On the rare occasion a theater director receives an opportunity to direct for the cinema, it’s typically due to the project in question being a play adaptation (some, like John Patrick Shanley, toggle between adapting their own plays and directing original material). It was, then, noteworthy to me when Causeway (originally titled Red, White, and Water) was announced as the first feature for New York-based director Lila Neugebauer, whose Broadway production of Kenneth Lonergan’s The Wavery Gallery, with Elaine May starring in a Tony Award-winning performance, had recently concluded in early 2019. Not based on pre-existing material, Causeway was to be […]
by Erik Luers on Dec 9, 2022[Editor’s note: the newly restored Not a Pretty Picture opens at Anthology Film Archives this Friday.] “This film is based on incidents in the director’s life. The actress who plays Martha was also raped when she was in high school. Names and places have been changed.” Thus begins the harrowing and uniquely personal 1976 16mm feature Not a Pretty Picture by director Martha Coolidge (Valley Girl). A narrative/nonfiction hybrid in which the filmmaker casts actors to dramatize the sexual assault she experienced as a high school student in the 1960s, Picture toggles between semi-scripted scenes of Martha (played by Michelle Manenti) with […]
by Erik Luers on Dec 8, 2022An international movie star on screens both big (Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar-winning The Last Emperor) and small (David Lynch’s mega-hit, Twin Peaks), Joan Chen’s film career went behind the camera with her feature directorial debut, Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl. Released in the United States on May 7th, 1999 (the day the U.S. and NATO “accidentally” bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade), Chen’s film was adapted from a novella by Geling Yan and tells the story of the title character, a young girl (Li Xiaolu) who lives with her family in Chengdu and is being forced into Mao’s Down to […]
by Erik Luers on Nov 25, 2022While it’s been 35 years since the release of Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick’s U.S. Marines drama that featured R. Lee Ermey showering young male recruits with derogatory four-letter words, numerous films have sought to further emphasize the dehumanizing nature of military training bootcamps. At first glance, it might appear that The Inspection, writer-director Elegance Bratton’s narrative feature debut, fits comfortably within those expectations. Set in the early 2000s, the film opens as Ellis French (Jeremy Pope) has been kicked out of his mother’s (Gabrielle Union) apartment for being gay and finds himself at a homeless shelter in New Jersey. […]
by Erik Luers on Nov 18, 2022While the line “I want to believe” is most associated with The X-Files, today’s onslaught of conspiracy theorists and ravenous fact-deniers change that mantra to the more desperate “I need to believe.” After all, who needs objectivity or visual proof to confirm a preconceived notion that we wish to be true when some dude on Reddit can easily prove it for you? With a flare for endless questioning, tinfoil hat conspiracies and alternative views of history, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s two-hander, the 2022 Sundance Film Festival NEXT selection Something in the Dirt, burrows in and digs deep. Here the […]
by Erik Luers on Nov 9, 2022An unwritten rule of public restroom usage is that one should never attempt to strike up a conversation with the person one stall over, and that’s doubly true if the person next to you is an all-powerful god sent down from the cosmos. After a night of grieving and binge-drinking leads to hugging the toilet bowl at a gross rural rest stop, Wes (Ryan Kwanten) finds himself in that scenario when the person in the stall introduces themselves. That person is nothing more than a voice funneled through a gloryhole, but what that voice requests of Wes (and why) raises […]
by Erik Luers on Sep 21, 2022Now in its second season, Untold—the Netflix documentary series executive produced by brothers Chapman and Maclain Way (Wild Wild Country)—continues to offer an intriguing selection of sports-centered stories. From covering the world’s most successful female boxer to the infamous “Malice at the Palace” brawl, Volume 1 of the series became popular for choosing to tell a side of a notable story you thought you knew—essentially a nonfiction offering of feature-length episodes packaged under the Untold umbrella. As a basketball fan, I was curious to see what Volume 2 would include. Having premiered on August 16th and rolling out an episode […]
by Erik Luers on Aug 30, 2022If every film is a document of its own making, then Lodge Kerrigan’s Keane, shot in real locations in and around New York City in 2004, is also a depiction of the period in which it was made. Viewing the film on the occasion of a new digital restoration by Grasshopper Film that begins a theatrical run at Film at Lincoln Center today, I was struck by the numerous billboards and posters placed atop taxi cabs that the film’s lead character, William Keane (Damian Lewis), obliviously walks by. Short of pointing at the screen, Leonardo DiCaprio-style, as I noticed a […]
by Erik Luers on Aug 19, 2022For its 26th edition, the Fantasia International Film Festival returned to a fully in-person, three-week event in downtown Montréal. The festival has always been my own personal summer retreat, affording me a few days in Canada to embrace the undying creativity of the independent horror scene and the festival’s homegrown traditions. For reasons I’ve never fully understood but have always been happy to accept the entire audience erupts in applause at a generic TV spot for Nongshim ramen and, as the lights go down before a film, loudly meows like a cat. If you attend a screening in Concordia University’s Sir […]
by Erik Luers on Aug 10, 2022Director Andrew Semans’s 2012 debut feature, Nancy, Please, follows Paul (Will Rogers), an unraveling Ph.D. candidate obsessed with reclaiming his dog-eared, notes-filled copy of Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit from a spiteful ex-roommate (Eleonore Hendricks). Despite his increasingly desperate attempts, Paul just can’t get Nancy to relinquish the book from their formerly shared apartment. As the ex-roomie continues to live rent-free in Paul’s head, his deteriorating mental state prevents him from completing his thesis. Less interested in why Nancy won’t relinquish the book than why Paul so easily accepts his newfound submissiveness, Nancy, Please is a dark comedy about not being […]
by Erik Luers on Jul 14, 2022