In a rather lengthy profile piece we learnt that fresh from his brilliant Berlinale winner The Blue Trail (read review), Gabriel Mascaro is opening a production co. in his backyard of Recife, Brazil. Alongside Paula Cosenza, Trema will be focusing on “international co-productions, scripted series and auteur-driven cinema with global reach.” Below we have some projects worth keeping tabs on Three Dark Nights which was at the 2024 Venice Gap-Financing Market. João Paulo Miranda Maria who already has I Don’t Even Know Who I Was we now in post, will next be working on a film titled Rafael.… Read the rest

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A seeming departure for Kurosawa Kiyoshi, a filmmaker famously fine-tuned to the anxieties of modernity, The Samurai and the Prisoner is his first jidaigeki, or period drama. Elegant, methodical, and deeply rewarding to the patient, the film’s novelistic sprawl weaves together a series of mystery narratives set within the walls of a castle under siege into an overarching political drama about the real-life daimyo Araki Murashige’s rebellion against the dreaded warlord and conqueror Oda Nobunaga.

Filled with complex plotting, sumptuous period detail, and exhaustively researched depictions of feudal Japanese politics, religion, and warfare, the film also slips across the heightened registers of folklore and genre fiction in its subtle blending of styles. At the center of it all is Motoki Masahiro’s embattled Araki, a complex protagonist in a bristlingly contemporary story of one idealistic leader challenging a ruthless social system.

I spoke with Kurosawa shortly after The Samurai and the Prisoner’s release. Our conversation covered his approach to adapting Yonezawa Honobu’s 2021 novel, the film’s mixture of myth and historical reality, and its contemporary political resonance.

Why make a jidaigeki now? And what drew you to Yonezawa’s novel?

Making a jidaigeki now is mostly a lucky opportunity. It’s hard to make one. They tend to be very costly, and it’s hard to come up with an original script for something period-specific. My producer brought the novel to me and suggested it would make a great film adaptation.

Before I even encountered the novel, however, I was interested in the historical figure of Araki Murashige. He wasn’t a great warlord who took control of the country. He was actually a person who came to a great position of authority, and then discarded his authority and power. That’s why, historically, he’s considered cowardly, a weakling and a traitor. I find that I’m much more interested in figures like him, rather than people who end up conquering the land. I was curious to know: Why did he relinquish his authority? Why did he desert his castle, leaving behind his family and retainers? Historically, that’s the central mystery. So I was pleased to learn that, in the novel, there’s a fictional speculative account of what happened [behind closed doors] during [Oda’s] siege, leading up to [Araki’s] desertion of his castle.

The film positions Araki as rebelling not just against Oda, but the social system of bushido itself. Do you feel this is a uniquely Japanese story?

I like to think that it’s a very universal story! Of course, Araki is rebelling against the values of the bushi in 16th-century Japan, and decides to go his own way. But if we replace the idea of bushido with authority overall, I think that rebelling against authority is universal, no matter what time period or what nation, and continues to be relevant even in contemporary society.

On that note, do you consider Araki, in the way he’s interpreted here, to be an essentially modern protagonist or more a product of his time?

It’s hard to say which is correct. [On the one hand], Araki Murashige is an actual historical figure that existed in the 16th century, so in that sense he’s someone who can’t exist outside of that context. However, this is a film made today. Motoki, the actor portraying him, is a person living in a contemporary time, as am I. So, of course, there are going to be very modern elements that come through in the character’s portrayal and personality.

Creating this character is kind of a continuous act of linking period specificity with contemporary themes. Certainly, the Araki that we see on screen is different from a person we would see in our current moment, whether in the way that he dresses or the situations he finds himself in. But I think the drama that surrounds him, the story that’s told through him, is something that couldn’t exist outside of our contemporary moment. I think that’s what’s exciting about making a jidaigeki film today.

In the film, we’re never totally sure if and when we’re seeing history or mythology. At one point, we’re even tricked into thinking divine intervention has taken place. How consciously did you balance things on this tightrope between reality and myth, and how did it guide choices made in production?

I would say that my intention was to pursue a kind of reality, but because this is a film, there are many different lies and fictions that exist within that reality. For instance, no one [living] knows what 16th-century Japan was really like. I can film on location and use production design to recreate a world that looks as if it may be a speculative version of a 16th-century world, but if you were to move the camera just a meter then you would see signs of the present day, so 16th-century Japan doesn’t exist beyond the confines of the frame. I don’t think I was really cognizant of trying to shoot something as if it were mythological, but, of course, while I say I’m trying to pursue historical realism, it’s still a film, and it’s a kind of realism that can only be established cinematically. So maybe that sense is what makes you think of mythology as well.

You place great emphasis on physical objects and, thematically, the way that our perceptions of those objects imbue them with power. This makes the film’s window into the distant past feel alive, and its politics feel urgently contemporary.

Yes, there are many interesting “things” that exist in the world of The Samurai and the Prisoner. Often, in film, such “things” are real and specific to that period, but represented as props. But, as you mentioned myth earlier, as a filmmaker I think it’s important to be very careful about depicting these objects in such a way that I actually believe they’re real and true for the universe of the film. Whether those “things” become memorable objects for the viewer is something that I can’t guarantee, or can only guarantee for myself. Some viewers may only recognize or remember an actor’s face or the lines that they say, and some may not even notice these various props at all. But, specifically for the objects in this film, they’re very different from things we encounter in the present day. We were very careful to choose and construct objects that felt appropriate for the 16th century. All of those things come together to add proof of the reality of the world we’re building, and at times they help to progress the narrative as well.

Translation by Monika Uchiyama

The post Interview: Kurosawa Kiyoshi on the Universal Resonance of ‘The Samurai and the Prisoner’ appeared first on Slant Magazine.

Ryan Murphy teams with Brit Easton Ellis for an 80s serial-killer adaptation, while Megan Park refreshes modern YA tropes. It was a warm and sunny day. The Shards The first two episodes are now streaming on Hulu and Disney Plus. Subsequent episodes in the 8-episode series will debut every Wednesday at 23:00 EST. First released as an audiobook in 27 chapters between September 2020 and September 2021, Bret Easton Ellis’ The Shards is a fictionalized memoir of the writer’s final year of high school, beginning in September 1981. The first episode begins on the morning that young Bret (Igby Rigney) watches a Saturday matinee of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. (Which, by the way, was released in May 1980. Ahem.) At the screening, Bret is mesmerized…

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The official poster for Laika’s upcoming animated feature, Wildwood is a beauty. Kind of a minimalist collage, with bird-induced verticality to it. Showcasing the lead characters, the inciting incident (stolen baby) and the background location (from Portland, Oregon to the eponymous fantasy kingdom) this key art is doing a lot of work with a fair bit of restraint. Alas, there is no credit block, but then again, given the slight gradient white/grey space, perhaps it is for the best here. The post has a misty-fogginess to its mood and style without laying it on too thick. It is rumoured that Wildwood will be the longest runtime stop-motion feature ever made, and Laika is staying true to the non-A.I. tagline, “From the hands that made Coraline.”…

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Rarely has an animated show felt more like an extension of its creator’s personality than Netflix’s “Alley Cats,” a Ricky Gervais production from top to fuzzy bottom. It’s a disheartening reminder of how far the once-creative star of “The Office” and “Extras” has fallen, becoming almost a parody of himself with his “edgy” humor and boasting about defeating a cancel culture that Netflix clearly never believed existed if one looks at its roster of stand-up specials.

All six of the short (15 minutes or so) episodes of “Alley Cats” follow a nearly identical format as Gervais’ Gus and his cat buddies sit on a couch, riff for a few minutes, wander around town for a loose plot, and end up with piano-accompanied thoughts about life and death in a way that’s aggressively manipulative. Gervais even has the nerve to use the opening piano riffs of Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” more than once, leaning into a show that’s surprisingly sentimental.

More than ever, Gervais as a writer exists only in extremes: He’s either trying to offend with lame attempts at graphic humor or leaning into the kind of manipulative storytelling he honed on “After Life.” He’s made a show with an extended conversation about a cat being fingered by local kids and yet another reminder that Gervais can’t believe in a God that gives children fatal diseases. It’s the only show on TV that addresses both cats watching their owners erotically asphyxiate and what happens after we die.

That description probably makes “Alley Cats” sound more entertaining than it is, even with its undeniable points for originality. The short length of each episode (and the overall season, which can be watched in less time than it takes to see most feature films) allows for “Alley Cats” to be more forgettable than atrocious, and the writers do find a joke here or there that connects. The voice work is relatively strong (including former Gervais collaborators like David Earl, Kerry Godliman, and Tony Way), and the animation has charming simplicity that fits its subject matter: A show about homeless, raunchy cats shouldn’t look too pretty.

What’s ultimately disheartening about “Alley Cats” is how little impact it makes either on the legacy of Ricky Gervais or the current state of streaming animated comedy. Gervais used to be such an important voice in TV comedy (and, for a brief window, was also an interesting filmmaker), but like so many once-edgy artists, he seems content to repeat himself and fall into all the routines his detractors expect. And the saddest truth is that there’s nothing about “Alley Cats” that’s particularly interesting outside of how it reflects the current state of its creator’s career and sense of humor.

Ricky Gervais thrives on attention, whether it’s in being a provocateur on an awards show stage or repeatedly espousing his atheism on podcasts. The problem is that comedy requires interest in something other than yourself, and Gervais has never met anyone funnier or smarter than himself. That ego seeps through so much of “Alley Cats,” a show that should be a casual, funny hang but can’t get out of the shadow of its own creator’s worst instincts.

The tagline for “Alley Cats” is “Nine Lives, Zero Fucks.” Ricky Gervais has certainly had the former as he’s maintained popularity for nearly three decades now. And he’s made the latter his entire personality. As a huge fan of his work with Stephen Merchant, I believe there’s always a chance that this undeniably smart TV creator could find that magic again, but it’s only going to happen if he’s able to leave the predictable comedic alleys that his fans know by heart.

Whole season screened for review. Now on Netflix.

Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe) is “a man of letters,” declares a young man who accosts him on the street one day, eagerly explaining he’s stumbled across a poetry collection Saxberger wrote long ago and believes it to be an overlooked masterpiece. Setting aside the relative merits of Way Past Go, which nobody’s mentioned to Saxberger in decades, the young man has a point; Saxberger now works at the post office, sorting other people’s mail. But the tantalizing possibility that his once-lofty literary ambitions have belatedly earned him a following—not only this slightly snobbish student of the arts (Edmund Donovan) but a society of self-described “enthusiasts”—is enough to awaken strong emotions in Saxberger, causing him to reassess his own merits.

“Late Fame,” opening in theaters this week, is the second narrative feature directed by Kent Jones, a former critic and programmer who also led the New York Film Festival from 2013 to 2019. Featuring a rich and contemplative lead performance from Dafoe—much as Jones’ last feature, “Diane,” foregrounded a revelatory turn from character actress Mary Kay Place—this smart and sensitive follow-up co-stars Greta Lee as Gloria, a middle-aged theater actress who aspires to the fading archetype of screen divas Sally Bowles and Marlene Dietrich but hasn’t yet broken through, instead settling into a far less lucrative role as tragedienne-in-residence for this “Enthusiasm Society.” 

With the rich chemistry between Dafoe and Lee providing his drama with a gravitational core, Jones—working with a carefully nuanced script by Samy Burch (“May December”), who adapted a novella by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler, shifting the setting from 19th-century Vienna to contemporary SoHo—turns “Late Fame” into a delicate, layered examination of the artist’s life, personal fulfillment, and ghosts of our cultural past that continue to possess and compel us in the present. 

Ahead of the film’s release, Jones spoke with RogerEbert.com about the appeal of working within someone else’s sensibility, his own memories of the soul of SoHo, moving away from the auteur theory of criticism that originally drove his engagement with cinema, and much more.  

This interview has been edited and condensed.

You took decades to complete the screenplay for “Diane,” your feature debut. How did you arrive at “Late Fame,” which was written by Samy Burch—herself adapting a novella by Arthur Schnitzler that was written over a century ago—as your next project?

Pam Koffler, [an American film producer] from Killer Films, called me one day and asked if I ever read scripts by other people—and because it was her asking, I didn’t stop to think about it. After I had read the novella, I went ahead and read Samy’s script. We should all be so lucky to get scripts by a writer like Samy, because she writes with a real movie sense. She has a sense of surprise. There’s nothing expected; inevitably, in a lot of scripts you read, there’s the moment you can sense coming early on, and once it arrives everything that’s been interesting about that build-up suddenly falls away to make way for something less interesting. 

There are so many well-trodden paths in movies, some of which are unfortunately rewarded in the reception of the work or treated as if they’re a given. There was nothing like that in Samy’s script. I met with her and liked it even more after I met her, because I liked her. She and I got along really well; now we’re pretty close friends. I’ve reflected recently on how much I liked the idea of working with someone else’s sensibility that’s also at a remove from someone else’s sensibility—which is Arthur Schnitzler. I’m still thinking about that. I really enjoyed that process, but I can’t imagine it happening all the time. We really did connect; Samy also wrote the liner notes for the new Blu-ray of “Diane” that The Film Desk put out. 

Where did your sensibility come into play, given the palimpsest quality that emerges from Samy not only adapting Schnitzler but also translating it, across generations and geographies? It’s a quintessentially New York film, and the Saxberger character would have arrived in SoHo around the same time you did; as a critic-turned-filmmaker, as well as the former director for the New York Film Festival, the story’s dialogues around cultural cachet, artistic currency, and the evolution of the city’s literary scene could have struck a chord for you personally. 

Upon my first read, I knew that I liked “Late Fame.” I probably thought about these ideas; as we got into working together, these were the qualities of it that I moved toward—or at least that I didn’t move away from. The idea of going out, finding someone, and saying to them, “I read your work from 40 years ago, I think you’re a genius, and you never got your proper recognition” is so familiar to me from a particular strand of criticism. 

When I was young, I came out of the auteurist school of thinking—which was all retrospective, and even when it wasn’t, it was. I mean that, if somebody was writing about Ingmar Bergman, they would write, “But Howard Hawks is better, because he was less pretentious about it.” And people actually wrote such things, if you can believe it. That vision of retrospective criticism had started in France, because all of these films had flooded into France after the war, but that was what had attracted me to criticism; the first piece I had published in Film Comment, for instance, was about Olivier Assayas; long before Assayas was recognized in this country, I’d seen “Paris Awakens” and didn’t understand why nobody here knew who he was. He’d been programmed in a few series, but I was very taken with him and became—like many others—invested in really promoting certain filmmakers. 

I recently learned that the critic Tony Rayns had died and was recalling that crazy, buzzing energy between him, Pierre Rissient, Peggy Chaio, Berenice Reynaud, Max Tessier—all these critics focused on European and Asian cinema, some of them on Iranian cinema too. There was a lot of competition between them, but they were all very passionate in that sense. I felt that same passion for Monte Helleman very personally, because the first time I interviewed him was before “Two-Lane Blacktop” was restored and reclaimed by history, and I felt he’d been almost forgotten; that feeling was very familiar to me.

The more we got into “Late Fame,” the more I wanted to deal with poetry on a real level. Samy told me poetry was not her area of expertise, and she’d had a poem in the script that was very good but too close to Schnitzler, we thought. I knew something of the New York School of Poets, [who’d lived and worked in downtown Manhattan in the 1950s and ’60s,] through my friend Pete [Gizzi,] to whom “Late Fame” is dedicated. I’d read a lot of that poetry, and I wanted this film to reflect that, but there’s also the sense of the memory of New York of an earlier moment in time, and the ghost of it, in the story. 

In the first draft, it was the West Village where he wandered, but he was supposed to be an older character at that point, and then, when we started working with Willem, I realized that Willem and I both came to New York around the same time, and we both had that sense. He was a founding member of The Wooster Group, named for Wooster Street in SoHo, along with Richard Foreman. Anthology Film Archives was there, and SoHo was a very different place at the time. Then, suddenly, that was all gone, which was crazy—but the ghost of it is still there.

Physically, it just isn’t that different, you know? I find SoHo very haunting, its arcades and those little buildings, all its cobblestones. That became more of a presence for me in the story, as it all developed.

What brought you first to New York?

I just moved to New York because I wanted to move to New York. Then I did a year at McGill, and then I took a year off; I was just focused on movies. As a matter of fact, Godard came to Montréal, and I saw him give a few of his “Histoire(s) du cinéma” lectures. I met him when I was 17 years old. That was crazy. I took a year off, then I went to NYU because I had this romantic dream of coming down and studying with Nicholas Ray—which of course never would have happened, and he was dead by the time I got there anyway—but that was because they’d all come to New York. 

How did memories of your experiences around that time inform the quasi-vérité way that you chose to film the literary salons, the spaces where The Enthusiasm Society elects to meet and the way those gatherings unfold? 

Those kinds of mythic places that people recall, or that they try to emulate—like Gertrude Stein’s salon in Paris, or the Algonquin Round Table, or the Cedar Bar—I tend to think they happened spontaneously. It was interesting, because I had a friend who lived in an apartment on the Upper West Side, and she started inviting people over to her place on Sundays. And there was a conductor, some musicians, some theater people. I was there, too. At a certain point, after a few weeks, she said, “Everybody, I’d like to make an announcement. It’s always been a dream of mine to have a salon. And I’ve realized that’s what we’re doing now, and I just want to say, ‘Keep coming!’” It all fell apart, almost on contact, the minute that she named it. 

What I wanted to do was to have people gathering in a place that felt out of time. It’s not really a kind of place that exists in New York anymore. The bar itself, all the interiors for the film, were shot in New Jersey, and so that café is very much a Jersey place—but it feels like a New York place from 30 years ago or even more. It was the same with the performance space at the end. It’s almost like Bushwick, but not really; it’s a different, more surreal art community that lives out there. I wanted to create a space that would be ideal for those kinds of gatherings, the kinds of places people wanted to be at, but never really were, and had these ideas of earlier moments when people were. I knew people who had been to the Cedar Bar. Alfred Leslie was a friend of mine, and he knew a lot of people who had been part of the New York poetry scene.

“Late Fame” asks these questions about whether art can reflect authenticity, and that’s this element of Saxberger’s poetry that the younger generation responds to, or at least that they interpret or infer in writing that’s from—as you’re saying—a place and a scene that came before their time. When Saxberger is reading his poetry aloud, there’s a slight edge that led me to think about Dafoe potentially harkening back to his own time as a member of an experimental theatre company. Greta Lee, in a much showier role, is constantly performing for this group of young admirers. Tell me about working with the layers of performance you wanted from these characters.

I had very few conversations with Willem around this, but we were of like minds, basically, and needed to iron out certain scenes and lines of dialogue. When we were shooting, Willem was the guy who just wanted to keep going, to move ahead, because the moment is everything for him. Every actor is different, and sometimes there would be little adjustments I’d ask him to make here and there, but there was never conscious thought about that. It’s more like Ed is confronted with this situation, and he’s lured into it—in a way that we all would be; who wouldn’t respond to that? And there’s a part of him that recognizes the fragility, the borderline craziness, of the situation, and there’s another part of him where the state and the feeling of being young come back to him very suddenly, like muscle memory. When he’s reading the poem, that’s quite different, because he’s not expecting to read it, but then [Gloria] can’t keep it together to read it for him; when he reads the poem, he’s confronted with it in the moment, returning to this piece he wrote as a younger man about a woman that he was in love with. And he just gives it a good reading, I think. 

With Gloria, it’s a little bit different. Greta is playing a character who’s playing a character, quite often, under every circumstance, in every different circumstance, with the sole exception of an awkward moment when he goes to her apartment. She’s someone who’s traveled the toughest road of all the characters, because she is someone who came to New York probably a little bit late and who’s singing a song in this environment, something that would have been the lingua franca of New York 30 years earlier but not so much anymore. She’s giving it her all—but the edginess that you’re talking about is definitely there. It’s present, it’s part of my sensibility, and it’s also just part of the story. I wouldn’t want her to be singing Rodgers and Hammerstein, so it had to be Brecht and Weill.

Her performance of “Surabaya Johnny,” in this downtown cabaret, is one of the scenes that leaps to mind first when I think about “Late Fame.” 

That was one of the rare instances where, if you’re talking about film references, I was thinking a lot about the way that it couldn’t look. I’m an extravagant Fassbinder aficionado, but the way he filmed those musical numbers in “Lola” or “The Marriage of Maria Braun” has such a bare-bones quality.

You spoke earlier about coming out of this auteur-theory school of criticism, embarking on your own path as a filmmaker. “Late Fame” is engaged with all these ideas about what it means to be discovered, to be celebrated, to consider oneself esteemed in the arts. Did the process change your own thinking about what constitutes a successful artistic life?

I would say, on the one hand, you have to just keep going—to keep making films, as many as possible—but also never waste your time on bullshit, because there’s a lot of it. It’s always hard to make independent films—that’s the nature of it, that’s what it is, those are the circumstances. There are a lot of people who think about getting into movies, but they think about it from the inside out; they want to have made something, rather than to be involved in the actual making, which is a completely different experience.

The auteurist part of criticism was a tool for me when I was young; it was getting me into other people’s work and into seeing it along a certain wavelength. I still think of it as valid; it is true in a way that’s what a movie is. But then, on the other hand, what it isn’t is people deciding on a theme and elucidating it over 40 movies. It’s not the theme; it’s the practice, and there are the preoccupations, but that’s for other people to figure out. What it’s really about is not wasting your time on bullshit, because there’s a lot of it out there. Some of it comes with a smile, but there’s no time, and especially not for that.

“Late Fame” is in select theaters August 7, via Magnolia Pictures.

While hunting a twisted serial killer targeting young men, a devout detective must confront a massive conspiracy and his own shattering faith before his personal life implodes.

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An ordinary couple wins a dream weekend getaway with a glamorous celebrity power couple, only for the vacation to spiral into murder, manipulation, and psychological games as the stars’ manicured image completely unravels.

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