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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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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