I screened the amorphous Madeline’s Madeline twice in preparation for my interview with DP Ashley Connor; on the second go-around, I realized I’d be as nonplussed on a third or forth. I didn’t write any questions because I couldn’t. But perhaps an improvised approach was truer to the spirit of Madeline’s Madeline, which refuses to be pinned down. One of New York’s most prolific working DPs, Connor’s fervent demand for a higher standard of nuance, diversity, and inclusivity in the film industry naturally formed the backbone and throughline of our oscillating conversation which features, amongst other things, Nathaniel Dorsky’s Devotional Cinema, Grand […]

As in Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly (2009), a woman’s disappearance in Everybody Knows (Todos Lo Saben—this is Farhadi’s first film in Spanish) is the inciting incident. This time it is Irene, the daughter of Laura (Penelope Cruz), swept from her bed on the night of her aunt’s wedding—either by her own anarchic free spirit, or a kidnapper, stranger, or kin. Irene’s absence turns up dormant family secrets and suspicions that, perhaps, they all already knew. Bare and exposed, the festered family wounds must be dealt with until new ones emerge to be cast aside. Everybody Knows is another social realist thriller in […]

Gus Van Sant won’t settle and his insatiable itch to reinvent himself hasn’t ebbed. Years working in, out, and around the studio system have offered him ample opportunity to normalize, and, occasionally, he’s adopted the opportunity, if only to do something different (as only different could be his “norm”) once more. Even his deliberate efforts to direct something “standard” tend to tinge off-kilter, with his itch to experiment crackling just under frame. His latest re-invention, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot, which has its streaming premiere today on Amazon Prime, wiggles somewhere in between Van Sant’s oeuvre of […]

A restless trucker (credited as the titular “Phantom”) tugs his wheels across the highway and calls out to fellow drivers over his CB radio. No one else is on the road and no one reciprocates his cries via electronic airwaves. Eventually, the endless road gives to an endless ocean and the big rigs of the freeway morph into the whale varieties of the water. Whale calls, clicks, and songs reverberating over long distances in the ocean stand in for the Semis CB radios. But our Phantom’s whale calls out at a 52hz frequency, and no whale hears at 52hz, so […]

When it comes time to “punish” the image of a film, say with filtration, grease (generously applied to the front of the lens), or underexposure, cinematographers regress from their dear and safe technical jargon and assume the barbarous dialect of medieval executioners. They don’t just underexpose their picture to see how it reacts under strain, they “suffocate” it, “break” it, and “destroy” it — sometimes in spite of itself. The digital image is nary embraced and mostly worked against, its sterile lines deliberately corroded and beaten to a duller moosh. Cinematographer Lol Crawley BSC (Ballast, 45 Years) tortures the film […]

In Blumhouse’s first female-directed feature film, New Year, New You, Sophia Takal (Always Shine, Green) sticks four friends from high school (played by an all-female cast toplined by Suki Waterhouse, Carly Chaikin, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, and Melissa Bergland) and their hidden grievances into one of the women’s sealed residence for a New Year’s reunion. The four are connected, molded and torn by a tragedy in their past that Takal reveals through sharp cuts of glass shattering and blood inking through a pool. Danielle (Carly Chaikin), now a social media self-care icon who claims to mix amongst the likes of Leonardo Dicaprio […]

All Kore-eda films prior to Shoplifters (Manbiki Kozoku) involved families pushed together by blood or filiation, but for his new family of misfits crime is the only accord. They are a troop of scavengers who steal to survive, orphans, abandoners, and the abandoned, who’ve found each other. For the first time he tells the story of a family that chooses to be together. Drama arises from those characters not wanting to admit their motivations, as doing so might affirm no “real” family awaits their return. Kore-eda doesn’t know this story, though he’s shaped it through his life experience as much […]

Alice (Madeline Brewer), the star of Cam, sustains herself as a full-time webcam model at the top of the “FreeGirls.Live” leaderboards. She aspires to break Top 50, but to do so she’ll have to descend deeper into her on-screen persona and farther from her off-screen principles. The system of rewards in this cyber cranny conditions her to betray her standards; the more Alice caters to her audience’s desires the more her fan base grows and the bigger her tips get. When she’s pushed to go beyond her comfort zone, a digital doppelganger of Alice, named Lola, manifests and assumes control […]

At the time of our Skype call, director of photography Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Call Me By Your Name, Cemetery Of Splendour, Arabian Nights Vol.1 & 2) was celebrating the news that Nakee 2, a film he shot in Thailand last year, had just broken box-office records. He was also celebrating a friend’s wedding party in Bangkok, his choice venue for the interview, and its jolly attendees enjoyed hollering their two cents in Thai from off screen. Spirits were high. It was midnight in New York and 11:00 AM in Bangkok. My questions were too prepared. I had mistaken Guadagnino’s complex reimagining […]

Jong-Su (Ah-In Yoo) meets Hae-Mi (Jong-Seo Jeon) dancing at a storefront display beside a lottery machine. Her dance partner projects keywords (“Sales,” “Prizes”) over a PA system and through a K-Pop deluge. They are lures. Hae-Mi has rigged the whole raffle, Jong-Su wins a pink wristwatch (per her intervention) and she expects he’ll gift it back to her. This is no meet-cute, it’s an odd-reunion, Hae-Mi reveals to Jong-Su, her old friend. They grew up together, but Jong-Su either can’t remember or can’t recognize her post-plastic surgery. He won’t forget her now. These two characters thicken and sink to form […]