Authors — Brandon Harris
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Geoffrey Fletcher on Violet & Daisy
An often stirring and certainly very odd meditation on the difficulties and ambiguities of love and friendship about a pair of female teenage assassins, Violet & Daisy is the debut feature of Oscar-winning screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher (Precious). A tricky balance of near camp, New Wave aesthetic hijinks and earnest melodrama unfold in this three-handed chamber piece and are for the most part deftly pulled off by Fletcher and his collaborators, who have made a film that is reminiscent of both grindhouse cheapies (Danny Trejo is in it after all, albeit very briefly) and Godardian reveries. Ex-Gilmore Girl Alexis Bledel and Atonement‘s Saoirse Ronan play the title […]
by Brandon Harris on Jun 5, 2013 -
Margarethe von Trotta on Hannah Arendt
The most evocative and engrossing picture this writer has ever encountered about the life and times of a thinker is Hannah Arendt, German filmmaker and actress Margarethe von Trotta’s magnificent meditation on the incendiary political theorist. Reuniting with her Vision (2009) and Rosa Luxemburg (1986) star Barbara Sukowa, the ex-Fassbinder muse has delivered a titanic and highly unusual work, a film of rare intelligence that animates the life of a protean mind in a manner that is at once spartan, highly dramatic, and incredibly timely. Hannah Arendt focuses on the period immediately before, during and after Arendt’s famous coverage of the Adolf Eichmann […]
by Brandon Harris on May 29, 2013 -
Bobbito Garcia on Doin’ It in the Park: Pick-Up Basketball
By some estimates, over half a million people play pick-up basketball in the playgrounds of New York each year. In Doin’ It in the Park: Pick-Up Basketball, filmmakers and pick-up basketball enthusiasts Bobbito Garcia and Kevin Couliau set out to create the most comprehensive document of New York City’s summer, outdoor pick-up basketball scene by visiting 180 courts throughout all five of the city’s boroughs. Shot in a breakneck 75 summer days during 2011, their debut documentary has an immediacy and intimacy that speaks to its homemade vibe, even amongst former and current NBA players like Kenny Anderson and Brandon Jennings, […]
by Brandon Harris on May 22, 2013 -
Kim Ki-Duk on Pieta
Made quickly and on the cheap, prolific South Korean director Kim Ki-duk’s 18th film, Pieta, is an often disturbing revenge tale, moody and morally challenging, where redemption for one of recent cinema’s most dark-hearted anti-heroes seems just out of grasp. Kang-do (Lee Jung-jin) is a pitiless and anger-fueled debt collector for a equally brutal moneylender who specializes in forcing his often destitute debtors to commit insurance fraud in order to pay back what they owe him. Living a comfortless and filthy existence in the same slum as many of his victim, Kang-do has not a friend or a care in the […]
by Brandon Harris on May 17, 2013 -
Martha Stephens on Pilgrim Song
In Martha Stephens’ lovely, evocative and deceptively simple Pilgrim Song, Timothy Morton (Team Picture) plays James, a newly unemployed elementary school music teacher from Louisville, Kentucky. A gangly fellow with a large red beard, some mean fiddle skills and an unreliable sense of direction, James finds his future hanging in the balance in more ways than one after he’s laid off from his teaching gig. Seeking some sort solace following his dismissal and an unspoken trauma that has pushed him apart from his girlfriend Joan (Karrie Crouse, also the film’s co-writer), he sets out on a trek across Kentucky’s Sheltowee Trace […]
by Brandon Harris on May 10, 2013 -
Jared Moshe on Dead Man’s Burden
Sumptuous and evocative, Jared Moshe’s Dead Man’s Burden is the rarest of species in specialty film, a Western. More importantly, it is a fine addition to the genre, a complex meditation on the wages of sin and the burdens of family, a chamber drama with more than a hint of noir. Set during the years after the Civil War in and around a rural New Mexican ranch, the film initially focuses on a young couple, Martha (Clare Bowen) and Heck (David Call). They plan to sell the ranch after the death of her father, a struggling farmer, and use the money […]
by Brandon Harris on May 3, 2013 -
2nd Julien Dubuque International Film Festival
At its by turns lavish and kitschy second edition, the Julien Dubuque International Film Festival unspooled 67 films earlier this month. With or without its film festival, Dubuque is a surprisingly memorable locale, a fast-growing place which, like the best Midwest cities, is a universe unto itself. One of the first European settlements west of the Mississippi River, upon the muddy banks of which it still rests, Iowa’s ninth largest city (pop. 60,000), which like the festival is named after a French Quebecois who settled the area and later befriended and made love to Indians, is known both for its […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 29, 2013 -
Tribeca 2013 Critic’s Notebook #3: On The Margins
It’s easy to feel cheated at film festivals, especially ones that charge $18 per ticket. (Does Tribeca still do that?) You couldn’t get into this screening or you missed that party or the awards because you couldn’t find a cab or had to file some copy. The publicist you have a crush on just isn’t that into you. Cry me a river. And then the awards have been given, the parties have been had, the distribution panel nameplates thrown in the trash. The clock is ticking, always, and you can never see or do everything. Funny, when you’re young, you […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 29, 2013 -
Tribeca 2013 Critic’s Notebook #2: Black (Out)Rage
So I’ll get right to it — the only truly great film I’ve seen at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival is Jason Osder’s searing Let the Fire Burn. A found-footage marvel with no narration and sparse title cards, it dives into the maelstrom that was the Philadelphia police’s tragic raid on the black separatist group MOVE’s West Philadelphia compound in 1985, during which the home, where 13 men, women and children lived, was fired upon 10,000 times, doused with unspeakable amounts of water and then finally firebombed, an event which led to nearly 70 other homes in the surrounding working […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 26, 2013 -
Tribeca 2013 Critic’s Notebook #1: Sea Change
It’s easy to get a bad rap in New York. It’s a town that holds grudges, where easy assumptions die hard and critical whispers ricochet from person to person. For a long time it was difficult for the Tribeca Film Festival to escape the stigma of its early years, when it remained spiritually connected to the aftermath of 9/11 and its original purpose while not having yet evolved into a truly satisfying event. Back then it was brash, unwieldy and overlong, its ambitions outstripping necessity and good taste. These qualities often overshadowed what it did well, and even as the festival […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 26, 2013
