Lizzie Borden is back. The pioneering writer-director of punk sci-fi feminist classic Born In Flames (1983) and its Sundance-prized follow-up Working Girls (1986) has been enjoying a long-overdue return to the spotlight this year, with revivals of her pioneering provocations on both sides of the Atlantic. “The free, ardent, spontaneous creativity of Born In Flames,” proclaimed Richard Brody in the New Yorker, “emerges as an indispensable mode of radical change — one that many contemporary filmmakers with political intentions have yet to assimilate.” Born Linda Elizabeth Borden in Detroit, Borden opted at the age of 11 to honor Massachusetts’ most […]
When legendary producer and studio executive Robert Evans penned his autobiography — later adapted into a documentary — he picked a telling title: The Kid Stays in the Picture. You would think that after producing films like Chinatown and Urban Cowboy, Evans could happily rest on his laurels, but his book’s title, with its defiant use of the present tense, speaks to the ambitions and anxieties affecting every filmmaker with producer DNA. These, of course, are issues of continuing relevance and professional durability — or, to use the independent film parlance of the moment, sustainability. Contrary to the imagination of […]
With his last film, 2013’s Sacro GRA, Italian Gianfranco Rosi became the first documentarian to win the Golden Lion at Venice. He was also the first doc director to win the Golden Bear at Berlin with Fire At Sea, a disciplined, urgent look at the migrant crisis anchored on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, whose proximity to the African coast has made it a target destination for those fleeing their countries. It takes a while before the migrants appear onscreen: initially, Rosi divides his attention among various islanders, including a radio DJ whose tunes are heard all over the island […]
“I didn’t want to make a poverty porn,” says Shanghai-born, Vancouver-residing filmmaker Johnny Ma about his first feature, Old Stone, released this fall by Zeitgeist. “I felt if I can’t bring myself to really understand what it is like to live in this town and environment, then I don’t deserve to make this film.” That extra degree of empathy and social insight was especially needed for Old Stone, which thrusts viewers into a contemporary China where motorists are faced with a stunning dilemma. Drivers who strike pedestrians are forced to shoulder these pedestrians’ related lifetime medical expenses. If the pedestrian […]
With a name like Fortissimo Films, that could have been the company’s unofficial motto in its early years — fortissimo, of course, defined in music terms as an instruction to play notes with force. The 25-year-old international sales company boldly took on challenging arthouse cinema, from the likes of Wong Kar-wai, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Jim Jarmusch, and championed them in global markets with a deafening level of commitment. But earlier this year, the sales company went silent, declaring bankruptcy and signaling not just the end of the respected arthouse giant, but as former Focus Features CEO James Schamus says, “the […]
“I want to make films on the other side of fashion, on the other side of taste,” whispers a melancholic starlet into a velvety black void. It’s the 1930s, and the alluring actress — known in Europe as “La Divina” — has been brought to Hollywood to vamp in commercial confections alongside an American matinee idol. She doesn’t fit in. She wants to play real roles, like Dorian Gray or Christ. Her nervy agent is bewildered. “That’s art!” he scoffs. “Who’s gonna to pay for that?” Brooke Dammkoehler’s 45-minute La Divina (1989), a buoyant pastiche of Golden Age melodrama by way […]
The notorious 1964 film Scorpio Rising opens on a tangle of metal, pieces from a disassembled motorcycle, and a young man tinkering with the detritus in a garage. Ricky Nelson sings “Fools Rush In” on the soundtrack as the camera pans lovingly over rugged boots, bulky links of chain, and then down over the back of a leather jacket with the film’s title and director’s name — Kenneth Anger — written in shiny studs. The man wearing the jacket spins around, and we’re suddenly up close both to his crotch and the soft naked skin of his belly. I was […]
The camera pushes tight in on Natalie Portman’s distressed face, a layer of 16mm grain putting a slight filter on her perfect features. From the very beginning, we’re too close; the customary distance from an iconic first lady is gone. Also missing are biographical flashbacks, or early happy moments, or pretty montages locating Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy within the tapestry of her husband’s life and administration. No, Pablo Larraín’s Jackie, which follows the first lady in the days following John F. Kennedy’s assassination, begins in a kind of emotional media res, a heightened state accentuated by the dark chords of Mica […]
In the nearly ten years I have worked as a film critic and journalist, the sources and stability of my income have severely varied. Freelance movie reviewing for multimedia outlets, like The Rotten Tomatoes Show on the now-defunct Current TV, or Medium Rare TV in San Francisco, kept me afloat through film school. Then in Sydney, Australia, internships in advertising and radio paid well enough for me to start and support a boutique film blog, CineMalin: Film Commentary and Criticism. But in Austin, Texas, where I moved for graduate school some years ago, employment options for professional film writers are […]
Two nights ago I stopped by a party following a screening of Barry Jenkins’s superlative new Moonlight at the New York Film Festival. Jenkins was there, along with producer Adele Romanski, actress Janelle Monáe, and there was a mood of excitement as well as appreciation. Let’s face it: we in independent film need things to be excited about, and it’s great when those things are actually movies made by great people who we can unabashedly champion. Jenkins made our 2008 25 New Faces list and then, in 2009, our cover with his debut picture, Medicine for Melancholy, and it’s been […]