NYFF: Happy as Lazzaro

Jason Adams reporting from the New York Film Festival

The surprises that flow out of Alice Rohrwacher's Happy as Lazzaro start like a trickle - an idiosyncratic sound in the forest, a mysterious red light burning in the night sky - and flash to a flood by  the mid-point, washing away what we thought we knew of its retro-future strangenesses. The earth cracks like a shell, piece by piece, and reveals another odd shell underneath.

Lazarro tells the story of an isolated band of sharecroppers in rural Italy, whose Sisyphean work in the tobacco fields only seems to plow them further into debt day after day...

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NYFF: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Jason Adams reporting from the New York Film Festival

Anthology films always have a bit of an under-cooked quality - you like a chunk of meat here, a chunk of potato there, but the stew's uneven, the broth skinned over from sitting. Even the very best ones can feel haphazard - you can and should certainly argue that Pulp Fiction is an anthology film, albeit one that's po-mo'd up in glorious fashion, but some days you're just not in the mood for Honey Bunny, ya dig?  The Coens' six-part The Ballad of Buster Scruggs maintains that streak - highs, lows, and everything in between, slapped between two fraying book covers...

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Coming Very Soon: Oscar Submissions "Burning" and "Border"

NYFF/TIFF screenings from Nathaniel R

"My what lovely posters!" he said, as he struggled to decide how to review two pictures that are best seen cold, knowing as little as possible. "But people don't buy tickets / get excited about movies without knowing something," he reasoned with himself about reviewing both South Korea and Sweden's Oscar submissions which are opening in US theaters very soon.

"Okay, okay," the purist in him, responded. "I'll say a little something about each but only if I can limit my discussion to the posters! People absolutely shouldn't watch the trailers." "Deal" his practical self muttered rolling his eyes, having been through this existential crisis of movie blogging numerous times. "Proceed..."

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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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