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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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: "Once Upon a Time in Harlem," William Greaves threw a party like no other

by Cláudio Alves

Here at The Film Experience, we love to celebrate centennials, and yesterday marked a big one. On October 8th, 1926, William Greaves was born in Harlem, and would go on to become one of the most important figures in 20th-century American non-fiction filmmaking. More specifically, his legacy rests on documenting African-American life, spanning from avant-garde exercises like the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm duology to more conventional fare like his Ida B. Wells profile for the American Experience series. And though he died in 2014, Greaves’ cinema lives on in ways that defy convention. Through the efforts of his son, director David Greaves, and granddaughter, producer Liani Greaves, the great cineaste is gifting us a new film from beyond the grave. 

Indeed, he is inviting you, the viewer, to a most exclusive cocktail party at the home of the one and only Duke Ellington. It’ll be a gathering of artists and intellectuals, the living luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance of the 20s and 30s. Or it was, for this happened already, in August 1972, when said party took place and the director recorded it all. From that wealth of footage comes Once Upon a Time in Harlem, left unfinished for half a century before it was completed and premiered at Sundance earlier this year. Neon bought the rights then and will release it theatrically next week, on October 16. In the meantime, this ghostly party from a bygone era, remembering an even older day, has been doing the festival circuit, spellbinding audiences wherever it goes, including TIFF and the NYFF…

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NYFF 64: "My Undesirable Friends: Part II - Exile" is as vivid as its predecessor

by Joanna Sodeman-Taylor

Forget spectacle, forget box office, forget IP and star power. Digger? I hardly know her! The biggest, most epic movie of the year is Julia Loktev’s six-hour documentary My Undesirable Friends: Part II - Exile, a continuation of last year’s Part I, subtitled Last Air in Moscow. That film followed roughly a dozen journalists, most of them women, at the independent reporting outfit known as TV Rain. These folks had already spent years operating as “undesirables” or “foreign agents” (ie, folks not mindlessly repeating government propaganda), and worked to undermine the dictums coming from the Kremlin despite constant surveillance and the imprisonment of several colleagues. Last Air in Moscow concluded with a huge chunk of TV Rain’s reporters fleeing Russia following the start of their invasion into Ukraine in February 2022.

The military operation led Putin’s government to immediately crack down on independent media, meaning these journalists had to get the fuck out of dodge or risk being jailed. Last Air in Moscow filmed across a span of several months in 2021-2022, and Exile takes up right where that film left off, seeing those same faces (and a few new ones) all the way to March 2026...

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NYFF 64: “Clarissa” is the best “Mrs. Dalloway” adaptation you’ll ever see

by Cláudio Alves

Between Wuthering Heights and The Odyssey, much has been said this year about the merits and demerits of film adaptations straying from their source material. Most of the time, I’m a defender of unfaithfulness in the transformation of a text between mediums. Indeed, some of the most interesting aspects of both those box office success stories are precisely the dialogues established between them and their literary origins, deviation as conversation. Moreover, the general public’s idea of fidelity to a text can be superficial, to say the least, and believe me, I’m trying to be diplomatic in my choice of words here. Some would say Arie and Chuko Esiri’s Clarissa is a wild re-imagining of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, unfaithful as can be in its transposition of a narrative set in post-WWI England to contemporary Nigeria.

They would be wrong. Not because the Esiri brothers don’t do what I’ve just described, but because, in this gesture, they have managed to capture the essence of Mrs. Dalloway in ways no other cineaste has to this day. Step aside, Gorris and Daldry, for there are new masters of putting Woolf on screen to join Sally Potter in her tiny pantheon. And it’s precisely through their changes to the classic novel that they manage to make Clarissa the best Mrs. Dalloway we’re likely to see in the annals of film history, yesteryear’s and those to come, purists be damned…

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