Authors — Kevin Canfield
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Director Ted Kotcheff on Wake in Fright
Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright was a hit at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971, but as the film made its way across the Atlantic, its stateside distributor decided to do a bit of rebranding. Against Kotcheff’s will, his intense fish-out-of-water tale was released in New York the following winter as Outback, a perfectly bland title for a movie that’s anything but. If the new name threw some film-goers off the trail, United Artists’ failure, as Kotcheff recalls it, to “spend 25 cents on publicity” made certain that the rest of its potential audience never heard about it in the […]
by Kevin Canfield on Oct 1, 2012 -
Five Questions with Knuckleball! Directors Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg
Knuckleball, the new documentary from Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, is about a small group of athletes who’ve gone against the grain. Just a handful of pitchers in the century-plus history of Major League Baseball have relied on the famously unpredictable knuckleball, a pitch that doesn’t spin yet darts every which way. Stern and Sundberg followed two of these guys—Tim Wakefield, of the Boston Red Sox, and the New York Mets’ R.A. Dickey (above)—for the duration of 2011 season. Significantly lighter than the Manhattan-based filmmakers’ previous documentaries—The Devil Came on Horseback was about the genocide in Sudan; The Trials of […]
by Kevin Canfield on Sep 17, 2012 -
PARSING POLITICAL DOC HIT “2016: OBAMA’S AMERICA”
Tuesday’s 10 a.m. showing of 2016: Obama’s America drew about 20 customers to the big AMC theater in Times Square. A modest turnout, to be sure, but part of a larger wave that’s turned this conservative documentary into one of the summer’s independent film success stories. After a small opening in July, the film expanded to almost 1,100 screens last weekend. Over three days, 2016—directed by Dinesh D’Souza and John Sullivan, and released by Rocky Mountain Pictures, a company that specializes in conservative movies—grossed a reported $6.2 million, with a per-screen average of almost $6,000, “the best of any film […]
by Kevin Canfield on Aug 28, 2012 -
Five Questions with Teddy Bear Director Mads Matthiesen
Kim Kold, the six-foot-something, 300-plus pound star of Teddy Bear, is a striking, memorable screen presence. In the first feature from Danish writer-director Mads Matthiesen, Kold plays Dennis, a mama’s boy who decides to travel to Thailand in search of a wife. Dennis knows this will irk the heck out of his possessive mother Ingrid (Elsebeth Steentoft), so he lies, telling her he’s off to Germany to compete in a bodybuilding competition. This buys him time, but ultimately Dennis will have to sort out his feelings: Is his desire to forge a life of his own as powerful as the […]
by Kevin Canfield on Aug 21, 2012 -
Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, Chicken with Plums
Chicken with Plums focuses on a deeply sensitive Iranian musician named Nasser Ali (Mathieu Amalric), and the film, from writer-directors Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, makes clear from the start that viewers shouldn’t be expecting anything like a storybook ending. Having watched helplessly as his violin is smashed before his eyes, Nasser decides he’s had it with this life. And so into bed he climbs, determined to die, lest he face another year with Faranguisse (Maria de Medeiros), the wife he’s never loved. As the days go by, his mind wanders from the past to the present, and to the […]
by Kevin Canfield on Aug 15, 2012 -
Five Questions with Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry Director Alison Klayman
Ai Weiwei has been a presence on the international art scene for three decades, but within the past few years the Chinese artist has become a superstar. His profile has grown for a couple reasons. First, he’s made large-scale works that have been seen by millions in London, Berlin and, recently, in New York City, where in 2011 Mayor Michael Bloomberg heralded the installation of Ai’s sculptures at the southeastern edge of Central Park. Second, Ai has used just about every means available—documentary films, photography, crowd-sourced art projects, newspaper op-eds and his Twitter feed, which had more than 155,000 followers […]
by Kevin Canfield on Jul 24, 2012
