Penance (2012) FIlm Comment Selects

Kiyoshi Kurosawa returns to filmmaking after four years with the kick in the ass five part TV drama Penance. The film was run in one block as part of this years Film Comment Selects.

The plot of the film follows the aftermath, some fifteen years after the fact, of the abduction and murder of a ten year old girl. Four of her friends saw the man responsible but the trauma of the event left them unable to say what he looked like. While still children the mother of the slain girl made them promise to either find the killer or perform some form of penance for not preventing the tragedy.

Fifteen years on the girls, now women are haunted in someway by the events and as the mother of the slain girl drifts back into their lives, they are forced to make choices about the men in their lives. The first four parts of the series are four separate but related stories of each of the girls. The final part follows the still grieving mother and dangerous path that she is forced to walk.

Taken as a whole this film is truly a kick in the ass. Its a riveting film that sustains it's almost five hour running time (and trust me no one got up to leave during the marathon screening). Its a story that plays out and builds on each part adding details and shadings as we go. It's the sort of thing that you'll want to see a second or third time when you're done with the first viewing because you're going to pick up things in later parts that affect the earlier ones.

While the film's story holds our attention  the film has two minor problems, first the first girl's story seems to go on forever. It's not bad, but the story of how the girl who lives alone and tries to keep the world away only to find herself falling into a marriage plays like it'sown unconnected movie. In all honesty you could, with minor tweeking have it play as it's own feature film. It's a great piece, but it kind of doesn't add anything to the main thrust relating to the murder 15 years earlier.

The other problem with the film is the plotting in the final part is a bit too neat. I don't want to say too much, since I've decided not to do a full on discussion of the film*, but things tie up too cleanly. What exactly I mean by that I'll leave for you to discover.

Minor flaws aside this is an incredible achievement in filmmaking and story telling.It's a film that anyone who likes shows like The Killing will want to track down. One can hope this gets some sort of US release since this demands to be seen.


*-After seeing the film I was torn between doing a review that was reasonably spoiler free or doing a full on discussion with all the plot twists and details laid out. I opted against the latter for two reasons, first almost none of you will have seen the film series so doing a full on discussion will reveal way too much before you get a chance to see it, thus clouding things when you do.  Secondly there is so much to the film that in order to really to the film justice I'd have to see it again and then tag team with Mondocurry, who was at the screening with me, because there is too much for just one person to discuss.

A purely personal aside- when I say that they ran the film in one super block I mean it. they ran the film straight through with no breaks in four hours and fourty minutes. No intermission, no opening and closing titles (which was promised) 

Sorry Film Society, but four hours and fourty minutes in the seats in the Film Center is too long to ever do again. While I completely understand why you ran it that way, the film has a killer momentum that just carries you  along and its best if you keep going,  the thought of sitting for that length of time in a seat that isn't in the Walter Reade is an unpleasant one.  I loved the film, but the experience made me sell my tickets for the two films that followed since I was too damn sore.

Two from FIlm Comment Selects- 3 and Nights with Theodore

As much as I like the programing of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and particularly their Film Comment Select series, occasionally they miss the mark. Such is the case with two films that are running at this year’s series

3

This is a film about a divorced (or are they just separated?) couple and their teen daughter.

As Dad tries to stay connected his life outside of his marriage implodes, his girlfriend is never there (we never see her), the guys he plays soccer with don’t want him, and he just can’t deal with people.

His wife is tending a sick aunt and falling for one of the relatives of one of the other patients.

Their daughter is too smart for school and has lost interest. She’s more interested in finding a guy and hooking up, even though she’s still attracted to her ex.

As the film goes on they drift around each other for almost two hours kind of connecting, kind of not, before there is a WTF ending that involves a dance number.

What does it mean? I have no idea. The film has no narrative thrust it’s simply a series of loosely connected scenes of the characters not being together. None of the main characters communicate, actually almost no one talks to each other and several key characters are never seen at all. Volumes are unsaid. Much is unexplained.

When the film ended I turned to the person next to me and said, “what did I just see?”

He replied, “I don’t know but it has a good soundtrack.”

Yes it does, it also has some pretty good characters that deserve a better script or even an outline, or even a sentence that has them has them doing more than wandering around aimlessly for two hours. And to be perfectly honest this could have, might have, perhaps, maybe been a good film if they came up with an ending that was not out of left field and undercut anything that had gone on before. (I mean what the hell was that?)


Nights With Theodore

After a brief history of Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, a park in Paris the film shifts to show us the meeting of a man and a woman at a party. They hit it off and leave together. They end up going into the part after hours and spending the night. After that we watch as the couple goes back night after night, making the time together their existence. Its so much their life that Theodore literally can’t breathe when he isn’t there. Things are intercut with documentary footage of the park and of other people’s stories about the place.

Sounds good?

It isn’t. Once the couple spends the first night in the park the film stops dead and just repeats variations on the trips to the park. Okay yes, they do go to the seaside briefly but other than that nothing happens until the end when something happens right as the film ends in order to wake up the audience so they can go home.

Dull doesn’t begin to describe this. Running an hour it feels several times longer than that. Other than Theo becoming psychologically connected to the park there is no change in the characters, and any points, themes ect are lost either in the boredom or because the director proves he is the master of the obvious by telling you what he’s getting at with the commentaries and documentary footage.

Frankly I couldn’t flee into the night any faster than our heroine does at the end.

A true must miss film.

Motorway (2012) Film Comment Selects 2013

The simplest thing to say is go see Motorway when it plays on the big screen at Film Comment Selects next weekend (actually it plays February 23 and 26).

Those of you who are regular readers know that I had watched this film on DVD a few weeks ago for inclusion in our Chinese New Year series. I really didn’t care for it and said so, adding that I would report back after seeing it on the big screen (since it was clear when I saw it this was a big screen movie). I’ve seen it big at the press screening for the series and now all I can say is GO.

The plot of the film has two cops (one of which is the great Anthony Wong) getting involved in the chase for a legendary getaway driver and the robber he breaks out of jail. Years before the getaway driver was responsible for killing Anthony Wong’s partner and putting him in the hospital.

The plot is secondary to the chases. The chases which played just okay on my 42 inch screen played incredibly on the BIG screen at Lincoln Center. There is something about seeing the POV shots of the cars going down the roads with big theater sound that makes you want to curl up and go along for the ride.

What an absolute blast and a half.

Just remeber this isn’t the high octane computer enhanced nonsense of the Fast and Furious films, rather this is just old school racing which for my money is all you need.

If you love great car chases or great action  go see this film on the big screen because this is one of those times where it really makes a difference where you see the film. Trust me the difference is going from a two star film on DVD to a four star film on the big screen.

Go see this BIG

Film Comment Selects 2013 Titles Announced

Here's the llst of titles being shown at Lincoln Center's film Comment Selects. Its a great bunch of films.

Tickets are on sale to Film Society Members Tuesday and the general public Thursday.
All screenings will take place at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 West 65th Street (between Broadway and Amsterdam). Visit www.FilmLinc.com  for additional information.


Films, Descriptions & Schedule

OPENING NIGHT
NEW YORK PREMIERE
SIMON KILLER (2012) 105m
Director: Antonio Campos
Country: U.S.
An American in Paris, only dark. Very dark. Afterschool writer-director Antonio Campos crosses the Atlantic to descend into the unraveling psyche of a charming young sociopath at loose in the City of Lights. On the rebound from a troubling breakup, sketchy and possibly unhinged Simon (Brady Corbet) becomes fixated on prostitute Victoria (Mati Diop)—and from there a chilling, claustrophobic, and unpredictable dance of death unfolds. This ostensible portrait of a serial killer in the making makes for tense, compulsive viewing, in no small part due to Corbet’s fearless performance, while Campos’s evocative location shooting perfectly captures the textures and sleazy ambience of Paris by night. An IFC Films release.
Monday, February 18 at 8:15pm

CLOSING NIGHT
U.S. PREMIERE
THE WE AND THE I (2012) 103m
Director: Michel Gondry
Country: U.S.
Michel Gondry’s delightful and wholly unexpected lo-fi experiment is a mobile kammerspiel set entirely on a crowded bus wending its way through the Bronx as it takes its high-school student passengers home on the last day of school. The film was developed by the unpredictable French director and his ensemble cast in an after-school arts-and-activism workshop—the latest in a series of site-specific open-participation film projects undertaken by Gondry between directing everything from Hollywood blockbusters to intimate personal documentaries. At first glance The We and the I might come off like an experiment in realism or ethnography, but Gondry is much more invested in celebrating the individuality of each member of his young multiethnic cast (all playing themselves) and the way the dynamics within and across its different subgroups and cliques shift and play out in a free-form setting that’s by turns raucously funny, poignantly tender, and gently observant. Moreover any notion that this is an exercise in naturalism are dispelled when you begin to notice how Gondry takes mischievous liberties with time and place (this is the longest bus ride in cinema history, and day turns to night before everybody gets home!). One of the most winning films of the year!
Thursday, February 28 at 8:30pm

A BORROWED LIFE (1994) 167m
Director: Wu Nien-jen
Country: Taiwan
A deeply felt, epic father-and-son drama chronicling the tumultuous life and times of a provincial mining-town family in the 1950s, A Borrowed Life is one of New Taiwanese Cinema’s masterpieces, and listed among Martin Scorsese’s 10 favorite films of the Nineties, yet has nevertheless remained largely unseen. Actor and novelist-turned-writer-director Wu’s 1994 film presents a dual portrait of coal miner Sega, a failed patriarch doomed to stand on the sidelines of his own life, and Wen Jian, his young son who bears witness from his own painful remove. It’s one of Taiwanese cinema’s most clear-eyed explorations of family dynamics—a distinction it shares with Edward Yang’s Yi Yi, which introduced Wu to Western audiences in the role of yet another discontented father figure. Few films have so vividly re-created the sensation of having known another human being for one’s entire life, while simultaneously evoking the suspicion that all along one has loved a stranger. Print courtesy of George Eastman House.
Sunday, February 24 at 2:00pm

U.S. PREMIERE
CALL GIRL (2012) 140m
Director: Mikael Marcimain
Country: Sweden
Based on a true story, and subject of a major controversy in Sweden last year, this inevitably semi-lurid but never exploitative drama is about the corruption of a 14-year-old girl lured into a prostitution ring catering to the political establishment in the 1970s. Partly a hard-knocks coming-of-age story and partly a political thriller, the movie’s action centers on Iris (Sofia Karemyr), who routinely sneaks out of her group foster home, drawn like a moth to the flame by the bright lights of Stockholm at night. She finds a kind of mother figure in the form of Dagmar Glans (Pernilla August), a madam who initiates her latest catch into the life and its perks, and soon what starts out as a boundary-testing adventure becomes an intoxicating thrill—until things quickly get too much for our young heroine. Enter Sandberg (Simon J. Berger), the only honest vice cop on the force, who, against the backdrop of an impending general election, starts to expose the ring and finds that its links go all the way to the top. It’s only a matter of time before these two characters cross paths and start attracting the kind of attention that gets people killed. Having served as an second unit director on Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Marcimain is completely at ease in this Seventies period setting and takes care to underline the irony of politicians appearing on television and delivering campaign speeches extolling the virtues of the government’s progressive policies regarding women’s equality and evolving sexual mores. Based on an actual scandal in which assassinated Prime Minister Olof Palme was implicated and which was brushed under the carpet for many years by the Swedish authorities.
Wednesday, February 20 at 9:00pm
Thursday, February 21 at 3:30pm

US PREMIERE
DORMANT BEAUTY (2012) 115m
Director: Marco Bellocchio
Country: Italy
Isabelle Huppert and Toni Servillo star in Italian master Bellocchio’s compelling, somber ensemble drama in which a characters in three interrelated storylines struggle with the moral impasses and compromises of modern life. The film’s point of departure is a real-life right-to-euthanasia case that became a national controversy in 2008, culminating in a Parliamentary vote. (The film’s title might more precisely be “Sleeping Beauty.”) Against this backdrop Bellocchio attempts to encompass the differing values and outlook of young and old, reactionary and idealistic: that of a senator (Servillo) with a passionately pro-life daughter (Alba Rohrwacher) preparing to cast his vote on the issue; a retired actress and devout Catholic (Huppert) who tends to her own comatose daughter; and a troubled young doctor (Bellocchio’s brother, Pier Giorgio) who tries to help a suicidal methadone addict (Maya Sansa). Bellocchio takes an X-ray of the lingering malaise of late-Berlusconi Italy and its frightening intellectual and psychological confusion—and certainly touches a nerve.
Wednesday, February 20 at 6:30pm
Friday, February 22 at 4:00pm
Sunday, February 24 at 5:15pm

ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE (1973) 114m
Director: James William Guercio
Country: U.S.
Record producer James William Guercio’s first and last film is a visually extravagant, behaviorally loopy story of an Arizona motorcycle cop named “Big” John Wintergreen (Robert Blake) who aspires to be a big-shot Los Angeles detective. Longer on mood and sun-soaked atmosphere than narrative complication, the film revels in the antics of its twitchy, hyped-up cast, a motley crew of character actors which includes Billy Green Bush as Blake’s partner, Mitchell Ryan, and Elisha Cook Jr. Stunningly shot by the legendary Conrad Hall, Electra Glide in Blue features a bravura final shot, a capper to the film’s Easy Rider-in-reverse ending. Print courtesy of Park Circus.
Saturday, February 23 at 9:45pm

FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES (1980) 104m
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Country: Germany
Never available on DVD, Bergman’s rarely screened film investigates the underlying emotional and psychological causes that lead an ordinary German business executive to murder a prostitute. After confessing to the crime, impeccably middle-class Peter (Robert Atzorn) is held in custody, while the police question those closest to him—his wife (who shares her name with Peter’s victim), his psychoanalyst, his mother, his wife’s gay fashion business partner—each of whom attempt to account for Peter's actions while revealing their own hidden emotional agendas and blind spots, which inadvertently combine to make the tragedy inevitable. Stylistically cold and stark, its narrative articulated in a nonlinear fashion that shifts back and forth in time, and clinical in its detachment, this is one of Bergman’s bleakest visions of emotional disconnect and the emptiness of modern European life—but it’s never less than mesmerizing. Print Courtesy of The Swedish Film Archive.
Tuesday, February 19 at 6:30pm

U.S. PREMIERE
GEBO AND THE SHADOW (2012) 95m
Director: Manoel de Oliveira
Countries: France/Portugal
Struggling to keep his family intact and fed, an impoverished government accountant faces a slow-burning crisis in this brooding nighttime kammerspiel starring Michael Lonsdale, Claudia Cardinale, Jeanne Moreau, and Oliveira axioms Leonor Silveira and Ricardo Trêpa. Now 104 and going strong, Portugal’s greatest living director once again explores the interplay of cinema and theater, adapting a 1923 modernist stage play by Raul Brandão. A prodigal son (Trêpa) returns to the bosom of his family with a hidden agenda, taking advantage of a mother (Cardinale) who idealizes him and a father (Lonsdale) who keeps his uneasy half-suspicions to himself.
Monday, February 18 at 6pm
Tuesday, February 19 at 4:30pm

FILM COMMENT DOUBLE FEATURE
HEARTS OF THE WEST (1975) 103m
Director: Howard Zieff
Country: U.S.
Jeff Bridges, Alan Arkin, Blythe Danner, and Andy Griffith star in this affectionate, underrated, often hilarious comedy about a naïve youth’s Tinseltown rite of passage. Set in a poverty row studio grinding out B-Westerns for Depression-era audiences, Howard Zieff’s nimble, laid-back comedy stars Bridges as a would-be novelist who accepts work as a stuntman after a run in with two grifters, while insisting he’s the next Zane Grey, and is taken under the wing of a wise old pro (Andy Griffith) who may not be as benign as imagined. Bridges’s canny performance balances broadness and subtlety, while Griffith wears his character’s sad, threadbare duplicity like a medal rather than a wound, oozing pride instead of blood. One of the highlights of the Seventies Hollywood’s nostalgia trend, Hearts of the West has as much vitality, originality, and craft as any classic from the Thirties and Forties. Print courtesy of BFI Distribution.
Thursday, February 21 at 6:30pm
&
SLITHER (1973) 96m
Director: Howard Zieff
Country: U.S.
In this little-known, rarely screened, not-to-be-missed comedy written by future Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai director W.D. Richter, bemused car thief James Caan, fresh from prison, hits the road to track down his murdered friend’s stash of embezzled cash. After hitching a ride with a fast talking, pistol-packing kook (Sally Kellerman), he teams up with rec-vehicle enthusiast Peter Boyle and wife Louise Lasser and soon the trio find themselves pursued across Northern California by two mysterious black mobile homes. Amidst the deadpan, rambling, low-key comedy and increasingly absurd circumstances (watch out for the Bingo Hall fight sequence), Caan reveals his genius for double-taking comic befuddlement, more than holding his own against the antics of Boyle, Kellerman, Allen Garfield, et al. A glorious piece of Seventies oddball Americana.
Thursday, February 21 at 8:25pm

NEW YORK PREMIERE
HERE COMES THE DEVIL (2012) 97m
Director: Adrían García Bogliano
Country: Mexico
In Adrían García Bogliano’s unnerving, bracingly lo-fi chiller, a Mexican family outing goes bad when two children disappear overnight and return strangely altered by their misadventure. Although this is the sixth feature by unpredictable Argentinean genre specialist Bogliano (Penumbra, Rooms for Tourists), it’s put together in an almost primitive rough-and-ready manner in every respect. Regardless of the unrefined style, make no mistake: the director’s definitely in control of his material, its tale of possession, revenge, and steadily encroaching supernatural malevolence underpinned by a sense of sexual unrest will keep you guessing all the way from the WTF prologue to the WTF kicker. A Magnet Films release.
Friday, February 22 at 10:15pm

U.S. PREMIERE
IN THE FOG (2012) 128m
Director: Sergei Loznitsa
Countries: Ukraine/Germany
This quietly spellbinding follow-up to 2010’s My Joy is a gritty yet deliberately paced behind-enemy-lines Word War II drama. Sushenya, a railway worker suspected of collaboration (having inexplicably been set free by the Germans after a case of attempted sabotage) finds himself marooned deep in the woods with the two Soviet resistance fighters charged with executing him. Too late, Sushenya realizes that he is the bait, and that a trap is closing in on all three of them. A vigorous, masterfully directed, and yet strangely placid vision that both honors the venerable Soviet genre of the partisan war film while refracting it through a perhaps more cynical contemporary lens, in which one cruel irony follows another and the dirty business of war is anything but glorious. A Strand Releasing release.
Sunday, February 24 at 7:45pm
Tuesday, February 26 at 4:00pm

U.S. PREMIERE
LESSON OF THE EVIL (2012) 128m
Director: Takashi Miike
Country: Japan
Japan’s most notorious and unpredictable filmmaker returns to what he knows best in this sensationally violent thriller about a popular and seemingly model teacher who has his own special way of dealing with bullying and overbearing “monster parents.” Mr. Hasumi (heartthrob star Hideaki Ito) works at an elite high school where his adolescent students, on the verge of adulthood, bond, mope and tentatively flirt with each other. Hasumi wins their affection and his colleagues' respect for his smooth way of dealing with the daily problems of school life. But he’s not what he seems—for a start, what’s he doing living in a shack in the woods with two crows for company (like the Norse god Odin, we are told in voiceover)? Slowly it becomes clear that Hasumi is the proverbial teacher from hell, and after blackmailing two teachers who are having affairs with students, he turns to murder to cover his tracks. The action slowly builds for the first hour, and then Miike pulls out all the stops as the mayhem escalates and Harumi becomes a calculating killing machine. But wait: Miike assures you there’s a message in the madness: “The superficiality of the peacefulness within the classroom is a reflection of Japanese society. It’s not a true peace. And in the film, I express what actually happens when the illusion on the surface begins to fall apart.”
Tuesday, February 26 at 8:30pm
Wednesday, February 27 at 9:30pm

MISS LOVELY (2012) 100m
Director: Ashim Ahluwalia
Countries: U.S./India
There’s no business like sleaze business in this tale of low-rent filmmaking in the illicit demimonde of gangster-controlled Bollywood exploitation film production. If you’re looking for Hindi song-and-dance, you’ve come to the wrong neighborhood. The first narrative feature by Ashim Ahluwalia (director of 2005’s call-center documentary John & Jane), takes us deep into the gangland precincts of Bombay’s cutthroat, cut-rate filmmaking scene, Eighties style. Keeping softcore porn and horror films fed with fresh meat under varying degrees of duress, director Vikky shoots writhing young things in titillating sex scenes while humoring the whims of his producer-gangster boss—until his hapless gofer brother Sonu gets the idea to make his own grindhouse effort starring the girl of his dreams, and soon gets in over his head. After an off-kilter, at times delirious first hour, Miss Lovely settles into a pungent story of jealousy, betrayal, and doomed love.
Tuesday, February 19 at 9:00pm
Wednesday, February 20 at 4:00pm

U.S. PREMIERE
MOTORWAY (2012) 89m
Director: Soi Cheang
Country: Hong Kong
In this kinetic fuel-injected thriller produced by Soi Cheang’s mentor, Johnnie To, a secret high-speed-pursuit unit of the Hong Police called the Stealth Riders battle with underworld getaway drivers through the city’s nocturnal maze of streets and highways. Overconfident unit newcomer Cheung (Shawn Yue) arrests notorious getaway driver Sun (Gu Xiaodong) but soon finds he’s been taken for a ride when Sun stages a breakout to free his partner Huang (Li Haitao). The humbled Cheung, in the time-honored sifu-disciple tradition, takes lessons from veteran cop and master driver Lo (Anthony Wong) to gain the skills and knowhow he needs to nail his formidable adversary. State-of-the-art filmmaking and inspired, white-knuckle stuntwork once again prove that the Hong Kong action movie still lives—and need we say fasten your seatbelts? Print courtesy of Media Asia Films.
Saturday, February 23 at 1:00pm
Tuesday, February 26 at 6:30pm

U.S. PREMIERE
NIGHTS WITH THEODORE (2012) 67m
Director: Sébastien Betbeder
Country: France
A romantic connection blossoms between two young Parisians during a succession of dreamlike nocturnal visits to a singular, beguiling park. Sébastien Betbeder’s haunting and delicate film is a decidedly sui generis affair that is truly enchanting. Anna meets Theodore at a party, and together they impulsively climb the fence and enter the nearby Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, an unusual and striking hillside public garden in Paris’s 19th arrondissement (if you’ve ever been there, you’ll never forget it). The two part in the morning but find themselves drawn back the following night, and, falling in love under the park’s spell, embark on nightly explorations of its topographic mysteries, gradually discovering that they are not the only ones drawn to this perhaps magical place. Ingeniously, Betbeder annotates his scenario with archival footage and anecdotes (perhaps invented) relating to the park and its history. A very special film that introduces a writer-director of great promise and originality.
Friday, February 22 at 6:30pm
Thursday, February 28 at 4:45pm

U.S. PREMIERE
PENANCE (2012) 278m
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Country: Japan
After a four-year hiatus, Kiyoshi Kurosawa returns with this five-part made-for-television psychological drama/murder mystery that tests viewer endurance, and truly rewards it. Penance tells the stories of four women who have been shaped by a burden of guilt from 15 years ago, when they witnessed the abduction of a classmate who was later murdered. In the first four chapters, the carefully ordered and widely contrasting lives of the women are disturbed by a crisis that involves each one committing an act of aggression on a male victim. The film’s final segment focuses on the dead girl’s mother, who has turned up like a ghost from the past in all of the preceding sections, still searching for closure—and for the identity of her daughter’s killer. Filmed in the familiar placid-but-uneasy Kurosawa style, Penance marks a return to his roots.
Monday, February 18 at 1pm

NEW YORK PREMIERE
SIGHTSEERS (2012) 89m
Director: Ben Wheatley
Country: U.K.
A country caravan tour spins horribly out of control when a very English couple embark on a romantic getaway that gradually escalates into all-out killing-spree in this blackly funny new outing from rising indie star Ben Wheatley, the man who, in collaboration with co-writer and partner Amy Jump, unleashed Kill List and Down Terrace on the world. Continuing to mine the irrational violence lurking just beneath the surface of unremarkable, everyday Englishness, Wheatley follows the progress of aspiring writer Chris (Steve Oram) and dog-lover Tina (Alice Lowe) as they visit the Keswick Pencil Museum, the Crich National Tramway Museum, and the Lake District’s majestic Ribblehead Viaduct. And you better believe it—Chris is not about to let litterbug tourists, obnoxious teenagers, and booked-up camping sites spoil things for them. Winner of the British Independent Film Award for Best Screenplay, this new thriller recently screened at Cannes, Toronto and Sundance Film Festivals. An IFC Midnight release.
Thursday, February 28 at 6:30pm

U.S. PREMIERE
STEMPLE PASS (2012) 121m
Director: James Benning
Country: U.S.
Investigating another, deeply troubling facet of rugged American individualism, James Benning gives us four landscape shots containing a painstakingly constructed replica of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s cabin, one shot per season. On the soundtrack, Benning himself reads extracts from Kaczynski’s journals from the early 1970s, recording his progress at hunting and gathering, and his connection to the Montana wilderness; a hand-written folded sheet of paper detailing his acts of “monkey wrenching” and first attempts at planting bombs; two notebooks written in numerical code in 1985 and decoded by Benning in 2011; two excepts from Industrial Society and Its Future by "FC" (aka the Unabomber Manifesto) as published in its entirety (35,000 words) in The New York Times and The Washington Post in 1995; and a 2001 interview with Kaczynski by J. Alienus Rychalski, special correspondent for the Blackfoot Valley Dispatch.
Saturday, February 23 at 3:00pm

U.S. PREMIERE
3 (2012) 199m
Director: Pablo Stoll
Country: Uruguay
A low-key and unexpected melancomédie from the co-director of Whisky. A middle-aged dentist with a quietly unraveling life makes repeated and poignantly ineffectual efforts to renew his relationship with his ex-wife and adolescent daughter. The two remain as oblivious to his approaches as they are to one another, caught up in their own burgeoning romantic and sexual entanglements. While setting up a refreshingly eccentric tempo through an episodic construction consisting of very brief scenes, Stoll never undercuts the pathos that gradually begins to emerge. Slight and unassuming, 3 is small but beautiful, full of wry observations and little heartbreaks.
Saturday, February 23 at 5:30pm
Wednesday, February 27 at 4:30pm

WISH YOU WERE HERE (2012) 89m
Director: Kieran Darcy-Smith
Country: Australia
Kieran Darcy-Smith’s feature debut is a calmly devastating exploration of how one misjudged moment in life has the potential to cause everything to fall to pieces. Dave (Joel Edgerton) reluctantly travels to Cambodia with his pregnant wife (co-writer Felicity Price) and her younger sister and new boyfriend, and after a night of partying the boyfriend disappears without a trace. The others are left to return to their lives, each bearing differing degrees of knowledge about what happened. Delivering doses of information bit by bit, the film’s meticulously edited, nonlinear disclosure of events is transfixing—as are the superb performances. An eOne release.
Saturday, February 23 at 7:45pm

U.S. PREMIERE
WHITE EPILEPSY (2013) 68m
Director: Philippe Grandrieux
Country: France
The man behind Sombre, La Vie Nouvelle, and Un Lac returns in person with his newest foray into the realm of the liminal. Derived from an installation piece, White Epilepsy pushes the limits of the visible and sheds all vestiges of narrative to enter a state of total immersion that’s at once disembodied yet deeply physical, metaphysical yet grounded in the primordial reality of the body. In the cinema of consciousness, Grandrieux continues to find ways to make darkness visible and embody mysterious states of becoming.
Friday, February 22 at 8:30pm


Public Screening Schedule

Screening Venue:
The Film Society of Lincoln Center – Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65 Street, between Broadway & Amsterdam

Monday, February 18
1pm Penance (270m)
6pm Gebo and the Shadow (95m)
8:15pm Simon Killer (105m)

Tuesday, February 19
4.30pm Gebo and the Shadow (95m)
6:30pm From the Life of the Marionettes (104m)
9:00pm Miss Lovely (115m)

Wednesday, February 20
4:00pm Miss Lovely (115m)
6:30pm Dormant Beauty (115m)
9:00pm Call Girl (140m)

Thursday, February 21
3:30pm Call Girl (140m)
6:30pm DOUBLE FEATURE: Hearts of the West (103m) & Slither (96m)

Friday, February 22
4:00pm Dormant Beauty (115m)
6:30pm Nights with Theodore (67m)
8:30pm White Epilepsy (68m)
10:15 Here Comes the Devil (97m)

Saturday, February 23
1:00pm Motorway (90m)
3:00pm Stemple Pass (121m)
5:30pm 3 (119m)
7.45pm Wish You Were Here (89m)
9.45pm Electra Glide in Blue (113m)

Sunday, February 24
2:00pm A Borrowed Life (165m)
5.15pm Dormant Beauty (115m)
7:45pm In the Fog (128m)

Monday, February 25
No Film Comment Selects screenings

Tuesday, February 26
4:00pm In the Fog (128m)
6:30pm Motorway (90m)
8.30pm Lesson of the Evil (128m)

Wednesday, February 27
4:30pm 3 (119m)
9:30pm Lesson of the Evil (128m)

Thursday, February 28
4:45pm Nights with Theodore (67m)
6:30pm Sightseers (89m)
8:30pm The We and the I (103m)