Tag Archives: AFI Fest 2018

ALEX ROSS PERRY IN CONVERSATION

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A sensation at last year’s New York and American Film Institute festivals, HER SMELL returns to Los Angeles as part of the inaugural Red Bull Music Center Channel film fest.

Starring the always-remarkable Elisabeth Moss as Becky Something—a rocker in drastic free fall—HER SMELL is not, according to the writer-director Alex Ross Perry, based on Courtney Love.

Perry will participate in a post-screening conversation, joined by the film’s composer Keegan DeWitt.

HER SMELL

Friday, February 15, doors at 7 pm.

Ukrainian Culture Center

4315 Melrose Avenue, East Hollywood, Los Angeles.

From top: Original poster; Elizabeth Moss in Her Smell; Moss with Dan Stevens. Images courtesy Gunpowder & Sky.

AFI FEST — GENESIS

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The title of GENÈSE (Genesis)—writer and director Philippe Lesage’s beautifully considered take on the adolescent trials of a pair of Quebecois siblings—reminds us that the depredations of youth are part of a process and not (despite on-screen evidence to the contrary) an irrevocable fall.

For most of its running time, GENÈSE (Lesage’s second feature) details, with intelligence and plausibility, the social-sexual explorations of Charlotte (Noée Abita)—an uncommitted college student—and her slightly younger brother Guillaume (Théodore Pellerin, Boy Erased), who is enrolled in an all-male boarding school.

A third-act coda revisits characters from Lesage’s first feature, Les Démons. Perhaps, in an upcoming film, Lesage will return to where the filmmaker and his deeply invested audience leave Charlotte and Guillaume, simultaneously stranded yet irresistibly propelled into the unknown.

This World Cinema selection premieres in Hollywood this evening as part of AFI Fest 2018, with an encore screening tomorrow.

GENESIS

Monday, November 12, at 5:45 pm, with director Philippe Lesage in attendance.

Tuesday, November 13, at 6:30 pm.

Chinese Theatre

6801 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles.

Philippe Lesage, Genèse, from top: Théodore Pellerin and Noée Abita; image credit Be For Films; Pellerin (seated center), photograph by Marco Abraham. Images courtesy and © the filmmaker, the actors, and Be For Films.

NEVER LOOK AWAY

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Inspired by the youth of a colossus of contemporary art, NEVER LOOK AWAY is Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s fictional take on the early life of Gerhard Richter—who grew up under the Nazis (and in the GDR after the war), studied and practiced Socialist Realism at Dresden’s Art Academy, and escaped to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf just before the Wall went up.

The film stars Tom Schilling, Paula Beer, Sebastian Koch—who was in Henckel von Donnersmarck’s remarkable debut feature The Lives of Others—and Oliver Masucci plays a character based on Joseph Beuys.

AFI Fest 2018 presents the Los Angeles premiere of NEVER LOOK AWAY this weekend at the Egyptian, with an encore screening on Wednesday at the Chinese. The director will be present on Sunday in Hollywood, as well as at LACMA for a January, 2019 screening.

NEVER LOOK AWAY

Sunday, November 11, at 7:30 pm.

Egyptian Theatre

6712 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles.

Wednesday, November 14, at 2:45 pm.

Chinese Theatre

6925 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles.

Friday, January 18, at 7:30 pm.

Bing Theater, LACMA

5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles.

See Dana Goodyear on the Richter-Donnersmarck dynamic, and Morgan Falconer, “Photo-Painting,” in Painting After Pollock (London: Phaidon, 2015), 232–247.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Never Look Away, from top: Tom Schilling (2); Shilling and Paula Beer. Images courtesy and © the filmmaker, the actors, and Sony Pictures Classics.

AFI FEST — KNIFE + HEART

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Each man kills the thing he loves… the coward does it with a kiss, the brave man with a sword. — Oscar Wilde

The black-leather-masked murderer in Yann Gonzalez’s KNIFE + HEART—set in a gay porn milieu in late-1970s Paris—employs both methods.

With dialogue like “Okay, darlings, it’s business time. I want you all naked and stiffer than Giscard,” and a fluffer named Bouche d’or (“Mouth of Gold”), this psychosexual drama is a delicious heir to the camp exploits of John Waters and the thrillers of Brian De Palma.

The film stars Vanessa Paradis, Nicolas Maury, Kate Moran, Jonathan Genet, Khaled Alouach, Thomas Ducasse, Jacques Nolot, Romane Bohringer, Bertrand Mandico, Jules Ritmanic, and Félix Maritaud.

Artist Simon Thiébaut and choreographer Ari de B (plus dancers) are also featured.

The film will premiere tonight in Hollywood at the AFI Fest, with an encore screening early tomorrow afternoon.

KNIFE + HEART

Friday, November 9, at 11:59 pm.

Saturday, November 10, at 12:15 pm.

Chinese Theatre

6950 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles.

Yann Gonzalez, Knife + Heart, from top: Vanessa Paradis; Paradis and Nicolas Maury; Paradis (center); Félix Maritaud (left). Images courtesy and © the filmmaker, the actors, and Memento Films Distribution, France.

OLIVIER ASSAYAS’ NON-FICTION

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How our habitual engagements with writing, reading, performance, publishing, and politics have been transformed in the internet age are some of the concerns addressed in NON-FICTION (Double vies), the new film from writer-director Olivier Assayas.

The film—Assayas’ seventeenth feature, and one that carries a strong echo of Rohmer—stars Juliette Binoche, Guillaume Canet, Christa Théret, Vincent Macaigne, Nora Hamzawi, and Pascal Greggory as denizens of the Parisian culture-media complex, and its Los Angeles premiere this week is part of the annual AFI Fest.

NON-FICTION

Friday, November 9, at 6 pm.

Thursday, November 15, at 12:30 pm.

Chinese Sixplex, 6925 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles.

See Will Self on the tyranny of the virtual.

Top: Guillaume Canet in Non-Fiction.

Above: Vincent Macaigne (right) and Canet.

Below: Juliette Binoche and Canet.