At the height of her fame, actor Jean Seberg was targeted by the FBI for her political beliefs. Clandestine surveillance and smear campaigns helped damage her career, destroy her personal relationships, and led her to doubt her sanity. In Seberg, director Benedict Andrews explores both the actor, played by Kristen Stewart, and an FBI agent assigned to her case (Jack O’Connell). The script (by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse) also shows how the COINTELPRO operation helped undermine the civil rights movement. The Amazon Studios release opened theatrically December 13. Cinematographer Rachel Morrison worked with Andrews and production designer Jahmin Assa […]
Marriage Story depicts the love two people can find in separation. It is not a rekindling, it is stepping back to respect the boundaries you crossed in your strangling embrace. The original love hardens. It dies and returns as something like an actual reverence. At this distance, you might actually be able to see each other again. If the separating lovers in question, Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), can learn to walk away from each other with nothing more than that knowing glance—“I accept that we will not be together. It is sad, but you are great. I […]
Thunderous farts and the roiling sea, booming foghorns and the menacing squawks of predatory seagulls—the Melvillian world of Robert Eggers’s supernatural-tinged film The Lighthouse offers a composer many sources of sonic inspiration. Mark Korven, who reunited with Eggers following their collaboration on the director’s 2015 feature, The Witch, admits that the environment of the film dominated their early conversations. “We did discuss nature a lot,” he says, “and also the world the characters inhabited. There might be a rusty old cornet lying around the lighthouse or maybe a bashed-up accordion. Rob felt strongly about a brass score because there was […]
The credits of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood are filled with the director’s usual suspects. Cinematographer Robert Richardson, editor Fred Raskin and assistant director William Paul Clark are among the consummate craftspeople who have spent at least a decade collaborating with the auteur. However, Hollywood also features a significant contribution from a new initiate to the Tarantino film family—production designer Barbara Ling. While Ling doesn’t share any work history with the director, the two are connected in another way. Both grew up in the Hollywood milieu lovingly resurrected in Tarantino’s ninth—and, if you believe him, next […]
Supervising sound editor Donald Sylvester was working on James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari before shooting even started. “They had mocked up some of the races with visual effects and pre-viz,” Sylvester says, “proving that you can see the right scene, but if you don’t feel the cars, it’s hard to visualize.” The sound journey of Ford v Ferrari, from those early pre-visualizations to the Dolby Atmos-mixed period feature currently exciting audiences in theaters, is one involving the sound team’s intense collaboration with Mangold, careful consideration of POV and the interplay between internal and external space and perspicacious car collector detective […]
Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood centers on New York–based journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), who’s assigned to profile Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) for Esquire in the late 1990s. For editor Anne McCabe, who cut Heller’s previous feature, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, and Beautiful Day, the process was fundamentally the same on both: She began cutting dailies on day two of production while working through familiar challenges. “Any movie I work on is a lot longer at the beginning,” she observes. “Almost always you’re working on the setup. There’s usually too much at the beginning, and you’re […]
Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, based on hitman Frank Sheeran’s (Robert De Niro) account of the murder of Teamster luminary Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), talks back to its characters’ memories as much as it does the director’s past films. It’s Sheeran’s perspective told from Scorsese’s, executed by his go-to cinematographer since The Wolf of Wall Street, Rodrigo Prieto. Sheeran confessed to murdering Hoffa, the dear friend he served as bodyguard. But Hoffa’s true cause of death is still subject to speculation, as are details of Sheeran’s recollection. “Some people are mulling over what’s accurate and what’s not accurate, and I don’t […]
Hustlers, Lorene Scafaria’s adaptation (from a 2015 New York article by Jessica Pressler) of the real-life tale of savvy strippers scamming their wealthy clients in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, is one of the year’s top crowd-pleasers, and its giddy garishness is expertly manifested in the costumes worn by the all-female primary cast. Early on, veteran stripper Ramona (Jennifer Lopez) wraps her sumptuous fur coat around the considerably less confident Destiny (Constance Wu) in a moment of feminine bonding and reassurance. The scene has elicited spontaneous clapping from audiences—not just for Lopez’s considerable charisma, but for her unforgettably […]
The visual exquisiteness of Peter Strickland’s films has sometimes led to them being regarded as precious bon-bons—laced with strychnine—that favor style over substance. It’s an argument that applies no more to his self-financed feature debut Katalin Varga (2009), an unsentimental neo-Gothic rape revenge drama, than to his harrowing giallo homage Berberian Sound Studio (2012) or his depiction of an inverse Domme/sub relationship in The Duke of Burgundy (2014). Each of these movies is a penetrating psychological study of a character struggling to survive victimhood and the unfair hand she or he has been dealt. If you don’t sympathize with Katalin […]
Pedro Costa will not separate films from how they are made. We cannot escape that “how” from what we are seeing on screen, so we must make films the hard way. It is not enough for us to get them made: We must know our technicians closely, see that they are compensated fairly, ensure that our project is optimized for our tools and that those tools only operate at their zenith. Ease, Costa warns, is the sure sign of a “trap,” that, if succumbed to, will expose one’s work to “bullshit,” a word he does not use lightly. If we […]