“The Tragedy of Macbeth”
Is there a film fan who doesn’t have their eye on “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” Joel Coen’s slightly anticipated Shakespeare adaptation? The first film credited to a solo brother since 2003’s “Intolerable Cruelty,” and the first movie Joel has made not to be co-directed by younger brother Ethan (who wasn’t officially co-credited alongside his bro until “The Ladykillers” due to silly Guild semantics). Starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, Joel’s “boldly inventive visualization” of the Elizabethan classic is set to open the fest. A close to 50-year veteran of attending NYFF, ‘Macbeth’ also finds the director re-teaming with DP Bruno Delbonell, as regular collaborator Roger Deakins has been busy winning Oscars in the meantime.
“The Tsugua Diaries”
Shot on 16mm during the COVID lockdown, Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes’s (“Arabian Nights”) “The Tsugua Diaries” sounds curiously experimental and quite intriguing. Described as “a playful rug-puller… that unfolds in revelatory reverser order,” the film follows the daily rituals of a trio of housemates (Carloto Cotta, Crista Alfaiate, and João Nunes Monteiro) during the pandemic. A movie about the process of movie-making when creative liberty has been constrained by the limits of a film camera and lethargy takes over, “The Tsugua Diaries,” is a slyly clever exercise of self-reflective cinema, stripping the barriers of its form down to a meta-eschew process.
“Unclenching the Fists”
Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes early this year, Kira Kovalenko’s “Unclenching the Fists”—a stirring Russian drama wherein toxic attraction suspensefully looms beneath the surface —heralds the arrival of a powerfully distinct filmmaking talent. Traumatized by her infantilized past with an abusive father and obsessive brother, Ada (Milana Aguzarova), sees a possible means of escaping her controlled existence when her older brother returns home after their papa falls ill. A protégé of acclaimed director Alexander Sokurov (“Russian Ark”), Kovalenko’s sophomore film was hugely buzzed about in France this summer, our review comparing the cinematic ambition of ‘Fists’ to Kantemir Balagov’s desolating post-war drama, “Beanpole.” Keep an eye on Kovalenko.
“Vortex”
A cinematic master at weaving, synchronic downward spirals, director Gaspar Noe’s “Vortex” is “by far [his] most somber and mature work, and also perhaps his most accessible, in the sense that such human misery is, of course, accessible to all.” Starring Francoise Lebrun and legendary giallo filmmaker Dario Argento (in what purports to be his first and last starring role) as a writer and retiree working on a book about the intersection of dreams and cinema. Training in “Climax’s” psychedelic anchoring for a simultaneous action, split-screen effect, one of film’s most aesthetically provocative auteur’s “Vortex” prods at artistic boundaries in a dark but more tender manner than Noe’s work typically does.
