The Year of the Wild Goose

by Jason Adams

The latest crime-thriller from director Yi'nan Diao of Black Coal Thin Ice fame is hitting the streets of New York running on March 6th when The Wild Goose Lake opens at Film Forum -- for the rest of you, here in the US anyway, it's supposed to have a national roll-out from there. The film's already played a slew of international fests (Team Experience voted it one of the best Unreleased Films of 2019 with our annual awards) -- it premiered at Cannes last spring and by fall it was playing the New York Film Festival, which is where I saw it and reviewed it, calling it...

(Hey that's me!) The story's a Noir standard, kind of Fritz Lang's M meets The Warriors...

Click to read more ...

Interview: Nadav Lapid on 'Synonyms' and who gets to tell which stories

by Murtada Elfadl

Using his own experiences as a blueprint Nadav Lapid (The Kindergarten Teacher) made a furious, kinetic and altogether astounding film about being disaffected and seeking a new life, ideals and country. In Synonyms (opening today in limited release) Tom Mercier plays Yoav, a young Israeli who flees Tel Aviv for Paris and tries to completely erase his former identity. The movie is not easy to describe, it’s better to dive in and enjoy the experience. It won numerous accolades around the world this year starting with the Golden Bear at the Berlinale. While in New York to present his film in the main slate of the New York Film Festival, we got the chance to talk to Lapid about his film, his powerful lead actor and who owns the rights to tell which stories. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity

Murtada Elfadl: Can you talk about the beginning of the film. The first 10, 15 minutes are hypnotic, confusing, and disorienting, throwing the audience into the story with no introduction.

NADAV LAPID: I felt that the movie should start with a vibration, with movement. In a way the biggest challenge of the filmmaking was to create this movie that doesn't have a clear narrative line. I didn't want the film to become a series of anecdotes. We had to have something attached to that feeling, that vibration. It's a movie that's based on compulsion, on an urge. You cannot imagine an introduction to such a movie...

Click to read more ...

NYFF Review: Marriage Story

by Murtada Elfadl

What happens to the love once a marriage ends? In his latest film Marriage Story, Noah Baumbach charts the dissolution of a marriage from the time it starts to falter to the breaking point when the couple in question Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) and Charlie (Adam Driver) are actively wishing death upon each other. The title is a clever play on divorce as we are supposed to find out what they once loved about each other by the end.

The film builds the memory of intimacy in throwaway moments....

Click to read more ...

NYFF: "The Booksellers"

by Jason Adams

Once upon a time in a land only as far away as blasted impossible time travel forces it to be there were blocks upon blocks of bookshops in New York City -- old dusty cavernous things, with stalactites and stalagmites of leather bound little readers piled up and down from the floors and ceilings. You'd need a miner's cap to traverse the places to dig up all of the glittering gold preciousness held within, but buried treasures abounded. Once upon a time, anyway.

D. W. Young's captivating new nerd-out of a documentary The Booksellers excavates that magical place, those treasured memories...

Click to read more ...

NYFF Review: Pain and Glory

by Murtada Elfadl

Salvador Mallo, the director and lead character in Pain and Glory, tells one of his actors that holding back tears in emotional scenes instead of crying makes actors better. Yet Pedro Almodóvar, who wrote and directed and based this film partially on his life, does not. He goes deep, he explores honestly and elicits a deeply emotional and cathartic reaction. 

In this thesis on his life and his work, he finds the generous space to include many of his collaborators in front and behind the camera. On screen we have Antonio Banderas as Mallo, Cecilia Roth, from All About My Mother (1999), appears as an actress from Mallo’s past who’s eager to work with him again. And most poignantly Peneope Cruz, his muse of many years and movies, plays a version of his mother...

Click to read more ...