Authors — Michael Nordine
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From Family-Friendly Sheep to the Greek Weird Wave: The 2015 Seattle International Film Festival
The 41st Seattle International Film Festival ran for 24 days. To put that in context, it began one day after Cannes and remained in full effect for two weeks after the red carpet was rolled up on the Croisette. Arriving to such a long-running event for the closing weekend had the effect of making me feel like a cinephile-come-lately, an outsider there to scavenge the crumbs of a very elaborate cake. It also made writing a summation of the nearly month-long affair feel like a fool’s errand: 450 films comprised SIFF’s program this year; I saw approximately 1% of them. […]
by Michael Nordine on Jun 16, 2015 -
Palm Springs International Film Festival 2013
Outside of Camelot Theatres, where Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas screens in 30 minutes, stands an older man with a telescope. He doesn’t appear to be affiliated with the Palm Springs International Film Festival — or even attending it, for that matter — and is dressed as you might expect an actual astronomer to be. Arnaud des Pallières’ adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist’s 1811 novella premiered to mixed reviews at Cannes last year, but familiarity with the source material and the fact that Mads Mikkelsen and Denis Lavant are both involved seem reason enough to take a […]
by Michael Nordine on Jan 17, 2014 -
Five Questions with Breakfast With Curtis Director Laura Colella
The following interview first appeared on the Filmmaker website in June 2012 to coincide with the world premiere of Breakfast with Curtis at the Los Angeles Film Festival. Laura Colella’s movie goes on theatrical release through BOND360/Abramorama from today. 25 New Faces alum Laura Colella’s Breakfast with Curtis unfolds at its own pace, not unlike the leisurely chats it spends so much time documenting. Colella, who wrote, directed, and acted in the film, used her own home as a shooting location and cast her real-life neighbors and housemates in prominent roles. Centered around a bookseller named Syd (Theo Green) who enlists […]
by Michael Nordine on Dec 4, 2013 -
Making Sense of To the Wonder
Terrence Malick lends himself well to hyperbole. Few other filmmakers make the act of writing about movies feel like such a fool’s errand; no other is as hard to write about in a measured way. In one of the few interviews he’s given, the director says at one point, “When people express what is most important to them, it often comes out in clichés. That doesn’t make them laughable; it’s something tender about them — as though in struggling to reach what’s most personal about them they could only come up with what’s most public.” This may be the most […]
by Michael Nordine on Apr 10, 2013 -
AFI Fest 2012: Electrick Children and Simon Killer
In Dogtooth, an authoritarian father’s carefully constructed sham world falls apart after one of his sheltered daughters watches Rocky IV and Jaws. In Electrick Children (above), a 15-year-old Mormon girl (played by “25 New Face” Julia Garner) gets pregnant after listening to a rock ‘n’ roll song on an unmarked blue cassette tape. The narrative similarities essentially end there but, given their equally unorthodox takes on coming of age in cloistered environments, the two are oddly complementary. Split between rural Utah and fabulous Las Vegas, Electrick Children‘s visual world is entirely at odds with what its doe-eyed protagonist is used to on her big-sky homestead: neon lights, dingy […]
by Michael Nordine on Nov 9, 2012 -
AFI Fest 2012: Antiviral and Caesar Must Die
In diagnosing a cultural affliction without so much as mentioning a possible cure or even treatment, Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral coldly suggests that it’ll only continue to spread. The outlandish-but-believable premise – involving a high-end clinic that harvests and sells celebrities’ infections to their obsessed fans – brings to mind both Children of Men and, of all things, Idiocracy for how depressingly realistic its vision of the near future ends up being. We want to think that something like this could never happen, but there’s more than a little evidence to the contrary. The fact that nearly every element of the […]
by Michael Nordine on Nov 7, 2012 -
AFI Fest 2012: A Hijacking and Paradise: Faith
Between A Royal Affair, The Hunt, Eat Sleep Die, and now A Hijacking, it might be wise to start thinking of 2012 as something of a banner year for Scandinavian film—Denmark in particular. (Let’s call Klown the exception that proves the rule and leave it at that.) An impressively restrained thriller about a cargo ship commandeered by Somali pirates, Tobias Lindholm’s second feature has the kind of ripped-from-headlines premise one would expect Hollywood to have capitalized on by now. In an early sign of his rather un-Hollywood approach, however, the frequent Thomas Vinterberg collaborator shows us extremely little of the […]
by Michael Nordine on Nov 5, 2012 -
Locarno Film Festival
What to say of a film festival at which the most highly anticipated — and, as it turns out, best — entry is an 83-minute-long documentary about fishermen with no real dialogue or narration that was shot on a dozen GoPro cameras, many of them tethered to a commercial fishing boat? A number of things come to mind, all of them complimentary, but what first bears mention is how well matched the 65th Festival del Film Locarno and Leviathan were for one another. Had it premiered at Cannes or Toronto, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s film would likely have been […]
by Michael Nordine on Nov 1, 2012 -
Five Questions with Drought Director Everardo González
In Everardo González’s Drought, the residents of a barely-there area in northern Mexico called Cuates de Australia (a strange names whose origins even they aren’t sure of) search for water and travel about during the annual drought. The toll it takes on the land, people, and animals is sometimes deadly. A sort of documentary answer to Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring, the film won the nonfiction prize at this year’s L.A. Film Festival and will play at the IFC Center in New York and Laemmle’s NoHo 7 starting this Friday as part of DocuWeeks. Filmmaker spoke to González about the project’s origins, participants, and […]
by Michael Nordine on Aug 9, 2012 -
LOS ANGELES FILM FESTIVAL 2012
The Los Angeles Film Festival is something of an oddity, not least because of its relative obscurity: for a 11-day-long cinematic event a stone’s throw away from the heart of the American film industry, it hardly registers on the local radar. As a reasonably cinema-savvy Angeleno, I don’t personally know anyone who gets more excited for it than they do for AFI Fest – my usual screening buddies either skipped LAFF entirely or only showed up for a handful of films this time around – though perhaps the comparison isn’t entirely valid. Where this is a “traditional” fest, with programming […]
by Michael Nordine on Jul 12, 2012
