Mint Julep: Theatre 80 St. Marks, June 8 through 10, 2011

One of my favorite American indies of recent years, Mint Julep, will have its long-delayed New York premiere at Theatre 80 St. Marks, screening from Wednesday, June 8 to Friday, June 10 at 7:30 pm each night. My review of the film, with a few comments on its unusual history, is up at MUBI.com.

All the Ships at Sea at the Wexner Center, Columbus, OH, March 17, 2011

My 2004 movie All the Ships at Sea will screen this week as part of a series of "21st Century Independents" at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. Ships plays on Thursday, March 17 at 8:50 pm, on the tail end of a bill with Jennifer Reeder's short Seven Songs about Thunder and Damien Chazelle's Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. The entire series is very well curated: I especially like the March 24 double feature of Lance Hammer's Ballast and Andrew Bujalski's Beeswax.

La belle endormie (The Sleeping Beauty): IFC, March 6, 2011; Walter Reade, March 8, 2011

Catherine Breillat's fans probably don't need a nudge to see her films, and her detractors should ignore all recommendations. But: wow, her 2010 La belle endormie (The Sleeping Beauty) is a major work even by her high standards. Starting from the premise of Perrault's fairy tale, Breillat contrives that the titular princess shall fall victim to her sleeping curse at age six (Carla Besnaïnou, showing off Breillat's distinctive manner of directing young children) but awaken at age sixteen (Julia Artamonov), and that she shall enjoy an active dream life. Once the plot is sprung, Breillat plunges into dreamland, and the film takes on more resemblance to Chabrol's Alice ou la dernière fugue (1977) or even Resnais' Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968) than to her more modest Perrault adaptation Barbe Bleue (2009). But not until the credits roll can we be completely sure that Breillat is after bigger game than fairy tales or even dreams... Her wide-ranging, tender interest in the contradictory twists of the human psyche is fully engaged by the unrestricted subject matter - and she has never made a film that demonstrates more clearly her great gift for operating on multiple levels of abstraction, a game that for her has always meant breaking the cage of narrative closure instead of seeing us safely to solid ground. Practically a trailer for our second viewing, La belle endormie screens twice more in the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series: on Sunday, March 6 at 1 pm at the IFC Center, and on Tuesday, March 8 at 1:30 pm at the Walter Reade. And I believe it's been picked up by Strand for a spring 2011 theatrical release.

Bas-Fonds: Walter Reade, Saturday, February 19, 2011

I have no time to write about this at any length, but if you can muster some tolerance for in-your-face cinematic depictions of depravity and malevolence, you should really try to see Isild Le Besco's remarkable third feature (barely so, at 68 minutes) in the Film Comment Selects series at the Walter Reade. I personally didn't think I could bear keeping company with these characters for a whole film, but Le Besco's control of the experience is extraordinary: on one hand, she stylizes her people into absurdist archetypes, and on the other she carefully disengages the spectacle from drama and identification. The crazy dichotomy between the behavior shown and the religious tone introduced via voiceover commentary is gradually and inevitably resolved. Bas-Fonds screens once more, on Saturday, February 19 at 4 pm.

2010 Manhattan One-Week Premieres

I might still catch a first-run 2010 movie or two, but I think I'm ready to make a ten-best list. This list is for films that played at least one week in Manhattan for the first time in 2010 - which, as I complain every year, is a pretty arbitrary grouping. But I'm in no position at all yet to make a list of 2010 international releases.

(I exclude films that were made too long ago to feel contemporary.)

1. The Father of My Children (Mia Hansen-Løve)
2. The Exploding Girl (Bradley Rust Gray)
3. Bluebeard (Catherine Breillat)
4. Mid-August Lunch (Gianni di Gregorio)
5. Between Two Worlds (Vimukthi Jayasundara)
6. Audrey the Trainwreck (Frank V. Ross)
7. Life During Wartime (Todd Solondz)
8. Anton Chekhov's The Duel (Dover Kosashvili)
9. Barking Water (Sterlin Harjo)
10. How Do You Know (James L. Brooks)

Honorable mention: Animal Kingdom (David Michôd). And I'll add two others that could go up or down after another viewing: Tiny Furniture (Lena Dunham) and Unstoppable (Tony Scott).

Special category for a uniquely confusing film: Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky). In the unstable transition period following this film's challenge to my aesthetic system, I can imagine putting it in any of the categories above or below.

Films with a lot going for them, in alphabetical order: Another Year (Mike Leigh), Around a Small Mountain (Jacques Rivette), The City of Your Final Destination (James Ivory), Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos), Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé), The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski), Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont), The Illusionist (Sylvain Chomet), Never Let Me Go (Mark Romanek), Open Five (Kentucker Audley), Soul Kitchen (Fatih Akin), The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira), Sweetgrass (Ilisa Barbash & Lucien Castaing-Taylor), True Grit (Joel Coen & Ethan Coen).

Films with something going for them, in alphabetical order: Ajami (Scandar Copti & Yaron Shani), All Good Things (Andrew Jarecki), The Anchorage (C.W Winter & Anders Edstrom), Breaking Upwards (Daryl Wein), Delta (Kornel Mundruczó), Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold), George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead (George A. Romero), I Am Love (Luca Guadagnino), Inspector Bellamy (Claude Chabrol), The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko), Lourdes (Jessica Hausner), Mesrine: Killer Instinct (Jean-Francois Richet), Mundane History (Anocha Suwichakornpong), Ne change rien (Pedro Costa), Tirador (Brillante Mendoza), Women Without Men (Shirin Neshat).

Films that mostly didn't work for me, in alphabetical order: Alamar (Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio), Daddy Longlegs (Josh Safdie & Benny Safdie), Due Date (Todd Phillips), Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl (Manoel de Oliveira), Everyone Else (Maren Ade), Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy), The Fighter (David O. Russell), Get Low (Aaron Schneider), Greenberg (Noah Baumbach), Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (Serge Bromberg & Ruxandra Medrea), I Love You Phillip Morris (Glenn Ficarra & John Requa), The King's Speech (Tom Hooper), Leaving (Catherine Corsini), Lebanon (Samuel Maoz), Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 (Jean-Francois Richet), The Milk of Sorrow (Claudia Llosa), Mother (Bong Joon-ho), Our Beloved Month of August (Miguel Gomes), Outside the Law (Rachid Bouchareb), Red Riding: 1980 (James Marsh), Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong), Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese), The Social Network (David Fincher), Somewhere (Sofia Coppola), Spring Fever (Lou Ye), Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine), Vincere (Marco Bellocchio), Welcome (Philippe Lioret), White Material (Claire Denis), Wild Grass (Alain Resnais), Winter's Bone (Debra Granik), You Wont Miss Me (Ry Russo-Young).

A lot of directors I admire placed films in the last category, which must mean that I'm an unusually fickle sort of auteurist.

Mister Cory

I wrote a piece on Blake Edwards' Mister Cory (my favorite Edwards film, along with The Tamarind Seed) for issue #7 of Undercurrent. Basically, I expanded two sentences from the middle of my review of the film for Jaime Christley's Unexamined Essentials.

2010 Wrap-Ups at MUBI

I made two contributions to MUBI's 2010 wrap-ups: an item in this compilation of present/past fantasy double features; and a top-five list of "new old movies" seen in 2010.