New York Film Festival - Fourth Dispatch

The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho) - Wagner Moura gives an electric performance as a dissident in 1977 Brazil who finds precarious protection amongst a shelter for political refugees before attempting to flee the country. Those who fell for the Oscar-validated I'm Still Here (Walter Salles, 2024) should enjoy this adept thriller skewering the Brazilian military dictatorship of the era. But at 158 minutes, it overstays its welcome. And it betrays a straightforward conventionality unworthy of the dislocations of Filho's Bacurau (2019), one of the finest films of our rapidly aging century. 

Grade: B+ 

Duse (Pietro Marcello) - I first heard of the legendary actress and Sarah Bernhardt rival Eleonora Duse (1858-1924) from All About Eve in Bill's rant to Eve about what The Theatre means (although my preteen, pre-internet mind heard it as "Eleanor Adusa"). Then for forty years, I never gave her another thought until this most welcome biopic. Marcello picks up Duse's story in the last act of her life, past previous glories and desperate to find her way back to audiences scarred by WWI. She even breaks bread with Mussolini over a doomed plan to recreate Athens in Italy. It's the kind of narrative that would have worked well with the anachronisms Marcello sprinkled throughout Martin Eden (2019), another film about a fiery artistic temperament. Like The Secret Agent, unfortunately, there's a safe, Oscary feel to the project that makes one long for the lopsided structure of Martin Eden or the proto-art-film longueurs of the Italian diva film of the 1910s. That it all still works is testament to Valeria Bruni Tedeschi's blistering performance as Duse. Out of historical sync, in tears 90% of the time, Tedeschi's Duse exhausts herself trying to find a time and a place for her art. A full century after her death, she feels right at home in 2025. 

Grade: A-minus

New York Film Festival - Third Dispatch

Rose of Nevada (Mark Jenkin) - I'll be blunt. I admired Jenkin's Enys Men (2022) as a perplexing mood piece. But I opted for his latest feature solely because I thought it would allow me to be in the same room with the co-star of the film, George MacKay, the architecturally gorgeous actor who appeared in two of my favorite recent films, The End (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2024) and best-film-of-the-decade-candidate The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2023). Alas, the beauty was not in attendance. Still, I wasn't aware of his absence until after the screening so I received Jenkin's latest Cornwall puzzle with an open mind if not heart. 

McKay plays Nick, a fisherman from a present-day, rundown Cornish village who goes off with drifter Liam (Callum Turner, perhaps even more gorgeous but lacking the angularity that makes MacKay's face so delectable for filmic compositions) on the titular watercraft for a job. They return to find they are back in 1993 when the village was thriving and each subsequent run on the Rose of Nevada tosses them back and forth between the two eras. Jenkin provides narrative tension through the men's divergent reactions to the time jumps. While Nick is understandably baffled and searches for signs of his wife and family, Liam plays the sexual field and may be engaging in some conceptual incest back in the present. Jonathan Romney in Sight & Sound found it "a tale of the fantastic, but rooted in the bleak political realities of 2020s Britain." I found it suffered from the drawbacks of the subgenre - diverting while it plays but easily placed on the shelf with other puzzles and forgotten once it's over, despite its gorgeous 16mm photography and reportedly post-sync sound that make the film look like a lost 1970s folk-horror screamer.

Grade: B+

 

Sirāt (Óliver Laxe) - Since Laxe's latest shifts into shock mode about halfway through, it's best to keep this short. A father, Luis (Sergi López), with his son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), descends upon a rave in a Moroccan desert in search of his daughter who has gone missing. A military unit breaks up the rave and lines up a caravan to be arrested. But along with two groups of revelers, Luis speeds away in his van. They're all off to another rave where Luis hopes he might find his daughter. After changing tires, bartering with locals for gas, and avoiding another military convoy, things take a turn for the even worse. 

Sirāt enjoyed a June release in Spain, doing robust box office figures for an art film. It's also divided audiences pretty starkly; check the array of takes on Letterboxd. I didn't know what to do with it once I stepped off the ride. Since the ensemble are all European, Laxe may be suggesting something about colonialism or locating pleasure zones in the midst of regional conflicts. But where Rose of Nevada is a puzzle, Sirāt is a roller coaster. Extremely gripping, even harrowing, it raises your blood pressure but to what end? Wrong answers only.

Grade: B+

New York Film Festival 2025 - Second Dispatch

Resurrection (Bi Gan) 

The marketing and wide release in China of Gan's previous feature, Long Day's Journey into Night (2018), hoodwinked the moviegoing masses into thinking it was a romantic comedy instead of a drifty art film. Box office figures plummeted after its New Year's Eve opening night and the hashtag "can't understand Long Day's Journey Into Night" started to trend. We'll have to wait to discover if Resurrection (the Chinese title is different and translates as Savage Age) will meet the same fate when it hits general release. I myself felt snookered by the NYFF blurb promising a film "unfolding over five chapters that feature a dazzling array of styles and genres." As with Long Day's Journey into Night and 2015's Kaili Blues, it dazzles, to be sure. Blessed with a hefty budget, a leisurely production schedule (began in 2023, a workprint barely made it to Cannes this May), and superstars Jackson Yee and Shu Qi, Gan indulges in a feckless extravagance. He takes on the entire history of cinema with Caligari and Nosferatu nods, time jumps, and a climax comprised of yet another of his characteristic long-takes, this one lasting 30 minutes. All of this takes place in some sort of time-space continuum in which, as we are told in periodic titles, dreams either no longer exist or are somehow rendered illegal. A band of rebels called Fantasmers still dream, though, including one Frankenstein monster type (Yee) equipped with a film projector in his torso during an early silent sequence. He then reappears in various guises throughout that array of styles and genres.

As you might suspect, none of the above adds up to much in narrative terms. It sustains on mood and visuals alone. I just wish I got the buffet promised. Most of the vignettes traffic in noirish crime and grit which we have a surfeit of on television and in cinema (and in criticism and in academia and...) so lovers of musicals, melodramas, pornography, and westerns are left to f(l)ap in the wind. I also wish I knew what Gan was trying to tell us about the History of Cinema assuming he had any clear viewpoint throughout the two years it took to bring the film to life. And I rue the forthcoming exegeses that will take the framing device too seriously and "explain" how each historical and generic register makes perfect narrative sense, as if that were the heroic goal of all cinema.

Grade: B

New York Film Festival 2025 - First Dispatch

I don't feel comfortable pronouncing on the 63rd New York Film Festival or what it said about the State of Cinema overall given that I saw only nine of the over 100 titles programmed. All I will attest to is my inability to catch a single masterpiece for the second year in a row, a function of time, money, and sticking to directors/subjects I like best. Perhaps next year I'll be reckless enough to choose something outside of my wheelhouse. Or else stick with experimental films, the jazz of cinema - always there, taken for granted, and capable of dazzling you with its risky changes when you deign to check in again. 

Starting with the most infuriating film, I experienced unwelcome déjà vu with one of Richard Linklater's two biopics screening at the festival - Blue Moon, about the Great American Songbook lyricist Lorenz Hart (Nouvelle Vague, the other, concerns Godard and the making of Breathless). Taking place almost entirely on March 31, 1943, the evening Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! opened, Blue Moon finds Hart (Ethan Hawke) leaving the show at intermission and hieing to Sardi's where he proceeds to get soused and rue the success of his former writing partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott). For the first half of the film, he holds court in the near-empty bar, swirling vapors of wit and sass around bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) and E. B. White (Patrick Kennedy) writing unobtrusively on the sidelines. Then a triumphant Rodgers and his entourage arrive and Hart puts on a pathetic display trying to rekindle the songwriting spark with Rodgers and introducing him to an ingenue with whom he is inexplicably obsessed, Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), an apparently real person who remains a nullity by film's end. 

Writer Robert Kaplow based his screenplay on letters Hart and Weiland wrote one another instead of the most recent biography, Gary Marmorstein's A Ship Without A Sail: The Life of Lorenz Hart (Simon & Schuster, 2012) which imparts a certain documentary value to the undertaking. We ought to embrace such deep dives into the relationships between women and bisexual men (or however we are to ascribe the morass made of sexual identity by the era). But no film is an island and Blue Moon joins De-Lovely (Irwin Winkler, 2004) and the disastrous Maestro (Bradley Cooper, 2023) as yet another nervous attempt to center the heterosexual relationships of queer composers (Cole Porter and Leonard Bernstein in the latter two instances). One need only peep the panicky poster art of each assuring Mr. and Mrs. Popcorn that no deviant sexuality will cross their screens today. Will we not get biopics of Sondheim (who shows up here at 13 years old in a cameo played by Cillian Sullivan), Ebb and Kander, or Ned Rorem because they never married women?

In partial compensation, the performances are uniformly sparkling, especially Hawke who should be a shoo-in for an Oscar nod. And Linklater ventilates his recreation of Sardi's, shot in Dublin, by letting the camera rummage through the bathroom, climb atop the staircase, sneak into the cloak room. The latter location, though, is the setting for a dreary tête-à-tête in which Weiland recounts a recent sexual exploit to Hart with nary a suggestion of how such spaces informed the creation of Hart anti-valentines like "It Never Entered My Mind, "Glad To Be Unhappy," and "Blue Moon" itself. You're better off watching the greatest film of the century instead. 

Grade: B-minus