NYFF Review: Chloe Zhao's "Nomadland"

by Murtada Elfadl

You know you are not watching just any old prestige drama when a film throws in a shot of its lead character - played by a 2-time Oscar winner - defecating a mere three minutes into its running time. Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland is a film concerned with the concrete realities of life. Things that might seem mundane or unmentionable but take up a big part of everyday life. How a woman carves a small place on earth to sleep, eat, work and yes defecate. 

Fern (Frances McDormand), having lost her work and home when the factory that employed her in a now-defunct company town closed, refurbishes her old van and sets out in the vastness of the American West to find seasonal work. She rests when she can, deals with the elements and makes tentative attempts to find a community among the older itinerant people she meets. They exchange DIY tips for survival, share stories and sometimes companionship. But mostly Fern is stubbornly on her own. She is grieving her husband, town and job. Combating her constant grief by constantly moving...

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NYFF Doc Corner: Frederick Wiseman's 'City Hall'

By Glenn Dunks

The idea of ‘seeing ourselves’ on screen relates most often to race and sexuality, which is fair enough. Rarely is it spoken about in terms of occupation. But one of the my most unexpected experiences this past week was watching Frederick Wiseman’s latest institutional observatory documentary City Hall and seeing my other non-film life as a public servant on screen for four and a half hours.

The world of stakeholder meetings and budget discussions, community functions and office dynamics is more often than not the world of comedy (Working Dog’s Utopia being the best, if you ask me). But here Wiseman captures the daily grind and ticking realities of what goes into making a city—in this case Boston—keep moving with steely realism and refinement...

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NYFF: Pedro & Tilda & "The Human Voice"

by Nathaniel R

Green. Black. And of course, glorious Red. These are just some of the bold colors worn by Tilda, hanging not just from her body in a true fashion parade, but spilling from her tight mouth. Pedro Almodóvar's first English language project, The Human Voice (2020), a swift 30 minute monodrama "freely" based on Jean Cocteau's play, makes perfectly expected use of Tilda's much-celebrated fashion iconicity. More crucially it doesn't forget her acting gift. The actress repays the auteur with primal colors of jealously, nihilism, and fury in her line readings...

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NYFF: Laura Dern's first leading role and a lost Blaxploitation treasure

Sean Donovan looks at two films from NYFF's "Revivals" section...

The major film festivals of the world, New York included, take as much responsibility for cinema’s past as its future. Alongside new hyped arthouse projects, festivals program curios from the past that may have fallen through the cracks or not received their due recognition in their day. In other instances, festivals re-deploy older films to the contemporary moment in an act of deliberate commentary, the film speaking to culture in a way that feels freshly vital for 2020 (that is certainly the case of one of the selections profiled here). Over the past weekend, New York Film Fest virtual cinema uploaded two of their revival selections, Joyce Chopra’s Sundance-winning drama Smooth Talk (1985) and a Blaxploitation cult film The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973). Both are canny, fascinating picks from the NYFF, and well worth the revisit in 2020...

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NYFF: "Malmkrog"

by Jason Adams

The urge to wander off into our own personal worlds has become, presently, understandable. Many of us have been literally forced into it in 2020, covering our faces and taping up our windows, our only human interaction through Zoom. How many of us have watched pixelated people blow out their birthday candles from their corner of the Brady Bunch squares on our laptop screens? But I mean more than physical isolation here -- I mean it feels as if in some ways our imaginations are having a renaissance; in the absence of open spaces and fresh air at the least our brains have been given a moment to breathe.  It's in some ways terrifying and in others liberating, but there seem to be ways of embracing this shitty moment that aren't shit in themselves.

Reality dictates that Cristi Puiu's new film Malmkrog, named after the region in Romania where it is supposed to be set, must have been filmed before right now. But it feels of right now, right this minute, at least in the way of its isolated white-windowed impenetrability...

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