In 'The Loneliest Planet,' a pervasive dread, or maybe that's just 'relationships':
Julie Loktev's new film, The Loneliest Planet, follows a couple on a vacation through the Caucasus, where tension builds in the forest and in their own minds.
Bio: Akiva Gottlieb writes about film for The Nation and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Without much dialogue, the film quickly introduces Alex and Nica (Gael Garcia Bernal and Hani Furstenberg), an attractive couple in their early 30s on a pre-wedding backpacking trip in the Caucausus Mountains of formerly Soviet Georgia. The couple hires a local guide, Dato (Bidzina Gujabidze), to lead them on a multi-day hiking trip, and with minimal fuss they set off into the wild. The Westerners need not have read The Sheltering Sky to know that this story doesn’t usually end in rapture and enlightenment, but that doesn’t make the developments any less unpredictable. More
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on October 26th, 2012 6:00pmIn the coming months, you can savor celluloid retrospectives of low-budget pioneer Edgar G. Ulmer, French anthropologist Jean Rouch, the documentaries of Shohei Imamura, and most excitingly, the late, great Ben Gazzara. But first, Anthology spotlights the work of two burgeoning world cinema titans, both devoted to analog methods but not gauzy nostalgia. Though both hover in the orbit of the avant-garde, both Ben Rivers the Brit and Denis Côté the French-Canadian keep their work approachable by establishing an ethic of radical simplicity. More
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on October 12th, 2012 12:28pmDavid France, director of the simple and powerful AIDS activism documentary How To Survive a Plague, out now, considers it important that news of the H.I.V. virus first appeared in medical journals just months before the first generation of camcorders became available, immediately broadening the definition of “mass media.” The bulky camcorders enabled a multipurpose agenda: establishing accountability in a leaderless mass movement; documenting the struggle for the sake of posterity, so that future generations could not say that no one fought; and, of course, memorialization. More
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on September 21st, 2012 2:49pmHe’s weaving his way to a desolate patch of upstate New York to sign divorce papers for his silent, seething, estranged wife (Margarita Levieva), initially unaware that doing so means forfeiting custody of his six-year-old daughter, Ellen (first-time performer Shaylena Mandigo). Joby hasn’t seen the girl in a while, and can’t convince himself that he deserves parental authority, but he recognizes an emotional crossroads when he sees one. Joby negotiates an afternoon playdate with his child, and For Ellen observes the possibility of a single visit awakening a sense of duty. More
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on September 6th, 2012 11:23amGreenfield chose as subjects David and Jackie Siegel, he the billionaire CEO of the Orlando-based timeshare empire Westgate Resorts, she his wife and would-be queen of "Versailles," their unfinished 90,000-square-foot mega-mansion. Even given such details, Greenfield had no way of knowing that they would, over the course of filming, lose their bearings and a significant chunk of their finances in the 2008 economic collapse. More
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on July 19th, 2012 8:40amIf you were one of the lucky estimated 750,000 visitors who made it to the event—and its central exhibit in the atrium, in which Abramović sat immobile in a chair for seven and a half hours each day, silently gazing into the eyes of audience members who waited in long lines to take turns sitting across from her—you understand that her project of pure-presence-and-nothing-else performance art is built to resist the disembodiment of adaptation. Matthew Akers’ film, whose two-week Film Forum engagement comes in advance of its airing on HBO, is necessarily a watered-down simulacrum of the real thing. More
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on June 13th, 2012 12:49pmEssential big-screen viewing for CinemaScope fetishists, Otto Preminger's 1958 film Bonjour Tristesse, screening this week at Film Forum, is one of late-classic Hollywood's most eloquent triumphs of mise-en-scène over source material. It's an experience that will make you wish you had the time, or the wherewithal, or the proper seaside location in which to be so properly and officially Sad. More
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on April 27th, 2012 9:51amThat the films of 51-year-old South Korean writer/director Hong Sang-Soo have been a welcome mainstay on the international festival circuit over the past decade and a half should come as no surprise; his melancholic but sharply rendered social comedies about male narcissism are often set in the milieu of filmmakers and film critics. What is surprising is that these conceptually interlocking chronicles of young adults fumbling through states of drunken idiocy and false clarity so rarely gain U.S. distribution. As a stopgap remedy, Hong is being honored with a five-film retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image, in conjunction with the Korea Society, starting this weekend. More
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on March 16th, 2012 1:56pm
