Film Matters Magazine

Microbe & Gasoline (Michel Gondry, 2015)

Michel Gondry’s intimate film Microbe & Gasoline (Microbe et Gasoil) tells the seemingly straightforward tale of Daniel (Ange Dargent)—nicknamed Microbe because of his unusually small frame—and Théo (Théophile Baquet)—called Gasoline based on his affinity for mechanics—two friends who bond, as so often happens, in misery. The pair suffers the indignity of schoolyard taunts, the uniquely painful heartbreak of dance-floor rejection, and family members that don’t understand or respect their passions and preoccupations. This is where the film takes a delightfully offbeat turn: to cope with it all, the two young rebels build a car from parts scavenged from a scrapyard. After failing to make the contraption street legal, the pair slap on four walls and a roof and depart on a madcap road trip across France in the car, now disguised as a house, guided only by crumpled paper maps, faint sun-soaked memories, and a half-baked (ultimately unsuccessful) scheme to win over a girl.
Continue reading →

My Golden Days (Arnaud Desplechin, 2015)

My memories of New York hold light – the refraction of gold lamps in rain-slick glass doors, the flickering burn of taillights, the gentle halogen glow of the city as reflected by low-hanging clouds. I found the city easy to romanticize, and in memory even more so. Looking back, I can erase the sharp edges of my experience, the biting rain, the broken umbrellas, and dwell instead in images of light: reflected, refracted, or projected large onto the screen in Alice Tully Hall.
Continue reading →

Something Between Us
(Jodie Mack, 2015)

Writing about Projections Program 2 feels very freeing for me. Unlike other reviews for longer films, which feel as though the narrative of the film always restrains them, where describing plot feels like an obligation, Projections Program 2, a collection of short avant-garde films, allows for a more creative, looser review. The series of films in Projections Program 2 privileged the images, the particular film stock, and the manipulation of film stock. The films featured in Projections Program 2 were Prima Materia (Charlotte Pryce); Intersection (Vincent Grenier); Port Noir (Laura Kraning); Centre of the Cyclone (Heather Trawick); Le Pays Dévasté (The Devastated Land, Emmanuel Lefrant); Cathode Garden (Janie Geiser); Something Between Us (Jodie Mack); and brouillard – passage 15 (Alexandre Larose).
Continue reading →

Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti, 1960)

Of all the fine films I saw at The New York Film Festival, my favorite was Rocco and His Brothers. Recently restored in digital 4K, this black-and-white Italian melodrama focuses on a family who moves from the countryside to Milan after the patriarch’s death. The story is broken into segments, each focusing on one of the five brothers: Luca (Rocca Vidolazzi), Ciro (Max Cartier), Rocco (Alain Delon), Simone (Renata Salvatori), and Vincenzo (Spiros Focás). Yet the women of the story are, perhaps, even more important than the men. The strong matriarch (Katina Paxinou) remains a solid foundation for the family throughout the film, unchanging except for her mounting grief—first she loses her husband, and then her family begins to fall apart as she sits at the sidelines doing the only thing she knows to do, love them unconditionally. To her, it is never the sons’ fault for anything; it is the corrupting influence of the city life, or, more specifically, the whore Nadia (Annie Girardot).
Continue reading →

Steve Jobs (Danny Boyle, 2015)

The 6 p.m. centerpiece showing of Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs (2015) at the New York Film Festival started with the entire audience singing the birthday song. It just so happened to be Kate Winslet’s birthday (Winslet plays Joanna Hoffman, a marketing exec at Apple and Jobs’s confidant). After the cast filtered onto the stage, the director led the actors and audience in a spirited, off-key rendition of the well-known lyrics. The surprising intimacy of these few minutes—encapsulated in the moment when the audience called Winslet by her first name, as though we were all old friends—was a component notably absent from the film itself.
Continue reading →

Visit, or Memories and Confessions (Manoel de Oliveira, 1982)

It’s hard to say exactly what Visit, or Memories and Confessions (Oliveira 1982) is about. A house, a family, a filmmaker, or a marriage are all fine answers, but they fail to capture the feeling of the film. Shot in 1982, it was only screened after Oliveira’s death in 2015. Oliveira presumably thought he was near death at the time, but he would go on to live another 33 years. We receive a tour, of sorts, of the house he and his wife were living in at the time. At times, Oliveira addresses us directly, sitting at his desk and looking toward the camera. At others, his body is nowhere in sight, but his voiceover follows us as the camera tracks down empty hallways or lingers on a photo. Occasionally, Oliveira is silent, letting the shots speak for themselves.
Continue reading →

Where to Invade Next (Michael Moore, 2015)

“Prepare to be shocked!” warns the trailer for Where to Invade Next. The film’s firebrand director, Michael Moore, brandishes a six-foot-tall American flag to the low roar of Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation.” The film is drenched in this imagery, painting Moore as the populist vigilante telling the truths that The Man – in this case, the American government – doesn’t want us to hear. But past the bravado, Moore delivers unsurprising revelations to an audience who already knows them.
Continue reading →

Spring (Nathaniel Dorsky, 2013)

The day I traveled to the New York Film Festival was exhausting. My classmates and I rose early in the morning and rushed to the Little Rock airport (cutting it a little too close for comfort in the eyes of our professor eagerly waiting at LIT). We flew to Chicago’s ORD before landing at JFK. Then, as soon as I settled into our hotel it was time to rush to Lincoln Center for my first film of the festival. When I arrived at the theater just in time and dazedly nestled into my seat, instead of catching my breath, I held it.
Continue reading →