Here’s your first look at MA, the debut feature from one of our most recent 25 New Faces, Celia Rowlson-Hall. The dialogue free film just received its world premiere in the Venice Days section of the Venice Film Festival, and I was fortunate enough to catch a work-in-progress screening back in April at Tribeca. Be sure to keep an eye out for it on the circuit in the coming year.
Here’s the first trailer for Josh Mond’s Sundance winner James White, starring Cynthia Nixon and Christopher Abbott as a cancer patient and her alcoholic son. As his mother leans on the eponymous character for emotional stability, James spirals into self-destructive pattern, in what’s a tightly controlled, affecting character study. The Film Arcade will open James White on November 13, 2015.
In this interview clip from a shelved Errol Morris project, businessman and now presidential candidate Donald Trump muses on the meanings of Orson Welles’ classic film, Citizen Kane. Trump doesn’t diverge from critical orthodoxy about the film, but it’s still interesting to hear him take away the standard lesson that money isn’t everything. Still, as Jason Kottke notes, Trump can’t just help himself from throwing in conversation-ending misogynistic aside. From Morris’s site: The Movie Movie, an aborted project, is based on the idea of taking Donald Trump, Mikhail Gorbachev and others and putting them in the movies they most admire. […]
In his latest video essay, the prolific Jacob T. Swinney pulls off a nifty trick in assembling a variety of dutch angles from film history. Instead of just stringing them together, he measures the angle of the camera by degree, quantifying extremity of effect in numbers.
Want to start your day by seeing some enlighteningly disturbing parallels between The Birds and The Brood? This video by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin connects the dots between late Hitchcock and early Cronenberg; over at MUBI, there’s an essay to go along with it. If you’re familiar with both films, you’ll know this is probably not something to watch first thing in the morning — it’s strong fare.
A new site called Film Scalpel is devoted to not just the production of video essays, but also understanding their grammar and exemplary practitioners. Among their first handful of videos are four takes on different motifs in the work of Martin Scorsese, with a thoughtful look at his use of red as it historically relates to tinting and black and white compositions. Check that out above, and read below for some context. Just as silent movies were rarely silent, black-and-white films were not often simply black and white. In the silent era, the techniques of tinting and toning were commonly used to add a dash of […]
In honor of Ingrid Bergman’s centenary, Criterion has posted this tribute video cut together by Jonathan Keogh. For more reading, head over to Keyframe Daily, where David Hudson has rounded up some recent writing on the actress and the many retros of her films currently taking place.
In our second Jacob T. Swinney video post of the day, here’s the critic and filmmaker’s tribute to the late Wes Craven, in the form of an analysis of the director’s use of sound in his horror classic. From the video’s notes: The first horror movie I ever watched was Wes Craven’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street”. Being a child, the film frightened me so badly that I didn’t view another horror film until my teen years. Despite the obvious tormentors of a man with a burned face, gravity defying whirlpools of blood, and a dying teen being dragged around […]
Peppered with documentary elements, Alexander Sokurov’s Francofonia returns the director to similar territory of his much heralded Russian Ark, this time among the hallowed halls of Paris’ Louvre. The film will explore the relationships between art and culture, war and power, throughout the centuries of the museum. Francofonia premieres in competition at Venice and will be shown in the Masters program at TIFF. Check out the first trailer above.
Here’s another nifty video from Jacob T. Swinney, this time bookending an assembly of the Coen brothers’ numerous POV with montages of their many dashboard-driving shots.