Inner Friction
Share
As Locarno heads into its final weekend, contributors to the Moirée critics grid have sent out their first podcast from the festival, and Christopher Small, who has a piece on Jean Epstein in Pontón, has profiled Asia Argento for Pardo, Locarno’s daily magazine. Earlier this week, I ventured up to the Madonna del Sasso—a Franciscan sanctuary perched above the city—with Hugo Emmerzael to talk about Transition, Peter Badel and Chris Wright’s vital portrait of documentarian Thomas Heise.
Edinburgh is on through Wednesday, and one highlight will surely be tonight’s thirtieth-anniversary screening of Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting with live commentary from the cast and crew and a party afterward featuring DJ sets from Irvine Welsh, who wrote the novel, and Darren Emerson, who was the third member of Underworld when the movie’s soundtrack made “Born Slippy” a club standard.
Toronto (September 10 through 20) has topped off its lineup with the addition of eleven features, including Peter Ho-Sun Chan’s family drama The Road Not Taken and Martin McDonagh’s CIA buddy comedy Wild Horse Nine. And Lee Min-ho, Rachel Morrison, Chris Rock, Andrew Scott, and Hudson Williams will be taking part in TIFF’s In Conversation with . . . series.
Film at Lincoln Center has kept busy this week announcing lineups for the Spotlight and Currents programs in this year’s New York Film Festival (September 25 through October 12). Among the Spotlight world premieres are Tom McCarthy’s A Statement, which dramatizes a 1980 meeting of scientists, activists, and policymakers on global warming; Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus Zero; and several short and mid-length films: Kleber Mendonça Filho meets Jafar Panahi in South of Tehran, Charlotte Wells (Aftersun) profiles drummer Paula Spiro in New York Never Let Me Down, and Jonathan Glazer has reteamed with composer Mica Levi to oversee Joy of Joys, a film “by children, for children.”
The festival will launch filmmaker and photographer Tala Hadid’s Bardi, which explores the world of horse-riders in central Morocco, as this year’s Currents Centerpiece. The other feature-length world premieres in the program are Éric Baudelaire’s For the Moon, a collaboration with students at the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris; Carlos Reygadas’s Heil Jupiter!, which the NYFF calls “a work of feral cinematic expression”; Tiffany Sia’s Overt Listening, a film charged with historical tensions between China and Taiwan; Dan Sallitt’s What Can’t Be Mentioned, a “sequel of sorts” to The Unspeakable Act (2012); and a new restoration of Fred Camper’s Suicide Note (1976–1984), shot in New York on Super 8.
This week’s highlights:
- NYFF 2026 will open with James Gray’s Paper Tiger, a film that many, including Time’s Stephanie Zacharek, have noted “nods to his marvelous debut film, Little Odessa, about a family in the grip of tough Russian Brighton Beach gangsters.” Made in 1994, when Gray was twenty-five, Little Odessa, “shot on 35 mm film as grainy and throwback as the idea of a hit man, is a movie divided by time, by commercial viability, by the cinematic interests of its maker,” writes the A.V. Club’s Jacob Oller. “It’s split between past and present, between arty family drama and pulpy mafia story, between atmospheric melancholy and stark thrills. It’s inspired by the greats who used this environment to put forth their own auteurism (the Scorseses and Coppolas of New Hollywood), but has little in common with them. It’s a film whose inner friction is contained in a scene where its characters go check out the latest Nightmare on Elm Street—this is a world where hoary, old-school movie gangsters coexist with Freddy Krueger.”
- “In half a dozen years of the 1940s, and under significant restrictions of theme, movement, and resources, a cosmopolitan Englishman and an exiled Hungarian produced half a dozen films that could each feature in a top ten of the finest British films ever made,” writes Robert Wilton at Bright Wall/Dark Room. “Over the two decades of their collaboration, the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger emerged as the working out of a love affair with Britain and Britishness.” The “obvious analogue” to Pressburger is Anton Walbrook’s Theo in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), “a man who finds sanctuary and kindness and much to admire in Britain, but who sees the British more dispassionately and astutely than they do themselves.”
- On the occasion of the recent L’Alliance New York series of films directed by Claude Chabrol and starring Isabelle Huppert, Vadim Rizov spoke with Huppert for Notebook about a collaboration that spanned seven films and nearly thirty years. “I always thought that The Swindle [1997] was one of his most autobiographical films, like a hidden self-portrait of himself and our relationship as a director and as an actress,” says Huppert. “It was also a movie about moviemaking. He would consider the cinema world and moviemaking as, sometimes, a world of little crooks—you know, people trying to make money and make their way. I think he was speaking about himself in that film and about the world of cinema, in a very fun and tender way. Everybody was trying to make a little business, you know?”
- Catherine Breillat’s films “pose ethical questions about desire and aesthetic questions about representation; in particular, they ask how explicit cinema can be without becoming pornography,” writes Anahid Nersessian in the London Review of Books. “Yet for all their moral seriousness, they reject the trappings of high art. With their washed-out palettes, soft focus, and diffuse lighting, they sometimes resemble the smutty pastel covers of mid-century novels such as Bonjour Tristesse. This seems deliberate. Femininity is compelling to Breillat because it is so banal; its conventionality and dullness set the terms under which women are allowed to exist.”
- “An expert practitioner of the spiritual sequel, Richard Linklater especially indulges in the delight of crafting movies that rhyme with each other,” writes Vikram Murthi at IndieWire. For Murthi, Linklater’s “best spiritual sequel” is Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), “a semi-autobiographical 1980s-set college baseball comedy that has no plot and stars relatively unknown actors playing horny, testosterone-fueled jocks.” The “pivotal difference” between Dazed and Confused, the 1993 film set on the last day of high school in 1976, and EWS!! is “a matter of tone. For all of its quotability and cozy atmosphere, Dazed exhibits a real dark streak in terms of casual violence and the unforgiving nature of social hierarchy,” notes Murthi. “Conversely, EWS!! assumes a palpable sense of optimism, visually epitomized by [cinematographer Shane F.] Kelly’s warm-toned digital photography that makes night scenes feel like they’re blessed by the sun.”
Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
