NewFest: "Cowboys"

Coverage from NewFest the 32nd Annual LGBTQ Film Festival

 

by Abe Friedtanzer

Films about young transgender children tend to focus on the responses of parents to the reality of what their children express to them. Teenagers can talk back and run away from home, but if they’re younger, it’s unlikely that they will be able to fully separate themselves from a situation, good or bad. A Kid Like Jake was one recent effort starring Claire Danes and Jim Parsons about parents who were mostly on the same page about accepting their four-year-old. Cowboys, which is screening as part of NewFest, finds its adults at odds when it comes to supporting their child, Joe…

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NYFF: The sad, strange, incomplete "French Exit"

by Nathaniel R

Frances Price, the soon to be impoverished widow at the center of French Exit alarms everyone around her and puts them on edge. She will just not cooperate. Neither will Michelle Pfeiffer, the actress playing her, for that matter. Rather than dance around it, let's just state the conundrum up front. When you're watching your favourite actor star in a potential comeback role based on a book you've grown deeply fond of and have already visualized as a movie in your head, the conflicts between expectations and reality and dreams can be impossible to mediate. And disconcerting, too. You've got to watch the movie for the movie but also work through your own external actress-related issues while doing so.

I obsess over Michelle Pfeiffer, okay?! There's no avoiding it and little point not foregrounding it in this review. Complete strangers know this about me...

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Middleburg Festival 2020 - Virtual This Weekend!

by Nathaniel R

Just a heads up that the Middleburg International Film Festival, that we cover each year right here, has gone mostly virtual this year. The festival is later this week (Thurs, Oct 15th - Sunday, Oct 18th). Despite the unfortunate circumstances of movies in this bizarre year, they've somehow gathered their usual crop of buzzy Oscar contenders and possible breakout indies. You can see the full list here -- any films in particular you'd like us to cover?  You may recall that last year we did a "Coffee and Contenders" Oscar panel with Clayton Davis and Jazz Tangcay (who both work for Variety now). We're repeating that again this year since it was a success last time. This year it will be on Zoom due to, well, you know... but we're still excited.

The panel is this coming Friday at 9:00 AM EST. It will be available for free if any of you reading would like to tune in (ignore the "not available in your country" notice. They are in the process of fixing that)

NYFF: the queer slow cinema of Tsai Ming-liang's "Days"

by Sean Donovan

Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang’s brand has reached a point where any objections to his style seem of limited use or value. At this point in his career, Tsai is going to do what Tsai is always wont to do- which is make films composed of far less shots overall than most filmmakers working today, some stretching as long as 10 minutes, studies in slow repetition and urbane melancholy, sometimes touching on queer themes but just grazing them (Tsai himself is gay). When a filmmaker’s brand is so immediately recognizable it’s sometimes met with impatience and boredom by audiences, as if wondering ‘when are they gonna just get over this already?’ ‘How many lengthy shots of people doing housework is too many?’ Matías Piñeiro’s latest entry in the New York Film Festival, Isabella, received notices of exactly this kind from many critics, wondering what the balance is between honing a brand vs. refusing to develop creatively (I reviewed the film here for TFE to a similarly lukewarm shrug). 

Yet with Tsai Ming-liang I find myself not caring whatsoever about any criteria of versatility or artistic variance in his work...

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NYFF: "Isabella"

by Sean Donovan

As part of their series of drive-in events, the New York Film Festival programmed Matías Piñeiro’s latest Shakespeare-influenced drama Isabella alongside Pedro Almodóvar and Tilda Swinton’s delicious queer treasure The Human Voice (previously unpacked by Nathaniel). In some ways this choice makes sense: both films relish in vivid expressions of color, the kind of experiences you would want to have in as close to a theatrical environment as we can get right now. But in terms of intensity and impact the films could not be more different, Human Voice’s sledgehammer playfulness is a misplaced introduction to Piñeiro’s foggy and ultimately disappointing drama.    

Isabella is named after the main character of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, one of the bard’s ‘problem plays’ positioned awkwardly between comedy and drama. Isabella displays no proclivities towards the comedic, but it may have internalized the problem play position of being stuck between choices and controlled by doubt...

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