Peculiarly, pathos has proven to be a more reliable element in comedies than in dramas. The pitiful man tends to incite a curious form of laughter than he would empathy, especially when his piteousness is welded with a muted strain of conceit. This is particularly a male phenomenon as well. By account of his built-in …
Turkey is a place of complicated ethos and Winter Sleep, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s meandering three-hour work attempts to obliquely capture some of this complexity where his previous films would simply obliterate the vast swathes of Turkey’s predominantly “oriental”, non-secular, less Cannes-friendly identity. With this umpteenth filmic attempt at decorticating the ennui of the westernised, urban Turkish middle class, Ceylan, the poster boy for the part of Turkey that views itself as a precinct of Europe, and a Cannes darling, eventually succeeded in winning the Palme d’Or.
Audience Q&As at a film festival can be a mixed bag. At the World Premiere screening for Tuesday night’s Algren, a man waved at Director Michael Caplan, who recognized the man from a coffee shop earlier in the day. During the Q&A for Red Army, Director Gabe Polsky charmingly asked his grandmother (correction: Babushka), in …
The Chicago Film Festival is sadly not New York, Cannes, Toronto, Telluride or Sundance. It doesn’t take place in a quaint mountain town but in the heart of Streeterville where the film fest has taken over a local AMC multiplex. It doesn’t get world premieres of the biggest auteur debuts or Oscar bait like Inherent …
7. Leviafan (Andrey Zvyagintsev) Andrey Zvyagintsev’s The Return and Elena were mysterious, slow-burning films. His 2014 entry, Leviafan, described by IMDb as “human insecurity in a ‘new country’” should mark a definite return to the Cannes Film Festival. 6. Winter Sleep (Nuri Bilge Ceylan) Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film Once Upon a Time in …