NYFF: "Sibyl"

by Jason Adams

Living in a big city is a great incentive to get lost in other people's stories. Just walk outside and you can see people falling in love, people falling out of love -- I once saw a couple have an insanely over-the-top meltdown banshee screaming in the middle of Sixth Avenue in the pouring rain as taxi cabs honked to pass. It's a wonderful way to distract you from yourself -- turn on the public television right at the stoop or in the subway station. And it's why lots of writers move to cities -- all that inspiration smashing you in the elbow. 

I can only imagine then what kind of a double draw, a draw squared, it would turn out to be if you were openly invited right into those people's personal dramas. What if you were both a writer and a psychotherapist, desperately trying to keep your own demons at bay at the same time?

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NYFF: Aquarius team wows again with "Bacurau"

by Jason Adams

You think you know somebody. You think you've got it all figured out. You think you sit down to a movie at the New York Film Festival you're gonna see something respectable -- something serious and challenging. But hyper-violent revenge westerns? Those are for Toronto. 

Well Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles' film Bacurau already played Toronto, and now it is playing NYFF, and it somehow splits the difference -- it's somehow an ass-blistering revenge fable with exploding heads, while also being a deadly serious story of an indigenous community terrorized by big business interests. It is, quite simply, the sort of movie we'll look back on from the future -- assuming there is a future -- and say, "Yup, that got it just right..."

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NYFF: Albert Serra's idea of "Liberté"

by Jason Adams

What better way to make a movie about sadomasochism than to inflict that relationship on the viewer? That seems to have been the grain of an idea that ignited Albert Serra to make Liberté, at least -- a fascinating nightmare slog that actively pokes you in the eye while also lulling you to sleep. I say all this with a sort of admiration! Perhaps I was brainwashed a bit by the time it was through but I certainly haven't been able to stop thinking about Liberté since I fell under its awful spell days ago, and that's got to count for something.

Somewhere in a patchy nighttime forest in 18th Century France an assemblage of powder-puffs, mostly men but with a couple of corseted ladies who keep caged up in their litter boxes -- the proper word is really "palanquin" but "litter box" will totally make sense once you've seen/suffered the movie -- have gathered to cavort. And cavort they shall, in the slowest of motions...

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NYFF: The color-filled noir of "The Wild Goose Lake"

by Jason Adams

Police officers close in on and surround a perp, their light-up dance sneakers blinking blue with every step. Hotel rooms half orange half pink, a sleepless phantasmagoria. A panicked streak through a zoo in the middle of night, flashes of light illuminating a tiger, an elephant, a succession of wild animal eyes in extreme close-up, blinking back madness. The Wild Goose Lake, the latest film from Black Coal Thin Ice director Yi'nan Diao, turns the crowded alleys and markets of Wuhan, Central China, into some sort of neon fever dream -- a riot of crime and color and scooter rides straight to hell, bang bang.

Starting off like a variation on The Warriors we first meet our characters gathered for an underground syndicate meeting -- everybody's come together to divide up the city, block by block, street by street...

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Al Pacino May Meet Oscar Again

by Murtada Elfadl

Oscar may call an old favourite's name again this year. Al Pacino, an eight-time nominee, has not been recognized by his peers in the Academy since he won for Scent of a Woman (1992) more than a quarter century ago. However in Martin Scorsese The Irishman he finally gets a showcase part that will likely bring him back to the ceremony. 

In this story of American moral decay and gangland infiltration into all structures of American society, Pacino plays Jimmy Hoffa the controversial leader of the country’s strongest union, the Teamsters. The film tracks his involvement with the mafia particularly his friendship with hitman Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro). It’s not only a great part but a flashy and memorable one particularly in comparison with the quieter tones that his co-stars De Niro and Joe Pesci have to play...

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