
Victoria
The best thing about Victoria isn’t actually its technical prowess—it’s the lead performance from the mesmerizing Laia Costa as the title character.
The best thing about Victoria isn’t actually its technical prowess—it’s the lead performance from the mesmerizing Laia Costa as the title character.
As a piece of social satire, Knock Knock winds up being not just toothless but anticlimactic.
"The Ballad of Narayama" is a Japanese film of great beauty and elegant artifice, telling a story of startling cruelty. What a space it opens…
Patrice Leconte's "Monsieur Hire" is a tragedy about loneliness and erotomania, told about two solitary people who have nothing else in common. It involves a…
A NYFF report on Don Cheadle's directorial debut, "Miles Ahead."
A NYFF report on "Carol," "The Assassin" and "Right Now, Wrong Then."
An interview with Joshua Abrams, composer of "Life Itself."
A report about Chaz Ebert's upcoming appearance on OWN's "Where Are They Now?" program.
A FFC review of "The Look of Silence."
A review of "A Girl at My Door".
On the set of "The Knick"; Swedish cinema gives women a bigger role; When Amazon dies; Stories of "Star Wars" extras; Chatting with Abi Morgan.
Eight films to check out before Guillermo Del Toro's "Crimson Peak" comes out Friday.
Feel-bad docu-essay "We Come As Friends" is a deliberately vague portrait of Sudan as a country beset by self-interested neocolonialist outsiders. Fitfully narrated by director Hubert Sauper ("Darwin's Nightmare"), "We Come As Friends" adopts an apolitical, and largely anecdotal approach to its presentation of Sudan and its inhabitants. Interview subjects are almost never introduced by name since Sauper's footage is meant to be accepted on an implicit, symbolic level. This approach is infuriating since it constantly asks viewers to understand scenes in a general way. Viewers are not privileged with a more thoughtful, specific view of the institutionalized problems that Sudanese natives face because Sauper's not interested in making that kind of film. Instead, he provokes viewers by juxtaposing quasi-archetypal stories and loaded footage that are, as they're arranged in the film, only as meaningful as you want them to be.
"We Come As Friends" begins and ends with an unidentified speaker rhetorically asking "Did you know that the moon belongs to the white man?" That pseudo-naive question makes a little more sense at the beginning of Sauper's film since it is the punchline to a story about the voracious nature of white countries who, during the Space Race, were vain enough to try to claim outer space for their respective countries. Sauper repeatedly sympathizes with this kind of mythical revisionist history by over-extending, though never cogently developing, its logic.
We are told that in Sudan, rich foreigners assimilate everything. People sing songs about and in the voice of French, British, American, and Chinese celebrities, politicians and philanthropists. Religion is perceived in binary form: there are only Christians and Muslims, and nary a Jew, Sikh, Buddhist, atheist, or anything else in between. Children are punished if they do not wear Western uniforms. They are taught to sing about the value of "cooperating and development." And outsiders are called "aliens," as in the scene where Sauper asks a trio of indifferent Chinese engineers "which planet did you come from." One engineer shoots back a blank stare that speaks volumes, but doesn't necessarily confirm Sauper's simplistic adopted perspective.
At this point, I must point out that I am sympathetic to the pessimistic but pragmatic ideas that are forcefully presented throughout "We Come As Friends." I also think that Sauper's presentation demands a critical response. Viewers—even ones who are part of the choir Sauper is preaching to—should not trust "We Come As Friends" because it constantly expects its audience to understand conflicts and interview segments without any contextualizing information. What does it matter if one engineer tells viewers to "be careful of cultural differences" while a clip from "Star Wars: A New Hope" plays on a laptop right next to Sauper's subject? This clip means nothing beyond its implicit, over-burdened message.
This message came to me from a reader named Peter Svensland. He and a fr...
A review of Steven Spielberg's "Bridge of Spies" from its NYFF premiere last night.
A review of season two of FX's "Fargo."