for these familiar, even universal, elements...

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NYFF Review: Chloe Zhao's "Nomadland"

by Murtada Elfadl

You know you are not watching just any old prestige drama when a film throws in a shot of its lead character - played by a 2-time Oscar winner - defecating a mere three minutes into its running time. Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland is a film concerned with the concrete realities of life. Things that might seem mundane or unmentionable but take up a big part of everyday life. How a woman carves a small place on earth to sleep, eat, work and yes defecate. 

Fern (Frances McDormand), having lost her work and home when the factory that employed her in a now-defunct company town closed, refurbishes her old van and sets out in the vastness of the American West to find seasonal work. She rests when she can, deals with the elements and makes tentative attempts to find a community among the older itinerant people she meets. They exchange DIY tips for survival, share stories and sometimes companionship. But mostly Fern is stubbornly on her own. She is grieving her husband, town and job. Combating her constant grief by constantly moving...

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NYFF: Laura Dern's first leading role and a lost Blaxploitation treasure

Sean Donovan looks at two films from NYFF's "Revivals" section...

The major film festivals of the world, New York included, take as much responsibility for cinema’s past as its future. Alongside new hyped arthouse projects, festivals program curios from the past that may have fallen through the cracks or not received their due recognition in their day. In other instances, festivals re-deploy older films to the contemporary moment in an act of deliberate commentary, the film speaking to culture in a way that feels freshly vital for 2020 (that is certainly the case of one of the selections profiled here). Over the past weekend, New York Film Fest virtual cinema uploaded two of their revival selections, Joyce Chopra’s Sundance-winning drama Smooth Talk (1985) and a Blaxploitation cult film The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973). Both are canny, fascinating picks from the NYFF, and well worth the revisit in 2020...

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NYFF: "Malmkrog"

by Jason Adams

The urge to wander off into our own personal worlds has become, presently, understandable. Many of us have been literally forced into it in 2020, covering our faces and taping up our windows, our only human interaction through Zoom. How many of us have watched pixelated people blow out their birthday candles from their corner of the Brady Bunch squares on our laptop screens? But I mean more than physical isolation here -- I mean it feels as if in some ways our imaginations are having a renaissance; in the absence of open spaces and fresh air at the least our brains have been given a moment to breathe.  It's in some ways terrifying and in others liberating, but there seem to be ways of embracing this shitty moment that aren't shit in themselves.

Reality dictates that Cristi Puiu's new film Malmkrog, named after the region in Romania where it is supposed to be set, must have been filmed before right now. But it feels of right now, right this minute, at least in the way of its isolated white-windowed impenetrability...

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