Authors — Isaac Feldberg
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Paris, Remembered: Production Designer Katia Wyszkop on “Nouvelle Vague”
In setting out to make Nouvelle Vague, his effervescent ode to the birth of French New Wave cinema, Richard Linklater knew from the start that realizing his artistic ambition—to dramatize Jean-Luc Godard’s making of Breathless—would involve revisiting both the film’s experimental, guerilla-style production and the larger time and place that gave rise to it. To bring audiences back through history to Paris circa 1959—not only to the same bustling streets and lively corner cafés where Breathless filmed but also the intimate apartments, hotel rooms and offices where Godard and his collaborators convened—Linklater turned to French production designer Katia Wyszkop (The […]
by Isaac Feldberg on Dec 22, 2025 -
Analog Fetishism: Sound Designer Graham Reznick on “Rabbit Trap”
What does the sublime sound like? For Graham Reznick, serving as the sound designer for Bryn Chaney’s psychological thriller Rabbit Trap (available on digital Sept. 30, from Magnolia Pictures) was a sustained exercise in experimenting with aural narrative storytelling, searching for the same sorts of subliminally haunting sound effects that alternately entrance and unsettle the film’s musician protagonists. When Darcy (Dev Patel) and Daphne Davenport (Rosy McEwen) move to a remote house in rural Wales, they seek to draw sounds out of the local landscape, with Daphne interpolating and manipulating Darcy’s field recordings to create experimental compositions marrying electronic distortion […]
by Isaac Feldberg on Sep 30, 2025 -
Childhood After Dark: Shih-Ching Tsou on Left-Handed Girl
Taipei first appears in Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Girl glimpsed indistinctly through a little girl’s kaleidoscope. A vivid, swirling combination of colors and shapes, it’s a fittingly vibrant entrance for Taiwan’s capital, a cultural center that Tsou—making her solo directorial debut more than 20 years after co-writing/-directing 2004’s Take Out with Sean Baker—captures as a layered panorama of neon-lit alleyways and crowded streets. Following a single mother and two daughters who return after several years in the countryside to carve out a new life for themselves in the big city, the film has been described by Tsou as a “neo-melodramatic tapestry,” […]
by Isaac Feldberg on Sep 17, 2025 -
“We Do Believe the Audience is More Intelligent Than the Industry Thinks: Producer Sylvain Corbeil on the Cannes-Premiering Peak Everything
Since founding Metafilms over two decades ago, Montreal-based producer Sylvain Corbeil has become a prolific and respected pillar of Quebec’s independent film scene, collaborating with filmmakers whose bold and idiosyncratic visions have served to bolster the place of modern Canadian cinema on a world stage. Alongside fellow producer Nancy Grant, who co-leads Metafilms, Corbeil has championed the work of widely acclaimed French-language filmmakers like Xavier Dolan (Mommy, It’s Only the End of the World), Maxime Giroux (Felix & Meira), Denis Côté (That Kind of Summer), Monia Chokri (A Brother’s Love), and Anne Émond (Nuit #1, Our Loved Ones). A frequent […]
by Isaac Feldberg on May 20, 2025 -
“Coziness was a Creative North Star”: Andrew Ahn on The Wedding Banquet
In approaching The Wedding Banquet, director Andrew Ahn knew his reimagining of the 1993 romantic comedy directed by Ang Lee had to navigate nuances of queer and cultural identity that he still wrestles with today. So, in updating the original story—about a bisexual Taiwanese immigrant who tries to convince his traditionally-minded parents that he’s straight—Ahn chose to expand it, focusing on a foursome of queer friends who live together in Seattle and become unlikely co-conspirators in a similarly elaborate ruse. Involving not one but two same-sex couples navigating milestone moments, this version of the story (in theaters April 18) goes beyond […]
by Isaac Feldberg on Apr 17, 2025 -
Inspired by Springfield and Sesame Street: Osgood Perkins on The Monkey
“Everybody dies, and that’s life,” one character proclaims in Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, approaching the inevitability of suffering with a wink and a grin. In between executing a real-estate agent via shotgun blast and setting fire to an occupied baby stroller, this more deliberately comedic outing from the writer-director behind Longlegs is all about the strange catharsis of helplessly laughing through life’s horrors. Adapted from Stephen King’s short story of the same name, The Monkey follows twin brothers Bill and Hal (Christian Convery in childhood, Theo James in adulthood), who discover a sinister wind-up “organ grinder” monkey toy among their […]
by Isaac Feldberg on Feb 20, 2025 -
History Made Concrete: Production Designer Judy Becker on The Brutalist
In constructing The Brutalist, his epic of assimilation and survival, Brady Corbet sought a sense of scale large enough to reflect the ambitious vision of László Tóth, a fictional Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who flees to America with hopes of building a better future. As Tóth works to reclaim his life, legacy and marriage to wife Erzsébet after being forcibly separated from all three, this decades-spanning immigrant saga—which Corbet directed and produced from a screenplay he co-wrote with Mona Fastvold—settles in Philadelphia, where Tóth is offered the commission of a lifetime, albeit at a steep psychological cost. For production […]
by Isaac Feldberg on Dec 16, 2024 -
Behind Closed Doors: Production Designer Kevin Thompson on Maestro
In making Maestro, his magisterial portrait of Leonard Bernstein, Bradley Cooper set out to explore the life of the legendary American conductor and composer through the lens of his complicated relationship with wife Felicia Montealegre, which lasted from the 1940s until her death in 1978. Depicting their love story across four decades, two engagements and three children, Cooper—who directed, co-wrote, co-produced and starred in the biopic—often approached Maestro “as if he was conducting a musical symphony,” according to production designer Kevin Thompson. Envisioning its story in movements, Cooper opted for period shifts in color and black-and-white (both in a 1.33 […]
by Isaac Feldberg on Dec 15, 2023 -
Tone and Rhythm: Editor Hilda Rasula on American Fiction
Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, a satire of the publishing world and modern race relations, stars Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, an English professor and novelist frustrated by what he sees as the literary establishment’s exploitation of Black stereotypes for profit. To prove a point, Monk adopts a pseudonym, writes a book steeped in tired and offensive tropes and jokingly sends it off to publishers. Much to his chagrin, the book becomes a massive hit. But before Monk can unmask himself, a family tragedy leads him home, where the financial needs of his ailing mother (Leslie Uggams) compel him to […]
by Isaac Feldberg on Dec 15, 2023 -
“On Any Road of Vieques, There’s Beauty Around”: Glorimar Marrero Sánchez on La Pecera
From the 1940s until 2003, the U.S. Navy used Vieques as a bombing range and military-training site, deploying heavy metals and toxic chemicals, such as napalm and depleted uranium, that left the island contaminated. Today, Vieques has some of the highest cancer rates in the Caribbean, though the U.S. government continues to deny that its activities are responsible. In writing La Pecera, Glorimar Marrero Sánchez sought to reflect the symptoms of colonialism both literally and symbolically, through the character of a woman whose body has been colonized by cancer—a disease, the film asserts, connected to the Navy’s pollution of Vieques. […]
by Isaac Feldberg on Feb 3, 2023
