Notícias

AIDS is ever present in Christophe Honoré’s 2018 film Sorry Angel. But rather than dictate the choices and emotions of the characters, the disease simply colors their experiences, serving as a filter through which they see the world. In Winter Boy, Honoré approaches grief in a similarly subtle, intriguingly indirect manner. Where many films show grief merely as a crippling hindrance, Winter Boy sees it as an emotional state that constantly rises and recedes, disrupting the flow and morphing the meaning of everyday experience.

Honoré himself plays a soon-to-be-deceased father, Claude, immediately alluding to the personal nature of the film, which is based on his experiences after losing his own father. Winter Boy’s main focus, though, is Claude’s 17-year-old son, Lucas (Paul Kircher), who’s the same age that Honoré was when his father died, and who faces the aftermath of this loss with his mother, Isabelle (Juliette Binoche), and older brother,...

In 2017 many of us went to the movies to try and find what we feared we would lose in real life. I found myself particularly drawn to films led by women and people of color that would reassure me that there was something worth staying alive and fighting for when it seemed the world was on fire. By the third time I found myself sitting down to watch Wonder Woman on the big screen, popcorn and candy in hand, I realized I kept coming back because its powerful message compelled me to return. When Amazon princess Diana explains, “Only love can save this world. So I stay. I fight, and I give,” it was as if the movies were giving me a mission: go out and be the best person you can be, help others, and come back to us when you need to refuel. So, here’s what I...

By Jose Solís

Courtesy of Cinema Guild

Jérôme Reybaud 4 Days in France (which I reviewed here) is a sensual travelogue that follows Pierre (Pascal Cervo) a privileged Parisian man who leaves his lover (Arthur Igual) behind to go on an aimless road trip into the French countryside accompanied only by Grindr and his desire. An evocative, funny, and quite sexy film, 4 Days in France is surprisingly Reybaud’s directorial debut, quite the feat given how secure he is in his choices, and how much he relies on elements - gay sex onscreen, older female characters, poetic dialogues - that would make other filmmakers run for the woods, no pun intended.

As the film opens in New York and select markets in the Us, I spoke to Reybaud about his bold directorial choices, his fascination with online dating, and how he ended up casting a Tony nominated legend.

Jose: The first...

Among the sea of headless torsos and shirtless bathroom selfies that populate the symmetrical grid of gay hook-up app Grindr, one is also likely to find users who deem themselves as more of the romantic kind, who claim in their profiles that they are not interested in “meaningless sex.” In 4 Days in France, writer-director Jérôme Reybaud establishes that almost any connection between humans, whether physically or digitally, can never truly be meaningless. As the film opens we meet Pierre (Pascal Cervo) a boyishly handsome 36-year-old who stands in the darkness, shining a light over the body of his sleeping lover Paul (Arthur Igual). Pierre runs the light from head to toes, as if trying to take all of him in one last time, or perhaps, the first. Soon after Pierre is on the road in a white Alfa Romeo, carrying nothing but a small weekender bag and his phone open to Grindr,...

There’s a critical cliche often lobbed at limited-screen-time players who make big impressions: that they seem to “have their own lives that go on before and after the movie.” Generally speaking, this doesn’t mean anything more than that characters have been written and performed in such a way that they don’t come off as crude ciphers merely delivering exposition or enabling plot pivots, but this really does apply in a meaningful way to Jerome Reybaud’s 4 Days in France. The title is literal: one morning, Pierre (Pascal Cervo) wakes up and, for no apparent reason, leaves the apartment he shares with […]...

The queer French road movie 4 Days In France features three main characters. There’s Pierre (Pascal Cervo), a diminutive, soft-spoken guy in his 40s who’s apparently had enough, though it’s never made clear exactly why he gets into his white Alfa Romeo at the beginning of the film and just starts driving, with no destination in mind. There’s Paul (Arthur Igual), Pierre’s impressively mustachioed live-in boyfriend, who waits around in confusion for 24 hours before renting a cheap Volvo and setting out in pursuit. And then there’s Grindr, the gay networking app, which Pierre employs throughout the film as a means of finding strange men to screw and/or beds for the night, and which Paul uses to monitor Pierre’s ever-shifting location. Grindr’s distinctive notification alert becomes a running aural joke, and the turning point of Paul’s parallel storyline arrives when ...

Writer-director Jérôme Reybaud’s first feature film “4 Days in France” is being billed as a movie about a man who leaves his boyfriend for a road trip odyssey dictated by the mobile gay hook-up app Grindr. Yet nearly all of the scenes in this meandering 141-minute picture involve the protagonist Pierre (Pascal Cervo) being accosted on the road and elsewhere by vibrant and judgmental women. The film begins with a shot of Pierre’s sleeping lover Paul (Arthur Igual, “Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe”) as the light from Pierre’s phone illuminates his body. Pierre is soon out the door and driving.

The Summer Is GoneOne of the greater pleasures of New Directors/New Films, the yearly collaboration in New York between the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Museum of Modern Art, is reveling in the mystery of emerging directors. Of course, many and most festivals have offerings from first (and second and third time) directors, but at none is this explicitly the point. When a minimum of information is offered, save for a brief bio, relinquished is the burden of pre-viewing research and any expectations that may arise from it. More prominent titles have been covered by the Notebook already, but here are highlights from around the globe, from directors not-yet-known, though hopefully for not much longer. The Summer Is Gone echoes the ghosts of Edward Yang by locating drama in a particular moment in history, wedding personal histories to political ones. Set in inner Mongolia, the film throws back to the ever-receding 90s,...

The Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center has today announces their complete lineup for the 46th annual New Directors/New Films (Nd/Nf), running March 15 – 26. Dedicated to the discovery of new works by emerging and dynamic filmmaking talent, this year’s festival will screen 29 features and nine short films. This year’s lineup boasts nine North American premieres, seven U.S. premieres, and two world premieres, with features and shorts from 32 countries across five continents.

The opening, centerpiece, and closing night selections showcase three exciting new voices in American independent cinema that all recently debuted at Sundance: Geremy Jasper’s “Patti Cake$” is the opening night pick, while Eliza Hittman’s “Beach Rats” is the centerpiece selection and Dustin Guy Defa will close the festival with “Person to Person.” Other standouts include “Menashe,” “My Happy Family,” “Quest” and “The Wound.”

Read More: The Sundance Rebel:...

Described by the filmmaker as a "gallery," Sosialismi assembles footage from 40-something films, while also mixing in quotes, songs, and more. The theme that unites the cited material is, as the title might suggest, socialism. Peter von Bagh appropriates the footage to reconstruct a unified, idealist, and even dreamlike vision of socialist / left-wing ideas...or maybe not ideas so much as faith. This reconstruction knows no borders, and transcends place and temporality. Rather than delving into the details of the history/reality of socialism in the 20th century, the film creates a tapestry of socialist belief as found in disparate works from around the world. It is a take on what cinema thinks of / imagines as socialism. Ranging from Dziga Vertov to John Ford to Chaplin to Pasolini, dozens of films and filmmakers take part, if only implicitly, in testifying to a certain way of thinking/believing/living.

Von Bagh...

Doing homage well is a difficult enough task, but creating a new film that harkens back to a certain genre or timeperiod provides a whole new set of issues. While there’s been a onslaught of grindhouse homages in the wake of Rodriguez and Tarantino’s double-feature Grindhouse, giallo has also seen a few entries. Perhaps the best or at least most widely recognized title was the Belgian film Amer, a fever-dream of a movie told in three parts. While Amer nailed the framing, lighting, color and soundtrack that epitomized Italian giallo films, it did so at the expense of story, featuring a fractured, blurred narrative. It’s a case of style over substance and while the style is certainly impressive, the substance is certainly missed. Last Screening is another film that wears its giallo influences on its proverbial sleeve, but it does so in service of the story being told. Sylvain...

Derniere Seance (Last Screening)

Directed by Laurent Achard

Screenplay by Laurent Achard and Frédérique Moreau

2011, France

If Last Screening’s greatest flaw is the silliness of its premise, it’s greatest success is director Laurent Achard unflaggingly earnest commitment to that premise. It won’t be spoiled in this review, but it may have something to do with a series of one-eared female corpses. And maybe with cinema. And it definitely has something to do with the troubled, introvert of a cinema projectionist who is responsible for said corpses.

Sylvain (Pascal Cervo) manages a classic Parisian cinema and screens the French Can Can daily to anywhere between one and three patrons. Naturally, it’s not a profitable venture and the owner arranges for the cinema to be sold and reconfigured. Sylvain proves more than just resistant to the idea–he is in complete denial and continues to arrange screenings well after the scheduled close.