Podcast: Battle of the Sexes, Beach Rats, and mother!

Nathaniel, Nick, Joe and Chris try and catch up with movies the podcast hasn't covered

Index (42 minutes)
00:01 Battle of the Sexes
12:00 mother!, interpretations, Q & A culture
28:30 Michelle Pfeiffer and Darren Aronofsky
34:00 Beach Rats
39:15 silliness and sign-offs

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

"the sink's not braced yet!"

DOC NYC Announce Their 15 Oscar Potentials

by Glenn Dunks

Every year the mammoth New York based documentary film festival DOC NYC announces a program of films titled the “Short List”. These are films they describe as "[feeling] like worthy contenders for the Oscar short list based on festival accolades, reviews, box office”, culled from a longer list by means of “evaluating what titles appear to have momentum.”

The DOC NYC festival casts a very wide net for their selections with an annual line-up including films that have already screened in theatrical release or on television. Because of this, they’re able to claim to have played the last six winners of the Best Documentary Oscar. And in the four years since they began the Short List, the only Oscar nominee to not feature in the Short List program is Virunga. It’s an impressive statistic if not a somewhat deflating one knowing that this year’s nominees are likely somewhere to be found in this list of 15. But that's the Oscar prognastication game for you and we all love to play along so it's worth mentioning.

THE FINAL YEAR (Greg Barker)

There’s still about two months until the Academy release their own shortlist of 15 from the estimated 130 titles that will be submitted. But for now, let’s take a look at what DOC NYC are hedging their bets on...

Click to read more ...

NYFF: Faces Places

by Murtada

Agnes Varda, recently named one of 2017's Honorary Oscar recipients, retuns to cinemas very soon. Her latest documentary is Faces Places or Visages Villages - sounds more delicious in French, n'est pas? It's Varda's collaboration with visual artist JR to celebrate the power of images. For that it was the perfect confection to see first at NYFF. The two artists set out on a journey inside France, finding farmers, miners, dock workers and others to document and preserve in the places in which they reside and work. They don’t have a plan, they just go where luck takes them or as Varda puts it:

Chance has always been my best assistant.

Varda and JR operate their own separate cameras, but they were also recorded in their travels by multiple other cameras in both still and moving images. What we get is a delightful mix of the histories and stories of the people they meet, JR’s eccentricities (he never takes off his small rounded sunglasses), plus Varda’s grapple with her mortality (she’s 88 and has problems with her eyesight). A joy from start to finish. It’s worth the price of admission just for recreating the running in the Louvre scene from Godard’s Bande A Part (1964), with Varda’s age adding poignancy and exuberance.

Grade: B+

Faces Places screens at the New York Film Festival on October 1st and 2nd. It will be out in limited release on October 6th. On November 11th, she will be awarded the Honorary Oscar at the annual Governor's Awards in Los Angeles.