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Personal Effects: Boots Riley and His Collaborators on Crafting I Love Boosters
Boots Riley BTS on I Love Boosters
Boots Riley has directed two movies and one TV show over the past decade, but he’s been telling stories through music for more than 30 years. “I usually think about my songs the same way I think about movies,” said… Read more
Northern Exposure: Chandler Levack and Sophy Romvari Chat Mile End Kicks and Blue Heron
Photo by Robb McCaghren
Chandler Levack’s Mile End Kicks and Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron make time travel feel possible. Levack retreats into the beer-drenched, laissez-faire vibe of Montreal’s indie rock scene circa 2011; Romvari reflects on her Hungarian immigrant family’s domestic struggles on Vancouver… Read more
Steven Soderbergh on Making The Christophers With Michaela Coel and Ian McKellen
The Christophers
Twisty as a Hitchcock movie but not a thriller, Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers is a two-hander for two great actors. Michaela Coel plays Lori Butler, a serious painter with a side gig as an art forger. Ian McKellen plays Julian Sklar, an… Read more
Facing the Music: David Lowery and Chloé Zhao Dig Into Mother Mary
Mother Mary, photo by Eric Zachanowich
David Lowery and Chloé Zhao have been friends and collaborators since January 2012, when they met as fellows in the annual Sundance Screenwriters Lab. In the years since, both directors have found artistic and commercial success. Much as Zhao has… Read more
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Talk Is Cheap: Radu Jude on Kontinental ’25
From Pearl White’s Perils of Pauline to Antonioni’s aimless, quasi-somnambulant heroines, the wandering woman has a venerable history in cinema. The figure has given filmmakers a vehicle for formal experimentation and narrative risk and stories organized less around destination than duration, encounter, and drift. With Kontinental ’25, Radu Jude continues his exploration of wandering women, this time through Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), a bailiff reeling after the suicide of her most recent evictee—a former athlete turned squatter living in abandoned buildings in the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca. Guilt or shame? Humiliation or distress? Jude doesn’t delineate Orsolya’s feelings so much as […]
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Subterranean Histories: Laura Poitras on “Cover-Up”
When we meet Seymour Hersh at his Washington office in Laura Poitras’s and Mark Obenhaus’s Cover-Up, the veteran journalist is framed by papers—documents piled on his desk, notebooks stacked against the wall, binders stuffed into bookcases. The man who began his career in 1959, broke stories about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and prison torture in Abu Ghraib and penned provocative counter-histories about the killing of Bin Laden and the 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline is very much still at work. (Now on Substack, he’s recently been writing about the genocide in Gaza, Trump administration plans to […]
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Source File: Mark Obenhaus on “Cover-Up”
Mark Obenhaus has had an extensive career in television documentary, having worked with ABC News as well as on the PBS series Frontline, Great Performances and The American Experience. His subjects have ranged from the Kennedy assassination to UFOs to Robert Wilson’s groundbreaking opera, Einstein on the Beach, and he has won five national Emmy awards, two for the Frontline series “Abortion Clinic” and “Living Below the Line.” He worked with Seymour Hersh on projects including the Frontline documentary Buying the Bomb and brought his long relationship with Sy and understanding of the reporter’s working methods and very understandable sensitivities […]
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The Music Guides the Way: Oliver Laxe and Gaspar Noé Discuss “Sirāt”
When Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt premiered at Cannes this year, it caught both those familiar with his work as well as new viewers off guard; that the film takes an unexpected turn in its second half is only part of its disorienting effect. Where his first three, score-free features defaulted to the quiet and contemplative, Sirāt is nearly an action movie and accordingly nerve-wracking, increasingly suspenseful and—thanks in large part to Kangding Ray’s excellent electronic score—sometimes so deafeningly loud that it’s been known to literally make projection booths shake. With a larger budget and longer schedule than Laxe has had before, […]
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Small Talk is Optional: Jim Jarmusch and Amalia Ulman Discuss “Father Mother Sister Brother”
Across his 45-year career, independent auteur Jim Jarmusch has continually returned to a particular type of film in which feature-length narrative is broken into a series of short, discrete episodes united by place (Mystery Train), time (Night on Earth) or activity (Coffee and Cigarettes). Through their internal correspondences and connections, and perhaps because of their fractured nature, these films, liberated from traditional three-act structure, produce sly epiphanies and unexpected pleasures. Jarmusch’s attraction to filmic miniatures continues with Father Mother Sister Brother, in which the connective tissue is, yes, the family. (In a clever bit of calendaring by MUBI, the film […]
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The Purity of Song: Mona Fastvold on “The Testament of Ann Lee”
What if Jesus already made his way back to us in the 18th century, and we just missed it? The titular British-born spiritual leader played by Amanda Seyfried in Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee believed herself to be the female embodiment of Jesus Christ and brought her scripture to Colonial America, enticed by its supposed promise of spiritual freedom. Co-written by Fastvold, who directed, and her partner Brady Corbet, and arriving only a year after their architectural epic The Brutalist, Ann Lee continues the pair’s interest in eccentric individuals who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of what […]
