NYFF: Assayas's Summer of Marx and Moon Landing Theories

While NYFF is over, I've got a couple pieces left to file, including this one on Olivier Assayas's Something in the Air, which was my favorite of the festival. I look at the film as a spiritual sequel to Carlos, his 5.5 hour epic from 2010. The piece is pretty good, but I actually had a couple more notes I should have included after chatting with Adam Kempenaar from Filmspotting the other night. Here's what I wrote to him: 

"[Assayas] kind of was this remedy for the French New Wave in a lot of ways that decided to foreground emotion in every frame. I think those dolly shots rising up into the air are totally subjective in a lot of ways ("Don't watch me leave" and the camera totally does), and so the fire during that sequence in the middle is like the emotions are so angry and so furious that instead of appearing via people screaming at each other, they conjure themselves visually as physical elements such as fire. And I love that element to this film."

So you can read that piece here.

UPDATE: Here's my final piece from NYFF, a consideration of Room 237, in which I try and parse through some of the criticisms remarked by two legendary critics, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Girish Shambu. Their pieces are better (and are linked in there), so read those, as well as mine here.