Authors — Amy Taubin
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Steven Soderbergh on Making The Christophers With Michaela Coel and Ian McKellen
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 art world star in the 1960s and ’70s who hasn’t made any work of note in decades. Julian’s children, who hate him, concoct a scheme in which Lori is smuggled into Julian’s dilapidated five-story house as a temporary assistant. She is tasked with finding “The Christophers,” a series of portraits that Julian began in his prime but never finished. If […]
by Amy Taubin on Apr 7, 2026 -
“Long Time Artistic Relations Are Fascinating… And Hard to Maintain”: Rick Linklater on “Nouvelle Vague” and “Blue Moon”
One of our most prolific independent American filmmakers, Richard Linklater, now has two new movies in release. Nouvelle Vague and Blue Moon are both evocations of transformative moments in, respectively, narrative cinema and Broadway musical theater. Both are period films, ingenious in form and generous in spirit — in other words they are two of the best films of the year. Nouvelle Vague is set in Paris in 1959, when many of the critics who had formed a community around the magazine Cahiers du Cinema had already directed at least one feature. Desperate to catch-up was Jean-Luc Godard. Nouvelle Vague […]
by Amy Taubin on Nov 4, 2025 -
“14 Inches From a Very Personal Form of Murder”: Steven Soderbergh on Camera as Character and His Sundance Horror Film, Presence
The following interview of Steven Soderbergh about Presence was originally published last year when the film premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. It is being reposted today as the film is released in theaters from NEON. — Editor A heady, elegantly-constructed ghost story, Steven Soderbergh’s Presence has a bunch of half-buried threads, a couple of perfectly-timed scares, and a horrific close-up of an act of violence that mesmerizes the camera—just as horror films mesmerize their audience. The camera is the star here, and not merely because its sustained, floating movements, its sudden turns and retreats, its anxious hovering display […]
by Amy Taubin on Jan 24, 2025 -
Off Screen Spaces: Azazel Jacobs on His Three Daughters
Azazel Jacobs’s films treat the tragicomedy of human existence with tenderness and a heartbreakingly honest sense of the absurd. In his first released feature, The GoodTimesKid (2005), the anti-hero (played by Jacobs) is trapped in a repetitive nightmare of mistaken identity punctuated by Marx Brothers slapstick and 1930s movie dance routines. Jacobs made it with colleagues and friends he met when he was getting his MFA from the AFI Conservatory, some of whom became a permanent part of his team, including his wife Diaz, an actor and filmmaker in her own right. Momma’s Man (2008) memorialized the trauma of moving […]
by Amy Taubin on Sep 18, 2024 -
Images & Action: Director Laura Poitras on Her Nan Goldin Documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Perhaps the simplest way to describe Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is as a conversation between two artists who are committed to the truth potential of lens-based mediums. The film, which won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival and will be released in theaters this fall by NEON, is Poitras’s portrait of Nan Goldin, one of the most celebrated photographers of her generation. What may be less known is that Goldin is also an organizer of campaigns for social justice to which she brings as much fiercely dedicated energy as she does to her photography. […]
by Amy Taubin on Oct 11, 2022 -
A Restaurant’s Democratic Promise: Director Lisa Hurwitz and Her Doc, The Automat
When The Automat director Lisa Hurwitz left her family’s home in Southern California to go to The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, she found that the place where she was most comfortable was the school’s cafeteria, the Greenery. “I made new friends there every day and there was a different food every day,” she says. Hurwitz’s academic focus wasn’t film: “I took one documentary filmmaking course, just before I graduated.” But she also had a job projecting 35mm movies at Olympia’s Capitol Theater, aka the Picture Palace, which was operated by the Olympia Film Society and was the venue for […]
by Amy Taubin on Feb 20, 2022 -
Review: Steven Soderbergh’s Bright-Hued Techno Thriller Kimi, Starring Zoe Kravitz
Want 87 minutes of something bright and beautiful with a cool kind of “hotness?” Try Kimi, a minimalist thriller in which Steven Soderbergh’s camera and an electric-blue-haired Zoe Kravitz move in sync like two rare birds in flight. Kravitz plays Angela Childs, a data stream analyst for a company behind “KIMI”, a more responsive version of the ALEXA smart audio device, that’s about to go public. The movie opens with a sleazy-looking guy doing a Zoom presser from his kitchen (COVID remote rules, a sketchy company or both?) explaining that KIMI is better than other devices because its communication skills are […]
by Amy Taubin on Feb 9, 2022 -
“A Haunting Symbiosis”: On Ed Lachman’s Newly Restored Lou Reed & John Cale Concert Film, Songs for Drella
Not merely an addendum to Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground, Ed Lachman’s Songs For Drella is a ravishingly beautiful, sometimes thrilling audiovisual recording of a song cycle by Lou Reed and John Cale, the founders of the Velvet Underground. Cale and Reed’s early musical collaboration as the VU was inspired but unlikely – they had diametrically opposed musical roots and passions. Short lived as the band was, it became the source for punk, glam, and whatever followed from those fundamentally subversive pop genres. The VU began sliding toward death when Reed effectively fired Cale in 1968. (He had fired their first producer, Andy Warhol, […]
by Amy Taubin on Oct 22, 2021 -
Travel Companions: Steven Soderbergh on Cruise-Ship Shooting, Working with Deborah Eisenberg and Meryl Streep, and Let Them All Talk
In August 2019, when Steven Soderbergh shot Let Them All Talk, COVID-19 was not on his mind, except to the degree that his research on Contagion (2011) had convinced him that a pandemic similar to the one depicted in the film was inevitable. And yet, one of the most compelling aspects of the workaholic director’s latest feature (streaming this Fall on HBO Max) is that the eight-day Atlantic crossing on the Queen Mary 2, during which most of the movie is set, now can be read as a metaphor for the necessarily transformational journey from before to after COVID. In […]
by Amy Taubin on Oct 28, 2020
