Oh readers. What to do with me? I'm always falling behind. In an effort to acknowledge that NYFF ended this weekend, and fall prestige/early campaign season is already upon us (Toy Story 3 event tonight!), here's everything I saw at the NYFF. I got sick right in the middle so I missed a handful I wanted to see. The films are presented in the order I saw with a brief description and a 7 Word Review. For now. Surely I'll find time to say something more about two or three of these later. If you've wondered why I've been posting 2 grades for each movie I see lately, it's because it's my current grade (bold) plus the grade I could be talked into / might end up with when all is said and done.
Poetry & Oki's Movie (South Korea) | Tuesday After Christmas (Romania)
Poetry full review A-/A
Oki's Movie
A filmmaker recounts a romantic affair and professional entanglements.
7WR: Funny. Repetitive. Aggressively unwilling to engage visually. C/C-
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives full review B+/B
Tuesday After Christmas
A Romanian man loves two women. Must choose.
7WR: Love Wrecked! Incisive, naturalistic gem. Pitch-perfect ending. B/B+
The Robber (Germany/Austria) | My Joy (Ukraine) | Certified Copy (Various)
The Robber & My Joy
The Robber: an ex-con trains for long distance runs but continues his life of crime.
My Joy: a truck driver gets lost on dangerous allegorical roads.
7WR (x2): Virtuosic filmmaking but autistic experience. Couldn't connect.
Grade? Depends on what we're grading. This is when Nick's VOR would come in handy as both films strike me as worthy sees for commited cinephiles. But they're almost impossible to enjoy because they're so emotionally deficient or at least tonally limited to entirely nihilistic worldviews.
Certified Copy
The English author of a book on the worth of artistic forgeries, tours Italy with a beautiful married French stranger (Binoche!).
7WR: Transcends its fun intellectual gimmick. Beautifully acted. B+/A-
Of Gods and Men
French monks living peacefully in a Muslim village are warned to leave when terrorists arrive.
7WR: Despite vibrant emotional pulses, touch too sedate. B/B+
The Social Network previous articles A-/A
We Are What We Are (Mexico) | Another Year (UK) | Meek's Cutoff (USA)
We Are What We Are
A poor Mexican family struggles to keep their "rituals" alive after the father dies in this gruesome horror film.
7WR: Thematically obvious/clumsy but compulsively, masochistically watchable B-/C+
Tempest
Julie Taymor adapts Shakespeare's shipwrecks & sorcery play.
7WR: Muddy everything: ideas, sound, performance. Visual tourettes. D-/F
Another Year
Mike Leigh! A long married couple in England are surrounded by needy friends in four seasonal vignettes.
7WR: Blissful troupe rapport, comic beats. Weirdly judgmental. B+/B
Meek's Cutoff
Three families in covered wagons get lost in Indian country. They're running out of water.
7WR: Western From Another Planet but mysteriously confident. B/B+
A French woman experiences near death. A British boy copes with grief. An American psychic resists his gift.
7WR: Mawkishly moving but stiff, disjointed, weak storytelling. C-/D+
The Social Network used the fest as its world premiere and then promptly opened to great acclaim and presumptively leggy box office. Otherwise you're going to have to wait until 2011 for these films, apart from two: Hereafter (Oct 22nd) and The Tempest (Dec 10th)... unless you want to count Another Year but New Year's Eve releases are soooo next year if you ask us.
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