Milford Graves enjoys a bite in his garden in documentary about the unique percussionist and philosopher
MILFORD GRAVES FULL MANTIS (Jake Meginsky, 2018)
Maysles Documentary Center
343 Lenox Ave./Malcolm X Blvd. between 127th & 128th Sts.
Sunday, September 27, $7-$15, 2:00, free Q&A 4:30 maysles.org fullmantis.com
Jake Meginsky’s unconventional documentary of unconventional musician Milford Graves begins with the following epigraph from Graves: “Look at the room downstairs / Look at the garden outside / Don’t try to analyze it / Just take it in.” That is not only Graves’s life philosophy but also the best way to experience Milford Graves Full Mantis, which is screening September 27 at 2:00 at the Maysles Documentary Center. Born in 1941 in South Jamaica, Queens, where he resided until his death in February 2021, Graves was an avant-garde free jazz percussionist who played and lived to his own beat. In 2004, Meginsky knocked on Graves’s door, asked to study with him, and soon became the Professor’s assistant and documentarian; the film, codirected by drummer Neil Young, who also edited and photographed it with Meginsky, features compelling live footage along with peaceful moments in Graves’s basement and expansive garden. Early on, Meginsky shows a wild excerpt from a 1973 concert at the Jazz Middelheim Festival in Antwerp in which Graves performs with Joe Rigby and Hugh Glover on reeds and Arthur Williams on trumpet; the fierce, dissonant music might not be to everyone’s taste, but it serves as a terrific counterpoint to Graves’s calmer side, pontificating on, well, sometimes it’s hard to tell what, but it’s always fascinating.
There are also clips of Graves playing solo at the Brandeis Improv Festival in 2015 and in one of Park Ave. Armory’s historic rooms in 2016; in 2011 in his basement, where he’s surrounded by African sculpture, books, and computers that record his heartbeat and nervous system, which he incorporates into his work; and in Japan in 1981 with dancer Min Tanaka at a school for autistic children, where his unique performance inspired the kids to get up and move to the groove. In his backyard dojo he explains Yara, the discipline he invented based on martial arts, African ritual dance, the Lindy Hop, and the praying mantis and which he refers to as “the black way of self protection.” There are no talking-head experts or Graves acolytes singing his praises; the only voice heard in the film is Graves’s own, and for the first half of its ninety minutes Meginsky doesn’t show the film’s subject as he talks. Instead, while Graves speaks about his past and shares his kaleidoscopic philosophies, the camera slowly focuses on his lush garden or shows some of Graves’s animations.
But eventually Graves is seen sitting in his basement, telling a long, remarkable story of a turning point in his life. He’s an engaging character, bursting with enthusiasm and a unique view of the human body, the five senses, tear ducts, and the parasympathetic nervous system. And throughout, he keeps playing those drums, holding the sticks in his trademark way on a nonstandard kit he put together himself.
The screening at MDC will be followed at 4:30 by “An Afternoon with Ashanti Omowali Alston,” a free Q&A with the revolutionary, orator, writer, organizer, motivator, anarchist, and former Black Panther Party member, in conversation with political philosopher, academic, and author Joy James, focusing on the new book Anarchist Panther: The Selected Writings of Ashanti O. Alston (AK Press, August 2026, $21.99).
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Everything Else Is Noise is one of several NYFF64 films that blend fiction and reality
NYFF64
Film at Lincoln Center
Walter Reade Theater, Alice Tully Hall, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
September 25 – October 12 filmlinc.org/nyff
One of my favorite times of every year comes each September, when I play hooky and spend all day at the New York Film Festival, catching four or five press screenings. This year, I shuttled between the Walter Reade Theater and the Francesca Beale Theater to see four extraordinary gems that fit extremely well together, a quartet of exquisite works that move at the pace of life, mixing fiction and nonfiction as they explore the relationship between cinema and reality in beautiful and unique ways.
Nowhere to Lay My Eyes is another gem from Hong Sangsoo
NOWHERE TO LAY MY EYES (눈둘데가 없네) (Hong Sangsoo, 2026)
Saturday, September 26, 12:30
Wednesday, October 7, 8:45 filmlinc.org
Festival favorite Hong Sangsoo once again has two films in the schedule, both fine examples of his personal style — the South Korean auteur writes, directs, edits, produces, and photographs his films. Since 2015, they usually star his partner, Kim Min-hee, who has appeared in thirteen of his movies and doesn’t act for any other director.
In Nowhere to Lay My Eyes, Kim portrays Sanghee, an experimental filmmaker who visits her mother (Choi Myung-gil) and stepfather (Kwon Hae-hyo) for the first time in ten years; Sanghee is joined by her younger brother (Shin Seok-ho), who is caught between his sister’s and mother’s estrangement. Their mother has made a new life on Jeju Island, where she owns a successful restaurant; meanwhile, her husband is a documentary filmmaker who has been working on the same project for two decades, about chobun, or grass graves, in which bodies are not buried but decompose aboveground. They also meet their stepsister (Park Mi-so), who discusses art with Sanghee.
As in so many Hong films, the well-drawn characters eat, drink, and visit the seashore as they talk about movies, aging, responsibility, and relationships. Hong often keeps the camera still and steady; for example, when Sanghee decides to visit a nearby pond, she walks slowly down a gravel road, her back to the stationary camera, her footsteps crunching gently as she says in voiceover, “It was a pleasant day, with clean air.” It’s a simple yet deeply affecting moment, representative of Hong’s work.
However, other scenes include two of his trademark zoom bursts to remind us that we are not watching real life. “Dramas are a scam,” the stepfather says at one point, a comment not only on his documentaries but on Hong’s oeuvre.
All senses are connected in Nicolás Pereda’s Everything Else Is Noise
EVERYTHING ELSE IS NOISE (LO DEMÁS ES RUIDO) (Nicolás Pereda, 2026)
Saturday, September 26, 4:30
Sunday, September 27, 9:30
Sunday, October 4, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 7:30
Monday, October 5, 1:00 filmlinc.org
Mexican filmmaker Nicolás Pereda’s Everything Else Is Noise is a wonderfully wry feminist comedy about music, family, and the art of filmmaking — as well as patience.
It begins with a long shot of crazy traffic, several minutes in which we follow one car at an intersection where vehicles are moving at a snail’s pace, if at all. This one sedan is having the most difficulty, attempting to make a left turn, but no one is letting it in. It’s both hilarious and frustrating, a terrific opening scene for a fabulously inventive film that requires patience on the part of the characters and the audience.
The story takes place in a single apartment, filled to the brim with plants. It is the home of cellist-composer Tere (Teresita Sánchez), who we first encounter when her downstairs neighbor (Andrew Rogers) comes to her door and complains that she is making too much noise. She calmly explains that she is practicing her cello and that she has already reached an agreement with another neighbor that it is fine to do so between nine and five. The man refuses to accept her explanation, repeating his demand again and again, but she insists, over and over in her soft-spoken yet sly manner, that she will continue practicing nonetheless. It’s a marvelously absurd exchange that sets the stage for the hilarious utter nonsense that is to follow.
Tere has let her friend and colleague, cellist and composer Rosa (Rosa Estela Juárez Vargas), borrow her apartment for a television interview about her career. Rosa, who does not want her husband to know about the interview, is nervous and is not the greatest with words, so Tere tries to settle her down by advising her to make up a fake story about her sense of smell. The interviewer, Lázaro (Lázaro G. Rodríguez), finally arrives with Paco (Francisco Barreiro), his cameraman and sound technician; it seems that they were in that car that was stuck in traffic, the first of a series of events that befall them as they try to conduct the interview.
It only gets more complicated when Tere’s daughter, avant-garde cellist Luisa (Luisa Pardo), shows up basically in her pajamas, eventually joined by her father, the famous composer Estevez (José Rodríguez López), who has not publicly acknowledged Luisa as his child, in order to protect his wife and their other, “legitimate” children. Things go wrong in droller and droller ways as Pereda, who wrote the script with Juan Francisco Maldonado and serves as cinematographer, has a blast with clever touches and details that sometimes fly under the radar if you don’t pay attention.
Sánchez, who has appeared in such other Pereda films as Fauna,Minotaur, and Lázaro at Night, is sensational as Tere, imbuing her with a spirited naturalism that brings a realistic quality to the narrative, melding fiction and nonfiction. (Pereda has won awards for both his documentaries and fiction features.) Pardo and Barreiro, also Pereda regulars, ramp up the absurdities to priceless levels.
Everything Else Is Noise is a small gem, making its points about gender inequality, class differences, the media, and the creative process in both subtle and overt ways that will have you shaking with laughter. As Luisa says, “In my opinion, the issue with experiencing this music live, where you can see the performer, is that the visual aspect takes over, and you stop really listening. So, for this to make sense, I’m going to ask you all to close your eyes while I play.” Paco then adjust the camera viewfinder and puts his head in his hands.
And as Tere notes, “The senses are all connected.”
Brava!
Song Sunmi stars as an actress making a comeback in The Day She Returns
THE DAY SHE RETURNS (그녀가 돌아온 날) (Hong Sangsoo, 2026)
Tuesday, October 6, 9:00
Thursday, October 8, 6:15 filmlinc.org
A kind of companion piece to his 2012 drama The Day He Arrives, Hong Sangsoo’s The Day She Returns is a meditative examination of life and art, of the choices we make amid our inherent biases and societal mores.
Song Sunmi stars as Bae Jeongsu, a famous actress returning to work after twelve years off raising her daughter. She has chosen a small indie film for her comeback, and she is promoting it through a series of one-on-one interviews with three woman journalists (Kim Seon-jin, Oh Yeon-su, and Kang So-yi) at a local German restaurant.
Instead of merely hyping the film or herself, she first asks what each of the women thought of the film, and they indeed share their thoughts while also delving into their own personal situations and agendas. Bae shows what appears to be genuine interest in them, even as their stories grow more absurd and self-centered, but she hesitates when they ask her about her recent divorce. She also wants them to have a beer with her.
Attempting to be accommodating yet not overly effusive, Bae shares such ideas as “All interpretations ultimately lead to anxiety. If you can see things as they are, then you can actually experience real peace,” “I refuse fake love in my life,” and “How can we maintain an innocent face when our souls are in tatters?” As happens at press junkets, Bae sometimes repeats herself, giving the same answer to similar questions, although the third interview is the most legitimate.
In between interviews, each of which lasts between fifteen and twenty minutes, shot with a still camera (but watch out for those strange trademark zooms), Bae goes outside with her personal assistant (Ha Seong-guk) for a smoke and wonders whether she is being too honest. Sitting on grass, seen in between two parked cars, Bae is a curious figure, provoking questions about whether she is acting for the interviewers, telling the truth, or having trouble discerning reality from fiction. That line is further blurred when she goes to her acting class and her teacher (Cho Yun-hee) gives her a challenging assignment with a fellow student (Park Mi-so).
Hong shoots The Day She Returns in a stark black-and-white that lends the film a ghostly, surreal quality, accompanied by a hypnotic score. (Hong serves as writer, director, cinematographer, editor, producer, and composer.) Sunmi, who played a film professor in The Day He Arrives, is brilliant as Bae, a former star trying to resuscitate her career in her forties but doing things her own way. She may be a well-known actress, but she could be any woman facing a transition, taking stock of where she’s been and trying to decide what comes next, but in her case displaying a vulnerability that may or may not be real, given her profession.
One of the questions asked is “What is a good film?” The answer, of course, is just about anything by Hong Sangsoo.
(The Day She Returns is screening with Kleber Mendonça Filho’s South of Tehran, in which the Brazilian director meets with Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi.)
Beatrice Gibson makes a stunning feature debut in the poetic At Night
CURRENTS: AT NIGHT (Beatrice Gibson, 2026)
Saturday, October 3, 9:00
Sunday, October 4, 5:30 filmlinc.org
“At Night is a film in the shape of a question,” experimental filmmaker and installation artist Beatrice Gibson explains in the director’s note for her feature debut, the poetic, elegiac At Night. That question mixes fiction and reality as six women examine their lives over the course of one evening in Paris, focusing on risk, love, sex, art, and motherhood.
Gibson, who has been celebrated for her short works, stars as B, a filmmaker reaching a creative crisis. Her husband (Nick Gordon) is not happy that she might miss another family event involving their son, Obie (Obie Gordon). She reaches out to an old friend and child minder, Didi (educator, mother, and activist Diocouda Diaoune), who we later see drinking tea by herself in a Chinese restaurant, by a large cerulean aquarium, watching Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s The Cloud in Her Room as she speaks on the phone with her mother (Aissata Ba). Waiting for a train, Didi meets a Metro nightworker (Habib Dembele) who, like Didi, knows Bambara, the national language of Mali.
In an extraordinary scene, B and Didi are joined for drinks by Kátia (psychoanalytic psychotherapist Kátia Belo Cardoso), Sophie (English poet and teacher Sophie Robinson), Amy (British filmmaker, photographer, and electrician Amy Gwatkin), Laida (Spanish artist and filmmaker Laida Lertxundi), Denna (producer Denna Cartamkhoob), and Pauline (visual and performance artist Pauline Curnier Jardin), who discuss their lives and careers, particularly how they try to balance sexual desire and children with their work. Other issues that are brought up in the film are race, class, and gender.
A mime (American-born English model and actress Lily McMenamy) performs a grotesque routine about women’s bodies. At a bus stop, Didi encounters a performer (London-based multimedia artist Adam Christensen) who shares a deeply personal story with her. Kátia shares the tale of Yemaya, the Yoruba ocean mother goddess.
The sounds of the night range from Elvin Brandhi’s haunting score to recited poetry, including excerpts from American poet and essayist June Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights” and Alice Notley’s “The Descent of Alette” (recorded by the American poet shortly before her death; Gibson was hoping Notley would be able to appear in the film) and a poem by Robinson she reads at a record store. (The film was inspired by the writings of Jordan, Notley, and American novelist and poet Kathy Acker.)
A compelling, deeply affecting feminist fantasia, At Night is gorgeously photographed by Ben Rivers, who captures the dark mystery of a Paris night, from bars and cafés to bland hotel rooms and empty streets. Many scenes are set at bus and train stops and in and on the Metro, as characters spend time in transition that only takes them so far. The film hovers over the melding of fiction and reality, as most of the participants — who are not professional actors — crafted their stories and dialogue with Gibson (Deux soeurs qui ne sont pas soeurs,I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead), based on their actual lives. Editor Liyo Gong masterfully stitches it all together, resulting in a spellbinding cinematic experience.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Frannie (Teri Garr) and Hank (Frederic Forrest) try to hold on to their love in One from the Heart
ONE FROM THE HEART (Francis Ford Coppola, 1982)
Paris Theater
4 West Fifty-Eighth St. at Fifth Ave.
Monday, September 14, 7:00 www.paristheaternyc.com
New York, New York meets La La Land in Francis Ford Coppola’s romantic musical fantasia, One from the Heart. The film, which famously bankrupted the director and his Zoetrope Studios when it was released in 1982, is screening September 14 in the Paris Theater series “Big & Loud,” for the first time ever in 70mm in New York City. Teri Garr, one of the best actresses of the 1970s and 1980s, stars as Frannie, a woman who works at the Paradise Travel agency with her best friend, Maggie (Lainie Kazan). Frannie lives with Hank (Frederic Forrest), a would-be musician who owns a surreal junkyard, called Reality Wrecking, with his best friend, Moe (Harry Dean Stanton). With their dreams drifting further and further out of reach — note how Frannie works at Paradise and Hank at Reality — Frannie and Hank spend the Fourth of July separately; Frannie is intrigued by local piano player Ray (Raúl Juliá), while Hank has the hots for circus girl Leila (Nastassja Kinski). Fireworks are on the way, just not necessarily what was expected. Written by Coppola and Armyan Bernstein, the film is lushly photographed by Vittorio Storaro, who previously worked extensively with Bernardo Bertolucci and won an Oscar for his cinematography on Apocalypse Now. Storaro drenches the screen in oversaturated blues, reds, greens, and pinks, creating a dreamlike neon atmosphere in which scenes sometimes converge in unusual ways.
Frannie (Teri Garr) gets carried away by Ray (Raúl Juliá) in famous Francis Ford Coppola financial disaster
Tom Waits’s lounge-music score features duets with Crystal Gayle that both enhance the mood and propel the plot, which could use a little help. Coppola re-created the Vegas strip at Zoetrope, with no location shooting; production designer Dean Tavoularis and art director Angelo P. Graham transformed Sin City into a dazzlingly fake place, as if existing only in the main characters’ minds. The film cost $26 million to make and took in less than $1 million at the box office, a disaster that puts it firmly in the pantheon with Cleopatra and Heaven’s Gate. But seen four decades later, One from the Heart is not quite the failure it is usually believed to be. The sets are spectacularly over the top, Storaro’s use of color — on Forrest’s face alone — is otherworldly, and Waits’s songs can serve as a good distraction at just the right times. There are still a whole lot of cringeworthy moments that make no sense — let’s not get started on the airport mess — but, as with Heaven’s Gate, it’s not nearly as bad as legend would have it. And some of it is downright delightful. Garr, who died in 2024 at the age of seventy-nine after a long illness that kept her out of public view and led to her retirement from acting in 2011, owns her role from start to finish, whether putting up a window display or being carried naked through the streets. Keep a look-out for cameos by Waits and Rebecca de Mornay, along with Coppola’s parents in an elevator.
“Big & Loud” continues through September 29 with such other films as David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music, William Friedkin’s underrated Sorcerer, and Louis Malle’s crime gem Elevator to the Gallows.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s remake of his own Serpent’s Path is another suspense gem
SERPENT’S PATH (『蛇の道』) (HEBI NO MICHI) (LA VOIE DU SERPENT) (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
September 11-17 www.ifccenter.com
When Kiyoshi Kurosawa was asked by a studio in France to remake one of his earlier films, he opted to revisit his 1998 straight-to-video thriller Serpent’s Path, which was written by Hiroshi Takahashi (Ringu,Sodom the Killer) and starred Show Aikawa and Teruyuki Kagawa. He cowrote the new script with French journalist Aurélien Ferenczi, who passed away in October 2024 at the age of sixty-one. The result is a brutal, gripping white-knuckle shocker that you won’t be able to turn away from, no matter how much you might want to.
Albert Bacheret (Damien Bonnard) is a disheveled, distraught man who is determined to find whoever murdered and dismembered his eight-year-old daughter, Marie (Hélène Caputo). He is helped by Sayoko Mijima (Ko Shibasaki), a calm, composed hospital psychiatrist who is treating Yoshimura (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a Japanese man having trouble adjusting to life in France. Sayoko has also moved from Japan to Paris, leaving behind her partner, Soichiro (Munetaka Aoki).
Albert and Sayoko are not criminal masterminds, but they expertly kidnap Laval (Mathieu Amalric) and chain him to a wall in an abandoned warehouse. Albert accuses Laval of having killed Marie, but Laval adamantly denies he had anything to do with it, claiming he is just an accountant at the Minard Foundation, an institution that we slowly learn more about, none of it good. Deprived of food, drink, and a bathroom, Laval eventually gives up his boss, Pierre Guérin (Grégoire Colin), who Albert and Sayoko decide to capture as well. Like Laval, Pierre is not forthcoming at first, but torture has a way of making people talk, whether it be truth or lies, and the plot thickens, offering more and more surprises along with more and more violence.
Albert Bacheret (Damien Bonnard) and Sayoko Mijima (Ko Shibasaki) hunt for a killer in Serpent’s Path
Throughout the film, Albert, who became estranged from his wife, Lola (Vimala Pons), after the tragic incident, shows a short video of Marie playing the piano and roller skating as he reads a newspaper report that details exactly what happened to her, making Laval, Pierre, and, later, Christian Samy (Slimane Dazi) watch it — but the audience as well, as if inuring us to the atrocity while also feeling Albert’s torment. Kurosawa (Wife of a Spy,Tokyo Sonata) and cinematographer Alex Kavyrchine have created a fascinating dichotomy between the kind of violence we see onscreen, whether a movie in a theater or a video on a smartphone or laptop, and the kind we are not shown but only have to imagine, especially when it involves children. We cringe every time Albert narrates the video but not at what Albert and Sayoko do; in fact, we are rooting for them. As the body count rises, so do humorous shots of the victims, eliciting uncomfortable yet necessary laughter. The original film clocked in at eighty-five minutes; the French remake adds more than twenty minutes, ratcheting up the tension.
Bonnard (Staying Vertical,Les Misérables) is terrific as Albert, ably portraying a laser-focused but perhaps misguided man who has disconnected from society, impulsive and restless, turning to screens to redefine his purpose. His unease is so palpable you just want to give him a giant hug — but maybe not when he’s armed. Actress and singer Shibasaki (One Missed Call,xxxHolic) adds just the right amount of mystery to Sayoko, who might be more than she seems. Meanwhile, the mighty Amalric (Kings and Queen,The Grand Budapest Hotel) once again proves why he’s one of the best actors on the planet.
At one point, when Yoshimura talks to Sayoko about facing the end, she replies, “The end? The end of what? Are you afraid of the end? Isn’t the hardest part when there is no end?”
Or, in other words, be careful what you wish for.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
RADICAL CHIAROSCURO: THE WORK OF DARIUS KHONDJI
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Begins September 4 metrograph.com
Eight years ago, Metrograph held a retrospective of the wide-ranging and diverse work of Iranian-born, Paris-raised cinematographer Darius Khondji, and now they’re bringing him back for “Radical Chiaroscuro,” as he continues to make films that capture the imagination of the public and the industry. The series begins September 4 and includes Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection (“a very different kind of Alien movie,” Khondji explains in a program note), Danny Boyle’s The Beach (“a very sharp movie, and I always felt the story was like a blade that cuts and causes you to bleed: There’s blood on the sand and sharks in the water, and the people themselves behave like sharks.”), Alan Parker’s Evita (“a very visual movie, and Alan Parker is probably one of the most exciting and visual directors I have ever worked with.”), Bong Joon-ho’s Okja (“represents a departure toward a different type of image, a different texture and look: Something very blue and metallic, with lots of compressed cityscapes and a bit of gold in the flesh tones.”), and F. J. Ossang’s The Treasure of the Bitch Islands (“The shoot was madness, and some of us risked our lives a few times, especially while doing a scene on the edge of this huge volcano. Ossang was really more like a rock star than a film director. . . . I shot the film completely inspired by him and his energy, even if I was sometimes terrified.”).
Also on the bill are David Fincher’s Se7en, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty, James Gray’s The Immigrant, and the below films. Khondji will be at Metrograph for Q&As following screenings of Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait on September 19 and Ari Aster’s underappreciated Eddington on September 26 (joined by Aster).
Butcher-landlord Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) has a unique way of taking care of his tenant-customers in Delicatessen
DELICATESSEN (Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1991)
Friday, September 4, 9:35
Monday, September 7, 4:20 metrograph.com
The Metrograph festival kicks off with Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s epic masterpiece, City of Lost Children, and their delicious debut, Delicatessen. In a bizarre, postapocalyptic future, one apartment complex is surviving via its ground-floor butcher shop, where landlord Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) carefully wields his giant cleaver, hiring desperate, lonely men to do odd jobs for him before carving them up and selling their flesh and bones to his hungry customers. His latest potential victim is Louison (Dominique Pinon), a mild-mannered clown struggling to get by. But when Clapet’s shy daughter, Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac), takes a liking to Louison, the butcher has to decide whether someone else should be their next meal. Meanwhile, Aurore Interligator (Silvie Laguna) keeps devising Rube Goldberg-esque ways to kill herself, Marcel Tapioca (Ticky Holgado) tries to prevent Clapet from making mincemeat of his mother-in-law (Edith Kerr), Frog Man (Howard Vernon) has come up with his own curious menu, Clapet gives special treatment to sexpot Mademoiselle Plusse (Karin Viard), and an underground group of Troglodistes are preparing for revolution.
Louison (Dominique Pinon) clowns around in Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Genet’s brilliant audiovisual feast
Inspired by the work of Terry Gilliam, Delicatessen is a brilliant audiovisual feast, with every sound and image orchestrated for maximum absurdity, courtesy of cinematographer Darius Khondji (Seven, Stealing Beauty), longtime Marguerite Duras composer Carlos d’Alessio (India Song, The Children), and art director Miljen Kreka Klakovic (The Pillars of the Earth, The Order). Caro also did the gorgeous production design and makes a cameo as Fox. Several scenes turn into wildly inventive, hysterical musical numbers with a vaudevillian sensibility. Winner of four César Awards, the film is wickedly funny, taking place in a grim, fantastical, surreal vision of the future that is part Road Warrior, part Brazil, part Monty Python, where even methods of surveillance are downright strange. The cast is appropriately weird, none more so than Caro and Jeunet regular Pinon and his familiar, oddball face. The directors went on to collaborate on the stunning sci-fi gem The City of Lost Children (also screening September 4 and 7) before going their separate ways, Jeunet making such films as Alien: Resurrection, A Very Long Engagement, and Amélie and Caro writing and directing Dante 01.
Adam Sandler plays a diamond dealer in danger in Uncut Gems
UNCUT GEMS (Josh Safdie & Benny Safdie, 2018)
Friday, September 11, 10:45
Sunday, September 13, 9:00 metrograph.com a24films.com
“That was manic, pure mania,” the Safdie brothers narrate at the end of a trailer for Uncut Gems, which itself is a magic gem. The film is a furious, unrelenting movie that sucks you into its claustrophobic frenzy and never lets go. Adam Sandler is a force, reaching new heights as Howard Ratner, a Diamond District dealer with a gambling addiction. He’s deep in debt to Arno (Eric Bogosian), who has sent his two goons, Phil (Keith Williams Richards) and Nico (Tommy Kominik), to make sure Howard knows just how much trouble he is in. His wife, Dinah (Idina Menzel), is fed up with him, not in the least because he has an apartment with his mistress, the much younger Julia (Julia Fox), and is not the most reliable father to their children, Eddie (Jonathan Aranbayev, who was discovered on Forty-Seventh St. in front of his parents’ jewelry store), Beni (Jacob Igielski), and Marcel (Noa Fisher).
Howard has a master plan to break free of all his problems by selling a chunk of Ethiopian black opals at an auction, with the help of one of his assistants, Demany (Lakeith Stanfield), who has lured in Boston Celtics center Kevin Garnett (terrific in his acting debut), who is fascinated by the rare, uncut gems, which sparkle with promise. The last half hour of the film is a brilliant, claustrophobic tour-de-force in which everyone onscreen is physically trapped, just like the audience is pinned to their seats, holding on for dear life. The Safdies, whose father worked in the Diamond District, use a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors as well as famous people playing themselves; the cast includes sports-radio legend Mike Francesa as a bookie, Garment District legend Wayne Diamond as a big-time gambler, Judd Hirsch as Howard’s father, Natasha Lyonne and Tilda Swinton as phone voices, and restaurant owner Nino Selimaj, writer Larry “Ratso” Sloman, actor John Amos, the Weeknd, and others as themselves.
Written by the Safdies (Daddy Longlegs, Heaven Knows What) with longtime collaborator Ronald Bronstein, Uncut Gems, which has been in process for ten years, is anchored by a career-redefining performance by Sandler, who previously revealed his significant acting chops in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2002 Punch-Drunk Love and Judd Apatow’s 2009 Funny People. In a performance that will make you forgive him for The Waterboy, Big Daddy, Little Nicky, and Mr. Deeds, among other silly effluvia, Sandler is a whirlwind throughout the film’s 135 minutes, which fly by. Darius Khondji’s camera is practically glued to him, Sandler’s unshaven, gruff face a character unto itself, Howard’s eyes always at least one step ahead of what’s happening in front of him. He’s a dreamer, and although you can’t not root for him, he is far from a likable hero. He is singlehandedly responsible for the dangerous mess he’s in, whether he admits it to himself or not. But he is also a kind of everyman, peering through the looking glass (in this case, the seductive, multicolored opals in the stone), trying to survive in a hectic, frenetic world that can be overwhelming and spin out of control at any moment. You can’t just sit back, relax, and enjoy Uncut Gems; instead, you can’t help but be fully immersed in its nonstop, feverish intensity. “It was completely unlike anything I’ve done. I would never have thought I would photograph one day a movie like this. But it ended up being my favorite work, probably,” Khondji says.
Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva play a married couple facing tragedy in Michael Haneke’s brilliant Amour
Legendary French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant puts an exclamation point on his long, distinguished career with Amour, one of the most beautiful love stories ever told. In his first film in nearly a decade, Trintignant, the star of such classics as Z, My Night at Maud’s, A Man and a Woman, and The Conformist, plays Georges, an octogenarian who is immediately concerned when his wife, Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), suddenly freezes for a few moments, unable to speak, hear, move, or recognize anything. So begins a downward spiral in which Georges takes care of his ailing wife by himself, refusing help from his daughter, Eva (Isabelle Huppert), as he faces the grim situation with grace and dignity. A genuine romance for the ages, Amour is brilliantly written and directed by Michael Haneke, earning the German filmmaker his second Palme d’Or, following 2009’s The White Ribbon. Haneke (Cache, The Piano Teacher) and cinematographer Darius Khondji allow the heartbreaking tale to unfold in long interior shots with very little camera movement, spread across more than two hours.
Despite its length, the film is far from torturous; instead, it is filled with quietly beautiful moments. Trintignant, who was eighty-two when the film was released, is magnificent as Georges, his every physical movement and eye glance rendered with powerful yet gentle emotions, whether he’s preparing food for Anne or trying to catch a bird that has flown into the apartment. It’s an unforgettable performance in an unforgettable film. “I’m actually the one who initially talked to Michael about shooting Amour on digital,” Khondji notes about the film in a Metrograph series note. “I tried to explain to him that for me, Amour was really like a recording, a recording of the lives of these two characters during their final six months together. . . . We could just keep recording with them until the very end.”
Writer Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) waits to mingle with the Lost Generation in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris
In 1979, Woody Allen and master cinematographer Gordon Willis made love to New York City architecture in gorgeous black and white in the stunning opening section of Manhattan set to George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Allen’s Midnight in Paris begins with Allen and cinematographer Darius Khondji getting intimate with the City of Light in lush color, scanning familiar Parisian landmarks to Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love.” In this beautifully shot love letter to Paris, Owen Wilson stars as Gil Pender, a Hollywood hack screenwriter working on his first novel, about a nostalgia dealer. He and his fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams), are vacationing in Paris with her parents, the wealthy, ultraconservative John (Kurt Fuller) and Helen (Mimi Kennedy), who think their daughter can do much better. Gil and Inez bump into their friends Carol (Nina Arianda) and Paul (Michael Sheen), the latter a pedantic know-it-all who begins many an observation with “If I’m not mistaken” and whom Gil can’t stand. Gil is hoping Paris will get his creative juices flowing, and that’s exactly what happens late one evening when he is walking the streets alone at midnight and is invited into an old-fashioned car and taken to what appears to be a throwback party — until he meets F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill), Cole Porter (Yves Heck), Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), and fashion designer and Picasso muse Adriana (Marion Cotillard). Suddenly he feels more at ease in the swinging ’20s than the 2010s, heading out each night to the same spot, hoping to hang out more with the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Picasso (Marcial Di Fonzo), and, most importantly, Adriana.
Nostalgia for the past and the promise of the future collide as Gil searches deep inside himself, trying to discover just what it is that he wants and needs out of life. Combining elements of such previous films as The Purple Rose of Cairo, Alice, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex*, and Everyone Says I Love You with a rather standard Twilight Zone-esque setup and a nod to his mid-’60s Lost Generation joke — in which he hangs out with Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Picasso, and Stein talking about art and literature, with a series of punch lines involving Allen getting punched in the mouth — Midnight in Paris is a charming, if at times overwrought and just plain silly, romantic fantasy that evokes Allen’s own fondness for nostalgia and the past. As more and more famous artists keep showing up, it gets more than a tad ridiculous, although it is also kinda fun. Midnight in Paris, which opened the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, follows four Allen films set in London (Match Point, Scoop, Cassandra’s Dream, and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger), one in Barcelona (Vicky Christina Barcelona), and only one in New York (Whatever Works) as Allen continues to travel the world after experiencing a dwindling audience and scandal back home. Wilson is excellent as the nostalgic writer, playing him with an edgy uncomfortablilty that makes him endearing, and Cotillard is sexy and alluring as the quintessential artistic muse. And in an inspired bit of casting, then–French first lady Carla Bruni plays a tour guide who butts heads with the smarmy Paul when discussing Rodin’s The Thinker.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
The audience can sit on a central wooden platform or move about the space to experience Doug Aitken’s Lightscape (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
DOUG AITKEN: LIGHTSCAPE
The Shed
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 13, pay-what-you-wish (suggested $10) theshed.org www.lightscapeart.org
“All of this will never make sense,” one of the characters says in Doug Aitken’s Lightscape, a seven-screen immersive installation at the Shed that is an audiovisual tone poem about the old and the new, nature and technology, and America itself — where we were, where we are, and where we’re heading. Gorgeously photographed by Chris Hadland and Aitken, it’s beautiful to watch and listen to; it makes you want to stop and look and treasure what you have, what’s around you right now.
A cowboy (Christopher Duke Blassman) hovers on the periphery before riding to a gas station in the desert. Two dancers (Daphne Fernberger and Konkrete) subtly move about in an Amazon factory. A couple (Natasha Lyonne and Bryn Mooser) contemplate their relationship in a high-rise hotel. A man (Nikki Haas) keeps running, more toward something than away. Potentially dangerous animals lurk.
The cast also features Ray Braungart as the diving man, Megan Renee as the city driver, Benjamin Earl as the truck stop drifter, Victoria Martinez as the sleeping young woman, and Beck as the man in the donut shop. The images swirl across the screens, with shots reminiscent of the work of Robert Smithson, Andreas Gursky, Edward Burtynsky, and David Hockney, occasionally offering different angles of the same scene. Music by Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Meredith Monk, Beck, LA LOM, and Aitken with Grant Gershon echoes throughout the room, performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the LA Master Chorale.
Doug Aitken’s Lightscape continues at the Shed through September 13 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Characters rarely speak but when they do, they offer up such bons mots as “One day I’ll slip away,” “It just keeps going and going,” and “You can get lost in the blink of an eye.”
The audience can sit on the platform, facing any direction, or walk around the room; I advise checking out some of the film from behind the screens. It’s on a sixty-five-minute loop, and the abstract narrative has no obvious beginning, middle, and end, so you can enter at any time. As a woman tells us, “It’s all connected.”
A Redondo Beach native based in California and New York City, Aitken has previously presented such shows as Sleepwalkers, a multichannel video starring Donald Sutherland and Tilda Swinton created for MoMA’s sculpture garden and facade, 100 Yrs, which concluded with the destruction of 303 Gallery, New Horizon, involving a gondola and a hot air balloon rising into the night sky, and Station to Station, which took place on a moving transcontinental train.
With Lightscape, previously seen in unique iterations at Disney Hall and the Marciano Art Foundation, Aitken continues his investigation of art’s role in a changing world. The work doesn’t condemn the future, but it questions how we’re getting there, emphasizing how everything is connected but all of it will never make sense, able to slip away in the blink of an eye as it keeps going and going.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
“Stepping into the Unknown” features rare and previously unreleased footage and special live performances
STEPPING INTO THE UNKNOWN: FILMS FROM THE BOB DYLAN CENTER
Paris Theater
4 West Fifty-Eighth St. at Fifth Ave.
Wednesday, September 2, $15-$17, 7:00 paristheaternyc.com bobdylancenter.com
My first Bob Dylan show was in September 1978 at the Nassau Coliseum. At one point relatively early on, I could see that my best friend was looking uncomfortable. “I don’t know any of these songs,” he said. “When is he going to play ‘Tangled Up in Blue’?” I hesitated before telling him, “Um, he just played that.”
I’ve since seen Dylan — with whom I share a birthday — about twenty times, with the Grateful Dead and Tom Petty, at Forest Hills, the Beacon, and the Jones Beach Theater, with such opening acts as Mavis Staples, Patti Smith, and Lucinda Williams. I camped outside overnight to get tickets to the 1992 Bobfest at the Garden. I was at the 2012 Prospect Park concert where he shared a brief memory about having once lived nearby in Brooklyn. “He knows where he is!” I called out.
During the pandemic, I watched Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs of Bob Dylan, his mysterious concert film that had a wild live chat, questioning just about everything we were seeing and hearing. I devoured his 2005 memoir, Chronicles: Volume 1, glorying in the vastly entertaining fictionalization of stories from his life (while understanding that just because he called it Volume 1 didn’t mean there would be a Volume 2). I was impressed by Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown and tried not to let all the factual inaccuracies get in the way of a good movie. I can’t hear “A Hard Rain’s a‐Gonna Fall” without remembering the excitement I felt watching the 1976 Hard Rain film on NBC documenting the Rolling Thunder Revue. Heck, I once let the nails of my thumbs grow ridiculously long because Bob’s were like that on the cover of the 1978 tour book.
And then there are the shows on Dylan’s Never Ending Tour, in which he constantly reinvents songs, sometimes making them all but unrecognizable. He stands back from the stage, wearing a hat or a hoodie, in low lighting so his face is hard to see. He doesn’t allow any video or photography and he rarely speaks to the audience except for announcing his band, which lately has been changing without explanation. At every concert, a handful of the uninitiated leave when they realize he’s not going to play many of his most famous songs, and when he does they sound very different. But we faithful love every twist and turn, following the master’s superb vocal phrasings and precise enunciations emanating from his raspier and raspier voice.
Which brings us to the Bob Dylan Center (BDC), his archive that opened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in May 2022. Why Tulsa? One answer is because it’s Dylan, so why ask. But Dylan himself said, “There’s more vibrations on the coasts, for sure. But I’m from Minnesota and I like the casual hum of the heartland.”
On September 2, the Bob Dylan Archive comes to the Paris Theater for the special program “Stepping into the Unknown: Films from the Bob Dylan Center.” The event, presented by BDC director Steven Jenkins, will feature rare and previously unreleased material and will be followed by a Q&A and a live solo-electric performance by jazz guitarist extraordinaire Bill Frisell, who has recorded several Dylan songs and recently celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday by playing a show at BDC that included tunes by Dylan and Woody Guthrie.
“Stepping into the Unknown” is part of the Paris Theater’s annual “Big & Loud” series, consisting of 70mm screenings and 4K restorations of more than forty classics, from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Elevator to the Gallows to Fight Club and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, with such special guests as Sofia Coppola and Isabella Rossellini.
You can also catch “Stepping into the Unknown” on September 1 at the Nitehawk in Williamsburg, followed by a Q&A with Jenkins and a performance by Steve Wynn from the Dream Syndicate and the Baseball Project, and on September 3 at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville with a Jenkins Q&A and a performance by Traveling Medicine Man with Luke Havranek.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
