Filmmaker Marie Losier shoots in 16 mm, and she clearly glories in the format. Not just the rich color saturation she squeezes from it, but the image artifacts many other camerapersons would deplore as defects. Frequently in her new documentary film, “Cassandro the Exotico!” individual shots practically bristle with what’s called “hair in the gate” (stray fragments of celluloid that look as if they want to scour the bottom of the screen).
Stephen King is so monumentally productive, even now, five decades into his career, that it’s hard to nail down the peaks of his bibliography. But critics and fans agree that his 1983 novel “Pet Sematary” was something special, and especially horrific. The story of an attractive American family finding terror in a new home credibly wedded Edgar Allan Poe’s twitchy, stiff-necked dread with the fetid, swampy atmospherics of a 1950s EC horror comic.
“The Last,” written and directed by Jeff Lipsky, begins on the first day of Rosh Hashana. In a park, a close-knit family performs a prayer ritual. Two characters in their early 30s, Josh (AJ Cedeño) and Olivia (Jill Durso), are soon to be married. Josh is a Modern Orthodox Jew, and Olivia has converted from Catholicism to Judaism. Josh’s father, Harry, is a sardonic agnostic. Claire, Josh’s great-grandmother, stays mostly silent but is clearly full of affection.
The statement Robert Mapplethorpe made with his photographs was practically self-evident. Every one of his pictures says “I think this is beautiful.” But the statement is followed by a question: “Don’t you?” Seen more than one at a time, his images create provocative, often startling juxtapositions. Consider the spadix of a white calla lily emerging from the center of the flower, next to, say, a man’s penis hanging outside the unzipped pants of a suit. Mapplethorpe’s question became one of th...
From the mid-1970s until 2013, Angela Ricci Lucchi and Yervant Gianikian, partners in life and art, forged an analytical cinematic mode in which they critiqued Western practices of war, colonialism, objectification and more. Their work is better known in the art and academic realms than in mainstream cinematic ones. Lucchi died in 2018, and Gianikian assembled this film as a memorial.
“The Venerable W.” completes what its director, Barbet Schroeder, calls a “trilogy of evil.” The subject of the first documentary in this informal series, Ugandan dictator Idi Amin Dada, was such an enthusiastic participant in the project that the 1976 result wound up being titled “General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait.”
Adults who regularly buy children’s gifts will recognize the denizens of the movie “UglyDolls,” the plush toys of the same name. Milder in design than old-school troll dolls, these figures have a message: Idiosyncrasies of appearance and personality are not “ugly,” but rather emblems of awesome individuality. The relentless positivity of this fable is put across with such bounce-house energy that children in the audience may be bludgeoned into submission instantly. (It made this adult’s teeth...
(Critic's Pick): Carmine Street Guitars, in its current Greenwich Village location since 1990, is one of the jewels of a fast-dissolving bohemian Manhattan. Rick Kelly, its proprietor and luthier, makes his electric guitars from resonant wood he’s snatched from older buildings around town. Several scenes in this warm and affectionate documentary depict him realizing a long-held dream: that of carving an ax out of a plank from McSorley’s Ale House.
(Critic’s Pick): When musicians turn to film directing, it doesn’t always work out. Ask anyone who’s seen Bob Dylan’s nearly-five-hour musical romance “Renaldo and Clara” (although that oddity does have its wary admirers).
Juli Jakab, the star of “Sunset,” has remarkable eyes. The way she holds a gaze suggests not just defiance but potentially supernatural powers of perception.
Writer-director Dan Gilroy makes the film’s contempt for the contemporary art world crystal clear from the outset, but puts Morf in an interesting position: As insufferable and pompous as he is, he has his own can’t-be-bought integrity.
