Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Getting an authoritative grip on a conceptual artist as elusive and unsusceptible to classification as David Hammons is no mean feat. He has been a willful outsider, defensively attuned to an art world that has, until recently, systematically excluded Blacks and others of color, and remains determined to disrupt and, in some ways, to frustrate the art establishment as he cajoles it into changing. Yet in their deft and moving documentary The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art and Times of David Hammons, which had its American theatrical debut at the Film Forum on May 5, Harold Crooks and Judd Tully essay Hammons’ iconoclastic critique with admirable clarity and due appreciation, plumbing the art, finding the man, and situating him firmly in art history without ever succumbing to hagiography or expository dullness.
Film & Television
Art and Film: Kelly Reichardt’s commune of angst
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Kelly Reichardt excels like no other filmmaker at conveying the subtle ravages of time on earth. She brilliantly tackled the epic theme of America’s western expansion in the revisionist westerns Meek’s Cutoff and First Cow and eco-terrorism in Night Moves. But it is the day-to-day yield and subtext of history and politics that most concern her: a young housewife facing down ennui in River of Grass; a friendship deteriorating with age in Old Joy; a young woman seeking a better life unprepared in Wendy and Lucy; women extracting meaning from desolation in the post-feminist Certain Women. For Reichardt, even subdued lives are fully lived and merit sympathetic attention. They include, she insists in Showing Up, the quietly precarious existences of artists. Wise, nuanced, and penetrating, the film is also stealthily hilarious.
Art and Film: The 2022 notables
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / This is a little late, but just in time for the Oscars. Filmmaking in the time of Covid is looking healthy, so no epochal disquisition is needed – just the usual caveat that these picks are inevitably subjective and, in some cases, perhaps eccentric.
When Irish eyes aren’t smiling
Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin is darkly comic — invariably mordant and occasionally hilarious. But the situational modesty and outward sardonicism are subterfuge. This is a stealthily grand film with weighty political and existential themes, framing McDonagh as contemporary cinema’s wisest bad-ass.
Emily, the struggling artist and the criminal
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In writer-director John Patton Ford’s grippingly lean and gritty thriller Emily the Criminal, the audience is immediately thrust in scene with Emily Benetto, who works for a caterer without benefits. Absent exposition, she simply seems petulant and put-upon, not unlike many young adults trying to make their way in an increasingly forbidding world. Forced to quit art school, Emily is saddled with $70,000 in debt and no marketable credentials. But thanks to the dark nuance of Aubrey Plaza’s terrific performance and Ford’s crafty screenplay and cold-eyed direction, it remains clear that something ugly and ingrained lurks behind Emily’s immediate circumstances. Despite early appearances, this film is not a didactic contemplation of the false seductions of the middle class in twenty-first-century America, and only incidentally concerns female empowerment. It is centrally about character and how immutable it is or isn’t.
Art and Film: A Belated 2021 Top Ten
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / When an arthouse revisionist western directed by an Australian woman and starring an Englishman dominates the Oscar nominations, it’s safe to say that the pandemic has not severely compromised the quality or vision of cinema, even if it has skewed the structure of the business towards streaming platforms and away from brick-and-mortar theaters.With the usual caveats about inevitable bias and subjectivity, here, in alphabetical order, is a defensible Top Ten for 2021.
Art and Film: The low spark of High Art
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / It�s a rare movie that finds the sweet spot between storyline cohesiveness and minimal exposition as well as great tone. Lisa Cholodenko�s plangent late-nineties gem High Art � her feature debut, now available on Criterion � is one such movie.
Wartime and time warps in Obayashi’s Labyrinth of Cinema
Contributed by Paul DAgostino / Nobuhiko Obayashis film Labyrinth of Cinema is, as billed, broadly, profoundly, and provocatively about war. He is best known for his epic War Trilogy. At the same time, the storied Japanese filmmakers final film completed not long before he passed away at the age of 82 in April 2020 is also a visually dazzling, pan-historical account of the ways and reasons for which films are made, viewed, critiqued, and recalled.
Art and TV: A misanthrope’s moment
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / If the Cold War suppressed heroism to the point where anti-heroes came to rule culture, the post-Cold War era may have engendered such disappointment in humankind as to elevate the thoughtful misanthrope to icon.
Art and Film: Casimir Nozkowski’s Brooklyn
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The Outside Story, writer-director Casimir Nozkowskis agreeable feature debut, shapes up as a fairly typical indie shaggy-dog story: a mildly dissolute creative type finds himself in a mildly humorous jam that resolves itself over the course of the film in a mildly heartwarming way, preferably […]