#so beyond proud for his cannes film festival premiere

[chaoticneutraltor]

[weekendwarriorblog]

WHAT TO WATCH THIS WEEKEND May 10, 2019  - POKEMON: DETECTIVE PIKACHU, THE HUSTLE, TOLKIEN and More

It’s Mother’s Day weekend and while Avengers: Endgame seems to holding strong, we get four new movies in wide release, two of which I’ve seen, both of which are pretty decent. Unfortunately, due to illness, I’m running a bit late on this column, but I’ll try not to cut too many corners.

The big movie this weekend is POKÉMON: DETECTIVE PIKACHU (Warner Bros.), starring Ryan Reynolds as the voice of Pikachu and Justice Smith from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, plus the likes of Bill Nighy and Ken Watanabe, the latter who seems to be Legendary Pictures’ go-to Japanese actor. (He’ll be appearing in Godzilla: King of the Monsters later this month.) I’m hoping to still get around to reviewing the movie, but I will say that I generally enjoyed it, even if my connection to the material was the old TV cartoon rather than any of the games. (Look for that review before Friday, if I’m able to get my ass gear. In the meantime, here’s my interview with director Rob Letterman.)

I’ve been interested in the Anne Hathaway-Rebel Wilson comedy THE HUSTLE (U.A. Releasing) since it was called “Nasty Women” and was a straight-up remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, but I just haven’t had time to catch the one press screening, so it looks like I’ll have to catch this sometime down the road.

And then there’s POMS (STXfilms), a new Diane Keaton comedy featuring an ensemble of actresses in their prime, including Pam Grier and Jacki Weaver. While this doesn’t look like my kind of movie, I totally would have gone to see it if I could, but I’m less apt to see it than The Hustle.

The other movie opening Friday which I’ve seen and enjoyed is TOLKIEN (Fox Searchlight), directed by Dome Karukoski (Tom of Finland) and starring Nicholas Hoult as J.R.R. Tolkien and Lily Collins as his wife Edith Bratt. I’m hoping this finds an audience, even though it’s obviously competing with much stronger and more high-profile films.

Mini-Review: I began to watch this movie with some trepidation, because at least at first, it seemed to be a typical biopic, much like director Dome Karukoski’s previous film. At least as the film began, it cut between Nicholas Hoult’s Tolkien while on the frontlines during WWII and his early schooldays at King Edwards and then Oxford, where he formed a bond with three other students.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure I necessary needed to see a Dead Poet’s Society type way of getting the viewer to know more about the fantasy author, but that’s just a very small part of the film. Where the film really picks up is when Hoult and Collins take over their respective roles, because this is when the romance between Tolkien and Edith becomes a larger part of the story. It’s a bittersweet tale where Tolkien is forced to pick going to Oxford over continuing this romance by Colm Meany’s pries, who has become Tolkien’s guardian after his mother dies suddenly. The majority of the film bounces between Tolkien in the trenches and dealing with school issues, being a poverty-stricken orphan, but he finds an ally in Derek Jacobi’s headmaster.

I’m constantly impressed by what Hoult has been doing as an actor as he gets older, but Collins really brings more to their scenes together than any of the classmates or acting veterans.

Tolkien is a flawed film for sure, but the last half hour is so abundantly full of feels it’s easy to forgive the earlier problems, as Tolkien seeks out one of his school chums on the battlefield, a part of the movie where Karukoski is allowed to shine as a director. (Honestly, I think Steven Spielberg would be quite proud if he made this movie, and that’s saying something.)

I’m not sure this movie will be for everyone, even those who love Tolkien’s work as much as I do, but as a testament to what an amazing life he had before he started writing The Hobbit, it’s quite an amazing story with a worthy film to tell it.

Rating: 8.5/10

You can find out my thoughts on the weekend box office over at The Beat.

LIMITED RELEASES

There’s actually some decent movies opening this weekend, but the one that I want to give special attention to is John Chester’s doc THE BIGGEST LITTLE FARM (NEON), which is all about how he and his wife Molly left their California apartment living behind to try to develop a 200-acre sustainable farm outside L.A.  For months, my favorite doc of the year was NEON’s Apollo 11 about the 1969 moon launch, but this quickly took it over after I saw it, because it’s amazingly educational in terms of what it takes to make a farm work. It also looks absolutely fantastic, and seeing the trailer in IMAX in front of Apollo 11 made me really want to see it. If you want to see a great doc that hopefully will be in theaters over the summer, then definitely look for this one. I’m sure it will open in a few cities Friday but hopefully NEON will do another great job getting out there as they did with Apollo 11 and Three Identical Strangers last year. This movie is a MUST SEE.

Kenneth Branagh directs and plays William Shakespeare in his new historical movie ALL IS TRUE (Sony Pictures Classics) which also costars Dame Judi Dench and Ian McKellen. It follows Shakespeare on his return home to Stratford after the Globe Theater has burned down, as he tries to reconnect with his older wife (Dench) and his two estranged daughters. This is a fine film if you’re a fan of Shakespeare’s works and were interested in knowing more about his last days, because it features a great script by Ben Elton, and fine performances by Branagh and Kathryn Wilder as his younger daughter Judith, who gets caught up in controversy while trying to find a husband. It will open in New York and L.A. this weekend, and you should look out for my interview with Sir Kenneth over at The Beat in the next couple days.

Opening at the Metrograph this week is Abel Ferrara’s PASOLINI (Kino Lorber), an amazing look at the Italian filmmaker as played by Willem Dafoe. I’m not particularly familiar with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s work, although the Metrograph did a pretty extensive retrospective last year. Like with All is True above, the movie covers the last days in the filmmaker’s life, and it proved to me that Dafoe is doing some of the best work of his career these days and like a few others (Woody Harrelson and Ethan Hawke, for instance), you can put Dafoe in your movie, and it will immediately make it better. I haven’t seen much of Ferrara’s recent work but I feel it’s been a while he’s been at the height of his greatness with Bad Lieutenant and King of New York, so it’s nice to see him creating a new movie in that general vein.  Apparently, Ferrara’s movie premiered at Cannes many, many moons ago, but I think it was a smart move by Kino Lorber to save the movie and give it a release. By pure coincidence… or not… MOMA has been having a Ferrara retrospective (see below), so if you haven’t been able to get up there and see the movie, then you now have a chance with Ferrara and Dafoe doing QnAs after a few showings this weekend.

Matt Smith plays cult leader Charles Manson in CHARLIE SAYS (IFC Films), the new movie from American Psycho and The Notorious Bettie Page director Mary Harron along with her frequent collaborator, writer Guinevere Turner. As a huge fan of their previous moviesand with interest in the subject matter, I’m not sure why I never got around to watching the screener I’ve had for months, but much of it has to do with how generally busy I’ve been. Anyway, it will open in around 35 theaters and be on VOD this weekend if you have similar interest.

Opening at the Film Forum Wednesday is Almedea Carracedo and Robert Bahar ‘s doc THE SILENCE OF OTHERS (Argot PIctures). Executive Produced and presented by Pedro Almodovar, this is an amazing film about the horrendous crimes committed under the Franco regime in Spain by people who were able to get away scott-free when it was decided to create an Amnesty Pact of “Forgiving” after Franco’s death. The thing is that there are people who had been tortured or had loved ones killed who are hoping to get justice or just get their bodies back from mass graves, and this doc covers those amazing efforts. Frankly, I found this film to be far more interesting than Joshua Oppenheimer’s similar films about the crimes by the Indonesian government in The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence.

The Quad Cinema will have two new exclusive releases starting Friday, beginning with Christian Carion’s French thriller MY SON (Cohen Media), starring Guillaume Canet as a man whose son has been kidnapped, so he travels across France to where his ex-wife (Melanie Laurent) lives to try to solve the crime.

Also, the Quad will be showing Nicolas Brown’s doc The Serengeti Rules (Abramorama), which looks at five ecologists who broke new ground with scientific concepts we take for granted, and it looks at how the Serengeti might be the place to look for civilizaton’s sustainable future.

Amy Poehler makes her feature directorial debut with the comedy Wine Country (Netflix), which is getting the usual nominal theatrical release in a handful of theaters but mostly will be on the streaming network. It co-stars long-tie Poehler pals Maya Rudoloph, Tina Fey, Ana Gasteyer and Paula Pell, but I’m excited to see it for Maya Erskine from the Hulu show Pen15 and the upcoming rom-com Plus One, which was one of my favorite movies at Tribeca. (Don’t worry.. I’ve started writing something about that festival, too, so stay tuned!)

Opening in New York at the Cinema Village and in L.A. at Arena Cinelounge is Akash Sherman’s Clara (Screen Media), starring Patrick J. Adams as Isaac Bruno, an astronomer looking for life beyond Earth. This becomes more of a reality when he meets Troian Bellisario’s artist Clara, who shares his interest in space.

After years of problems and lawsuits, Farhad Safinia’s The Professor and the Madman (Vertical) is finally seeing the light of day, no thanks to a lawsuit put on it by star and producer Mel Gibson, who plays Professor James Murray, who begins compiling the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, receiving 10,000 entries from Dr. William Minor (Sean Penn), who is a patient at a asylum for the criminally insane. I have no idea how bad this movie must be to be buried as long as it has, but it has a great cast including Eddie Marsan, Natalie Dormer, Stephen Dillane, Jennifer Ehle and Ioan Gruffudd, so how bad can it really be? Good luck finding it in theaters but it will prbobably be on VOD as well.

This week’s major Bollywood release is Student of the Year 2 (FIP), directed by Punit Malhotra. As you might guess, it’s a sequel to the 2012 romantic comedy, this one involving a love triangle between a guy and two girls, and it will be released in about 175 theaters on Friday.

STREAMING AND CABLE

Amy Poehler’s directorial debut WINE COUNTRY will begin streaming Friday, though I haven’t seen it yet, so instead, I’ll recommend Dava Whisenant’s fantastic doc Bathtubs over Broadway, which will premiere on Netflix Thursday. I missed this movie last year but I got to catch-up when it screened at the Oxford Film Festival in February, and it’s fantastic. It follows Letterman writer Steve Young as he follows his passion to find rare records featuring industrial musical numbers presented at corporate events throughout the ‘50s and later to energize employees.

REPERTORY

METROGRAPH (NYC):

I’ve already mentioned how Playtime: Family Matineeshas become this cinematic comfort food that’s helped me relive my childhood, but this weekend, the shit gets real as they screen the 1977 action-adventure Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, featuring the stop-motion animation of the late Ray Harryhausen. I still remember first seeing The Golden Voyage of Sinbad at a drive-through in Framingham, Mass. when it first came out and I loved it so much I picked up the novelization. I wonder if I still have that somewhere. (I’m pretty sure I saw this sequel as well.) Late Nites at Metrographwill screen Lukas Moodysson’s 2002 film Lilya 4-Ever, as well as the not old enough to be repertory film Climaxby Gaspar Noe. (Lots of cool movies coming up in this series, as well.) Another series starting Friday is the first-ever New York retrospective of Japanese filmmaker Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, whose new movie Asako I & II will have its theatrical premiere at the Metrograph starting next week. I’m not too familiar with Hamaguchi’s work – though I’ve seen Asakoand generally liked it -- but I don’t think I’ll have the time to see his 5-hour long 2015 family drama Happy Hourany time soon. The series features seven of his movies, almost all of them shorter than Happy Hour. (2012’s Intimacies, showing a week from Thursday, is four hours long.)

THE NEW BEVERLY (L.A.):

After showing the Judy Garland version of A Star is Born  (1954) today at 2pm, the New Bev has double features of Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends (1978) and It’s My Turn (1980), the latter starring Jill Clayburgh and Michael Douglas, on Weds and Thurs. Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) and Lizzie Borden’s 1983 Born in Flames will screen on Friday and Saturday and then the 1933 film Christopher Strong (starring Katharine Hepburn) and Anybody’s Woman  (1930) will screen Sunday and Monday. The weekend’s KIDDEE MATINEE is the animated The Chipmunk Adventure  (1987) while the 1995 anthology Four Rooms (featuring one room by Tarantino) is the Friday midnight and Anna Biller’s 2016 film The Love Witch will screen midnight on Saturday. On top of that, there’s a special Cartoon Club on Saturday morning at 10AM and Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Love & Basketball  (2000) will screen Monday afternoon.

FILM FORUM (NYC):

It’s the last full weekend of Film Forum’s“Trilogies” series and on Thursday, they’re screening Whit Stillman’s (Is this a real title for the trilogy?) “Doomed. Bourgeois. In Love” trilogy Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona  (1994) and The Last Days of Disco (1998) with Stillman doing select intros and QnAs that day. Friday is Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “BRD” Trilogy, including The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), Lola  (1981)and Veronika Voss, and this weekend is a Carol Reed Post-War Noir Trilogy, including The Third Man  (1949). Saturday also sees a Michelangelo Antonioni trilogy including L’Avventura  (1960) and two other films from the Italian master. Sunday and Monday sees a very rare screening of Wim Wenders’ “Road Trilogy” including Kings of the Roadfrom 1976 and Alice in the Cities. Also, on Wednesday and Saturday is a repeat of a John Ford trilogy, including Rio Grande and Fort Apache, plus don’t forget the weekend’s family-friendly Film Forum Jr, which this weekend shows a bunch of cartoons from Bugs, Daffy and Friends. Obviously, there’s a lot going on at this venerable NYC arthouse and I hope to get to some of these now that Tribeca is over.

EGYPTIAN THEATRE (LA):

If you live in L.A., you can spend a good part of your weekend at Maltin Fest 2019, taking place at the Egyptian Theater, which includes a really incredible series of screenings and events with special guests. Friday is Nicole Holefcener’s Please Give with Holefcener and frequent collaborator Catherine Keener on hand, plus a screening of Sing Street! Alexander Payne and Laura Dern will be there Saturday afternoon to screen the filmmaker’s early work Citizen Ruth, plus lots more! I also want to pay special attention to them showing the late Jon Schnepp’s doc The Death of “Superman Lives” on Saturday night.

AERO  (LA):

Thursday is a Christopher Munch double feature of The Hours and Times (1991) and The Sleepy Time Gal (2001) with Munch and the great Jacqueline Biset in person! Then it goes right into Starring Europe: New Films from the EU 2019 i.e. new films, not repertory but still interesting.

IFC CENTER (NYC)

Waverly Midnights: Parental Guidance shows James Cameron’s Aliens (okay, am I crazy or do they show this every other month?), Weekend Classics: Love Mom and Dad  shows Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) and Late Night Favorites: Spring is the Coen Brothers’ Fargo (1996).

BAM CINEMATEK (NYC):

In the midst of Black 90s: A Turning Point in American Cinema, which will include Ice Cube’s Friday (on Friday, of course), as well as Set It Off, New Jack City, Belly, Straight Out of Brooklyn and Menace II Society over the weekend. Also, the late John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood will screen twice on Sunday as well as on Monday as part of the series.

MOMA (NYC):

Abel Ferrara: Unrated continues this week with repeats of 1998’s New Rose Hotel, 1993’s Body Snatchers and more recent films like 2017’s Piazza Vittorio and 2007’sGo Go Tales, and this series will continue next week. The current Modern Matiness will conclude with Pixar’s Up on Wednesday and Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) on Weds and Thurs, respectively.

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE (NYC):

Panorama Europe continues through the weekend but that’s all new stuff, not repertory.

LANDMARK THEATRES NUART (LA):

Friday’s midnight screening is Wes Craven’s Shocker (1989) with a QnA… but not with Craven.. unless they plan the creepiest movie tie-in possible!

That’s it for this week but next week, we get John Wick Chapter 3 and more!

[healthywaywealthyway-blog]

Berlin Filmfest celebrates women trailblazers

EUROPE’s first major film festival of the year, the Berlinale, kicks off Feb 7 making a statement against entertainment industry sexism by welcoming an unprecedented line-up of female directors.

The 11-day event prides itself on being the most politically engaged of the A-list cinema showcases, presenting 400 movies from around the world, most on hard-hitting topical themes including rising extremism and economic exploitation.

But its red carpet promises a steady stream of glamour too with Christian Bale, Diane Kruger, Tilda Swinton, Catherine Deneuve, Jonah Hill, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Casey Affleck and Juliette Binoche, this year’s jury president, all awaited in the frosty German capital.

Binoche, 54, will lead a six-member panel choosing the winner of the prestigious Golden and Silver Bear prizes, to be awarded at a gala ceremony on February 16.

Last year, with the #MeToo movement roiling the industry, the innovative docudrama “Touch Me Not” about sexual intimacy by Romania’s Adina Pintilie clinched top honours.

For the first time this year, seven out of the 17 contenders will be women – a more than 40-percent share that eclipses rivals such as Cannes and Venice, which have come under fire as chummy men’s clubs.

The top festivals have long faced pressure to boost their female representation as they serve as gatekeepers to international distribution, awards and box office cash.

Binoche welcomed the more diverse selection, saying it was long overdue and sent a message beyond the world of cinema.

“I think a lot of men don’t get how women for generations have had to take a backseat,“ she told this week’s Der Spiegel magazine.

“But (Berlinale chief) Dieter Kosslick assured me that he made his choices because they’re good films, not just because women directed them.”

Denmark’s Lone Scherfig, who made the Oscar-nominated coming-of-age tale An Education in 2009, will start the festival with the premiere of her film The Kindness of Strangers.

The bittersweet drama stars Zoe Kazan (The Big Sick) as a mother of two who has to rely on her fellow New Yorkers for help, in a cast including Andrea Riseborough (The Death Of Stalin) and Bill Nighy (Love Actually).

Scherfig, 59, said she was proud her film would be opening the last Berlinale under Kosslick, who is passing on the baton after 18 years.

“It’s a milestone edition so I’m really looking forward to presenting the film there,“ Scherfig told film industry bible Variety.

Polish veteran Agnieszka Holland will unveil the Stalin-era thriller Mr Jones starring James Norton (Happy Valley) while France’s Agnes Varda will premiere a new autobiographical documentary out of competition.

Acclaimed French director Francois Ozon will present his controversial new drama By the Grace of God based on real-life cases of sex abuse allegedly committed by a French priest.

A cardinal, Philippe Barbarin, is currently on trial in Lyon on charges he covered up the assaults, allegations he denies.

Kosslick, 70, is credited with expanding the Berlinale and boosting its international profile with high-wattage guests ranging from the Rolling Stones to festival regulars Tilda Swinton and George Clooney.

“Our fans have stayed true to us and grown so much that we can say we’re the world’s biggest film festival in terms of audience,“ Kosslick told AFP, with around a half-million tickets sold each year.

Kosslick will be handing over the reins at a time of growing competition from streaming services but said he saw scope for cinemas to “co-exist” and thrive.

After winning the Golden Lion top prize at the Venice film festival in September with Roma, Netflix will enter the Berlin race for the first time with gay marriage drama Elisa and Marcela by Spain’s Isabel Coixet, based on a true story.

In June, Kosslick will be succeeded by Carlo Chatrian, the current head of the Locarno film festival, and Mariette Rissenbeek, the Dutch director of German Film, which promotes homegrown movies abroad.

For his last edition Kosslick has opted to make a parting political statement, offering to buy tickets for leaders of the far-right Alternative for Germany party to a screening of Who Will Write Our History?, a documentary about the Warsaw Ghetto. – AFP

from Style Life http://bit.ly/2BnaW48 from Blogger http://bit.ly/2Sz8od7

[thegloober]

NYFF 2018: The Times of Bill Cunningham, Cold War, Detour

by Odie Henderson

October 12, 2018   |  

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In 1978, candid photographer and fashion column writer Bill Cunningham took a picture of a woman passing by him on a New York street. He was interested in the coat she was wearing, which struck him as unusual. As luck would have it, Cunningham had inadvertently snapped a picture of the long-retired famous movie actress, Greta Garbo, who hadn’t been seen on screen since 1941. The New York Times snapped up the photo and gave Cunningham a long-running photography series called “On the Street.” Every week, readers discovered who crossed the viewfinder of the bike-riding shutterbug wearing his trademark blue shirt.

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Premiering at the New York Film Festival, director Mark Bozek’s “The Times of Bill Cunningham” chronicles the photographer’s career, starting with his time as a milliner, then working through his writing at magazines like Women’s Wear Daily before settling on the thing for which he is most famous, his street photographs. Our tour guide for this entertaining journey is Cunningham himself, who appears onscreen in a 1994 interview conducted by Bozek. Bozek structures his film around this lengthy interview, supplementing it with home videos and pictures rather than using a bunch of talking heads. The film has occasional narration of actress Sarah Jessica Parker, an inspired choice; her Carrie Bradshaw character from “Sex and the City” would have loved to live the bohemian lifestyle Cunningham did.

Cunningham was one of the most famous people to live in the Carnegie Hall Studios, residing there for over 50 years in a small room crammed with file cabinets overflowing with photographs, memorabilia and even diamonds. His famous neighbors included Leonard Bernstein, Norman Mailer and Marlon Brando who, we are told, hid out in Cunningham’s flat after female fans broke down his apartment door. Cunningham also rubbed elbows in the 1950’s with famous celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, who’d stop by his Chez Ninon office to try on the hats he designed, and Jacqueline Bouvier, who would later bring ladies’ hats back into style during her days as First Lady.

Though Cunningham comes off as a very nice guy whose thick Boston accent must have stood out like a sore thumb in Manhattan, there’s still some snootiness and shade bubbling underneath the surface, especially when he talks about fashion. It’s amusing coming from a guy whose wardrobe for decades consisted of thrift shop items or hand-me-downs from wealthy women whose husbands had bought the farm. “They were nice clothes!” Cunningham protests when Bozek presses him about this detail, but he then adds that he would have never been showcased in his own column.

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Cunningham describes his picture-taking as “stealing the shadows” of his subjects. One such set of shadows leads to the film’s most poignant moment. Cunningham suddenly breaks down when talking about how he’d photographed Gay Pride parades since their inception in NYC, and how he’d lost many of the people he knew to AIDS. We later learn that the man who lived so frugally had also donated millions of dollars to AIDS charities. Cunningham worked practically until his death in 2016; not even being hit by a truck could keep him off his beat for long.

“The Times of Bill Cunningham” runs a scant 74 minutes, which seems a perfect amount of time for a man who was so humble that he didn’t even attend the premiere of a prior documentary about him made back in 2011. Instead, he stood outside the theater and took pictures.

While festival centerpiece “Roma” has deserving buzz as a shoo-in for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, let’s not forget the hauntingly romantic “Cold War,” the new film from “Ida” director, Pawel Pawlikowski. It’s Poland’s official Oscar submission and the winner of the Golden Lion at the Polish Film Festival and the Best Director award at Cannes. Aided by the transcendent black and white cinematography of Lukasz Zal, who also worked on “Ida,” Pawlikowski tells a love story that feels symbolic of Poland during the Cold War era of the film’s setting. Music plays a big part here, first as a symbol of national pride and then as a means of escape via that Western world music known as jazz.

Stuck—or should I say trapped—within this framework are Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and Zula (a fantastic Joanna Kulig). Wiktor first encounters Zula while auditioning folk singers with his musical partner and former lover Irena (Agata Kulesza). Zula seems the wrong match for the more straight-laced Wiktor—she’s a hustler who’s wise beyond her teenaged years and who has infamously stabbed her father. “He mistook me for my mother,” she tells Wiktor, “and I used my knife to show him the difference.” Wiktor falls for her anyway.

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Many a love story has hinged upon people who are clearly mismatched but try like Hell to make it work. This duo drifts apart and comes together repeatedly, both behind and in front of the Iron Curtain, yet they’re as unlikely a pair as the film’s principal settings of rural Poland and Paris. Pawlikowski deftly uses his pacing and framing to keep our attention: Time passes in the blink of an eye, sometimes without prior warning. The timeline is as fractured and unpredictable as the lovers themselves, and the actors are often dwarfed on the screen by the cold, grey elements of nature that take up much of the screen. There’s a sense of impending doom, but “Cold War” doesn’t telegraph nor elicit our emotions. Its matter-of-factness is its greatest asset.

“Cold War”’s Kulig, “Roma”’s Yalitza Aparicio and “If Beale Street Could Talk”’s Kiki Layne form a trio of the best lead actress performances I’ve seen this year at NYFF. Their films are also the best ones I’ve seen here. “Beale Street” takes the top honor for me, however, for reasons I’ll explain later in my upcoming review. I’ll just say this for now: Barry Jenkins does Jimmy Baldwin proud and, like the directors of the other two films I mentioned, he gives his lead character free rein of the viewer’s gaze to great dramatic effect. Kulig, Layne and Aparicio each have moments when they pull us into their powerful orbits with just a look or a gesture. Add in “The Favourite,” “Ash is Purest White” and “3 Faces”  and It was a very good year for actresses.

I’ll close out on a few notes from the Revivals and Retrospectives sections of the festival. Following up on my last dispatch, I took in the screening of “Detour” and can confirm that it was indeed a splendid restoration. I noticed things I never saw before, including details in a shot I could never make out in prior versions. It’s getting a release from Janus Films at the end of November and is well worth the 68-minute investment of your time.

In the theater next to my “Detour” screening, NYFF was showing “My Dinner With Andre.” Our beloved Roger introduced me to that movie on Siskel & Ebert, and his love for it made me rent it when it came out on video. I was 12 or so, and I thought it was the most boring movie I’d ever seen. Good Lord, I hated this movie with the heat of a thousand suns. Now, I have no idea why this was being screened, but I considered it a sign! Maybe this was Roger telling me I should revisit the 1981 Louis Malle movie as an adult, because I have more wisdom and life experience now. Since I couldn’t be two places at the same time, I had to rent “My Dinner With Andre” on Amazon Prime rather than see it on the big screen.

And you know what? It was even worse than I remembered. It’s like being trapped in a college professor’s belly button for 2 hours, but there’s no lint in there to mercifully plug your ears to avoid having to listen to him. Forgive me, Roger! Actually, I think Roger’s laughing wherever he is, shaking his finger at me with mock shame as he often did. You got me, big guy.

See you all next year.

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