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What’s Old is New: Film Retrospectives in NYC (March)
Look through just about any issue of The Village Voice from the 60s and 70s and you’ll inevitably stumble across pages upon pages of film listings and advertisements, ranging from European auteur classics, avant-garde experimentals, and art-house pornography. It was a clear sign of New York City’s newfound position as…
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“There’s No Shame in It”: Dominic Hicks on Opening London’s Sleaziest Cinema
It’s movie night in New York City but all there is to see is your third viewing of Chungking Express at the Metrograph, or, if you’re feeling even crazier, a midnight screening at the IFC Center that, half-stoned, you will fall asleep in. Is there really nowhere in the world…
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Film Review: The Moment
Charli xcx has killed brat. Or, at least, she’s killed it in the alternate universe of The Moment. With longtime collaborator photographer Aidan Zamiri, director of the “360” and “Guess ft. Billie Eilish,” Charli rehashes the tour’s visuals with a Spice World-esque flair. Unfortunately, the situations that Charli faces are…
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Alireza Khatami: Interview
Well before The Things You Kill reaches its first act of violence, something far more unsettling has already begun to take shape. The universe of Alireza Khatami’s new film feels quietly askew. When a university professor returns home after his mother’s sudden death, he steps into a landscape clogged with…
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Film Review: It was Just an Accident
Jafar Panahi has mastered the art of restraint, and to an extent, not by choice. After a 20-year ban on filmmaking imposed on him by the Iranian government, he has had to practice creativity under immense restriction, filming in secret and directing remotely through a laptop. With Panahi’s latest, It…
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Film Review: Blue Film
Sex sells. Director Elliot Tuttle, like his leading man, is more than aware of that. In what walks the line between a morbid drama and an indelicate erotic thriller, Tuttle places a young sex worker and a mysterious older client in direct opposition. Sex doesn’t scratch the surface of what…
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Film Review: After the Hunt (STATIC @ NYFF)
We live in a panopticon police state where Yale philosophy professors who drink wine at college bars and ponder virtue ethics at academic soirées also exist in a world where, as the film’s tagline boasts, not everything is supposed to make you comfortable. Luca Guadagnino’s new film After the Hunt…
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STATIC’s Guide to NYFF 63
New York at the end of September and beginning of October might be the best time of year: there’s a chill in the air, the leaves begin to change colors, and hundreds of thousands of cinephiles descend on Lincoln Square for the New York Film Festival. For three weeks, you…
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film Review: Ronan Day-Lewis’s “Anemone” (STATIC @ NYFF)
When Ronan Day-Lewis said he wanted to make a film with Sean Bean because of the impression his work on Game of Thrones made upon him when he was 13, the crowd audibly gasped. For someone so young, a feature debut at The New York Film Festival is shocking; perhaps…
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NIGHTSWEAT: 6 movies to make you sweat this summer
I hope I’m not the only person here to have had a rather regrettable and naughty July. I’ve slept till noon on disgustingly hot mornings with all the usual symptoms: shirt grossly clinging to the slick of my back, cotton mouth, phone not actually plugged in etc., etc. All this…
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“We Had to Search for a Truer Self”: Jia Zhangke on the 22-year-long Journey towards Caught by the Tides
Jia Zhangke operates with the kind of precise and spontaneous patience of a fly on the wall of an archeological dig. Zhangke, born amid the reforms of the 1970s, came to prominence as a part of the “Sixth Generation” of directors in China’s post-socialist period; his films, often made without…
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“Reproducing life as it is—I was never interested in that”: An Interview with Alain Guiraudie (STATIC @ NYFF)
Alain Guiraudie’s breakout film Stranger by the Lake was all about murder and sex. His latest Misericordia is all about murder and the absence of sex. But the lack of anything explicit is somehow more titillating, making brawls between men ooze big-time sensuality. “I work on love scenes and fight…
