Cinema Studi: [The Daily] AFI Fest 2017

giovedì 9 novembre 2017

[The Daily] AFI Fest 2017

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This year’s AFI Fest opens tonight in Los Angeles with Dee Rees’s Mudbound and was to have closed on November 16 with Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World—until Sony Pictures pulled it from the lineup in the wake of accusations of sexual harassment and abuse leveled against one of the film’s stars, Kevin Spacey. Scott now plans to reshoot Spacey’s scenes with Christopher Plummer in the role of J. Paul Getty “in the story about the infamous 1973 kidnapping of his grandson, sixteen-year-old John Paul Getty III,” as noted in the Hollywood Reporter. “As of now, the release date”—December 22—“remains unchanged despite the reshoots, but insiders say that if anyone can pull off reshoots and still make the holiday release date, it's Scott.”

But back to the program at hand. “The richness of this event’s international scope—a heartening priority for the festival’s director, Jacqueline Lyanga, and her team of programmers—should not be taken for granted,” argues Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times. “You could see it as AFI Fest’s way of keeping faith with its legacy—a throwback to the old glory days of the institute’s long-defunct Los Angeles International Film Exposition, a.k.a. Filmex, which from 1971 to 1987 was a notable local bastion of globe-trotting cinephilia. Thirty years on, the need for that kind of discerning, adventurous curation is stronger than ever.”

“Lane Kneedler, the Director of Programming for AFI Fest, is undoubtedly one of the most enthusiastic cinephiles,” writes Kyle Turner for MovieMaker. “Rhapsodizing about Isabelle Huppert, Timothy Chalamet, Altman, and others, Kneedler gives a little insight into the best of what the festival has to offer.” An annotated list of ten films follows. And at ScreenAnarchy, Ryland Aldrich picks eight titles to spotlight.

This year’s edition also marks the fiftieth anniversary of the American Film Institute, and so the festival is launching a retrospective. The inaugural program is dedicated to the work of Robert Altman (above), and the festival interviews Altman’s son “and frequent collaborator,” Stephen Altman.

The festival’s also asked filmmakers with work in the current American Independents program to offer a few words on their five favorite films of the past fifty years. It’s a rich collection of lists with, for example, J. P. Sniadecki discussing Jia Zhangke, Aaron Katz on Claire Denis, Antonio Méndez Esparza on Edward Yang, Noël Wells on Kenneth Lonergan, Matt Porterfield on Robert Bresson, and more.

Here’s a round of links to collections of reviews of films in this year’s lineup that’ve appeared either here or at Critics Round Up.

Galas and Tributes

James Franco’s The Disaster Artist

Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name

Dee Rees’s Mudbound

Special Screenings

Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water

Paul McGuigan’s Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool

Aaron Sorkin’s Molly’s Game

Paolo Virzì’s The Leisure Seeker

World Cinema

Fatih Akin’s In the Fade