8 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022
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For more reviews, visit
newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town COURTESY MICROFILMThough feature films have always been the core of the New York Film Festival
(the sixtieth edition runs Sept. 30 through Oct. 16), the program reliably
includes a selection of notable shorts. Two of the best in this year’s batch belie
their brevity with their vast historical scope. “Lesser Choices” presents an
interview by the filmmaker Courtney Stephens with her mother, Estelle, who
details travelling to Mexico City for an abortion when it was highly restricted
in California, where she was living; she talks about the emotional cruelty of
the legal obstacles in the pre-Roe era, the risks of the clandestine procedure,
and the positive importance of her decision in her family life. In the Romanian
director Radu Jude’s fictional comedy “The Potemkinists,” a voluble sculptor
(Alexandru Dabija) reveals to a cultural bureaucrat (Cristina Draghici) the
historical truth behind the fictional elements of Sergei Eisenstein’s classic of
Soviet cinema “Battleship Potemkin”—namely, that the real-life battleship’s
rebellious sailors didn’t return to tsarist Russia but, rather, demanded and
received asylum in Romania. The sharp and sardonic discussion touches
on Romania’s sufferings under Soviet rule, Russia’s latter-day aggression,
and the contentious politics of official commemoration.—Richard BrodyONTHEBIGSCREEN
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MOVIES
Black God, White Devil
This ecstatic panorama of furious visions
and revolutionary dreams in the vast, vio-
lent landscape of rural Brazil, made in 1963
by the twenty-four-year-old director Glau-
ber Rocha, is one of the founding works of
modern Brazilian cinema. Manuel (Geraldo
Del Rey), a young cowherd, kills a wealthy
rancher who cheated him, and flees home,
along with his wife, Rosa (Yoná Magalhães),
to join a pilgrimage led by a self-proclaimed
saint (Lidio Silva) with a utopian, gory gos-
pel. The Catholic Church and the govern-
ment send a hired gun, Antonio das Mortes
(Maurício do Valle), to stop the procession—
and the revolutionary bandit Corisco (Othon
Bastos) plans to stop Antonio. Rocha’s hectic
drama is, in effect, a political Western that
rages at Brazil’s governmental corruption
and plutocratic oppression. His raw, grand,
urgent images—and the raucous, incanta-
tory soundtrack set against them—seem to
erupt with long-suppressed anger. Despite
its heroic energy and impulsive youth, it’s
a bleak philosophical work of its time, a
bitterly terrifying vision of no exit. In Por-
tuguese.—Richard Brody (Playing Oct. 1 and
Oct. 10 at the New York Film Festival.)Garry Winogrand: All Things
Are Photographable
With his teeming pictures from the nine-
teen-fifties and sixties, the New York-born
street photographer Garry Winogrand (1928-
84) wrenched the art form into confronta-
tional modernity. This 2018 documentary by
Sasha Waters Freyer, offering an abundant
sampling of his pictures, displays the breadth
of his achievement while tracing, briskly
but thinly, the course of his turbulent life.
Farming out perspectives on Winogrand to
an illustrious series of talking heads, the
director doesn’t shy away from controversies
that the photographer sparked (especiallywith a 1975 book called “Women Are Beau-
tiful”). Winogrand’s defenders, though often
less insightful about his work than his critics
are, prove particularly lucid regarding his
distinctive methods; he placed himself in the
center of the action that he photographed,
not observing or capturing his subjects’
energy but partaking in it. The film aligns
Winogrand’s œuvre with the history of pho-
tography and the politics of his times; above
all, it abounds in sound clips of Winogrand’s
own voice, recorded in classrooms and public
appearances, which overflows with the fierce
devotion and reckless intensity with which he
lived and worked.—R.B. (Streaming on Tubi,
Prime Video, and other services.)Green
The director Sophia Takal’s shrewdly psycho-
logical first feature, from 2011, is centered
on young creative strivers and the emotional
strains that arise from their ambitions. Law-
rence Michael Levine, then her real-life fi-
ancé, plays Sebastian, a New York-based writer
who schleps his girlfriend, Genevieve (Kate
Lyn Sheil), to a house in rural Virginia, where
he begins an environmental project in order to
blog about it. When a too friendly neighbor
(played by Takal) barges in on the couple,
the subtle shifts in allegiance and attention
provoke a romantic crisis. Sheil and Levine
(who crisply declaims smart riffs on Philip
Roth) make an edgy, cultured pair facing their
first serious strain, which is captured in un-
derstatedly contentious dialogue and sharp
glances caught in tense long takes. Characters’
voices are heard, as if in closeup, over distant
shots of them in the lavish landscape, evoking
a jagged inner disarray that’s reinforced by the
insistent music. Takal coaxes melodrama from
lo-fi naturalism and smartly blends the allure
of genre with do-it-yourself intimacy.—R.B.
(Streaming on OVID.tv.)Logan Lucky
Steven Soderbergh’s 2017 film stars Chan-
ning Tatum and Adam Driver as Jimmy and
Clyde—the Logan boys, from West Virginia,
who, together with their sister, Mellie (Riley
Keough), hatch a plan to rob a bank vault
under Charlotte Motor Speedway. Also
on the team are Joe Bang (Daniel Craig)
and his brainless brothers (Jack Quaid and
Brian Gleeson). Joe is an expert bank robber,
though clearly not that expert, given that
he is in jail; Craig delivers, in the truest
sense, a breakout performance, springing
manically free from the bondage of 007. So-
derbergh likewise brushes off the glamour
that he conjured for “Ocean’s Eleven” (2001)
and its sequels, and revels in the rough and
compromised lives of his protagonists. The
movie, part of which takes place during a
Nascar race, can’t always resist the tempta-
tion to patronize, but as it proceeds it builds
up both a head of steam and an atmosphere
of reckless good will. With brief but striking
contributions from Katherine Waterston,
as a medic, and Katie Holmes, as Jimmy’s
ex.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of
8/28/17.) (Streaming on Kanopy, Prime Video,
and other services.)