Fourth generation Californian Paul McCloskey — aka “Pete” and “Bear” — is a former US Congressman who represented San Mateo County from 1967 (when he trounced Shirley Temple in the Republican primary) to 1983; a decorated Korean War vet, who torpedoed Pat Robertson’s ’88 campaign by revealing his lies about having served in combat; and an ultimately unsuccessful challenger to President Nixon in ’72, when the maverick Stanford Law grad went on Firing Line to make the case for his anti-Vietnam War platform to an electorate likely more receptive than the program’s highly condescending, pro-Cambodia-bombing host. That particular clip from the […]

French director Laurent Cantet, whose films include Human Resources, Heading South, The Workshop and his Palme d’Or-winning The Class, died today at the age of 63. With this sad news we are reposting Brandon Harris’s interview with Cantet about The Class from our Spring, 2008 print edition. — Editor Starting with 1999’s Human Resources, Laurent Cantet has quickly built an international reputation as France’s most socially engaged narrative filmmaker, crafting films that highlight the ever lingering issues of race and class in both France and, as in the case of his 2006 film Heading South, its former colony of Haiti. With […]

New York-based Argentinian director Matiás Piñeiro’s work is without a doubt, a celebration of intertextuality. After continuously exploring the female roles in Shakespeare’s comedies from 2011’s Rosalinda up until 2020’s Isabella, he was drawn to a text which seemed impenetrable, admitting he had no clue how to film a poetic dialogue. In order to collect the shots for the adaptation-film-collage that would become You Burn Me, the filmmaker traveled between New York and San Sebastian (where he teaches at the EQZE film school, Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola), which gave him the possibility to “develop the material, watch it and think […]

A decade ago, I interviewed Argentinian filmmaker Martín Rejtman for an hour, walking through the general scope of his career before discussing his then-most-recent feature, Two Shots Fired, which may help flesh out the parts of this interview relating to his first feature, Rapado. Rejtman’s new film, Riders, is only his second documentary. As I wrote in my dispatch on Visions du Réel 2024, where the film premiered, Riders kicks off in May 2020, with extended global lockdown fatigue ramping up; after an opening rally of delivery drivers protesting their horrible conditions (“It is inadmissable to normalize the bodies of […]

On the surface, Challengers is about a single tennis match between former friends turned rivals Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor). But as it flashes back and forth in time to show how their relationships with tennis champion turned coach Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) led them to this competition, it becomes much more than a typical sports drama. Challengers intelligently and entertainingly deals with issues of communication, aging, and how the pursuit of excellence can saddle one with both limitations and opportunities for transcendence. It also does all that while providing the thrills of watching “some good fucking […]

The following interview with filmmaker Lourdes Portillo by Bérénice Reynaud was originally published in our Spring, 1995 print issue, and it is being reposted today alongside the sad news that Portillo has passed away at the age of 80. — Editor “We’ve been told forever that films should be objective, but we knew that was not going to get us anywhere, because if you don’t have a point of view, you don’t have anything,” comments Lourdes Portillo on her approach to Las Madres: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, the 1986 film she co-directed with Susana Munoz. Nearly ten years […]