New York Film Festival 2011, "Confused Young Girls" Edition

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

My latest New York Film Festival dispatch couples together two films I saw at Toronto International Film Festival: Sean Durkin's tense debut feature Martha Marcy May Marlene and Mia Hansen-Løve's warm and wise third film Goodbye First Love. At first, the only reason I decided to bunch these two together was because I had previously seen them in Toronto; as I started writing this piece, however, I realized that there are some other similarities connecting them—most notably, the fact that both films feature young female heroines under duress, whether extreme in the case of the former or universal in the case of the latter. Similar or not, both are very much worth seeing.

(Both of them have theatrical distribution, by the way, so you won't have to pay, like, $24 to see them in upcoming public screenings. But, hey, far be it from me to discourage you from giving money over to the Film Society of Lincoln Center and their New York Film Festival! Without them, I wouldn't be keeping busy right now and keeping my mind off my stagnant professional career and all that!)

New York Film Festival 2011: Catching Up on Some Links

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

I've fallen behind on linking you all to my recent contributions to The House Next Door's New York Film Festival coverage, so...if you haven't seen them already thanks to my links to them on my Twitter and Facebook pages, here are my reviews of Two Years at Sea, the hypnotic first feature film of British avant-garde filmmaker Ben Rivers; and a dual review of German director Ulrich Köhler's so-so anti-imperialist screed Sleeping Sickness and Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's slow but rewarding police procedural Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.

Enjoy! I have three more films to review, and then I'll be done with this year's New York Film Festival. Home stretch, baby!

New York Film Festival 2011: The Student and This is Not a Film

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

I didn't have much of an idea going into Santiago Mitre's The Student what I was in for; heck, I didn't even have much of an idea of what other critics were saying about the film, if anything. Turns out, this is a reasonably engaging political drama from Argentina that manages to yield some dividends with its college-as-microcosm-of-Argentinian-politics conceit. It's a solid piece of work overall—as I try to suggest in my latest House Next Door New York Film Festival dispatch. (It screens on Saturday, Oct. 8, at 12:30 p.m. and Wednesday, Oct. 12, at 6 p.m., if any of you in the tri-state area are interested in checking it out.)

Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this in passing: Yesterday, I saw what I would probably consider my favorite film of the festival up to this point: This Is Not a Film (2010), the recent collaboration between Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb done while Panahi was still under house arrest and awaiting what would eventually be his sentence to six years in prison and 20 years banned from filmmaking. It's a documentary that doubles as a richly self-reflexive piece of cinema—but, like fellow Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami's great Close-Up (1990), it balances intellectual concerns with real, heartfelt emotion. The result is a heartening middle finger to a repressive regime and a deeply moving personal testament of an artist maintaining his humanistic stance even in the midst of imminent imprisonment that threatens to completely silence his voice. (Even the story of how the film was smuggled out of Iran is inspiring, being that it was smuggled in a USB drive hidden in a cake.)

I wasn't assigned this film to review, so consider that my (too short) review. Even shorter version: You must see this! (It screens at the New York Film Festival on Thursday, Oct. 13 at 6 p.m.)

NYFFing and TIFFing It Up!

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

Over the weekend, my New York Film Festival review of Le Havre went up at The House Next Door. Le Havre is the latest film from Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki—yet another well-regarded world-cinema auteur whose work I wasn't really familiar with before undertaking the assignment to review it. So I decided to make my inexperience with Kaurismäki's work a part of my review. I have the freedom to do that kind of thing at The House! The movie's not bad, either.

Oh, and here's a blast from the (recent) past: I contributed a few capsule reviews for In Review Online's recently published wrap-up of this year's Toronto International Film Festival. Surprisingly, I had a pretty easy time of sticking to 90-100 words for each of my contributions; I totally expected to struggle to condense my always complex opinions on films to such a short amount of space, but they just seemed to flow out of me once I got into a groove.

Anyway, enjoy my latest output! I need to keep up this writing thing, seriously.

New York Film Festival 2011: The Loneliest Planet and Dreileben

NEW YORK—

Tonight the New York Film Festival officially gets underway with lavish opening-night gala screenings of Roman Polanski's latest film, Carnage.

I won't be there, being that, even for members, getting into gala screenings at this festival can cost someone up to $50—hardly a cheap proposition! And alas, I had to miss the press screening for it, because this year I'm not taking any days off from work for them; instead, I find myself having to go to morning screenings and arrive to work just a bit late (though don't worry, my boss has so far been totally okay with this, provided I give her advance notice and all).

I have been able to see some other good films playing at the festival so far...and my reviews for two of them are finally up at The House Next Door—those of Julia Loktev's latest film The Loneliest Planet; and Dreileben, a trilogy of made-for-TV German films featuring three different directors offering different perspectives on the same crime. The links for both reviews are embedded on the individual film titles.

So go on, read 'em and then comment, why don'tcha?

There is plenty more to come, of course. "Watch this space," as they say here on the Web...