Authors — Ritesh Mehta
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“Billy Could Have Been My Own Brother”: Rachel Mason on Her SXSW Doc My Brother’s Killer
Rachel Mason’s gripping true crime doc My Brother’s Killer is, first and foremost, a love letter. My Brother’s Killer emerged, in part, from Rachel Mason’s previous documentary Circus of Books, named after her parents’ West Hollywood gay porn bookstore, where she grew up enamored by the men who frequented it. Her latest film is also an ode to West Hollywood’s famed yet notorious stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard of the 1990s. Moreover, it is a love letter to a VHS era; a magazine era; a video awards era (ushered in by the likes of Chi Chi LaRue); a cyberpunk era […]
by Ritesh Mehta on Mar 13, 2026 -
“I Wanted the Film to Have the Vignetted Existence of a Fable”: Sarmad Sultan Khoosat on his Genre-bending Berlinale Premiere Lali
A bullet grazes the shin of matriarch Sohni Ammi (Farazeh Syed) at her beloved son’s wedding. It was a celebratory bullet; shooting guns into the air replaces fireworks in this part of provincial Pakistan. Even though Sohni Ammi just needed stitches, the groom’s family blamed the freak mishap on the ongoing curse of Zeba, the bride (Mamya Shajaffar), whose previous two marriages never materialized because the grooms-to-be died under mysterious circumstances. Her last fiancé was stung by a scorpion when the couple was making out on a dune, Zeba would later admit to her new husband, Sajawal (Channan Hanif), who […]
by Ritesh Mehta on Feb 25, 2026 -
“I Really Wanted to Create a Chekhovian World”: Kornél Mundruczó on the Amy Adams-starring Berlinale Competition Film At the Sea
Drumroll: Amy Adams stares at you. It’s intense—not haunting, but certainly not inviting. The camera pulls away, and it’s her character Laura who’s playing the drums. It’s daytime, there’s unremarkable company around. Music, no dance. Soon, she will leave the facility. Soon, she will return to her Cape Cod home, to her devoted yet frustrated husband Martin (Murray Bartlett), to her barely tolerant teenage daughter Josie (Chloe East), to her young son Felix (Redding Munsell) who scurries away from her embrace, to her dance company that made her famous but which she now wants to quit, and to the forbidden […]
by Ritesh Mehta on Feb 19, 2026 -
“The Underbelly of Lagos”: Olive Nwosu on Lady
Lady, the titular lead of Olive Nwosu’s neo-noir feature debut about a taxi driver’s gradual solidarity with a group of Lagosian sex workers, possesses a piercing gaze. She’s not scanning you as much as she is preemptively fending you off. In her red taxi she stalks the nocturnal streets of the largest city in Nigeria, very much her own person, the only lady cab driver in a city on the verge of revolution around eradicating gasoline subsidies. Played with fiery commitment by Jessica Gabriel’s Ujah, Lady doesn’t even necessarily care that she’s a “woman in a man’s world,” or if […]
by Ritesh Mehta on Feb 18, 2026 -
“We Can Keep Living in a Glacial World”: Sara Dosa on Time and Water
A splendid yet elegiac homage to dying, receding, failing, yet magnificent glaciers, Sara Dosa’s Time and Water, a documentary produced with National Geographic and Sandbox Films, is awe-inspiring precisely because it makes you feel helpless to move. That’s what awe is, after all. The film makes use of a treasure trove of archival materials, some of it supplied by Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason and his family, who lived a lot of their lives recording them and raising posterity alongside the glaciers. Standing still with these images and sounds (in front of the largest screen only, please) and catching snippets of […]
by Ritesh Mehta on Jan 27, 2026 -
“A Lot of Disabled People Don’t Get to Take Big Risks”: Liz Sargent on Directing Her Sister in Take Me Home
Take Me Home is a film about a caregiver, and the spirit of caregiving infused the entire production. Writer-director Liz Sargent based the feature, her first, on her short of the same name, which premiered at Sundance in 2023. It stars Anna Sargent, her sister, as a woman with a cognitive disability who is the caregiver for her aging adoptive parents. In fact, this is a family of mutual caregivers whose routines are shattered during a central Florida heatwave. How Anna navigates her new emotional reality forms the story’s core, and in striving to locate her character’s need for autonomy, Sargent […]
by Ritesh Mehta on Jan 26, 2026 -
“On The Set It Was a Funeral Everyday”: Kaouther Ben Hania on “The Voice of Hind Rajab”
Almost no film has devastated me as much as Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab. In an age of numbing doom-scrolling, we may be unprepared for the impact when a single story is given the thoughtful, shattering treatment by an empathetic filmmaker. That story made headlines: a 6-year-old Palestinian girl, Hind, called the Red Crescent emergency center in Ramallah in January 2024 begging for help because a tank was shooting at her family’s car. Recently been nominated at the Oscars for Four Daughters and The Man Who Sold His Skin, Ben Hania sought permission from Hind’s […]
by Ritesh Mehta on Dec 16, 2025 -
John August on “Scriptnotes” (the Book)
After Syd Field’s Screenplay was published in 1979, an entire cottage industry sprung up in Hollywood. Screenwriting manuals and classes, overnight gurus and other (often predatory) enterprises promised impressionable aspirants a breakthrough if they just practiced a particular architecture of rules to write their dream spec feature. The next migration happened to the blogosphere in the Aughts, and in the teens, a plethora of screenwriting podcasts blossomed. Few voices have proven trustworthy, though. Cutting through the clutter in 2011, John August (Big Fish, Corpse Bride) and Craig Mazin’s (Chernobyl, The Last of Us) “Scriptnotes”’s podcast has developed a formidable following […]
by Ritesh Mehta on Dec 10, 2025 -
“We Have to Think Deeply about Community Policing”: Geeta Gandbhir on The Perfect Neighbor
With Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor premiering on Netflix today, we’re reposting our interview with Gandbhir out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. — Editor Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor, which premiered in the US Documentary section of this year’s Sundance, is likely one of the first feature docs primarily composed of police body camera footage. Sifting through footage with editor Viridiana Liberman (The Sentence), Gandbhir builds out a suspenseful and heartbreaking portrait of neighborly violence in a close-knit Central Florida community, after white woman Susan Lorincz fatally shot Ajike Owens—Gandbhir’s sister-in-law’s best friend, though Gandbhir didn’t know Owens personally. Given […]
by Ritesh Mehta on Oct 17, 2025 -
“We Had to Test the Audience’s Own Morality”: Harris Dickinson on Urchin
Harris Dickinson’s characters are demarcated by specific class consciousnesses: Coney Island’s Frankie in Beach Rats, who cruises for older men on a webcam site; a particular brand of selfishness and vulnerability as a model and influencer in Triangle of Sadness; most recently, a supremely confident intern who casts a domineering spell over a tech CEO in Babygirl. Urchin, the film Dickinson chose as his feature directorial debut vehicle (he’s directed shorts before, as early as 2013), stars Frank Dillane (Fear the Walking Dead) as a homeless addict trying to rehabilitate after his latest stint in jail. I spoke to Dickinson […]
by Ritesh Mehta on Oct 14, 2025
