Avengers: Infinity War
A good movie that buckles beneath the weight of its responsibilities to the franchise.
Jafar Panahi
-
Taxi (2015)
—
Director, Screenplay, Producer, Editor, Himself
Glenn Kenny -
Closed Curtain (2014)
—
Director, Screenplay, Himself
Godfrey Cheshire -
This Is Not a Film (2012)
—
Directed by
Roger Ebert -
Crimson Gold (2004)
—
Directed by
Roger Ebert -
The Circle (2001)
—
Directed by
Roger Ebert
* This filmography is not intended to be a comprehensive list of this artist’s work. Instead it reflects the films this person has been involved with that have been reviewed on this site.
New York Film Festival 2017 Preview
A preview of the 55th Annual New York Film Festival with commentary on the state of the fest and the Opening Night film by Richard Linklater, "Last Flag Flying."
A worthy cause: Godfrey Cheshire's book on Iranian Cinema
RogerEbert.com's Godfrey Cheshire is writing a book about Iranian cinema.
Cannes 2017: “In the Fade,” “You Were Never Really Here,” “Directions”
On the latest from Lynne Ramsay and Fatih Akin.
Godfrey Cheshire on Knowing Abbas Kiarostami Through His Films and Friendship
Godfrey Cheshire on his encounters with the late Abbas Kiarostami and the director's films.
A Slice of Life: Abbas Kiarostami 1940-2016
A tribute to the late, great Abbas Kiarostami.
Cannes 2016: "The Handmaiden," "Transfiguration," "American Honey"
Three more films from Cannes 2016, including the latest from Park Chan-wook and Andrea Arnold.
“La Dolce Vita” No More: On The Current State of Foreign-Language Film Distribution
A look at the devolving marketplace in America for foreign language films.
CIFF 2015: "A Very Ordinary Citizen," "Stinking Heaven," "Looking for Grace"
A report on "A Very Ordinary Citizen," "Stinking Heaven" and "Looking for Grace" from CIFF.
NYFF 2015: "The Walk"
A report from NYFF on Robert Zemeckis' "The Walk".
NYFF 2015: “Arabian Nights” & “Les Cowboys”
A dispatch from the New York Film Festival on Arabian Nights and Les Cowboys.
TIFF 2015 Recap: "45 Years," "Son of Saul," "Room," "Spotlight," and more
A recap of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival by the contributors who were there.
TIFF 2015: “The Ardennes,” “Desierto,” “Jafar Panahi’s Taxi,” “Victoria,” “Men & Chicken”
A dispatch on five TIFF 2015 films from all over the world.
The Individual Top Tens of 2014
Lists from our critics and contributors on the best of 2014.
National Society of Film Critics falls for "Amour"
Michael Haneke's "Amour," which won the Palme d'Or last May at Cannes, was voted Saturday the best film of 2012 by the prestigious National Society of Film Critics. The award, coming on the eve of voting for the 2013 Academy Awards, confirms "Amour" as a Best Foreign Film frontrunner. Other NSFC winners will also draw welcome attention.
Introducing the films of Ebertfest 2012
Something nice happened to us while we were preparing the schedule for Ebertfest 2012, which plays April 25-29 at the Virginia Theater (above) in Champaign-Urbana, Ill. We'd invited Patton Oswalt to attend with his "Big Fan. He agreed and went one additional step: "I'd like to personally choose a film to show to the students, and discuss it."
Good people facing impossible questions
In its own way, the success of the Iranian film "A Separation" is as remarkable as the success of "The Artist." Neither one seems made for an American audience. One is silent and black and white. The other is from Iran, a nation not currently in official favor. Both just won Academy Awards nominations, following their victories at the Golden Globes last week. "The Artist" had ten, and "A Separation" was nominated not only for best picture but, in a surprise, for Asghar Farhadi's original screenplay.
Almodovar's limp noodle, Panahi's home movie
This morning, Pedro Almodovar, Spain's biggest big-cheese filmmaker, handed us a limp noodle with "The Skin I Live In," his entry in the Cannes competition. The film stars Antonio Banderas (who began his career in Almodovar's early films) and Elena Anaya, who looks like a cross between Penelope Cruz and Audrey Hepburn. Even a second-best Almodovar film has its delicious moments, but "The Skin I Live In" is flat compared with his best work, including "Broken Embraces," "Volver," and his Oscar winner "All about My Mother."
Typical of Almodovar, the film is a melodramatic farce. Although it's based on the novel "Mygale" ("Tarantula" in English) by Thierry Jonquet, the story is also strongly reminiscent of the 1960 French horror classic "Eyes without a Face" by Georges Franju. In the Franju film, a surgeon kidnaps women in order to graft their faces onto the head of his disfigured daughter. In "The Skin I Live In," a plastic surgeon is engaged in highly experimental work in order to create synthetic skin as a tribute to his dead wife, who was burned to death in a car crash. He subsequently uses the results of his research in service of a unique punishment for his daughter's rapist.
This story has a lot of twists, and the element of surprise is important. I don't want to give away too much, especially since it's due to open in the U.S. in the fall. I haven't read "Mygale," but I understand that the narrative is fragmented into sections that all come together in the end. In this, Almodovar appears to have followed the structure of the book, perhaps too closely. One of the principle weaknesses of "The Skin I Live In" is that the story is scattered in pieces. Characters and subplots are introduced then dropped. They are loosely but not completely tied together in the end.
Pirates of the Riviera
It's another cool and overcast day in Cannes, but one that promises to be dominated by pirates and outlaws in the morning, and kids in the afternoon. The out-of-competition premiere European screening of "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides" was scheduled for the Grand Theatre Lumiere at 8:30 am. This meant that European critics would flock, but Americans like me were freed up to roam elsewhere for our viewing. For my first film I opted to walk down the Croisette to see a pirate of a very different kind in "Porfirio," a Colombian film by Alejandro Landes, in the Quinzaine (Directors Fortnight) section of the festival.
"Porfirio" is a scripted and lightly fictionalized account of the life of a man the Latin American press had dubbed "the air pirate." Actual events reenacted in the film by non-professional actors, including the original central figure in the story, Porfirio Ramirez Aldana. Porfirio made headlines in 2005 for hijacking a plane to Bogota.
What attracted Landes to the case after reading a sensationalized newspaper account was the fact that the hijacker is paralyzed from the waist down, confined to a wheelchair, and was wearing diapers at the time. The director spent five years working with his subject and his family to develop their trust, and only revealed to the man a few days before shooting began that he would play himself.
National Society: The last best critics awards for 2010
Above: Best supporting actress winner Olivia Williams, "The Ghost Writer."
"The Social Network" has swept the major critics' groups honors (following NY and LA) with its best picture award from the National Society of Film Critics. From the NSFC website:
The Society, which is made up of 61 of the country's most prominent movie critics, held its 45th annual awards voting meeting at Sardi's Restaurant in New York City. 46 members voted. Scrolls will be sent to the winners.
BEST PICTURE *1. The Social Network 61 2. Carlos 28 3. Winter's Bone 18
BEST DIRECTOR *1. David Fincher 66 - The Social Network 2. Olivier Assayas 36 - Carlos 3. Roman Polanski 29 - The Ghost Writer
BEST ACTOR *1. Jesse Eisenberg 30 - The Social Network 2. Colin Firth 29 - The King's Speech 2. Edgar Ramirez 29 - Carlos
BEST ACTRESS *1. Giovanna Mezzogiorno 33 - Vincere 2. Annette Bening 28 - The Kids Are All Right 3. Lesley Manville 27 - Another Year
Panahi gets six years; banned from film for 20
David Bordwell sums up the terrible news from the totalitarian state of Iran about the outrageous sentence given to director Jafar Panahi ("The White Balloon," "The Circle," "Offside," etc.) after he was accused of conspiring to make an "anti-regime" film:
From Tehran comes the shocking news that Jafar Panahi, one of the finest of Iranian filmmakers, has been sentenced to six years in prison. The sentence also bans him from filmmaking for twenty years, forbids him to leave the country, and forbids him from giving interviews to the press, foreign or domestic. Panahi's collaborator Muhammad Rasoulof was also sentenced to six years in jail. [...]
The charges may be simply a pretext for silencing a prominent figure critical of current Iranian society. Panahi's films do not circulate legally there, and he is widely believed to be in sympathy with liberal forces. The government has sought to eradicate the most visible of these factions, the Green Party. Even Islamic clerics have been swept up in the crackdown. A parallel case to Panahi's is the attack on Mohammad Taqi Khalaji, a dissident cleric. Last January he was arrested and his computer and papers were seized. He too was incarcerated in Evin prison before being released on bail. Yet he was not formally charged with anything. His personal papers, including his passport, were not returned to him.
You can get some grim satisfaction for knowing that movies still matter in some parts of the world. Films have the power to shock bureaucrats and threaten authoritarian regimes. Instead of being simply "assets" or "content" to be extruded across platforms and shoved through release windows, cinema is in some places taken seriously as political critique.
Iranian director Jafar Pahani begins prison hunger strike (UPDATED)
Jafar Panahi, the Iranian director of "The White Balloon" and "Offside," was supposed to have been on this year's Cannes Film Festival jury, but he was arrested by Iranian authorities in March. His countryman Abbas Kiarostami devoted much of his Cannes press conference to raising worldwide awareness of Pahani's plight. Pahani released a message Tuesday, published online at La Règle du Jeu, declaring that he and fellow political prisoners at Evin prison have begun a hunger strike:
I hereby declare that I have been subject to ill treatment in Evin prison.
On Saturday May 15, 2010, prison guards suddenly entered our cell, n° 56. They took us away, my cell mates and I, made us strip and kept us in the cold for an hour and a half.
UPDATE (05/25/2010): via Salon.com: "Iranian director finds freedom and moral victory." Of course, he's still in Iran...
UPDATE (05/21/2010): via New York Times: "Detained Iranian Director Granted Hearing"
Iranian filmmakers take center stage
May 18 -- Some Cannes traditions never die. In the years I've been coming to the festival, the same music has been playing in the Grand Theatre Lumiere before the early morning press screening. It's always jazz, and it always seems to be the same selection every morning, every year. I've started to imagine that there's some ancient reel-to-reel tape recorder in a distant control booth, and that a guard is assigned to rewind and start the old tape at 8:00 am each day.
Sound or more specifically, language is central to Jean-Luc Godard's "Film Socialism." Roger has commented so thoroughly on that film that I'm not going to add much, except to say that Godard remains one of the grand tricksters of world cinema. With his French dialogue, minimal and cryptic subtitles in so-called "Navajo English" (this in itself seems a tongue-in-cheek fiction on his part), and bits of a few other languages thrown in, he creates a Babel that I believe was made to baffle and intrigue one and all, no matter what your native tongue. It's a kind of rarefied fun to try to decipher, and maddening at the same time. Meanwhile, Godard the magician, like the wizard in "The Wizard of Oz," gets to hide behind his screen, sending out big ideas and big images.
Above: Abbas Kiarostami (AP photo)
That was the fest that was
An image from "The Host": It all depends on how you look at it.
I kinda wish I'd had girish's Toronto. I saw some great stuff -- "Pan's Labyrinth" and "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema" being my favorites, and was also impressed with "Volver," "Shortbus," "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" and a few others. Not bad, but (as I wrote earlier) not as overwhelming as last year. I steered away from most of the big commercial titles (except for "Borat"!) and concentrated on some of the high-profile foreign and "specialty" films, including some that had attracted attention at Cannes. In other words, titles I thought readers of Scanners would be particularly interested in.
Girish, on the other hand, followed his bliss and... well, here's his assessment of his Own Private Toronto: Of the eight TIFFs I’ve attended, I think this year’s was probably the strongest. Unlike last year, I took my laptop with me and fully expected to blog the fest, but it turned out that many of the films I saw were not so casually bloggable. I’m still trying to figure out how to think about many of them.
Of the twenty-five films I saw in Toronto, there were two flat-out masterpieces: Jia Zhang-ke’s Chinese diptych "Still Life"/"Dong"; and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s "Syndromes And A Century" from Thailand. Other favorites: Pedro Costa’s "Colossal Youth" (Portugal); Alain Resnais’s "Coeurs" (France); Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s "Climates" (Turkey); Abderrehmane Sissako’s "Bamako" (Mali); Sophie Fiennes’ "The Pervert’s Guide To Cinema" (UK); Hong Sang-Soo’s "Woman On The Beach" (S. Korea); Bong Joon-Ho’s "The Host" (S. Korea); Jafar Panahi’s "Offside" (Iran); etc. I had most of those on my "want to see" list, but they got bumped by other screenings or time I spent blogging from the fest. I'm hoping I'll be able to catch up with many of these (and I'll have to look up that Mali film in the catalog).
So, out of the "10 days, 352 films, and 27,747 minutes" of the 2006 TIFF, has anybody else had time to digest/recover? How was your Toronto?
Cannes all winners
The Festival International du Film, held annually in Cannes, France, has become the world's most prestigious film festival—the spot on the beach where the newest films from the world's top directors compete for both publicity and awards.
