Gary's Corner

Gary Palmucci, Film Curator

Films This Week 11/19/21

by Gary Palmucci | 19th November 2021 | Gary's Corner

This coming week may well be the most dramatic of the 2021 movie year with the theatrical releases of Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, King Richard (with Will Smith, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, and Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Cannes prize-winner, Drive My Car.

Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s previous film Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (lauded at this year’s Berlin Film Festival)  joins our Virtual Cinema lineup today. In three separate episodes, this rising auteur explores the romantic trajectories of young men and women with dialogue and precise staging that recall such masters as France’s Eric Rohmer and Korea’s Hong Sang-soo.

In her NY Times “Critic’s Pick,” my friend Manohla Dargis — always a perceptive observer of modern Asian cinema — writes:

“Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is a perfect entry point into Hamaguchi’s work. Not every episode works equally well or hits as hard, but both times I watched this movie, I found something to admire, consider, argue with and weep over. The three stories are clearly separated with coy or cryptic or plainly descriptive titles. They have separate casts and each takes place in contemporary settings, though one has a modest, somewhat random splash of speculative fiction. Here, as in life, the most blandly familiar spaces — the back seat of a cab, a cluttered office, a living room — serve as unadorned stages for ordinary, existence-defining encounters.”

 

Here’s an opportunity to catch the emergence of a new talent on the international cinema stage. His forthcoming Drive My Car is Japan’s submission for Best International Film at the 2022 Academy Awards, and his work is certain to be seen further on NYC art house screens…

Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema