Goings On: Campion, Demme, and More
New York. The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced that its retrospective Jane Campion’s Own Stories will run from September 8 through 17. “For four decades now, Campion has moved freely across genres—family melodrama (Sweetie), gothic romance (The Piano), literary adaptation (An Angel at My Table,The Portrait of a Lady), farce (Holy Smoke), suspense-thriller (In the Cut)—as well as between cinema and television.” Speaking of which, the occasion is the U.S. premiere of Top of the Lake: China Girl with Elisabeth Moss and Nicole Kidman (above) on SundanceTV this September.
“A loving satire of mating and mores among Park Slope lesbians, Ingrid Jungermann’s Women Who Kill combines romantic comedy and murder mystery, and a dollop of psychodrama, and lightly stirs it into a summer movie treat,” writes Amy Taubin for Artforum. Through August 10 at the IFC Center.
Le Gai Savoir (1969), running at the Quad through Tuesday, “is the blueprint for all of Late Godard,” writes Eric Barroso, “from his 70s essay film work and his sensuous 80s adaptations, all the way to his latest (a friend of mine aptly dubbed it Goodbye to Language 2D).”
Also at Screen Slate, Patrick Dahl offers a severely qualified recommendation, John Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), screening tonight at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown Brooklyn. “Ultimately, the film is equal parts risible, camp colonial fantasy and phantasmagoric rendering of faith crisis. That these two successes are intertwined to the extent that separating them requires a substantial generosity is a shame.”
Meantime, on through Thursday are Shot by Carlo Di Palma, from Rome to New York at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) at Film Forum.
Los Angeles.Shake It Off is a series of “dance-themed films that celebrate the bodies, the music, the editing, and the superhuman choreography that make the intersection of dance and film electrifying,” and it’s on through August 31. The Hammer Museum is also presenting—tonight—an advance screening of Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis’s Whose Streets?, “which chronicles the powerful public response to the murder of unarmed teenager Michael Brown by police.” And hey, all Hammer programs are free.
In the New Yorker,Anthony Lane finds that Folayan and Davis “hold no brief for even-handedness, and, for those who dominate the screen, any sign of temperance, even in a President, is treated with contempt. When Barack Obama describes the deployment of the National Guard as a matter for state jurisdiction, a fellow named Tory, watching him on TV, asks, ‘Didn’t he teach constitutional law in Harvard? Wasn’t he a constitutional professor? Ain’t no Constitution in Ferguson.’”
Chicago. “How do you convey with such effortlessness so much goofiness and goodness, tell tall tales that capture American optimism and flawed but ever-optimistic Americans? How to be wide-eyed without being a sap?” That’s Ray Pride in Newcity Film on Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard (1980). The Chicago Film Society is presenting a 35 mm print tonight.
For more on screenings in the city, see the new Cine-List.
Portland. The Northwest Film Center’s thirteenth Top Down: Rooftop Cinema season opens Thursday and runs through August 31.
Toronto. The world premiere of Janus Metz’s Borg/McEnroe with Shia LaBeouf and Stellan Skarsgård will be the opening night gala that kicks off the forty-second Toronto International Film Festival (September 7 through 17).
UK.BFI Thriller will be a multi-platform season running from October 20 through December 10. Among the highlights are a UK-wide re-release of Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), a new 4K restoration BFI DVD and Blu-ray release of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953), and a special screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974).
San Sebastian. Wim Wenders’s Submergence with James McAvoy and Alicia Vikander will open the sixty-fifth edition of the San Sebastian International Film Festival (September 22 through 30).
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