Author: Elizabeth

Swiss-born filmmaker Marc Forster has been making movies in Hollywood ever since his second film, death row drama Monster’s Ball, broke through, garnering Halle Berry an Oscar in 2002. Since then, he’s worked with everyone from Kate Winslet (Finding Neverland), Brad Pitt (World War Z) to Will Ferrell (Stranger Than Fiction); as well as becoming the youngest ever filmmaker to direct a James Bond movie, with 2008’s Quantum of Solace.

Forster now returns with A Man Called Otto, an American remake [and adaptation of the Fredrik Backman novel) of the life-affirming 2015 Swedish film A Man Called Ove directed by Hannes Holm, which was nominated for two Oscars. In it, Tom Hanks plays Otto, a curmudgeonly widower who seemingly has nothing left to live for. Until, that is, new neighbours and a stray cat come into his life…

How did you

This article appeared in the December 1, 2022 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

The Eternal Daughter (Joanna Hogg, 2022)

The most fearsome hauntings tend to come from those whom we know intimately. Suspended in spectral purgatory, the spirits of our forebears invoke a shared yet inaccessible past that destabilizes our present. In The Eternal Daughter, Joanna Hogg teases out the inherently gothic nature of the intergenerational dynamic, contriving a ghost story out of that most primordial and murky of close unions—that of a mother and daughter. Two women who are also one.

Riffing on her previous two features, The Souvenir (2019) and The Souvenir Part II (2021), both auto-fictional portraits of the artist as a young woman, Hogg once again summons her heroine-cum-surrogate, Julie Hart. But gone is the fledgling

This article appeared in the December 1, 2022 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

What’s Up Connection (Masashi Yamamoto, 1990)

The hop-skip nomadism of Masashi Yamamoto’s early narrative work can be said to be defined by three salient tendencies: the late-’70s jishu eiga, or “self-made films” movement, which countered the Japanese studio system with a rush of 8mm and 16mm vérités; home-seeking, an acute desire to build or find one’s place in the world; and political anarchism, with its passion for flagrant resistance. All three strands are plaited together in Yamamoto’s jishu contributions, Prelude to the Murder of a Prison Guard (1979), about a man magpieing objects in order to construct his own miniature city, and Carnival in the Night (1981), in which a fresh divorcée traipses around Tokyo’s punk underbelly, feverishly

Changing technologies have always made cinema a fluid art form, and in many ways, there is never a concrete version of a film. If you watch a nitrate print of any movie made prior to 1951, it becomes clear that all versions of the movie made afterward (whether standard acetate 35mm prints, television broadcasts, DVDs, Blu-rays, DCPs, or streaming) will be enormously different from the original, because each material records and conveys light, color, and movement differently. The goal, then, when speaking about film restoration, should be transparency and education, rather than re-creation. In other words, explaining the labor behind the process—what work was done, who did it, and the materials that were used.

Below are nine restorations (and two new 35mm prints) that I was l able to see in 2022. These represent what I consider to be some of the best work done this year, in terms of

John Sheedy’s new short film Tarneit is set in the growing suburb of Tarneit, west of Melbourne. It follows 15-year-old Tyrone (Calvin Black) who lives with his distressed mother (Nicci Wilks) and pick-of-the-month boyfriend Pommy (Nicolas Coghlan), a lowlife opportunist who despises immigrants and homosexuals. Tyrone’s best friend Clinton (Antanhe Zewdu), a refugee, lives with his absentee mother and older brother Shaker (John Mashar), in the same fast-developing housing trust crammed together for a disenfranchised society.

Tyrone and Clinton’s friendship is viewed with racism, bigotry, and malice, but despite these obstacles, the pair are deeply bonded. Partly because they’re both Deaf, partly through a shared sense of neglect, but mostly because they share a dream of one day escaping the harsh violence and hopelessness that swirl around them.

Adam Ross spoke with John before the film’s Australian premiere at Flickerfest in Bondi, Sydney on Friday 20th of January 2023.

First