Tag: Jonathan Demme

Stalker (1979) Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky This is a beautiful restoration, with Tarkovsky’s previous feature Solaris to follow, courtesy of Mosfilm. Now a “quasi-private” venture, the studio outlived the USSR by adapting successfully to an environment of economic, rather than historical, materialism—meaning that it trades on the many Soviet-era classics it once produced, including Stalker and Solaris. Happily, nothing like the sci-fi apparatus of the earlier film exists in Stalker, though it too is an adaptation...

Meek’s Cutoff (2011) Directed by Kelly Reichardt In the past decade, Reichardt has established herself as one of the most vital working American filmmakers, consistently making intensely incisive, psychologically fraught works usually centering on women. But her most masterful film to date (and one of the best films of the decade) is her most atypical. Meek’s Cutoff, Reichardt’s only period film thus far, is an unsparingly sparse depiction of the real-life story about a wagon train...

The number of moving parts in Justin Timberlake’s stage show is so overwhelming that you can have a grand time watching the concert film Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids with the sound muted, marveling at the expressionistic assembly of moving glass catwalks and geodesic screens that fragment and distort pointillist projections of faces. In last year's document of the final nights of Timberlake's 2015 world tour—making its US theatrical premiere at the Film...

Ricki and the Flash Directed by Jonathan Demme Opens August 7 Jonathan Demme’s first straight dramatic feature in several years is something of a companion piece to his jagged-edged 2008 ensemble piece Rachel Getting Married. Both are about familial dysfunction, both include an exuberant scene set at a wedding, and both feature a bona fide movie star (Anne Hathaway in Rachel; Meryl Streep here) doing some self-conscious deglamming. There’s something a bit more Hollywood about Ricki, however—a...