Mubi has partnered with New York's Film Society of Lincoln center to bring online audiences part of their February series, "Friends with Benefits: An Anthology of Four New American Filmmakers," programmed by Dennis Lim and Dan Sullivan. In less than a decade of activity, the four friends and polymorphously promiscuous collaborators Gabriel Abrantes, Alexander Carver, Benjamin Crotty, and Daniel Schmidt have made some of the most ravishing and least classifiable films in recent memory—and established themselves as a school of filmmaking unlike any other. These uncompromising young visionaries share a penchant for provocation, a taste for transgression, and a host of strategies and obsessions all their own. At once lyrical and perverse, by turns hilarious and delirious, their films obliterate distinctions—between high- and low-brow, between sensual and cerebral, between art cinema and the avant-garde—while remaining sharply attuned to the byproducts of globalization and the fluctuations of post-internet pop culture.
- 2/18/2016
- by Notebook
- MUBI
Taprobana“These poets are so intelligent,” notes King Philip II of Spain toward the end of Gabriel Abrantes’ Taprobana (2014). “They put a sex scene in the end, and I forget I didn’t understand the rest. Such sophisticated engineering.” He’s talking about the Portuguese national epic Os Lusíadas, but he could as well be describing Abrantes’ eclectic body of work. The Lisbon-based filmmaker's steady output of avant-garde shorts holds together a chain of idiosyncratic filmmakers currently being feted by the Film Society of Lincoln Center's "Friends with Benefits" series. Since 2007, Abrantes has matched an affinity for abstruse, looping narrative with a bawdy sense of humor. Although his work frequently draws on sources like Manet or Aristophanes, it’s never hindered by the dictates of good taste. Ribald slapstick abounds, for example, in the Shakespeare-derived frolic Fratelli (2011), which he co-directed with Alexandre Melo. The characters are earthy, their jokes puerile,...
- 2/11/2016
- by Alice Stoehr
- MUBI
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