Opening in theaters today is the debut feature from actress and short-film director Jordana Spiro, whose Night Comes On subversively wraps both a coming-of-age tale and story of sister bonding within a work of hardboiled revenge. Dominique Fishback, the breakout star of HBO’s The Deuce, plays Angel, a teen who, after being sprung from juvenile detention, trades sex for a handgun and hits the road, traveling towards the man who murdered her mother years ago. She picks up her younger sister, Abby, from her foster home, and as their relationship is teased out, the film’s rhythms shift, with the hours […]
The following article appears in Filmmaker’s Summer, 2018 print edition and is being posted today to mark the premiere, this Friday, of Terence Nance’s Random Acts of Flyness on HBO. When Brooklyn-based filmmaker and musician Terence Nance last appeared in this magazine’s print pages, it was in our 25 New Faces section — in 2012 — and he had been working on his debut feature, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, since 2006. A loose-limbed autobiographical drama detailing Nance’s own near-romantic relationship with an attractive friend (Namik Minter, who played herself in the film), the film unspools, I wrote, “like some […]
Valérie Massadian makes her first on-screen appearance in Milla near the film’s midpoint. The writer/director/editor plays a small but crucial role as a housekeeper at a remote seaside hotel. We first see her in a wide shot, pushing a cleaning cart down an empty hallway. When the title character, a pregnant teenager with little education and few prospects, takes a job at the hotel, Massadian’s unnamed housekeeper takes the girl under her wing. They make a fascinating study in contrasts. Massadian’s movements are practiced and efficient, honed through decades of labor. Séverine Jonckeere, who plays Milla, is disinterested and inept, […]
The “stay positive and keep it simple” approach Ann Dowd has toward her work is truly inspiring. A go-to character actor extraordinaire for 30 years, she has now received wide acclaim (and an Emmy) for her portrayal of the terrifyingly devout Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid’s Tale. And her pitch perfect performance in Craig Zobel’s Compliance is, in my opinion, a tour de force for the ages. In this half hour, she talks about the nuts and bolts of playing these roles and generously lets us peek “under the hood” at the inner workings of her craft. Inspiration is guaranteed. […]
With Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, which has topped many critics’ lists so far this year, on iTunes today, we’re unlocking from our paywall Darren Hughes’s interview with the writer/director from our Summer print edition. When discussing his latest film, First Reformed, Paul Schrader regularly recounts a conversation he had over dinner with the Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski. Schrader, who famously discovered cinema as a college student after coming of age in a strict Calvinist home, has very intentionally spent his career exploring darker, more transgressive aspects of the spiritual condition. He was intrigued, however, by Ida, Pawlikowksi’s quiet, black-and-white study […]
For a few brief shining years Howard Ashman was one of the most influential filmmakers in Hollywood. With the composer Alan Menken he had already created an Off-Broadway hit with Little Shop of Horrors, and, at Walt Disney Animation Studios in the late 1980s, he was a pivotal force in creating The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin—films that galvanized an industry-wide animation renaissance—as not just a lyricist but a producer, writer, and director. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1991, however, while the latter two of these films were still in production: Beauty and the Beast was dedicated “to our friend Howard, who […]
As someone who is not a parent, never wanted to be a parent, and still says a silent prayer of “thank heaven that’s not me” every time I walk by a mom or dad struggling with a stroller, Rachel Dretzin’s Far From the Tree — based on Andrew Solomon’s NY Times bestseller Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity — at first glance seemed far from making my must-watch-docs list. Which is precisely how I know it’s as good as it is. When I finally got around to catching it on screener recently, Dretzin’s film — […]
Some films make a splash on their initial release and are largely forgotten just a few years later; others are ignored but rise in stature with the passage of time. Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 debut sex, lies, and videotape is one of those rare movies that was a phenomenon in its time and has only gotten better with age, a razor-sharp exploration of the ways in which we lie to each other and ourselves and an inquiry into what those lies say about our relationships, our desires, and our society as a whole. An extremely specific movie about a precise social […]
While shooting a commercial in Thailand cinematographer Sean Price Williams (Good Time, Golden Exits, Marjorie Prime) contracted an ear infection. He let me rattle questions into his ear canals despite it. Two months prior The Great Pretender, the second feature film he had shot with writer/director Nathan Silver (Thirst Street, Stinking Heaven, Exit Elena), premiered in the Viewpoints section of Tribeca. Following the screening, Sean revealed that the film had been shot on a DLSR camera that could fit in one hand, with plastic, sparkle filters taped over the lens, completely eschewing a matte box. He managed to photograph Brooklyn […]
Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey, her studio romantic comedy about a thirtysomething trying to escape her Lower East Side roots, is the epitome of the New York Woman series the Quad has been running all month. After a difficult experience at United Artists with her 1979 masterpiece Chilly Scenes of Winter, Silver took on her biggest production yet, an adaptation of Susan Sandler’s stage play, Crossing Delancey. The Nebraska native returned to examining Jewish identity in New York, as she did in her first film Hester Street, but instead of immigrants at the turn of the century, her focus was […]