Weekend NYFF roundup.

"The classic tug of war between tradition and modernization is quite apparent as the 44th New York Film Festival heads into opening night," wrote indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez on Thursday. "'For 44 years we've been accused of being demanding, inflexible and insanely selective,' states the trailer for this year's festival, adding the punchline, 'Remarkably like our audience.'" Now at iW: Howard Feinstein's quick critical tour of what all's been screened so far.

"Film festivals crowd the calendar and circle the globe, but New York's is different," notes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Instead of hundreds of films, it presents a few dozen, and it presents them, for the most part, one at a time, rather than in a frenzy of overscheduling. It is neither a hectic marketplace nor a pre-Oscar buzz factory, like Cannes or Toronto, or a film industry frat party, like Sundance. Its tone tends to be serious, sober, and perhaps sometimes a little sedate, even when the movies it shows are daring and provocative."

"Clearly, the ideal NYFF film is one that combines artistic ambition, social relevance and some degree of sexy marketplace sizzle (last year's centerpiece, George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck, being a perfect example)," notes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "But as well as showcasing those pictures most likely to seduce upscale audiences during the cold-weather months, the NYFF also has a nobler, and more old-fashioned, mission. It programs several films each year with near-zero commercial appeal, hoping to focus the attention of New York's perennially distracted culture vultures, if only for an instant, on unexpected and unpredictable works with no bold-type names attached. It's a charming and paradoxical notion, but I'm delighted to play along."

"Many of the NYFF's most intriguing choices lie on its fringes," notes Steve Erickson in Gay City News, though he does offer his takes on many of the entries in the main program.

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As Andrew Grant notes below, the opening film on Friday night was, of course, The Queen, which the NYT's Manohla Dargis calls "a sublimely nimble evisceration of that cult of celebrity known as the British royal family.... Actors need to be loved, but one of [Helen] Mirren's strengths has always been her supreme self-confidence that we will love the performance no matter how unsympathetic the character.... This toughness is bracing, at times exhilarating, and it also reminds you of just how very good a director [Stephen] Frears can be... The new film serves as a return to form for the director not only of Dangerous Liaisons and The Grifters, both of which share with The Queen an interest in toxic tribal formations, but also of more freewheeling ensemble entertainments like Sammy and Rosie Get Laid." So glad she mentioned that last one; how many friends I dragged to the theater to see it all those years ago... Where's the DVD?

At any rate, in an accompanying audio slide show, Stephen Frears talks about his "cheeky" project and how pleasantly surprised he is that it hasn't upset anyone in Britain.

Acquarello sees "a trenchant, elegant, and compelling exposition into the nefarious role of the media as both creator (and self-generator) of news and manipulator public sentiment. By juxtaposing Diana's death within the framework of Tony Blair's recent election to the office of prime minister under the Labor Party platform of initiating a wide-range of sweeping reform ever to be instituted in the country after decades of Tory government (with visibly lackluster results), filmmaker Stephen Frears and screenwriter Peter Morgan contextualize the atmosphere as a symptom of a broader social angst - a synchronicity that intrinsically transformed a family's private grief into a disoriented public's search for leadership and direction in a time of crisis."

Responding to a comment on his own review, Dave Kehr writes that he finds The Queen "distinctly reactionary, and like too many British movies these last few years, aimed at American audiences who have an affection for the English monarchy and class system that those of you who live under it may not share."

Almost as if in reply, Stephanie Zacharek in Salon: "I suspect plenty of moviegoers - Stateside but maybe especially in the UK - will read The Queen as an apologia for the monarchy. But I think that's giving the picture only its most superficial reading. As many of the detractors of Sofia Coppola's upcoming (and wonderful) Marie Antoinette have failed to grasp, being a humanist doesn't automatically make you a royalist."

Nick Pinkerton at Reverse Shot can't resist the pairing, either: "Side by side, the films are a study in demographic gap; Marie, overtly gaga for royal pomp and festooned with post-punk nuggets, betrays its biopic function, acting largely as a solipsistic 'poor little rich girl' fantasy of excess, a confectionary binge of a movie set between the dark chocolate Hapsburg court and puff pastry Versailles.... The Queen, by contrast, examines rather than exhorts.... its stodgy, solid craftsmanship suits its subject like one of Elizabeth II's crisp Burberry trench coats."

Then there's Tom Nairn at openDemocracy: "The 1997 revolution was weird, but real, and is now showing itself to be irresistible in another disconcerting form. Today, the adroit saviour of the crown from post-Diana wrath finds himself the victim of much greater popular resentment, his party torn apart by implausible successors fighting madly to (once more) restore a dying régime."

Richard Corliss in Time: "I hope it finds a wide and receptive audience - for beyond the tattle, it tells a parable of political wisdom: knowing when to listen to the people, and when to lead them."

The Reeler got a few questions in at the press conference. More on the film from Nick Schager in Slant, Erik Davis at Cinematical and, as noted below, Philip Kemp in Sight & Sound.

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Back in the NYT, AO Scott reviews another NYFF title that's seeing its (limited) theatrical release all but simultaneously with its showcasing here, Little Children. Scott calls it a "superb film adaptation of the novel by Tom Perrotta" and "a rigorous study of adult behavior": "[Todd] Field, with his second feature - his directing debut was In the Bedroom - proves to be among the most literary of American filmmakers, one of the few who tries to find a visual language suited to the ambiguous plainness of contemporary realist fiction."

"It's very Short Cuts, very Magnolia, a little American Beauty. That's exactly the problem," proposes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "Why did I come out of Little Children... feeling so profoundly dissatisfied? Because Field has made a type of movie rather than an individual movie, an upscale formula picture that announces its own moral seriousness rather than something built organically from mind and heart."

Ed Gonzalez, blogging for Slant: "Expertly groomed for Oscar, this laughable concoction barely passes for satire - it is, nothing more nothing less, than the most pretentious film ever made about the problems festering in our suburban neighborhoods."

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Acquarello finds it "refreshing to see Hong [Sang-soo] crystallize his now familiar flat structured, mirroring triangulations on the ephemeral nature of human desire with Woman on the Beach."

"All the fuss that's been made in these pages and elsewhere about Andrew Bujalski and his sensitivity to the nuances of urban courtship could have been easily redirected to Hong," writes Jeff Reichert at Reverse Shot. "Something like Korea's answer to Eric Rohmer, Hong makes films that match the French master's in wry knowingness about sex, desire, and humankind's complicated maneuvering to achieve the former in order to satisfy the latter, but their outlook is more melancholy, their gaze often more cold and predatory."

"[M]y favorite film at the festival so far," announces Jürgen Fauth.

"[I]t's Hong's largely stationary, yet deftly composed, camerawork that gives Woman on the Beach its discreet power," writes Nick Schager in Slant, "working in tandem with the writer-director's dry, naturalistic dialogue to create an alternately humorous and forlorn mood situated somewhere amidst the collision between idealism and reality."

At the IFC Blog, Alison Willmore reminds us that this is "a comedy, and it is very funny, if also threaded with a sense of despair at the apparent futility of human connection."

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"[I]t is interesting to see Tian Zhuangzhuang's cinema converge towards the aesthetics of Hou Hsiao-hsien," notes acquarello. The Go Master is more impressionistic than biographical, allusive than anecdotal."

But for Keith Uhlich, writing at Slant, it's a "dull n' stately Zentenary."

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At Reverse Shot, Michael Joshua Rowin reviews Bamako, "a painful indictment of Africa's plunder at the hands of the West." The Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Goldstein has good news: the film's been picked up for the US by New Yorker Films.

Alison Willmore finds it "profoundly didactic, and while we don't fault Bamako's message or the passion behind it, we also can't recommend it as a film." And of course, below, you'll find David D'Arcy's review.

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For Slant's Ed Gonzalez, Offside is "the highlight so far" of the fest, "another cyclically crafted jewel in the spectacular crown of Iran's national cinema - a sterling example of grace resonating from grueling cultural pressure."

Alison finds it "lighthearted, optimistic, even kind of cute(sy)." Below, David D'Arcy's review.

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"Alberto Lattuada irreverently - and uproariously - explores the nurtured regionalisms, preconceptions, and ethnic stereotypes between the more progressive, industrialized north and more conservative, old world traditions of southern Italy - and in particular, Sicily - that continue to pervade and shape the social attitudes between the two divergent cultures of contemporary Italian society in his underseen comic masterpiece, Mafioso," writes acquarello.

But Keith Uhlich harrumphs in Slant: "Mafioso is many things, but a good movie ain't one of 'em."

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At Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Otar Iosseliani's Gardens in Autumn leaves Jenny Jediny disppointed in its "ineffectualness."

Jürgen Fauth on Paprika: "Japanese anime director Satoshi Kon (Tokyo Godfathers, Millennium Actress) always struck me as overrated, and this new film is no exception."

At Slant, Keith Uhlich reviews Marc Recha's "doc-fiction hybrid" August Days, which brings us back to Howard Feinstein, who calls the film "sublime... the revelation of the festival."

Posted by dwhudson at September 30, 2006 5:08 PM