Tom Charity

TIFF 2023 | Pictures of Ghosts (Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil) — Wavelengths

“All the cinemas went extinct,” observes a street vendor who used to sell movie posters and lobby cards behind the film distribution centre in downtown Recife, Brazil, before the bottom dropped out of the market. The kicker: this interview was recorded 30 years ago.
Read More

Ex Libris – The New York Public Library (Frederick Wiseman, US)

  By Tom Charity Let’s start with this: the transitions in Fred Wiseman’s new film (and there are many) have a simple and specific beauty. They double as establishing shots, each comprising a brief cluster of New York street views, usually including an intersection sign to pin us to one of the 88 branches in…
Read More

High-Rise (Ben Wheatley, UK)

By Tom Charity “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.” That, friends, is an opening sentence: J.G. Ballard at his best. And damn if Ben Wheatley doesn’t find just the…
Read More

TIFF 2015 | No Men Beyond This Point (Mark Sawers, Canada)—Vanguard

By Tom Charity Providing a welcome counterpoint to the pregnant pre-teen boys in Evolution, Mark Sawers’ documentary traces the rise of the Virgin Birth in the latter half of the 20th century, the redundancy of the male sex, and anticipates man’s imminent extinction as womankind inherits the planet. This is all in jest, of course—a mockumentary,…
Read More

Cannes 2014 | The Wonders (Alice Rohrwacher, Italy/Switzerland/Germany)

By Tom Charity For those “in the know,” the Grand Jury Prize accorded to Alice Rohrwacher’s second film was the one surprise on a night where Jane Campion’s jury otherwise played things safe and sure, dispensing awards with dutiful nods to all sides. (Libération described it as the one prize with the flavour of a…
Read More

TIFF 2013 | Tracks (John Curran, UK/Australia)—Special Presentation

By Tom Charity In 1977, Robyn Davidson set off to walk 1700 miles from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean with her dog and four camels. This quixotic endeavour clearly must have meant something—not only to the 25-year-old but to the many thousands of readers who made her memoir a bestseller at the time and…
Read More

TIFF 2013 | A Field in England (Ben Wheatley, UK)—Wavelengths

By Tom Charity “Open up and let the devil in!” With four movies in four years, Ben Wheatley seems set on giving Michael Winterbottom a run for his money as the most prolific filmmaker in Britain, and the devil take the hindmost. Unlike the versatile and self-effacing Winterbottom, however, Wheatley immediately stamped a distinctive authorial signature…
Read More

Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico)

By Tom Charity Hand it to Cannes: where else do art films get booed? On the rest of the planet, your typically well-adjusted art-house aficionado understands to appreciate whatever challenges the filmmaker has set…or the viewer walks out. To be sure, there are walkouts here too, but a good many hardier souls take it upon…
Read More

DVD Bonus | Light Show: Bill Douglas’ Comrades

By Tom Charity British cinema is notoriously careless with its visionaries, as students of Derek Jarman, Terence Davies, and Peter Greenaway will recognize. Some eight or nine years their senior, Bill Douglas belongs in this company of nonconformists, and certainly merits wider attention both within the UK and abroad. The belated release of his three…
Read More

Features | Regarding John Wayne

By Tom Charity John Wayne turned one hundred years old in May, an occasion Hollywood marked with several DVD releases. The Cannes Film Festival showcased a restored version of Hondo (1953) in 3-D. Newspapers and many bloggers dutifully doffed their hats. And Patrick Wayne bulldozed a gas station in Winterset, Iowa, to make way for…
Read More

Currency | There Will Be Blood

There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, US) By Tom Charity In the beginning there is darkness. And, in the darkness, a man with a pickaxe claws at the earth as if he’s looking for the way back in. He grunts from such heavy labour, but keeps digging, driven. Anderson’s Fifth shapes up like this,…
Read More

Interviews | As Far As the Eye Can See: Lance Hammer’s Ballast

By Tom Charity The last person I met on the way out of Sundance—in fact it was at Salt Lake City airport—was the Portland novelist Chuck Palahniuk. I’d seen the adaptation of his novel Choke just the night before, a scrappy, uneven but funny, ballsy movie with Sam Rockwell as a sex addict perturbed to…
Read More