NEW YORK — “Yeah, I very much felt like a guinea pig,” said Ang Lee toward the end of his Directors Dialogue discussion with New York Film Festival director Kent Jones at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center amphitheater the day after the world premiere of his latest film, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.” That offhand comment points to the visually experimental nature of his latest film: a psychological drama about the titular PTSD-stricken Iraq War veteran, shot at 120 frames per second and presented in that high frame rate as well as in 3D and 4K.

Continue reading Ang Lee Talks “Leap Of Faith” To High Frame Rates For ‘Billy Lynn,’ The Future Of Digital Cinema & More [NYFF] at The Playlist.

This is a reprint of our review from the 2016 New Directors/New Films festival.

The culprit at the heart of the terrors of Babak Anvari’s debut horror feature “Under The Shadow” is a djinn, a supernatural creature that is more popularly known as a “genie.” But this is hardly the benevolent wish-granting spirit of the famous “Thousand And One Nights” tale of Aladdin and his magic lamp; in fact, there are no wishes made or granted in this film at all.

Continue reading ‘Under The Shadow’ Finds The Balance Between Introspective Terror And Supernatural Intrigue [Review] at The Playlist.

Perhaps it was inevitable that “Brain On Fire” — writer/director Gerard Barrett’s adaptation of Susannah Cahalan’s memoir of her month being hospitalized with the rare autoimmune disease anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis — would lose arguably the most interesting aspect of the book: the fact that, because Cahalan can’t remember anything about her hospitalization, she treats her own life during that month as a journalistic investigation, and, by extension, as an inquiry into her own self.

Continue reading ‘Brain On Fire’ Starring Chloe Grace Moretz Is Disappointingly More Conventional Than Daring [TIFF Review] at The Playlist.

For roughly an hour, “All I See Is You” offers some mild but genuine intrigue as a stylistic exercise. To try to convey the way Gina (Blake Lively), a blind woman who lost her sight in a car accident during her honeymoon in Spain with her husband James (Jason Clarke), sees the world as a result of her physical handicap, director Marc Forster (with his first movie since the troubled but successful “World War Z”) uses a slew of visual and aural devices: anamorphic distortion, extreme blurring of shots, amplified/distorted sounds.

Continue reading Blake Lively Is Blind In ‘All I See Is You’ In Marc Forster’s Thriller [TIFF Review] at The Playlist.

For those who accuse Hong Sang-soo of essentially telling the same kinds of stories in his films, the first half of his latest, “Right Now, Wrong Then,” will look especially like a case of auteurist déjà vu. A male main character who is himself a film director? Check. Awkward attempts at picking up women? Yep. Machismo receiving its comeuppance? Been there, done that. The differences between the Korean director’s films, however, lie in the telling, and if his last film, “Hill of Freedom,” felt a bit too much like amusing formal gimmickry for its own sake, in “Right Now, Wrong Then,” Hong not only finds an intriguing gimmick to play with, but then proceeds to use it for genuinely revealing purposes.

Continue reading Hong Sang-soo Perfects And Subverts His Formula With ‘Right Now, Wrong Then’ [Review] at The Playlist.