Tribeca: Trine Dyrholm makes a great "Nico 1988"

by Jason Adams

Although I might have been hallucinating by the time, given the sheer length and purposeful boredom of the experience, I'm pretty sure there's a portion of Andy Warhol's four-hour double-projector experimental film Chelsea Girls where the Velvet Underground singer Nico just sits and cuts her bangs for twenty straight minutes on camera. It felt like twenty straight minutes, anyway. And that was my introduction to her. Catherine Deneuve heroin chic - too cool for anybody, herself included.

That's the baggage one drags into a bio-pic about the singer, and that's what Susanna Nicchiarelli's film called Nico, 1988 insists on clipping away like those bangs. It's right there in the title - this is 1988, twenty-two years after Underground, after Andy, and this is a fully fifty-year-old woman with dark brown hair and a debilitating drug habit who does not give a shit...

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Venice Lineup 2017: mother!, Bardem & Cruz, and more...

Fall Film Festival season is rapidly approaching. TIFF let us know their "special presentations" with many more announcements to come and now Venice (which actually starts sooner at the tail end of August) has announced its whole lineup. The films, including out of competition reunions of two iconic screen couples (Javier Bardem & Penélope Cruz / Jane Fonda & Robert Redford), are after the jump...

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Thomas Vinterberg returns with "The Commune"

This review originally ran in September 2016 from the Toronto International Film Festival. With the film finally in theaters in select cities starting today (and available to rent on Amazon), we didn't want you to miss it...

Thomas Vinterberg first came to fame with the Dogme 95 masterpiece The Celebration (1998) which was an international success reaping Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for Foreign Film. Oscar famously snubbed it during their long stretch of controversial years in the 90s and 00s where they regularly ignored major critical darlings eventually prompting reforms to the selection process in the late Aughts. Vinterberg was eventually nominated with another international success The Hunt (2012) and after his English language sleeper success Far From the Madding Crowd (2015) it's safe to say he's on quite a roll currently. 

For years people had suggested to Vinterberg that he make a film about commune life since he had grown up in one as a child in the 70s...

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