Saturday, October 8, 2016

All the Cities of the North (2016) New York Film Festival 2016 Projections

Getting one screening as part of the New York Film Festival's Projection series (Tickets here) ALL THE CITIES OF THE NORTH will either thrill you or bore you to tears. Its a moody art film where not much is said and most of the spoken words are voice overs about other things

The film is nominally about two guys living together in an abandoned resort village They go through their paces while we get voice overs explaining various tangentially related subjects (building arranged as star systems and the like). A third man arrives and the balance is upset

Longish static shots, brooding silence and voice overs make this a 100 minutes of either joy or boredom depending upon where you fall in the cinematic spectrum. The fact that it is screening as part of the Projections sidebar says a great deal about the moodiness and demeanor of the film This is not a film for all audiences  or even most audiences, it's slow obtuse way of doing things making it perfect for a self selecting audience

Personally I like this sort of thing when there is something to hook into, but for me there wasn't anything This was 100 minutes of guys wandering around and by the time it started to get interesting (relatively speaking) I was lost to it to the point that I was only half watching my Festival Scope screener while I doodled in my notebook

If you like arty avant garde stuff you'll eat this up. All other stay away

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