Favorite films of 2023:

The Boy and the Heron, dir. Hayao Miyazaki

Mr. Bachmann and His Class, dir. Maria Speth

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, dir. Radu Jude

Godland, dir. Hlynur Pálmason

R.M.N., dir. Cristian Mungiu

20 Days in Mariupol, dir. Mstyslav Chernov

EO, dir. Jerzy Skolimowski

Fallen Leaves, dir. Aki Kaurismäki

Anatomy of a Fall, dir. Justine Triet

The Novelist's Film, dir. Hong Sangsoo

Auguro a tutti un felice 2024!

Nel frattempo ecco un video che raccoglie i migliori film usciti e visti in questo ultimo anno, in rigoroso ordine sparso.

R.M.N. Cristian Mungiu. 2022

House DJ107M, Rimetea 517610, Romania See in map

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#88. R.M.N. - Cristian Mungiu

4/5

In Competition - Feature Films:

R.M.N. (2022), written and directed by Cristian Mungiu.

Marin Grigore as Matthias; Judith State as Csilla; Macrina Bârlădeanu as Ana; Orsolya Moldován as Mrs. Dénes.

TIFF 2022: Day 3

Films: 4 Best Film Of The Day: Glass Onion

Butcher’s Crossing: So the question becomes, in Gabe Polsky‘s grim survivalist  western, just how many bodies — carcasses — do you need to make your point, even if it’s a good one? The film is actually an anti-buffalo slaughter screed, but in the course of making its, admittedly estimable point, it devotes what seems like an interminable amount of screen time to the shooting, and subsequent skinning, of the animals, which once roamed the plains 30 million strong, but after two decades of brutal mass killing had dwindled down to less than 300 (now, after years of targeted conservation, it’s risen up to 30k, an achievement of no small measure). Leading the charge is, of course, Nicholas Cage, whose half-mad hunter, Miller, sports a Kurtzian shaved head, and a full length fur coat. He’s enlisted by the callow Will (Fred Hechinger), a young man just having left from Harvard, who’s come to see “more of the country,” and, one supposes, experience something real outside of a scholarly tome. In short order, Cage has taken the young man’s money and put together the crew for his dream hunt, off in the Rockies, where years before, he had spied a massive herd, waiting for the right cruel, money-grubbing bastard to come along and wipe them out. Naturally, the trip doesn’t go as planned and the party, including the combatitove Fred (Jeremy Bob), are forced to camp out there through the long, torturous winter, before they can head back with their bloody bounty.    The camera tends to stay close on the mugs of the characters, watching every twitch and lurch on their faces, as the mad hunter gets into his frenzy. This is only so effective, as the production is fairly threadbare, and the often shoddy make up doesn’t do anyone any favors. Production value aside, the film’s noble message gets a little chuffed up from its methodology, such that most of the viewers sympathetic to the cause will almost surely get turned off by the sheer amount of shooting and body parts the film sees fit to subject them to. 

Women Talking: The title isn’t misleading. In Sarah Polley’s feminist drama, about a Menonite collective, whose women have been abused and raped repeatedly for years by the men, a group of women are elected to determine what to do, after one of the men is caught and identified by some of their younger members. Along with some other perpetrators, the men are hauled off to jail, but are set on getting bailed out by the colony’s male members. The women, including friercely angry Salome (Claire Foy), sweetly firm Ona (Rooney Mara), aggrieved Mariche (Jessie Buckley), and resolute Janz (Frances McDormand), have only a few hours to talk things over up in a hayloft  —  with meeting notes dutifully recorded by August (Ben Whishaw), the schoolteacher, and the only man any of them can trust  —  and determine whether the women should forgive the men and stay on, or leave en masse and seek out a new possible future together. There is, shall we say, a lot of discourse on the nature of oppression, exoneration, and their reduced role in the male patriarchy. At times, it plays a bit like a version of 12 Angry Men, but with very different stakes, and involving a group of women in a hayloft. Breaking up the polemic, Polley, working from her own screenplay based on the novel by Miriam Toews, sends her cameras out into the fields, where the children are playing, or into brief flashbacks of the women’s experience. There is also an unrequited love story, between the sweet-minded August, and the independently minded Ona, pregnant with one of the attacker’s children, that helps stave off the static nature of the narrative. There are some unfortunate dramatic tics  —  a character who suddenly bursts into gales of laughter at inopportune moments, say, or sudden tears  —  and Polley’s decision to drain her film of all the most desaturated of colors, are distracting, but the central conceit is strong, and the love story (powered largely by Winshaw’s humble recalcitrance) is pretty moving. 

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery: How are you supposed to follow-up on one of the more deliriously fun films of the last few years? For Rian Johnson, whose initial foray into the whodunit genre was the delicious Knives Out, the problem isn’t merely to come up with a sequel that matches the original’s playful intrigue and high-energy, but to do it in a way that conjures up a new murder mystery that will keep everyone guessing, exactly when everyone is waiting on it. What he’s come up with is another intricate puzzle within a puzzle  —  fans of the original remember the way in which the first film seemed to solve itself not quite halfway through, before reinventing itself by the end  —  in which our understanding of the set of circumstances whiplashes considerably with a single devilish plot twist. The megarich tech tycoon Miles Bron (Edward Norton) has summoned his group of old friends, known amongst themselves as the “disruptors,” to his Greek isle mansion, for their annual gathering of revelry and debauchery, to stage a murder mystery over the weekend. Included on the guest list is Birdie (Kate Hudson), a ditzy formal model now turned entrepreneur, along with her assistant Peg (Jessica Henwick); Duke (Dave Bautista), a “men’s rights advocate with a robust youtube channel, along with his girlfriend Whiskey (Madelyn Cline); Claire (Kathryn Hahn), running for governor in Connecticut on an environmentalist platform; Lionel (Leslie Odum Jr.), one of Bron’s lead scientists for his ubiquitous company, Alpha; and, most shockingly, Cassandra (Janelle Monae), Bron’s former business partner at Alpha, who was recently ousted from the company she co-founded, largely on the strength of everyone else’s betrayal. For reasons somewhat unclear, even to Bron, the “world’s greatest detective” Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), has also been summoned for the weekend, a turn that proves fortuitous when bodies start to pile up and Blanc is suddenly thrust into a real investigation, one in which nothing is quite what it seems. Johnson, whose fiendishly clever plotting powers these films with rapturous joy, has created another exultant riddle-ride, in which the cast seems to be having exactly as much fun as the rest of us. While it might not have quite the richly satisfying subtext of the original, that sense of nearly perfect coherency, there is still a tremendous amount of fun to be had, as long as you’re open to Johnson’s blend of precision misdirections, pop-culture jibes, and screwball plot-twistings . 

R.M.N.: I have long adored the works of Romanian director Cristian Mungiu (Graduation, 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days), so any new release of his is cause for celebration. That said, this film, a slow-burning drama set up in the mountains of Transyvania, where jingoism and xenophobia begins to build  in a small community when the local bakery starts bringing in workers from Sri Lanka to help with their Christmas rush. Into this seething cauldron returns Matthias (Marin Grigore) a hulking sort of man, who left town some while back to work in Germany. After a violent episode there, he flees the job and comes home, but his fed-up young wife (Macrina Barladeanu) wants nothing to do with him, his 4-year-old son refuses to speak after being scared by something in the woods, and his lover, Csilla (Judith State), upper management at the bakery, is dealing with her own bevy of considerable problems with regards to the growing outrage and death threats made against her new (extremely affable) workers. The film moves in heavily dense scenework  —  one of the director’s long-held trademarks is filling his frame with different layers of action you have to take in simultaneously  —  as the characters bounce off one another in ways that become more and more enigmatic. What to make of Matthias, for example, a rigid, violence-prone man who seems utterly uninterested in politics, and far too dense for a intelligent, well-educated woman like Csilla to take an interest, but whose exhortations with his son to snap out of his semi-fugue state are, at times, sensitive and deeply felt? The film trades in these sorts of shades, for the most part, at least until a long, uninterrupted single shot of contentious village gathering at the community center in which the different factions all come together and argue uproariously against the continued presence of the new workers (in a town whose ethnic ties between Roma, Hungarian, and German all chaotically mix together, this distrust of POC is stark). The ending, which will doubtless be the subject for continued debate in film circles, takes a turn for the seeming surreal, further clouding the film’s intentions in the mist. Mungiu has made an impressively oblique film that nevertheless speaks eloquently about this particular political moment in time. 

TIFF: One Last Time, wherein the author contemplates this year’s offerings and the past decade of covering this fabulous film festival, as he’s poised to embark on a new career path that will more than likely involve him standing up in front of a group of sullen teens, espousing the glories of the Russian masters, rather than taking in a beatific week of international cinema in the early days of September. 

The Best of 2023: A Year In Film

Continue reading The Best of 2023: A Year In Film

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R.M.N. (2022) Cristian Mungiu.

11 May 2023

Film: JOYLAND (d. Saim Sadiq, 2022, Pakistan) and R.M.N. (d. Cristian Mungiu, 2022, Romania-France-Belgium-Sweden)

Forum: Gene Siskel Film Center   Format: DCP

Observations: Attended an unexpected double bill at the Film Center. When I arrived at the box office, I learned that they bumped the 6PM screening of R.M.N.; I expressed consternation, started heading out, got midway down the stairs, then rounded back to watch the 6PM show of JOYLAND, which was not on my radar at all (and the nice folks comped me the ticket for my trouble). About 16 people in the audience for that screening. Then I stuck around for the 830PM show of R.M.N., attended by maybe seven folks total. Both shows ran over two hours, which made (in the end) for a very late night. I expected R.M.N. to be grim (a movie exploring the labor-exploitive side of the EU and the ugly, sectional bigotry stirred up by globalism), but JOYLAND in the end proved equally difficult, if more personal in its appeal. Both films are recommended (by me).

R.M.N.

directed by Cristian Mungiu, 2022

Cinediario 2023 - giugno

R.M.N. (2022) Cristian Mingiu

R.M.N - Cristian Mungiu (2021)

Poster

Best Jewelry From Day Four Of The 2022 Cannes Film Festival

So many premieres, so many jewels. We’re recapping the best jewelry from day four of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Let’s start off with the gems featured on the ‘Three Thousand Years of Longing‘ red carpet. Click here to see more jewelry looks from this year’s Cannes Film Festival AT THE ‘THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING’ PREMIERE: ALESSANDRA AMBROSIO: One of our favorite jewelry looks to come…

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Happy 56th, Cristian Mungiu.

Poster for R.M.N. (2022) by Javi Aznarez.

Favorite films watched in March 2023:

R.M.N. (2022), dir. Cristian Mungiu

FTA (1972), dir. Francine Parker

L’Atalante (1934), dir. Jean Vigo

Providence (1977), dir. Alain Resnais

Family Life (1971), dir. Krzysztof Zanussi