Tom Grater International Film ReporterMatt Dillon is at Spain’s San Sebastian Film Festival this week for the world premiere of The Great Fellove, his second feature as a director after a 17-year gap since his debut City Of Ghosts.
07.09.2020 - 19:23 / theplaylist.net
There are many kinds of documentaries one might want to see from “I Am Greta,” a Hulu portrait about famous teenage Climate Change activist and eco-warrior Greta Thunberg. One might hope for something akin to “The Inconvenient Truth,” with tons of sobering statistics and easy-to-understand graphs and charts led by the passionate teenager (you won’t find that here).
Tom Grater International Film ReporterMatt Dillon is at Spain’s San Sebastian Film Festival this week for the world premiere of The Great Fellove, his second feature as a director after a 17-year gap since his debut City Of Ghosts.
Greta Thunberg says world leaders that rally behind her message to tackle a global climate crisis would rather hold photo calls at her side than actively reduce environmental destruction. "Nathan (Grossman), the director, really wanted to portray this celebrity culture that we live in and really show how absurd it is," Thunberg told a Toronto Film Festival panel on Saturday.
Bruce Haring pmc-editorial-manager“My gap year from school is over, and it feels so great to finally be back in school again!” Thunberg wrote, showing herself with a backpack.Thunberg is best known for her appeared at a UN climate summit, where she chided the assembled for their inaction and angrily told the delegates “How dare you!”Although she was snubbed by President Trump, he later joked that Thunberg was “a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.”Now, it
Composed of a series of striking tableaux, Gianfranco Rosi’s contemplative documentary, “Notturno,” mines the intergenerational conflict on the borders between Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria, and Lebanon.
Greta Thunberg’s climate protests and transatlantic boat journey feature in the trailer for a forthcoming documentary about her life.
Millie Bobby Brown and Dan Levy star as two of the world’s favourite TV characters but they dressed as who they love to see on screen in a new shoot.
Unfurling an entire life of failed artistic ambitions in the span of a two-hour film, Chaitanya Tamhane’s remarkable sophomore feature “The Disciple” is decidedly leisurely in its approach. Executive produced by Alfonso Cuarón, Tamhane’s film centralizes the world of Hindustani classical music, in which singers perform an improvised raga, modulating their voices depending on the singer’s emotional state.
Jessica Kiang The existential road movie gets an offbeat, elliptical yet peculiarly compelling Transcaucasian makeover in director Hilal Baydarov’s second fiction feature, “In Between Dying.” Set against the striking, often purgatorially stark backdrop of Azerbaijan’s rural landscapes, with their striated mountains, autumn forests, fog-shrouded fields and silvery pebbled lakesides, it’s a film indebted to its influences.
In almost no way does Chloé Zhao‘s quiet, enormous, deep breath of a movie, “Nomadland,” resemble “Blade Runner.” Except there’s this one moment: an outstanding speech in a film as attuned to vast wild silences as to conversation. Fern (Frances McDormand) is talking to her friend and fellow nomad Swankie (played, like many of the other roles by the real person on whom she is based).
“In Between Dying” is a dreamlike story of personal transformation from rising Azerbaijani director Hilal Beydarov. With a fast-growing body of work that blends fiction and documentary, Beydarov is singlehandedly raising the profile of Azerbaijan at film festivals.
Serious discussions on the perpetuated correlation between race and class in Mexico have dominated the country’s collective consciousness over the last few years. Cinema has actively participated in such reckoning, but never before as boldly as in Michel Franco’s “New Order (Nuevo Orden).” Bound to be contentious at home for its brutal depiction of a not-so-implausible and not-so-distant dystopia, the auteur’s latest shocks with blistering purpose.
So somebody somewhere one day had a thought: “What if ‘Die Hard’ except a school shooting?” and not only didn’t they immediately check themselves for other symptoms of lead poisoning but thought, “Yep, that’s a winner” and went on to make the movie.
Mining the well-worn tropes of the crusading journalist, Jing Wang’s “The Best is Yet to Come” is an investigatory look at Beijing in the aftermath of the SARS epidemic.
For a lot of Americans, words like “West Bank,” “Palestine,” and “Israel” exist more as political ideas rather than actual places, denoting a struggle that transcends a particular location. To understand this region and the reasons people live the way they do there (behind walls, passing through checkpoints, in the midst of one’s fiercest enemies) takes a nuanced understanding of history spanning World War II, conflicts in 1948 and 1967, and a series of accords over the last 20+ years.
The indie drama “Topside” opens with a startling image: a five-year-old girl sleeping on the ground with a beam of light shining on her from above. She’s underground living in the tunnels of New York beneath the subway system and she’s awoken by workers with flashlights.
June 1962: Novocherkassk, the USSR. The halcyon days of Stalin’s premiership, where meat rations were plentiful and cigarettes easy to come by, are over.
For a lot of Americans, words like “West Bank,” “Palestine,” and “Israel” exist more as political ideas rather than actual places, denoting a struggle that transcends a particular location. To understand this region and the reasons people live the way they do there (behind walls, passing through checkpoints, in the midst of one’s fiercest enemies) takes a nuanced understanding of history spanning World War II, conflicts in 1948 and 1967, and a series of accords over the last 20+ years.
The human voice is Tilda Swinton‘s, but the directorial voice is all Pedro Almodóvar in the Spanish legend’s half-hour, English-language “The Human Voice.” Freely adapting – read: ruthlessly modernizing and thoroughly Almodovarizing – the play by Jean Cocteau (material the director has circled around before, most evidently in “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and “Law of Desire“), despite its brevity, his new film is deceptively roomy, allowing us to pace through the superbly
It’s a proper shame we’re not allowed physical contact at the moment, because Quentin Dupieux‘s “Mandibles,” among its many other silly pleasures, offers up a modified fist-bump-style handshake that could easily have swept the Venice Film Festival campus as the greeting du jour any other year.
Manori Ravindran International EditorFilmmaker Nathan Grossman has followed Greta Thunberg’s remarkable journey from the earliest stages of her school strike for climate in 2018 to the United Nations Climate Action Summit last September, often operating as a one-man band shooting quietly in the background with fairly basic camera equipment.“As the movement grew and she grew, and the scope of the film grew, I thought to myself, ‘Jesus, were we too reluctant to bring in heavier gear?’” says