1. Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa)
2. Transit (Christian Petzold)
3. It Must Be Heaven (Elia Suleiman)
4. Flannery (Elizabeth Coffman and Mark Bosco)
5. Foxtrot (Samuel Maoz)
6. Conrad Veidt—My Life (Mark Rappaport)
7. Where’s My Roy Cohn? (Matt Tyrnauer)
8. If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins)
9. Ad Astra (James Gray)
10. Souvenir (Joanna Hogg)
Read more15th Annual Festival of Illinois Film and Video
2 Oxford Companion Entries (Albert Brooks and découpage)
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her
20th International Tournee of Animation
29th Chicago International Film Festival: Mired in the Present
A Bankable Feast [BABETTE’S FEAST]
A Bluffer’s Guide to Bela Tarr
A Breakthrough And A Throwback
A Christmas Commodity: SCROOGED
A Couple of Kooks [MY BEST FIEND]
A Cut Above [HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER]
A Depth in the Family [A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE]
A Dialogue about Abbas Kiarostami’s SHIRIN
A Different Kind of Swinger [GEORGE OF THE JUNGLE]
A Different Kind of Thrill (Richet’s ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13)
A Few Eruptions in the House of Lava
A Few Things Well [A LITTLE STIFF]
A Force Unto Himself [on Hou Hsiao-hsien]
À la recherche de Luc Moullet: 25 Propositions
A Little Transcendence Goes a Long Way
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master
A Place in the Pantheon: Films by Bela Tarr
A Prophet in His Own Country [Jon Jost retrospective]
A Quirky Cowboy Classic [on THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA]
A Radical Idea [HALF NELSON & THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED]
A Road Not Taken (The Films of Harun Farocki)
A Russian in Hollywood [SHY PEOPLE]
A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love
A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries
A Stylist Hits His Stride (ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND)
A Time to Lie (CROSS MY HEART)
A Time to Live and a Time to Die
Here are ten of the 40-odd short pieces I wrote for Chris Fujiwara’s excellent, 800-page volume Defining Moments in Movies (London: Cassell, 2007). — J.R.
Scene
1996 / Irma Vep – Maggie Cheung stealing Arsinée Khanjian’s jewels
France (Daica Films). Director: Olivier Assayas. Cast: Maggie Cheung, Arsinée Khanjian.
Why It’s Key: If a movie can be said to have an unconscious, here’s where this one’s secret is buried.
Costumed in a tight black latex suit, Maggie Cheung, playing herself, is in Paris to play the title role in a remake of Louis Feuillade’s 1916 crime serial, Les vampires. She also seems to be the object of the sexual fantasies of everyone working on the film —- most noticeably the director (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and the woman handling costumes (Nathalie Richard).
After what seems like a restless, sleepless evening in her hotel room, Cheung goes out into the hallway, still in her suit, stealthily climbs the stairs, and, after spying a maid delivering a tray to a room and leaving, sneaks into the room herself. Still hidden, she sees a nude woman (Khanjian, wife and lead actress of Atom Egoyan) describing her lonely boredom on the phone to someone named Fred, then glimpses the woman’s jewels in another room, which she promptly steals. Read more