Authors — Brandon Harris
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Act Break: Director Denis Villeneuve Talks His “Jaw-Droppingly Weird” Enemy
In his newest film Enemy, French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve immediately springs on us an omnipotent sense of dread. The chiaroscuro-tinged opening — a dynamo dream sequence in a film that feels like one long, unending hallucination — takes us inside an invitation-only sex club, populated by hard-looking, well-dressed men, one of whom is Jake Gyllenhaal. What are they watching? Scantily clad women doing seemingly erotic things that involve tarantulas. Bear with me. Soon we meet a pregnant blonde (Sarah Gadon) who’s waiting at home for her husband. Is it Gyllenhaal whom she’s waiting for? The next time he’s glimpsed, he […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 17, 2014 -
Blood Money: Tze Chun on Cold Comes the Night
The sophomore effort from Tze Chun (Children of Invention), thriller Cold Comes the Night, uses invigorated noir conventions to evoke the betrayed modern social compact in a dreary, post-industrial strip of upstate New York. Chloe (Alice Eve), a poor widow and single mother, manages a fleabag motel, the type that charges prostitutes and johns by the hour. Social Services is on Chloe’s case for providing such a rotten environment for her eight-year-old daughter Sophia (Ursula Parker), giving her two weeks to straighten out their circumstances before they intervene. Then things get worse — a Slavic drug runner named Topo (Breaking Bad‘s Bryan […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 11, 2014 -
I Went to the Movies in 2013. Thoughts Followed.
In 2013 I began watching over 500 movies and finished about half that number. (Film Critic Tip #1: don’t finish movies you plan not to write about that aren’t any good unless they are sublimely bad). Perhaps I’ve grown surly in my fourth decade or perhaps I always was. I just feel like I don’t have the time anymore. Sometimes I went weeks without watching a film, an unimaginable possibility in my recent past. Was this all driven by a sense that my life (and perhaps yours) will be shorter than we think, that the safeguards we’re building against the […]
by Brandon Harris on Dec 27, 2013 -
Dutch Masters: Oeke Hoogendijk on The New Rijksmuseum
Clocking in at nearly four hours over several discrete parts, Oeke Hoogendijk’s The New Rijksmuseum details the taxing decade-long process of renovating the iconic Amsterdam art museum, home to many of the key works of the Dutch masters, that became an operatic civic brouhaha. First, the reconstruction of a central entranceway draws the ire of the city’s politically powerful bicyclists lobby, which is opposed to a partial obstruction of the central pathway that runs through the center of the museum’s ground floor that is an extremely popular thoroughfare for the bike riding hordes. The safety of the 13,000 bikes that […]
by Brandon Harris on Dec 19, 2013 -
After the Wave: Atsushi Funahashi on Nuclear Nation
Nuclear Nation, Atsushi Funahashi’s remarkably touching and informative doc about some of the 1,4000 now-homeless refugees that were forced to abandon their town in the wake of the Fukashima nuclear catastrophe, foregoes the agitprop route, one which given the scale and potential world historical costs of the still unfolding fallout from the disaster seems appropriate, for a more grounded and humanitarian look at the tragedy. Instead the 39-year-old Funahashi, best known in Japan as a narrative filmmaker whose previous credits include 2005’s Big River and 2012’s Cold Bloom, remains focused on a group of refugees who exhibit tremendous poise and […]
by Brandon Harris on Dec 17, 2013 -
The Fog of War: Shaul Schwarz on Narco Cultura
A war on drugs, or specifically on the drug cartels that profit from them, a war separate from the 40-year-old campaign waged by the United States (though, of course, intricately tied to it) was declared by the Mexican government in 2006. With over 60,000 known murders in the country directly tied to the drug trade since then, what good is this war doing, one is tempted to ask? The Federal Police and the Mexican military’s joint operation, Michoacan, has proven toothless in its attempt to stop either the flow of dope through Mexico or the violence that surrounds this insatiably […]
by Brandon Harris on Dec 16, 2013 -
Hoop Dreams: Josh and Benny Safdie on Lenny Cooke
An intimate portrait of a near-forgotten high school basketball phenom turned undrafted afterthought, Lenny Cooke is the first documentary from the young New York wunderkinds Benny and Josh Safdie. Given that their previous films, The Pleasure of Being Robbed and Daddy Longlegs (I miss its original title, Go Get Some Rosemary), were intimate, 16 millimeter throwbacks to another era of rough and tumble New York independent filmmaking, this film comes as a surprise in a way. Made by self-professed basketball fanatics in the midst of a season of discontent (poor Knicks), Lenny Cooke is a project that predates any of the Safdies narrative efforts. An emotionally […]
by Brandon Harris on Dec 6, 2013 -
riot, girl: Sini Anderson on The Punk Singer
For many, Kathleen Hanna — frontwoman for the bands Bikini Kill and later Le Tigre — was the defining protopunk, feminist icon of the Clinton and W. eras. A centrifugal force whose career spans the entire era in which the genre folks used to call Alternative Rock grew and waned in popularity, this riot grrrl mysteriously left the public eye in the mid aughts without any explanation. In The Punk Singer directed by Sini Anderson, a friend of Ms. Hanna’s, and produced by the music video auteur and CB4 director Tamra Davis, she reemerges from the shadows of semi-retirement. The film […]
by Brandon Harris on Nov 30, 2013 -
The 21st CamerImage International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography
On the festival circuit, technicians generally get the short shrift. They work long, hard hours for weeks on end, often for less money than they ought to get rewarded with, towards a film that will ultimately have someone else’s name above the title or next to the “a film by” credit on the poster. Sure, they might get a shout out from a director while standing on stage at the closing night awards ceremony to go along with their fee, but glory is usually reserved for others. Not so at the CamerImage International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography […]
by Brandon Harris on Nov 27, 2013 -
Comic Striptease: Joel Allen Schroeder on Dear Mr. Watterson
In Dear Mr. Watterson, fellow comic-strip artists, eerily adoring fans and apparently serious comic-strip critics pay tribute to Bill Watterson, an enigmatic man whose sly, dexterous mind and remarkably precise hand are responsible for “Calvin and Hobbes,” a brilliant, widely-read syndicated newspaper strip that haunted the pages of America’s most hallowed dailies from the early 1980s through the mid-to-late ’90s. The film, Joel Allen Schroeder’s first, attempts to earnestly and without irony portray the ostensibly profound impact the “Calvin and Hobbes” strip has had on the lives of peculiar subset of American youth. In an era in which the form truly reached a […]
by Brandon Harris on Nov 15, 2013
