From working in the camera department, I can still picture vividly some of the worn-down bodies I observed between takes: DPs, camera operators, ACs, grips and electricians standing at slightly odd angles, gripping their lower backs with one hand like a scissor jack propping up their spines. Whenever a fellow assistant or operator passed me a rig I didn’t have enough strength to hold properly, I would feel my lower back compensating in a way I knew it shouldn’t, and it wasn’t hard for me to understand that that strain might stick around if I kept it up. I heard […]

The day before the start of his 20-film retrospective at Film at Lincoln Center, Dario Argento talked with film historian Rob King in front of a small delegation at the Italian Cultural Institute. King started by pointing out that the director has now directed giallo films for 53 years, or “four years longer than John Ford made westerns.” Asked what the genre means, Argento said he’s been asked this question thousands of times and that “once more” he will answer—“I don’t know.” Asked if his approach to directing giallo has changed, he also answered as he always has—No. He simply […]

After designing animatronics for franchises like Star Wars and Jurassic World, Gustav Hoegen and his team scaled back and happily returned to traditional design and puppetry methods for Hanna Bergholm’s indie creature-feature Hatching–the first feature film Hoegen’s Biomimic Studio worked on from start to finish. 12-year old Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) nurses an egg she brought in from the woods—a welcome distraction from her helicopter mother (Sophia Heikkilä), who obsessively micromanages the family to maintain her perfect social media presence. Then the egg grows at least as large as Tinja and a slimy and straggly bird bursts fist first through the top […]

Beyond the cartoonish mania of the multiverse action-comedy Everything Everywhere All At Once is a story about a mother and daughter, Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) and Joy (Stephanie Hu). Their family laundromat is on the brink of falling out, though  not for want of trying–both strive to get along, but the air between them remains tense and unpleasant. Under a scrupulous audit by a five-time award-winning IRS agent Deirdre Beaubeirdra (Jamie Lee Curtis), the laundromat may be taken away from the family too, and Evelyn’s sweetheart husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), has secretly prepared divorce papers. Eventually, Joy decides it might […]

In 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi appointed Gajendra Chauhan, a B-list actor and member of the right-wing BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), as chairman of the Film and Television Institute of India. Recognizing this as yet another BJP maneuver to saffronize (rewrite with right-wing policies and Hindu-nationalist agendas) curriculums, students protested and struck. Police arrested and tortured such dissenters across national institutes; administrations hiked up entry exam fees and cut nonconforming students’ stipends. Persisting today, the BJP’s violent acts of suppression especially affect students of the Dalit caste. But film students across campuses (including the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute) continue […]

By the time of the new Jackass Forever, some of the series’s performers have neared or surpassed age 50. Their bodies remain sturdy, if marked by 20 years of unnatural trials. To extend their infamous game of indecent brinkmanship, the crew has endured a brand-new omnibus of freak obstacles and some reimaginings of past favorites. Beekeepers use a queen bee to attract a hive to Steve-O’s (47) phallus; Danger Ehren (45) sustains countless blows to the groin in an exhaustive series of “Cup tests”; Johnny Knoxville (50) re-contends with a particularly mean bull in a ring; series newcomers (“Poopies,” “Jasper,” […]

Those who knew Chol Soo Lee, or saw his image printed on the posters, stickers, and t-shirts of the 1970s Pan-Asian American movement to release him from jail, often remarked on his stunning beauty. “What a good-looking kid. I mean real good-looking kid,” chirps investigative reporter K.W. Lee, recalling their first encounter at San Quentin Prison in Free Chol Soo Lee, a new Sundance documentary that tells the story of a young man falsely convicted of murder, the symbol he became, and the activists who rallied for both. Later in the film, investigative reporter, Josiah “Tink” Thompson, asks the witness […]

Thrown from a second floor window, a box television clocks old Leonor (Sheila Francisco) square on the head. She wakes up inside her work-in-progress movie script, an homage to ’80s Pinoy action movies, able to steer the rest of the unwritten plot in first person. Back in reality, the retired movie director lies comatose in a hospital bed while her sons–one flesh and blood, the other a ghost–wander and wonder around, trying to option their mother’s unfinished script to pay the bills. Will Leonor wake up in time, if at all, to retain agency of her comeback story?  When you […]

Cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom is an impenetrable interviewee, shrugging off my most premeditated questions. I get it, how many ways can you talk about your creative process or the equipment you rented for a film? When I asked him what lights he used on Memoria, he named an Arri Skypanel and left the rest, “the usual,” to my imagination. As I learned from our talk on Suspiria, which he dialed into from his friend’s unruly wedding party via Skype, Sayombhu prefers flexibility, creating lighting environments that are open to how the director and actors react to them, each other, and the […]

Bryan Wizemann’s You Mean Everything to Me is the first feature film I worked on as an A.C  in New York. Before principal photography, production sent me the script and the lookbook, which introduced me to the abusive relationship at the center of the film. Nathan (Ben Rosenfield) comes off affable and attractive enough on the surface, but is dangerously worn inside from lying to others and himself. Perpetuating his particularly gangrenous insecurity, he habitually coerces partners into his ring of control. Cassandra (Morgan Saylor) just happens to meet him while she’s down on her luck,and finds herself spiraling into […]