A slow-drip joke on the contemporary reality of the art heist genre, where all the exciting hallmarks—Nazis, slick art dealers, domineering bosses, foreign buyers, sexy young interns—are nullified by neoliberal realities: nobody has sex for fear of sexual harassment charges and the stolen painting is bound up, for most of the film, in a legal limbo. That the film ends up quietly extolling art’s virtues despite it being bound to capital is more than a little moving.
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A Complete Unknown 2024
A fascinating proposition: what if you make a film on one of the most protean artists of the 20th century with one the most anonymous non-stylists in all of Hollywood? It's like a film on Godard made by Jacques Deray or a Malick biopic by Jay Roach.
Certainly this is not a Bob Dylan film made by Todd Haynes. While the comparisons to the I'm Not There are going to happen anyways, they are instructive. As that is one artist…
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Ray Meets Helen 2017
This is about as strange as independent American dramas are going to get. Rudolph’s sense of cutting, image-making, and transitions are so head-and-shoulders above other people working in a similar budget range and his romantic fatalism and off-kilter dialogue was well preserved over the years. Two things, however. One, Rudolph certainly derived a lot of power from celluloid and as much as he tries to pervert the digital flatness (especially in those transitions and establishing shots) a lot of his…
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The Lorry 1977
Pasolini wrote that a screenplay is a structure that wants to be another structure. Here the attention is on neither form (the white pages filled with words nor the black screen filled with images) but on the “wants to be” and the way this wanting is now overrun by the strictures of capital. And the truck becomes a blue figuration of this: the blue emblem of the circulation of commodities (trucks deliver goods: food, parts, even film prints or production…
