NYFF 63: Currents Program #4 - Model Behaviors

by Nick Taylor

FICTION CONTRACT, Carolyn Lazard

As always, the names for these NYFF shorts programs are creatively apt. Here, Model Behaviors encompasses practical applications of technology across very different fields. How do these machines recognize human beings, and how do they in turn shape us? Broad perceptions of reality, filtered through a digital intermediate, are taken to specific extremes as these filmmakers explore the unique applications of technology happening across fields of labor and care…

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NYFF 63: Pedro Pinho's "I Only Rest In the Storm" is a Portuguese must-watch

by Cláudio Alves

Today, in Portugal, the country celebrated 115 years since the monarchy fell and its first Republic came into being. Across the Atlantic, at the New York Film Festival, there was another celebration of sorts as Pedro Pinho's I Only Rest In the Storm had its North American premiere. This three-and-a-half-hour oddball drama cum political comedy is one of the best Portuguese films of the season, drunk with playfulness and an audacious spirit to the point of euphoria. At Cannes, Cleo Diára won the Best Actress prize from the Un Certain Regard section, a well-deserved honor for what feels like a star-making turn. At its best, her work suggests an anticolonial variation on the Old Hollywood screwball heroine, complete with constant outfit changes, a barnburner of a monologue, and a starring role in the cinematic year's most entrancing sex scene…

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NYFF 63: Rose Byrne sinks her teeth into Mary Bronstein's "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You"

by Cláudio Alves

No mother is ever good enough. Not according to her children, nor to extended family, friends, nosy neighbors, presumptuous strangers. Not in the collective imagination of society at large and, above all else, herself. It might not seem like it, considering all the dubious looks and insulting concerns thrown her way, but she is her own worst critic. Others try their best, but there will never be a harshest judge than mother. Hell, she's prosecutor, accused and accuser, key witness and vengeful jury all wrapped into one in a trial that might sound like a pity party but is closer to a circus of fire and fury and self-loathing. 

Just ask Linda, the ever-aggrieved lead of Mary Bronstein's If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, played by Rose Byrne as a woman under the influence and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. And who can blame her for being such a mess? There's a hole in her daughter's stomach and a hole in her ceiling…

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Review: A mesmerizing Marion Cotillard reigns over Lucile Hadžihalilovic's "The Ice Tower"

by Cláudio Alves

The Ice Tower starts in the fashion of a trance-like fairytale, pulling you in through visions of refracted light, a snow globe landscape deconstructed by optical illusion. In the background, music twinkles, practically glistens as if singing the song one imagines a bauble would if it had a voice. And speaking of voices, a mellifluous woman sounds off, narrating and enchanting, beckoning closer in tones that feel like freshly fallen snow on a flushed cheek. It's Marion Cotillard, yet unseen but already magnetic as the Snow Queen and the actress who breathes life into her, a double role in a backstage melodrama with a Freudian spin.

Lucile Hadžihalilovic, one of contemporary cinema's most underrated masters, reunites with Cotillard, 21 years after Innocence, for a film that's both a free adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's classic story and its echo...

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NYFF 63: "Dry Leaf" is the dawn of the low-res epic poem

by Cláudio Alves

Alexandre Koberidze shot the most beautiful film of the year on a 2008 Sony Ericsson. That may sound like a hopelessly provocative hot take, the sort of dishonest hyperbole one flourishes in hopes of garnering attention, gasps of shock, mayhap the reputation of an iconoclast walking to the beat of their own drum. And yet, I come to you with utmost sincerity to say that Dry Leaf is beautiful indeed, the sort of film whose splendor makes me reconsider how I approach the art form itself and my own pre-conceived notions of what constitutes a valuable cinematic image. At a time when 4K restorations are all the rage, and large formats are back in style to the point of fetishistic fervor, the Georgian director best known for What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? has gone in the opposite direction and created a three-hour 240p masterpiece…

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