The extreme thoroughness, subtlety, and thought invested in this project indicate that, as Scorsese moves into his Joe Biden years, he has evolved into a more nuanced, more complex film artist. 

By Robert Koehler Published in Cinema Scope #95 (Summer 2023) Cinema has always had to defend itself against the pressures of business and capital, and yet, because filmmaking remains expensive (contrary to the false digital fantasies of “cheap” cameras), it is business and capital that continues to keep cinema going. This contradiction of conditions deepens when the…

By Robert Koehler It is good to witness John le Carré rising from the dead for a final, rare, and elaborately staged interview with filmmaker Errol Morris in The Pigeon Tunnel, an odd kind of audio-visual accompaniment to Le Carré’s autobiographical book, subtitled Stories from My Life, and published in 2016, four years before his…

Cinema has always had to defend itself against the pressures of business and capital, and yet, because filmmaking remains expensive (contrary to the false digital fantasies of “cheap” cameras), it is business and capital that continues to keep cinema going. This contradiction of conditions deepens when the filmmaking takes place in a communist-governed nation like Vietnam, where capital operates (albeit sometimes uneasily) within a state-run system.

After a protracted absence, Todd Field is back, and with a film that more than compensates for the wait. However, Tár shouldn’t be gauged in terms of some value system based on the number of years that Field has gone without a new movie (16, following his second feature, Little Children [2006]), any more than the gap of years between new works by Field’s mentor, Stanley Kubrick, should have been a measure for his movies.

Whatever else you may have heard about Nope, otherwise known as “Not of Planet Earth,” know this: Jordan Peele’s third and most radical movie is his subversive inquiry into Hollywood. On the surface, such a stance is old news. At least as early as Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust, artists who have experienced the Hollywood moviemaking business firsthand have exacted some form of literary or cinematic revenge at the beast that has fed them. The irony is that it can sometimes seem that it’s some of the most successful in the Hollywood galaxy who engage in this project, whether it be Vincente Minnelli with The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Paul Mazursky with Alex in Wonderland (1970), or Robert Altman with The Player (1992). 

By Robert Koehler TIFF may have been thrown for a loop by COVID-19, but it’s nothing compared to Wang Xiaoshuai, who has tried—along with screenwriters Ning Dai and Ye Fu—to make something from the quarantine setting in his film, The Hotel. Imagine a combination of a stripped-down Grand Hotel or California Suite with contemporary Chinese…

By Robert Koehler Not all dating-match events are made equal, and the one arranged in Macedonian filmmaker Teona Strugar Mitevska’s The Happiest Man in the World is especially, you could say, toxic. The viewer is dropped in medias res in the setting, as Mitevska’s camera follows middle-aged Asja (Jelena Kordić Kuret) into a large Sarajevo…

Sundance is the only major film festival in at least North America, and quite possibly the world, to create a section dedicated to the experimental/avant-garde and then turn around and destroy that section’s mission. The section is called New Frontiers, which used to be Sundance’s safe harbour for experimentation and, even if on rare occasions, non-narrative work. That was before the invasion of VR, which now has a near-monopoly on the section.

Why do Macbeth? As a dare, to confront the challenge of one of Shakespeare’s most problematic plays? To “beat it into submission,” as Sir Laurence Olivier once put it? To face and overcome the curse of “the Scottish Tragedy?” Kurosawa Akira came up with an original answer in Throne of Blood (1957), which was to transfer the play’s medieval Scotland setting to feudal Japan and explore its theme of the fatal hubris of ambition as a means of reflecting, 12 years after the end of the Pacific War, on the folly of Japanese imperial ambitions.

2020 may go down as The Year From Hell, but at least it gave us The Tsugua Diaries. Rudely interrupted by the COVID pandemic in proceeding with not one, but two productions—Savagery and Grand Tour—Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes opted to do exactly the opposite of what everyone, including undoubtedly the Portuguese Film Commission, expected: they went and made a movie, deciding, just like the NBA, to create a bubble environment (at a farmhouse compound near the Atlantic coast) and hope for the best.

By Robert Koehler 2020 may go down as The Year From Hell, but at least it gave us The Tsugua Diaries. Rudely interrupted by the COVID pandemic in proceeding with not one, but two productions—Savagery and Grand Tour—Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes opted to do exactly the opposite of what everyone, including undoubtedly the Portuguese…

By Robert Koehler One of the dirty little secrets of art cinema is that most directors who make such films can’t do action. (I adore Zama [2017] as much as anybody, but, oh my, those action scenes…) So it is with Edwin and his well-intentioned but bumbling Indonesian martial-arts tribute movie based on Eka Kurniawan’s…

In the fourth and final episode of Exterminate All the Brutes, Raoul Peck declares in his commanding voiceover narration, “The very existence of this film is a miracle.” Those are mighty big words for a filmmaker to say about his own work—it’s hard to imagine even the always self-impressed Godard making such a statement—but by the end of Peck’s grand yet accessible essay film, the viewer can’t argue.

Now that the cinema world was a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, what movies would be done and available? Would anything premiering be worth a damn after sitting on the shelf for nearly 12 months? Were the good movies being held back in the hope that actual festivals would kick back into gear by, oh, late spring? (Hope springs eternal.) That last question was the one that really mattered, one that pestered the fall festivals of 2020 to a degree but which has now come down hard on festivals in early 2021, as the feeling (is it just a feeling?) grows that the pandemic is coming to the beginning of the end.

By Robert Koehler “Why do I have this feeling that it’d be better off if you were dead?” Ruth Langmore (Julia Garner) says this to Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) in their first encounter inside a public-park washroom in Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams’ longform series, Ozark. As one of the notorious Langmores—a clan of (mostly)…

Sundance equals power, and for a good reason: get your movie into the lineup, and you have an excellent chance of securing distribution in the US, a better chance by far than at any other festival. This means that it’s the supreme gateway, and despite or because of this fact, Sundance’s audiences are among the most conservative and rearguard in the international festival world.

Since cinema is moving toward television, and since the MCU generation is trying to actually tussle with a good fella like Martin Scorsese, and since all of this is wrapped around a cultural moment steeped in glorious contradictions, the timing of The Irishman couldn’t be more perfect.

By Robert Koehler Published in Cinema Scope #80 (Fall 2019) Like an alien dropping out of the sky, Yoav, the hero of Nadav Lapid’s Synonyms, is introduced as a being without a home, a purpose, or even clothes. As he scrambles naked around a vacant Parisian apartment, his strong, lean, athletic body mitigates his desperate…

By Robert Koehler Since Ben Rivers is credited as co-director of Krabi 2562, there could be the assumption that this is another “Ben Rivers film.” The many instances in this project where assumptions are wrong start here, because Rivers has completely given himself over to his collaborator, the gifted Anocha Suwichakornpong, who is absolutely the…

Given the evidence of Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963) and François Truffaut’s Day for Night (1974), time isn’t kind to moviemakers who decide to leap into autobiography: too often, such an endeavour entails rampant solipsism, a romanticization of history, and getting the practice of moviemaking (and cinema itself) entirely wrong.

By Robert Koehler In Park City this January, all of those attending the Sundance Film Festival were told in no uncertain terms on a daily, if not hourly, basis that “the story lives in you.” The statement was right there on the cover of the catalogue, so dominant that it replaced the words—“Sundance Film Festival”—that…

By Robert Koehler SoCal being SoCal, it’s hard to leave it, especially if you were born there. The only good joke in Beatriz at Dinner has someone cracking wise about living in Newport Beach and the problem of going on vacation: Where do you go, since the best weather is here? People who don’t know…

By Robert Koehler Any discussion about Kissing Candice begins with cinematographer Steve Annis, who, up until now, has been a specialist in music videos for Nick Cave, Florence and the Machine, U2, and Bryan Ferry. Operating in anamorphic widescreen with writer-director Aoife McArdle (herself a music-video veteran, who previously collaborated with the cinematographer for U2’s…

By Robert Koehler After the dark pleasures of his debut feature Guidance, writer-director Pat Mills wanders into the deep Toronto suburban bush with his considerably less funny follow-up Don’t Talk to Irene. High school seems to be Mills’ bailiwick: Guidance took school counselling to extreme, twisted places, mining good sources of satire; Don’t Talk to…

By Robert Koehler Anticipating the current political moment of a fake US president attacking perceived enemies as fake, much of which is triggered by a culture drowning in simulacra, conceptual artist Xu Bing’s first foray into cinema seems like an ideal Chinese response to the madness. The result of a massive, years-long project to compile,…

By Robert Koehler It was a reminder of how much we desperately need stories and storytelling to make sense of the world when I saw one guy punch another guy in the face one evening on the UCLA campus in 1977. The guy getting punched had become all agitated arguing for his favourite book at…

By Robert Koehler The West Bengali auteur Buddhadeb Dasgupta is sufficiently ignored in the West so that his new movie, The Bait, isn’t listed among his 35 director credits at IMDb. Before watching it at TIFF, I would remark to friends, cinephiles, and fellow critics that I was “about to see the movie by Dasgupta,”…

By Robert Koehler Fun fact about the tenacious American boxer Vinny Paz, or as he was known during his heyday, Vinny Pazienza: In his final bid for the WBC world super middleweight title, he lost to Canada, represented by Quebec’s Eric “Lucky” Lucas. No Canadian has made a movie about Lucas, not yet anyway, but…

By Robert Koehler Like certain kinds of sports fans, those who are into volcanoes can’t understand those who aren’t. (I’ve met a few, and I’ve found little else in life to discuss with them.) So Into the Inferno, Werner Herzog’s third film addressing volcanoes, and the first taking a global perspective, is not for those…

By Robert Koehler Since few grieved over the demise of the dead-end genre known as the High School Comedy, it’s hard to fathom the purpose behind debuting writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig’s gambit to revive it with The Edge of Seventeen. But because James L. Brooks is backing it as producer and Hailee Steinfeld—currently best-of-show among…

By Robert Koehler In an ideal world, some things wouldn’t be possible in international cinema, such as Kim Ki-duk making any more movies. (Actually, China is doing its bit for that cause, in its own dubious way, right now.) Another would be that Werner Herzog couldn’t make any narrative features in English. The man, so…

By Robert Koehler Everybody wants to go to Paris, even Kurosawa Kiyoshi. Usually, these ventures to France by non-French directors in order to make French movies result in seriously messy omelettes. (Asghar Farhadi, anyone?) Kurosawa’s Daguerrotype is certainly a mess, though it’s easy to surmise why he was attracted to bring his interest in ghosts,…

By Robert Koehler If Snowden, director Oliver Stone and screenwriter Kieran Fitzgerald’s version of the Edward Snowden affair, is remembered for anything, it will be as the first Hollywood movie that turned Barack Obama into a bad guy. Time was, back in the day when Obama walked on water, there was a thing you could…

By Robert Koehler Diversity, thy name is The Magnificent Seven 2016: what was once a group of white guys saving a town of poor Mexican campesinos is now a veritable United Nations of the West. The assemblage of these gunfighters is the apotheosis of the Obama Era in the movies. The assemblyman and leader is…

By Robert Koehler Dutch filmmaker Alex Pitstra’s mother Anneke, trying to bounce back from a bitter divorce, vacationed in a Tunisia beach resort in the late ’70s, where she met and fell for local playboy Mohsen Ben Hassen. Together, back in the Netherlands, they had little Alex, soon after she had learned that Mohsen was…

From Cinema Scope #67 (Summer 2016) Termite Art: Kleber Mendonça Filho on Aquarius By Robert Koehler The Year of Trump now has its movie. In Kleber Mendonça Filho’s second feature, Aquarius, a property developer tries to force the last resident to move out of an old but hardly decrepit apartment building on a prime beachside…

By Robert Koehler The Year of Trump now has its movie. In Kleber Mendonça Filho’s second feature Aquarius, a property developer tries to force the last resident to move out of an old but hardly decrepit apartment building on a prime beachside lot. The tenant is Clara (Sonia Braga), a respected 65-year-old music critic and…

By Robert Koehler Amongst the certainties of every large festival, three are more certain than the others. One, every large festival shows many bad movies. Second, no two people (unless they’re attached at the hip) see remotely similar lineups of movies and can’t see enough of them to get the truly big picture on the…

By Robert Koehler The editor/publisher/filmmaker of this fine publication (in Issue 55) accurately termed Claire Denis’ latest her “incredibly divisive and equally irate attack on late capitalism.” Why Bastards is even slightly divisive is just one of the year’s many cinema mysteries, and it’s fairly easy to predict that after the ridiculously hothouse atmosphere of…

By Robert Koehler It’s not surprising that Mexico’s drug war can verge into surrealism, as Mexico oozes with surrealism. But there are many shades to this condition, and The Mayor captures one of them with just about the right deadpan tone. In the wealthy Monterrey suburb of San Pedro Garza Garcia, the country’s statistically safest…

By Robert Koehler Long ago in a cinema world far away, Marcel Ophüls made a movie titled The Sorrow and the Pity, an angry jeremiad against French collusion with the Nazis, and it left scars. Ophüls, Max’s son, had none of his father’s gifts for the combined grace and magnificence of mise en scène wrapped…

By Robert Koehler Incredibly, Argyris Papadimitropoulos’ and Jan Vogel’s sharply defined, co-written and directed look at an Athens teetering on the edge of mass social violence is only now receiving its Toronto premiere, which means that TIFF 2011 passed on one of the finds of Rotterdam 2011, where Wasted Youth premiered. (Let this be a…

By Robert Koehler An exceptionally pokey attempt to bring King Lear (and maybe just a bit of Père Goriot) to the Québécois farmlands, Sébastien Pilote’s Le Démantèlement reduces the spectacle of patriarchal self-destruction to the level of watching a cup of tea grow cold on the table. Something happened here, but oh my, how utterly…

By Robert Koehler The long shadow of Lucrecia Martel casts itself over the atmospherically weighty, metaphorically leaden The Summer of Flying Fish, Marcela Said’s uncertain entry into fiction after a string of non-fiction features. After Martel rewrote the coming-of-age playbook a decade ago in Argentina with La cienaga, Said is late to the same game…

By Robert Koehler Howard Hawks thought that if a movie contained four or five memorable scenes, the movie worked. Anthony Chen, who won Cannes’ Camera d’Or for Ilo Ilo, would please Hawks. Chen knows his memorable scenes, and they usually involve two or more of a quartet of indelible characters stumbling and bumbling about a…

By Robert Koehler The credits, right there on screen, insist that Quai d’Orsay is “un film de Bertrand Tavernier,” but I don’t believe it. Maybe some imposter named “Bertrand Tavernier,” appropriating the name of a director who, to put it mildly, is hardly associated with satirical farce. Adapting former government speechwriter Abel Lanzac’s autobiographical graphic…

By Robert Koehler Marrying narrative contrivances with topical real-world issues is always a bad idea: the former is dead certain to spell trouble from the start, the latter usually ensures a stolid movie. Thus, Dome Karukoski’s Heart of a Lion, which performs this very shotgun marriage with unearned gusto. Screenwriter Aleksi Bardy strains to justify…

From Cinema Scope #55, Summer 2013. By Robert Koehler Jia Zhangke is not an artist who normally trucks in anger. In an era when film criticism and programming have been steadily shifting away from a focus on nationalist tendencies, led by filmmakers who’ve become globalized along with the rest of us, Jia has maintained a…

By Robert Koehler Jia Zhangke is not an artist who normally trucks in anger. In an era when film criticism and programming have been steadily shifting away from a focus on nationalist tendencies, led by filmmakers who’ve become globalized along with the rest of us, Jia has maintained a steady bead on his native Mainland…

So, in the end, #teammargaret wins. Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret, the first movie rescued from oblivion by Twitter, is now properly viewable. Initially released by Fox Searchlight on two screens in New York and Los Angeles last October with virtually no promotion, the famously beleaguered production appeared to be DOA until Slant’s Jaime Christley’s famously successful…

“Kunsthistorisches. It’s the big old one.” This is how Vienna’s massive, venerable, lovely and, indeed, elderly central art museum is termed in Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours, and it neatly sums up the film’s warm, casual attitude toward weighty cultural institutions while serving as a way of reframing formerly perceived paragons of elitism in a more…

By Robert Koehler It was either a sign of the measure of the complete revulsion felt by those who had worked with previous Quinzaine des Réalisateurs director Frédéric Boyer, or an expression of relief that the 44th edition was coming to a conclusion (or both), that new director Eduoard Waintrop was thanked from the Theatre…

By Robert Koehler When we first found fire, we had our first movie. Once the flames began to curl around the wood, building up heat and its own thermal momentum, the fire took hold, and began to capture the imagination of those staring into the constantly flickering light, with stories and images emerging. For millennia,…

By Robert Koehler The lure of islands, their fundamental thereness, their separation from, and fragile connections to, the rest of civilization, their existence as an ideal metonym for individual identity but also for the world as a whole—all these, and more, make islands powerful places for filmmakers to land upon. When they do, they’re hopefully…

By Robert Koehler “Hey, do you wanna see somethin’?”—Driver in Drive In the middle of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, a film punctuated by extreme flourishes of violence and vengeance, there is a period of peace. It occurs when Driver (Ryan Gosling), a quietly contained guy who holds down three jobs—auto mechanic, movie stunt driver, and…