Authors — Brandon Harris
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Pattern Recognition: Havana Marking on Smash and Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers
Last Sunday, the most lucrative jewelry theft in world history was pulled off by a lone gunman at Cannes’ posh Carlton Hotel, the same one featured in Hitchcock’s classic light thriller To Catch a Thief. It was the fourth such high-profile jewelry heist in just the past few months. Although the most recent heist was pulled off by a lone gunman, it is highly unlikely that he acted without a team, one which worked for months if not years casing the venue, sizing up the security and concocting a reasoned and accomplishable scheme. Fitting then this week that British documentarian Havana […]
by Brandon Harris on Aug 3, 2013 -
Nenad Cicin-Sain on The Time Being
In Nenad Cicin-Sain’s moody debut feature, The Time Being, Frank Langella plays Warner, a wealthy art patron who after buying a painting at an art gallery hires the financially strapped artist behind the work (Wes Bentley) to do odd, artistically tinged jobs for him. Daniel, a dedicated painter who’s dour work isn’t exactly flying off the walls, struggles to support his family — to the increasing annoyance of his wife Olivia (Ahna O’Reilly). He is drawn to the reclusive and mysterious millionaire as a potential new benefactor, but when Warner’s assignments for Daniel become increasingly bizarre surveillance excursions, Daniel senses that he may […]
by Brandon Harris on Jul 25, 2013 -
Bangkok Dangerous: Nicolas Winding Refn on Only God Forgives
A superviolent and supremely strange Bangkok nocturne, Only God Forgives is Nicolas Winding Refn’s follow-up to his Cannes award-winning pop culture sensation Drive. This film, sure to be nowhere near as popular, is a distinctly less accessible affair. One senses that the filmmaker, a born contrarian, takes a certain pleasure in this. In both Thai and English, it meditates on a white man who trains child fighters and runs a family-operated drug ring with his brother. When said brother is dispatched via some brutal south Asian justice involving really sharp swords (after he is found to have rapped and killed […]
by Brandon Harris on Jul 19, 2013 -
Cullen Hoback on Terms and Conditions May Apply
Every mouse-stroke you make, every search query you use, is being recorded, one way or another, usually by powerful and insidious entities who have no incentive not to sell this information to the highest bidder. Its exchange for copious storage on your web-based email service, and cloud-empowered music players that allow you to play Gil Scott-Heron records, long out of print, night and day, comes a cost that is pervasive and hidden. Your privacy. Oh, and a tremendous amount of monetary value that you likely never knew you created. Shucks. Cullen Hoback’s thoughtful and, in the age of Snowden, all […]
by Brandon Harris on Jul 11, 2013 -
Drew DeNicola and Olivia Mori on Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me
It’s a golden era for “forgotten musical acts of the ’60s and ’70s” docs. While Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man took home the BAFTA and an Academy Award for Best Documentary earlier this year, following a wave of acclaim after its Sundance premiere, films like Jeff Howlett and Mark Christopher Covino’s A Band Called Death, Jay Bulger’s Beware of Mr. Baker and Morgan Neville’s Twenty Feet from Stardom have ridden the festival circuit praise to their own well-received releases in recent months. Next in line is Drew DeNicola and Olivia Mori’s Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me, an assured, rather handsome look at the […]
by Brandon Harris on Jul 5, 2013 -
Judd Ehrlich on Magic Camp
There is a camp for everything. Dance, wrestling, Jesus — you name it, your kid can camp it. In Judd Ehrlich’s charming Magic Camp, the kids have no desire to be the next LeBron James or Sidney Crosby, however; they want to be like one of the Davids, Blaine or Copperfield. Held each summer in Bryn Mawr, PA, Tannen’s Magic Camp, a spinoff of the famed Gotham magic store, teaches teenagers, mostly boys, the fine art of making a rabbit disappear into their ear or a wand suddenly appear in their hand. You think it’s difficult to saw someone in half? Just […]
by Brandon Harris on Jun 27, 2013 -
Antoni Stutz on Rushlights
In Antoni Stutz’s 90’s throwback neo-noir Rushlights, the casual flirtation between a very young, low-rent con-man, Billy (Josh Henderson), and ex-junkie turned lunch-counter waitress Sarah (Haley Webb) quickly grows into a torrid love affair in a tiny Texas hamlet, the type found in thrillers where money and guns often find themselves coming together in dangerous confluence, that bespeaks trouble. When Sarah’s roommate, with whom she has a remarkable resemblance, OD’s on heroin, she’s convinced by her cunning new lover to assume the dead woman’s identity after learning that she’s due to receive a hefty inheritance after the death of a wealthy […]
by Brandon Harris on Jun 20, 2013 -
Morgan Neville on Twenty Feet From Stardom
Backup singers, the ones who provide delicate harmony, who fill out so many of American popular music’s most famous songs, rarely if ever get their due. With Twenty Feet From Stardom, director Morgan Neville sought to change that. A big-hearted, engrossing, pleasurably watchable tribute to the underheralded work of dozens of key performers from the golden age of Blues, Rock, Soul and RnB, the film is a delightful recognition of artists who have long toiled in the shadows of some of American music’s most legendary performers. Emmy award winner Neville, whose past films have included well-received profiles of a gallery […]
by Brandon Harris on Jun 13, 2013 -
There Goes the Neighborhood: the 16th Brooklyn Film Festival
It’s a tough thing, being the Brooklyn Film Festival. Perched right at the beginning of the summer, the festival, which just concluded its 16th year, has the potentially world-class brand of Williamsburg Cool to exploit. According to most casual observers, it has never been able to adequately do so. The New York cinerati just doesn’t take the event seriously. If they don’t, who else will? The reasons for its reputation remain somewhat murky, but most lay the blame on the festival’s programming. The festival certainly suffers from its placement in this regard, between its newer, more prestigious Gotham neighbors Tribeca […]
by Brandon Harris on Jun 12, 2013 -
High Times: the 39th Seattle International Film Festival
Closing this past weekend with the North American premiere of Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, a rousing if troubling film from the talented poster child of Hollywood nepotism, the Seattle International Film Festival ended another stellar edition in appropriately laidback style for this sneakily large, aesthetically pleasing, generally all-too-inviting, pot-positive town. SIFF is a mammoth event, a well-oiled machine, smartly run and elegantly programmed; if there is a festival with a more devoted community of volunteers and board members, cultish cinephiles and casual participants making it into a unique and unusual thing, I don’t know of it. More on that […]
by Brandon Harris on Jun 11, 2013
