Actors who direct, and one who also cooks
Urchin, Shell, and Bradley Cooper's sandwich shop
On Monday I went to the secret NYFF screening of Marty Supreme and somehow found myself in the second row (thank you, Sayed)—close enough to clock the faint gleam of Timothée Chalamet’s scalp beneath a baseball cap, and to admire Josh Safdie’s anarchic beard. The energy was electric and I was, against my better judgment, starstruck, particularly when they trotted out Gwyneth Paltrow, feigning sheepishness, and Tyler the Creator, whose charisma cannot be contained. The festival’s artistic director and most stylish personage Dennis Lim presided over everything in Visvim.
Adrenaline, not liquor, carried me through the afterparty at the Waverly Inn, through the velvet crush of bodies and half-heard film gossip. I ran into old friends, made new ones, saw directors whose fans I distrust and spotted others I like better. I said hello to everyone’s favorite New Yorker writer, but not to Kylie Jenner, sitting in a dark corner.
Now the NYFF is finally winding down and I can say goodbye to Lincoln Center for a while. Today’s movie: Is This Thing On? Bradley Cooper’s latest attempt at directorial gravitas. So far, he’s been fine.
By coincidence, or fate, there are three new films in theaters right now that are also directed by actors, none of which are vanity projects, but some of which are better than others. I’ll get into that below.
a few things for the weekend:
Keith McNally’s film END OF NIGHT screens at The Roxy tonight. He disavowed the film, which really is the a self-loathing work that gives a look inside the male brain, and when I saw it last year all audience members got half-off their bill at Minetta Tavern.
The latest edition of Newfest brings us over 130 queer films, many of which you can also watch virtually.
Please please watch Mary Bronstein’s IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU. Rose Byrne is a miracle.
URCHIN
A film of directorial talent still in search of its own frequency. Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness, Babygirl) hasn’t calibrated his balance of storytelling, political instinct, and cinematic sensibilities. Urchin is, above all, the work of someone in love with movies. You can feel him studying, and sometimes straining under his influences. Dickinson looks back to British forebears like Loach and Leigh while reaching toward Glazer and the Safdies, fusing kitchen-sink grit with arthouse stylization. Some of the more overt quoting includes the pulsing score that surges during over physical movements (violence, dancing), and CGI-assisted riffs (literally water draining down the sink and ushering us into a network of dendrites and into dreams), which is more adornment than revelation.
