Aurelia Butler

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He helped define cinema as high art for generations of moviegoers and filmmakers in France and beyond, even if he irked some of them with his passion for Hollywood.Michel Ciment, a French film critic whose passion for cinema helped define it as serious art for generations of French moviegoers, directors and producers, even while irking some of them with his unabashed love of American film, died on Nov. 13 in Paris. He was 85.His death was confirmed by the film magazine Positif, for which he had long served as editor in chief, and by the Cannes Film Festival, which called him “a free spirit with an insatiable curiosity” and “the embodiment of cinephilia.”Mr. Ciment (pronounced SEE-mah) derived his authority from just that: his unbounded love of movies and an encyclopedic knowledge of film that sprang from it. He was an adept of the uniquely French cult of movies as high art, and of the great director as genius. But that was counterbalanced by an embrace of “all types of cinema,” the Cannes festival said, a passion born in his childhood addiction to American westerns and gangster movies.Mr. Ciment was an unabashed Americanophile in a French cultural environment in which checking the anti-American box is often a prerequisite to being taken seriously. He was sometimes reproached for it, his son Gilles recalled; in later years he became a senior lecturer in American Civilization at the University of Paris.He communicated his enthusiasm for film, beginning with his first critical forays in the early 1960s, in a torrent of books, reviews, interviews and radio broadcasts. (His status in the world of film criticism was such that he was often interviewed by other critics.)Mr. Ciment celebrated the great directors of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s in books on Joseph Losey, Stanley Kubrick, Elia Kazan and Francesco Rosi, each thick with probing interviews in which critic startles director with his detailed knowledge of their films.These directors trusted him and opened up to him because, he told the Toronto Film Review in 2020, “I asked questions that were about philosophy, about history, about politics.”His son recalled: “They would say that an exchange with Michel Ciment was like nothing else. With him, he really knows your film, he remembers the characters’ names. And then he would put your film in relation to the history of cinema.”For his book “Kazan on Kazan” (1973), Mr. Ciment spent 10 days with the director and conducted 40 hours of interviews. That was typical of his methods. He favored those who believed, like him, that “all the arts are found in cinema,” as he put it to an interviewer this year with the radio channel France Culture. For him, the superior film combined visual, aural and literary greatness.A 2009 book by Mr. Ciment compiling interviews he conducted with many movie directors. They opened up to him, he said, because “I asked questions that were about philosophy, about history, about politics.”Berg Publishers“All the great directors I hung out with — whether it was Losey, Kubrick, Kazan — they had a generalized culture,” Mr. Ciment said in the radio interview. “These were people who had read an enormous amount, who listened to music, who had seen lots of paintings.”He criticized contemporary directors like Quentin Tarantino, who, he said, work in a cruder idiom and have “encouraged the young toward an absence of culture.”The son of a Hungarian-Jewish immigrant tailor who narrowly escaped being rounded up with other Jews in Paris by Nazi collaborators during World War II, Mr. Ciment traced his pro-American views to childhood memories of the liberation of France in 1944.“At 6, to see the Americans disembark, pitching cans of food, chewing gum — it’s thanks to them we regained our liberty,” he told France Culture.In contrast to the sometimes doctrinaire impulses of that other pole of French film criticism, the magazine Cahiers du Cinema, where directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut propagated theories of cinema that they went on to put into practice, Mr. Ciment’s instinct at Positif was free-form.“Always a bit anarchist, libertarian, we couldn’t have cared less about fashions,” he told the Toronto Film Review. “We said what we thought about films, what we loved about films, without preconceptions.”His serious approach to film is evident in his book about the politically oriented realist Italian director Francesco Rosi, who made films about the mafia, corruption, injustice and war. Implicit in the book is the idea that film is as worthy of close analysis as serious literature, a view Mr. Ciment gained from his early studies with two postwar French masters of literary and philosophical criticism, Paul Benichou and Gilles Deleuze.Mr. Ciment praised Mr. Rosi for “hunting down the lie, cornering it in its hide-out,” for a “close engagement with reality in which the smallest false step would have been a betrayal,” and for being “conscious of the impossibility of reaching the truth.”Even in this early book, Mr. Ciment’s attention to detail in film is evident: At one point, referring to Mr. Rosi’s antiwar film “Many Wars Ago” (1970), he asks the director why “the night battle sequence is predominantly blue in color.”Mr. Ciment, second from left, with fellow members of the jury for the 1978 International Film Festival in Cannes, France. The American director Alan J. Pakula is third from left, and the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann is next to him. Jean Jacques Levy/Associated PressMichel Jean Ciment was born on May 26, 1938, in Paris to Alexander and Helene Cziment. His father “Frenchified” the name after the war, Gilles Ciment said. Michel’s father, who had immigrated from Hungary in the early 1920s, was a tailor for the great French fashion houses, and his wife worked with him.One morning in July 1942, the police came by the house to warn Helene that her husband had best not come home that evening: It was the eve of the great roundup of Paris Jews known as the Vel’ d’Hiv, named after the stadium where they were taken. Some 13,000 Jews were seized and subsequently sent to the death camp at Auschwitz.The elder Mr. Ciment escaped to Normandy and was hidden by peasants there for the duration of the war. His son followed him there, and his wife went back and forth from Paris.The family regrouped in Paris after the Liberation, and Michel Ciment went on to study at two prestigious secondary schools, the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand and the Lycée Condorcet. It was as a student that he discovered, in the intense Paris film culture of the day, the great silent films of Erich von Stroheim, F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang.He later studied at the Sorbonne and received a Fulbright Scholarship in the early 1960s, allowing him to study at Amherst College in Massachusetts. “It was American education that completely confirmed me in my tastes,” Mr. Ciment told France Culture.He made his debut as a critic with a defense of Orson Welles in Positif in 1963. He later joined its staff and went on to become editor in chief.From the 1970s on he published a stream of books. Besides the ones on Kazan and Rosi, there were others on American cinema, Losey, Stanley Kubrick and Theo Angelopoulos as well as “Passport to Hollywood,” a book of interviews with directors, including Roman Polanski, Milos Forman and Wim Wenders.In addition to his son, he is survived by his second wife, Evelyne Hazan-Ciment. His first wife, Jeannine Ciment, who worked with him at Positif, died in 1986.Mr. Ciment’s passion for film never flagged. As Jérôme Garcin, his colleague on the popular French public radio cultural review “Le Masque et La Plume,” said of him in the French magazine L’Obs, “At 85, he remained, when the lights went out and the magic lantern began to dispense onscreen its dream-colors, a child in wonderment.” More

A flood, a fire, Covid and “Shrek” were just a few of the roadblocks to “Dawn of the Nugget,” arriving 23 years after the original hit.When “Chicken Run” was released in theaters in June 2000, audiences and critics alike were charmed by the Claymation chickens Ginger and Rocky and the story of their escape from a sinister farm.The movie, which was the first feature from Aardman Animations (home of Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep), grossed more than $220 million and became the highest-grossing stop-motion animated film — a record it still holds.Now the sequel “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget” is finally arriving on Netflix. The director Sam Fell; Aardman’s creative director, Peter Lord; and the production designer Darren Dubicki explained what caused 23 years of delays.At first it was sheer exhaustion.Despite the instant success of the first film, Aardman, its partner on the production, DreamWorks, and the creators were in no rush to make a second one.Sequels weren’t as much of an expectation then as they are today, and the arduous process of Claymation had left the team relatively exhausted and ready for a break.“It’s like you’ve just run a marathon and someone says, ‘Hey, how about running another marathon?’ You think, ‘Well, not just now,’” Lord said. “So right back in 2000s, we were perhaps not ready. But after that, we had no objection to making a sequel at all.”DreamWorks had agreed to make five films total with Aardman, but any potential new productions fell off the priority list. The Hollywood studio instead focused on other stop-motion animated projects that were already in the pipeline and quickly zeroed in on a sequel to “Shrek” after the original became a box office smash in 2001.“So for a few years, the studio was sort of distracted, the relationship with DreamWorks finished and ‘Shrek’ arrived,” Fell said, adding that Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive of DreamWorks Animation at the time, “was probably more interested in ‘Shrek,’ too, by then.”There was also a fire.Even before sequel plans were in place, there was a setback: In Bristol, England, the warehouse filled with all the “Chicken Run” puppets, molds and sets caught fire. When it was time to start working on a second film, “we had to really start from scratch,” Fell said.He explained that they “didn’t have any reference apart from the making-of book — there were no puppets or anything to refer to.”Lord added, “We were briefly discouraged by the scale of the problem, and then we thought, ‘Well, no, it’s just like any other movie. Just get on with it.’”The do-over allowed for greater creativity: while the first film took place primarily in a single location — a Yorkshire chicken farm — the second one has dozens of intricate and colorful sets.“It was pretty apparent when we started reading the script, the scope and scale of the script meant that the world was much vaster than the first film,” Dubicki said.For Lord, seeing the characters come back to life after being lost in the fire was a moving experience.Then came the flood.After designs were rendered and all the puppets recreated, production of the sequel was on track — until the warehouse where the production team was storing all the characters and sets, as well as filming the movie, flooded.“The roof buckled in the heat of the hot summer and then it just started raining like mad for three days,” Fell explained. “The whole studio started leaking, like, not just a little bit, like a lot.”The team ended up engineering a system of funnels from the ceiling and bringing the water away from the sets. Fell likened it to Willy Wonka’s factory.On top of that? The pandemic.Preproduction began in the early months of 2020, but like everything else, it came to a screeching halt as the pandemic shut down regular life.When the crew started working again, the necessary Covid-19 precautions significantly slowed down the process.“Stop-motion animation is a very collaborative business — it’s about people being together in the same place, discussing, making group decisions, looking through the camera, choosing the building, designing, planning camera moves,” Lord noted. “In Covid, you couldn’t do that. You had to bring everyone on the set one at a time.”Dubicki added, “You had to be really mindful of bringing people together at various points that were integral to making it move forward.”It turns out that not only did staff members have to quarantine if someone tested positive or felt sick — the clay characters did as well.Crew members “hold and touch and move the puppet with their hands, so by the time they were finished their shot, the chicken was then considered to be potentially contaminated and someone had to come in with gloves and a mask and take the chicken to the quarantine area,” Fell explained.“There were shelves in a tent with a U.V. light where Babs would be put on the shelf for 10 days before anybody could touch her again,” he added, referring to Ginger’s knitting compadre.“Weather, wind, pestilence, plagues — we survived it all,” Fell said with a laugh, and joked, “Next one’s coming out in 2050.” More

The screenwriter and director Cord Jefferson narrates a sequence from his film.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.A conventional Black novel comes to life, with both comedic and dramatic results, in this scene from “American Fiction.”The film, written and directed by Cord Jefferson, who adapted Percival Everett’s 2001 novel, “Erasure,” follows the writer Thelonious Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), who goes by Monk, through his frustrations with the kinds of stories he thinks Black writers are allowed to tell.After one of his more academic books has poor sales, a frustrated Monk decides to pen a more stereotypically Black story under a pseudonym. That book’s title is “My Pafology.” In this scene, as Monk begins to write, his clichéd creations come alive before him: Willy the Wonker and Van Go, played by Keith David and Okieriete Onaodowan.Narrating the scene, Jefferson said that this sequence doesn’t appear in the novel; rather, the book recreates the entirety of “My Pafology” within its pages. To make Monk’s writing cinematic, Jefferson chose to stage it with Monk at the desk writing, his characters acting out his dialogue around him.While humor is the intention of the scene, Jefferson said, “Ok and Keith David are such great actors that you have this inclination to take them seriously.” He said that nuance, and the desire to not play the scene too broadly, only makes the scene better.Read the “American Fiction” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

We look at the finest in science fiction, horror, action and international films, all available to stream.Science FictionEnvironmental disaster and artificial intelligence run amok have emerged as the major science-fiction concerns of our time. Compared to those, gray, almond-eyed aliens in flying saucers, hellbent on destroying humanity, feel like a throwback to simpler times. But “No One Will Save You,” Brian Duffield’s genre exercise, is deceptive.Kaitlyn Dever plays Brynn, a demure semi-recluse who turns out to be surprisingly adept at fighting back the murderous visitors. The movie uses the suspenseful logistics of physical survival to grab viewers; Duffield has a terrific command of economical action filmmaking. But that is not the reason I’ve been mulling over this nearly dialogue-free movie since it premiered on Hulu in September: The story is actually about psychological survival.An outcast in her small town, Brynn is haunted by a traumatic event in her past, and when she fights for her life, her battle plays like an extreme version of a coping mechanism. I’ve read several theories about the ending, but the entire movie is coded, with the aliens’ retro appearance being a major clue. Under its straightforward exterior, “No One Will Save You” is a melancholic look at what Brynn does not just to live, but to live with herself. — ELISABETH VINCENTELLIStream “No One Will Save You” on Hulu.HorrorA scene from “The Outwaters.”CinedigmMy two favorite horror movies this year took apples-and-oranges paths to clock me in the face and rip out my heart.“The Outwaters” starts as a lighthearted found-footage account of four friends on a trip to the desert. But almost an hour into the film, a silhouetted figure appears in the dark distance, and that’s when the writer-director Robbie Banfitch shifts into gut-punching high gear with a frenzied maelstrom of screams, grunts, creatures and guts. The result is an experimental fever dream, a sustained and visually stunning sensory assault — I could smell fear — that’s singularly thrilling. Turn up the volume for a true razor’s edge experience.Paul Owens’s low-fi “LandLocked” delivers equally brutal blows but with softer gloves. It’s about a young man (Mason Owens, the director’s brother) who finds a VHS-era camera in his family’s old home that lets him glimpse his past wherever he points the lens. (Owens used his real-life family’s tapes as footage.) Even in empty rooms, demons long thought to be buried instead lurk, and in the film’s most terrifying passage, one monstrously emerges. It’s an assured, understated and deeply creepy slow-burn study of memory, loss and, most meaningfully, fatherhood. — ERIK PIEPENBURGStream both “The Outwaters” and “LandLocked” on Tubi.ActionJorma Tommila in “Sisu.”Antti Rastivo/Freezing Point Oy/LionsgateAt first glance, Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila), the silent, bruising figure in the Finnish World War II exploitation film “Sisu,” wouldn’t strike you as an activist. After all, he is a stoic prospector who, at the outset of the writer-director Jalmari Helander’s film, discovers a mother lode of gold. But the action genre is often where bold political statements are made through simple symbolic figures. So when the vicious SS tank commander Bruno Helldorf (Aksel Hennie) learns of Korpi’s riches, what arises is a Finnish anti-imperialist story with elements of female empowerment.Helander interweaves these themes through common action tropes. There is the cadre of Finnish female prisoners of war held by the Nazis who will eventually become the kind of army familiar to the exploitation genre, ultimately, winning their bodily freedom. The retired Korpi is also an unstoppable killing machine so feared by the Russian army, it nicknamed him the Immortal. Helldorf throws everything at Korpi: tank shells, bullets and a minefield. Korpi remains unbowed. His repeated return from near-death scenarios is a wonderful gag that marries comical violence with thematic heft, turning “Sisu” into this year’s sharpest resistance film. — ROBERT DANIELSRent or buy “Sisu” on major platforms.InternationalPaula Beer in “Afire.”Sideshow/JanusFor me, this year in international cinema is defined by two images: one of red fumes filling the skies above a German forest in “Afire,” and the other of blindingly blue waves towering over a Tahitian beach in “Pacifiction.”“Afire” is a horror-inflected summer comedy about vulnerable masculinity and bemusing desire from Christian Petzold, known for his postmodern period melodramas (“Transit,” “Phoenix”). “Pacifiction” is a woozy thriller about modern-day colonialism from Albert Serra, the Catalan filmmaker with an acclaimed oeuvre of formally stringent, often historically perverse films (“Liberté,” “The Death of Louis XIV”). Both movies move away from their directors’ usual obsessions with the past. They are animated, instead, by a trembling anxiety about the apocalyptic stakes of the present.In “Afire,” forest fires spurred by climate change spell doom for a group of four young lovers. In “Pacifiction,” a nuclear threat lurks in the ocean, the dark waters barely concealing the machinations of imperialist powers. If the elements rise dramatically to the heavens in both, it’s less to inspire awe than caution — a warning that the forces we have knowingly, venally wreaked upon the world and on one another may just consume us all. — DEVIKA GIRISHStream “Afire” on the Criterion Channel and “Pacifiction” on Mubi. More