Rialto Pictures, which specializes in forgotten French films from the ‘50s and ‘60s, has recovered another lost gem, or rather semi-precious stone, in the 1956 comedy of occupied France “A Pig Across Paris” (“La Traversée de Paris”), directed by Claude Autant-Lara from a story by the fantasist writer Marcel Aymé, playing in a fresh, newly-subtitled and restored DCP at Film Forum (May 24-30).
J. Hoberman on movies and movie-related things
MOVIE JOURNAL: J. Hoberman on movies and movie-related things
Archive for the ‘Performing Arts’ Category
May 22, 2013, 9:37 am
“Pig Across Paris”: Black-Out Farce or Comic Whitewash?
May 17, 2013, 10:50 am
Looking Backward: “Super Mario”—the Movie
May 9, 2013, 8:16 am
3-D “Gatsby”: Doo-Wack-a-Doo Up the Wazoo
Life is a cabaret, old sport, or maybe halftime at the Super Bowl in Baz Luhrmann’s overhyped and overheated 3D adaptation of “The Great Gatsby”—the fifth time Hollywood has taken on the 1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald novel that many consider the greatest novel in the American language.
May 8, 2013, 9:08 am
Sarah Polley Confidential: “Stories We Tell”
Canada’s erstwhile “sweetheart,” the former child star, sometime political activist, doggedly independent Sarah Polley excavates her tangled family history in this verbose but generally fascinating documentary hybrid—part home movie, part psychodrama, part reconstruction, part investigation, and part meta-narrative.
May 7, 2013, 8:45 am
“In Another Country”: Hong Meets Huppert
A fixture at Cannes and a disciple of Eric Rohmer, Hong Sang-soo is not only the most consistent of South Korean directors but, as I’ve said, the most Frenchified. He’s already set one of his 14 features, the 2008 “Night and Day” in Paris; “In Another Country” (newly out on DVD from Kino Lorber) brings France to the sleepy Korean resort town that seems to be Hong’s favorite setting, in the person of the great, apparently ageless Isabelle Huppert.
May 2, 2013, 10:30 am
All That Is Solid: Assayas’s “Something in the Air”
A youthful movie in more ways than one, Olivier Assayas’s “Something in the Air” evokes an irretrievable past even as it manages to embody the total excitement of a particular historical moment and even, self-reflexively, the trajectory of the French director’s career. This quasi-autobiographical evocation of student politics and European hippie counterculture circa 1971 is also a crypto sequel or perhaps a prequel to “Cold Water”, the extended party movie with which Assayas made his reputation in the mid ‘90s.
May 1, 2013, 8:04 am
Goin’ to “The Source”: Ex Cult Members Speak
A documentary case study of Aquarian Age mysticism, “The Source Family” (opening May 1 at the IFC and VOD thereafter) confounds the conventional cult narrative with its “happy ending”—and thereby inspires a bit of boredom.
April 29, 2013, 4:29 pm
“Post Tenebras Lux”: WTF with Carlos Reygadas
The showiest member of the new Mexican cinema, Carlos Reygadas is part stuntmeister, part visionary—a wildly ambitious post-Warhol impresario who, often working without a screenplay, seeks out exalted landscapes and orchestrates conditions where nonprofessional actors are compelled to expose themselves, sometimes cruelly, on camera. (more…)
April 25, 2013, 1:14 pm
Tribeca Stars: Ali, Broughton, and Moms
As befits a festival born from a star, the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival ends by celebrating one of co-founder Robert De Niro’s greatest performances, as the star-struck nerd Rupert Pupkin in “The King of Comedy,” the underrated 1983 Martin Scorsese film that might finally, after 30 years, be getting the respect it deserves. Still, for my money, the big stars this year appeared in a trio of archival portrait docs. All three were artists shaped by and to some degree shaping the social upheavals of the 1960s; all three successfully melded the personal with the political. (more…)
April 23, 2013, 10:22 am
Tribeca 2: Heralding the Unheralded
Ransack the Tribeca Film Festival and ye shall find, in this case, three relatively unheralded items that are well worth seeing. (more…)
