NYFF: Claire Denis and the "High Life"

Jason Adams here reporting from the New York Film Festival...

We're all dying. That's the grand rule of everything that we do all we can to distract ourselves from. It might seem like some of us are dying faster than others from the position we're standing in at any precise moment, but time is, as the saying goes, relative. We're all of us on track to stardust, circling the drain of a black hole out here, hair stiff on end.

Leave it to Claire Denis to dream-weave a perverse space opera all about that stuff, then. Who else, really? High Life on its gorgeous scuffed up Rothko painting of a surface has all sorts of distractions from that central mission statement - Horny convicts in outer space! Juliette Binoche's infinite ponytail! Something called a "Fuck Box!" - that a smaller-minded filmmaker would've gotten caught up on...

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NYFF: Olivia, Rachel, and Emma in "The Favourite"

Nathaniel reporting from the New York Film Festival

"Bunnies aren't just cute like everyone supposes," the vengeance demon Anya famously sang on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and you should know straightaway that she would absolutely recoil at The Favourite, which is filled with bunnies, even as she might well relate to the brutal practicalities of the social maneuvering between the servant Abigail (Emma Stone) and her cousin Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz) for the Queen's affections. Yet the two things, bunnies and favouritism, are inextricably linked.

Queen Anne's (Olivia Colman) chambers are filled with bunnies, seventeen to be precise, each named after one of her miscarried or stillborn babies. She would very much like her favourite Lady, whoever it is, to fawn on them...

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NYFF: 'Too Late To Die Young' and 'Ray & Liz'

by Murtada Elfadl

Childhood and adolescent memories are the basis for two films playing at this year’s New York Film Festival. Though they come from different parts of the world, both stories use a distinctive visual style to tell an intimate story of growing up. Dominga Sotomayor based Too Late To Die Young on her experiences growing up in a rural bohemian community of artists in Chile in 1990. English photographer and visual artist Richard Billingham’s Ray & Liz is a portrait of his childhood focusing on his very neglectful parents (yep the titular characters) in a council estate in London, around the same time (late 80s)...

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NYFF: Long Day's Journey Into Night

Jason Adams reporting from the New York Film Festival

Late in the film version of Six Degrees of Separation Stockard Channing's character, at her wit's end, says, "I will not turn him into an anecdote, it was an experience; how do we hold onto the experience?" That's how I feel about writing up my thoughts on Bi Gan's dream-adjacent Long Day's Journey Into Night. It was an experience. An out of body one, sorta. How do I turn that experience into words?

Luo (Huang Jute, whose handsome face we come to know from every angle) is haunted by what else, a lost woman (played by Lust Caution's Tang Wei, for a time anyway), and he wanders the damp earth and the the even damper underworld and everywhere damp in between trying to find her - trying to hold on to fractions of dreams and memories; who can tell which is which here? It's all fractured - time, space, sound...

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NYFF: Ash is Purest White

Murtada Elfadl reporting on the New York Film Festival which begins Friday

Have you seen Jia Zhangke’s previous film Mountains May Depart (2015)? Did you whoop with joy when his wife and collaborator Zhao Tao danced to the Pet Shop Boys’ Go West in the memorable opening sequence? Well you are in for another treat from this duo. Tao dances again, and to another delightful well known song that we won’t spoil here. More than that, Ash is Purest White is the showcase for her immense talent that we were hoping for...

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