NYFF: Elisabeth Moss's Primal Scream in "Her Smell"

Jason Adams reporting on the New York Film Festival which kicks off Friday

On The Handmaid's Tale Elisabeth Moss is all internalized feminist rage - a sublimated sneer, her Offred says one thing ("Under His eye"), but her eyes, the curl of her mouth, (and also her voice-over) say quite another. But what of her smell? Oh no, Handmaids don't get to stink. They are clean and holy vessels, scrubbed raw of female afflictions. Rock Stars, on the other hand... the real world ain't Gilead (not quite yet anyway) and we're still gonna scream and stink and scream. And Alex Ross Perry's Her Smell screams. Primal screams. This is the rage we've been waiting for...

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NYFF: Olivier Assayas' "Non-Fiction"

Jason Adams reporting on the New York Film Festival which kicks off Friday night.

Calling a movie "Woody-Allen-ish" in 2018 is less of a double-edged sword than it is a single-edged one - there's not a lot of benefit; mostly just wounds. And yet Olivier Assayas' Non-Fiction kind of demands the comparison to Classic Woody - it's about a group of chatty literate urbanites having  literate urbane chats in luxurious apartments and outfits, all of them sleeping with each other while being obsessed with death and sex and books, order TBD. It's terribly witty in that very specific way that certain New Yorkers love, where they can turn to the person next to them and smile and nod, everybody content that hey, they got that one.

And listen, hey, I am one of those Certain New Yorkers myself, so I'm allowed to make fun...

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NYFF: A Family Tour

Murtada Elfadl reporting on the New York Film Festival

Early on in A Family Tour a reporter asks the lead character, a Chinese film director exiled in Hong Kong, why she makes political films. She answers that everything she makes is personal. Over the next two hours the film shows us exactly how the political is never separate from the personal.

The film is autobiographical, the director Ying Liang having lived in exile in Hong Kong since making When Night Falls (2012), a sharply critical look at the biased judicial system in China. He has switched the protagonist’s gender so we are following a female director (Gong Zhe) as she travels to a film festival in Taiwan with her husband and small child...

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NYFF: Christophe Honoré's "Sorry Angel"

Jason Adams reporting on the New York Film Festival

The first time they meet, after eyeing each other across the seats of a cinema, puppy-eyed 22-year-old Arthur (Vincent Lacoste) describes himself as a "reader" to the somewhat older, wiser Jacques (Pierre Deladonchamps).  Jacques, a writer, is amused by this perfect puzzle snap of self-descriptions. If only timing was as much on their side, his tired but smirking eyes seem to say. They might have made a beautiful movie together. (And hey, turns out they did.)

Some time later Jacques explains that there are four types of gay men. As he goes on to list them Arthur on the other end of the telephone hilariously grabs a notebook and a pen. As Jacques rattles off all of the big names proving his thesis (Rimbaud, Auden, Whitman oh my) Arthur scribbles away, a sponge sucking up all the wisdom that Jacques has to offer...

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More Fall Festival Happenings!

Chris here with more news for the fall festivals! We're counting down the days until Nathaniel and I are in Toronto, and TIFF just announced all of their Canadian titles to be seen at the festival. Most notorious among them is the delayed Xavier Dolan film The Death and Life of John F. Donovan, which will be a world premiere. Producers had previously noted that the film would be likely for the fall fests, but it's post-production woes made those comments a bit in flux. Regardless, we are very curious to see Dolan's first English language effort and his bursting cast that includes Jacob Tremblay, Natalie Portman, and Kit Harrington (but not Jessica Chastain, left to the cutting room floor).

Another noteworthy announcement is that the New York Film Festival has chosen its closing film: Julian Schnabel's Venice-bound Van Gogh biopic starring Willem Dafoe At Eternity's Gate. The film joins that fest's opening night The Favourite and centerpiece Roma, which will each play other festivals. It had been unclear in the past few months if the film would be released in time for the 20189 Oscar season but CBS films looks to open the film in November. Can we bank on Dafoe as one of our Best Actor sure things this year? And could Schnabel return after The Diving Bell and the Butterfly got so close to Oscar?