An alum of the 2013 IFP Filmmaker Labs (an experience he wrote about here), Paul Harrill’s Something, Anything is less saccharine than truthful. A quietly meditative, regional production, Harrill’s debut feature follows Peggy (Ashley Shelton), a young Southern woman who, after a series of tragic personal events, begins a spiritual quest to better herself as an individual with altruistic intentions. Ethereal throughout, Harrill’s film displays an assured, contemplative expressiveness behind the camera. The writer/director and his producing partner, Ashley Maynor, are as much advocates for strong storytelling in their own work as they are for encouraging it in the films of […]

The world’s oldest profession proves stressful and arduous in The Foxy Merkins, director Madeleine Olnek’s follow-up to her zany “fish out of water” black-and-white debut Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same. By having much of her work featured at the Sundance Film Festival throughout the past 10 years, Olnek has developed a prominent voice in the queer filmmaking community, and The Foxy Merkins finds her once again working with some familiar faces (Dennis Davis, Alex Karpovsky, Lisa Haas and Jackie Monahan) and locations. The film is a buddy comedy for an underserved audience, observing the misadventures of Margaret (Haas) and Jo (Monahan), two New York-based lesbian hustlers often found hopelessly hooking […]

Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, a frightening new film that finds the horror in the familial, opens Friday in theaters and on demand, almost a year after its debut at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. Focusing on a mother and son terrorized by a lanky, ghost-like creature who originates from a withered pop-up book, Kent’s film does quite a lot with limited resources. Incorporating stop-motion animation, stylized lighting, and an effective use of sound, debuting Australian filmmaker Kent has a deft sense of control — a husband who dies in a car crash as he drives his pregnant wife to the hospital to give birth is pretty hefty stuff. […]

Since premiering at the Berlin International Film Festival in February, Butter on the Latch and Thou Wast Mild & Lovely, the remarkably assured debut feature-length films from Josephine Decker (one of the 25 New Faces of Film of 2013), have received much praise and bewilderment throughout their international festival circuit run. It speaks to Thou Wast‘s uncategorizable nature that it played at the celebrity-touted AFI Fest, the indie stalwart BAMcinemaFest, and the heavily-genre-oriented Fantasia International Film Festival. Experimental narratives with an intense focus on the frightening extremes of sexuality, the musically-inclined films feature a remarkable blend of both visual and literary poetry; everyone from Onur Tukel to […]

Charmingly crude and equipped with the gift of gab, filmmaker and painter Onur Tukel’s Summer of Blood is a Brooklyn-set vampire comedy with a love for witty banter. The film’s writer, director, and editor, Tukel also stars as the pugnacious Erik, a fast-talking pessimist who shoots down a marriage proposal from his longtime girlfriend. Now a solitary bachelor with a dead-end job, Erik takes to the streets to contemplate life and has an unfortunate encounter with an ominous vampire. A thirst for blood, a higher sex drive and fear of sunlight soon follow. Watching Summer of Blood, you observe a lead at […]

A not very wise man once reflected that the strongest examples of film editing are the sequences where you don’t notice it. Day-long seminars such as “Sight, Sound & Story,” which took place last Saturday at the Florence Gould Hall in Manhattan, seek to pull back the curtain on the constantly evolving digital tools and techniques in need of demystification. Structured around a series of topical, industry-specific interests, the panels I attended approached the craft (and the difficulties of perfecting it) from a myriad of vantage points, none the least being narrative structure, the identification of theme and post-production sound […]