The eerie, nagging feeling of being watched is elevated to a hauntingly tangible reality in Watcher, the feature directorial debut of Chloe Okuno. Co-written by Okuno (recently acclaimed for helming the “Storm Drain” segment in the horror anthology V/H/S/94) and seasoned screenwriter Zack Ford (who in 2021 ran for mayor of Skaneateles, NY before ultimately relocating to L.A.), the film follows Julia (Maika Monroe) and Francis (Karl Glusman), a young American couple who relocate to Bucharest for Francis’s work. Shortly after settling into their minimalist new digs, Julia begins to notice an unsettling presence in her most intimate spaces. As […]
Where Sierra Pettengill’s previous all-archival film, The Reagan Show (co-directed with Pacho Velez), asked the question “How did we get here?” by re-examining the ’80s, her new feature Riotsville, USA goes back further, to the oft-examined period from roughly 1967 to 1968. As she explains in a press kit interview conducted by programmer Nellie Killian (also credited as a researcher on the film), the project originated when, while reading Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, Pettengill grew curious about what, exactly, might have happened at the titular sites. “I Googled [“Riotsville”] and I didn’t find much of anything—and for me, as an archival researcher, that’s just the […]
The perils of being a fledgling musician go deeper than tour burnout and being paid with drink tickets. Isabel Castro’s nonfiction feature Mija, predominantly shot in Southern California, focuses on the unique plight of emerging alternative Latino artists—many of whom must tandemly fight for industry recognition and for largely undocumented family members to evade deportation. As portrayed in Mija, an integral part of the Latino music scene is Doris Muñoz, an up-and-coming music manager who juggles her various professional responsibilities while sponsoring her parents’ application for their green cards. At the film’s start, one of the artists Doris manages is singer-songwriter […]
The first rule of documentary film? “Lie to everyone.” This from no less an authority (and anti-authority) than Christine Choy, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker (Who Killed Vincent Chin?) and educator (NYU, Cornell, Yale, etc.), founding director of Third World Newsreel, and straight-shooting (no pun intended) civil rights rabble-rouser. (Once during the US Film and Video Festival – soon to be rebranded Sundance – Choy even pulled Robert Redford aside to bluntly ask what was up with all the white people and white snow.) And now she is the cigarette-puffing central character in Violet Columbus and Ben Klein’s The Exiles, which executive produced […]
Alon Schwarz’s Tantura takes its title from a particular Palestinian village that was depopulated – by any means necessary, including through a still-contested massacre of civilians – during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence (aka “Al Nakba,” the Catastrophe, if you hail from the occupied side). Yet the doc is less a history lesson than a deep-dive investigation into the stories a nation chooses to tell about itself. Schwarz’s (Aida’s Secrets) own story began when he got access to over 100 hours of shockingly candid audiotaped interviews that the (government and academia-silenced) researcher Teddy Katz conducted decades ago with former soldiers […]
“With the passing of the years, each neighborhood, each street in a city evokes a memory, a meeting, a regret, a moment of happiness for those who were born there and have lived there. Often the same street is tied up with successive memories, to the extent that the topography of a city becomes your whole life,” said French novelist Patrick Modiano in his 2014 Nobel Prize speech. Modiano was speaking of Paris, the setting of most of his novels, but his words resonate with the work of Norwegian director Joachim Trier—specifically, his loose “Oslo trilogy,” which culminates with the […]
There is a moment early in The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s extraordinary debut film as writer/director/transgressive character whisperer. Leda (Olivia Colman) is on a solo summer vacation in Greece, lost in a reverie, walking on a rocky path. Then, something—a pinecone? a slingshot?—falls from above and pierces her back. Is this intrusion a piercing of persona, of psychic armor? Is it a portent of indignities to come, or perhaps, is it the shock to the system that triggers Leda’s ensuing momentum of memory? The occurrence speaks to everything and perhaps nothing at all. Leda is a British-born academic who has […]
There may be no horror franchise that opens with as simple and satisfying a tradition as Scream. As the production company’s logo appears on screen, we begin hearing the ringing of a landline phone—if you’ve seen only one of Scream’s now five installments, you immediately know whose voice will be on the other line. Reeling in a character with a false sense of comfort before swiftly posing a question everyone in the audience would affirmatively respond to (“do you like scary movies?”), the soon-to-be-victim begins to realize what we already know: if they can’t answer three specific slasher-film trivia questions, they’ll […]
“This film was written in 2017 and shot in 2019,” reads a title card at the very beginning of Brazilian writer-director Iuli Gerbase’s debut feature The Pink Cloud. “Any resemblance to actual events is purely coincidental.” As the film’s plot unfurls, it becomes clear why such a disclaimer is necessary. Set in a present-day Brazilian metropolis, The Pink Cloud begins with protagonists Giovana (Renata de Lélis) and Yago (Eduardo Mendonça) in the midst of a playful, seemingly inconsequential one-night stand. When they wake up the next morning, it’simmediately clear something is off. Yago shows Giovana a notification on his phone, […]
As pre-production was ramping up on his first narrative feature, the pressure to find the perfect shooting location was weighing on Pete Ohs. While he and co-director Andrea Sisson eventually shot the film several hours outside LA — Everything Beautiful is Far Away stars Julia Garner and Joseph Cross, and was released by The Orchard in 2017 — Ohs theorized that knowing his shoot location before coming up with his next story idea would relieve some pressure from the narrative filmmaking process and, in turn, win back invaluable time for creative exploration. The result is Youngstown, Ohs’ sophomore feature which […]