Authors — Scott Macaulay
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12 Feature Recommendations from the 2021 New Directors/New Films Festival
New Directors/New Films, the venerable Spring festival presented by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, returns with a 50th anniversary edition that celebrates not only the fest’s longevity but a return to live moviegoing. The festival begins today and runs in its virtual cinema through May 8, while in-person screenings extend until May 14. The Lincoln Center screenings are limited capacity, and while there are sell-outs, tickets remain for many films, particularly the second screenings towards the end of the festival. Below are 12 recommendations from Vadim Rizov, Nelson Kim and myself (with assists from Natalia Keogan, Abby […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 28, 2021 -
Watch: Iva Radivojević’s Stunning and Eerie Arctic-Shot Short, UTUQAQ
Premiering online timed to Earth Day from Field of Vision is a stunning and poetic Arctic-shot short, UTUQAQ, directed by Iva Radivojević. Acting as her own cinematographer, Radivojević counterpoints elegant and abstract patterns across sweeping planes of ice with more human-scale documentation of the work of four researchers drilling ice cores in the region’s freezing temperatures. The narration — in Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic) by Aviaja Lyberth — is from the point of the view of the ice itself, evoking the earth’s geological memory as it confronts efforts of the researchers working in the moment to learn about what is being lost […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 22, 2021 -
Trailer Watch: Leos Carax’s Annette (Plus Cannes 2021 News)
The long-awaited trailer for Leos Carax’s musical Annette — his follow-up to Holy Motors, one of best films of the last decade — has just been posted online. Concurrent with a communique from French President Emmanuel Macron that seems designed to assure anxious international industry about the viability of the upcoming ’21 edition of the Cannes Film Festival, where Annette will be opening night, it’s a particularly impressive publicity drop. The film’s synopsis, from the press release: Los Angeles, today. Henry (Adam Driver) is a stand-up comedian with a fierce sense of humor who falls in love with Ann (Marion […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 19, 2021 -
“She Can Only Function in the Dark”: Writer/Director Corinna Faith On Her Female-Led, ’70s-Set Ghost Story, The Power
Set during London’s so-called “Three-Day Week” period — just over two months in 1974 when Conservatives in Britain rationed electricity as part of a dispute with the coal miners whose output supplied most of the country’s energy — Corinna Faith’s The Power is an impressively accomplished debut feature that yokes a classic ghost story to the dynamics of the contemporary #MeToo movement. Val is an apprentice nurse working her first night shift in an aging East London hospital. There are plenty of shadows as lights go out in unused areas, and gas lanterns are the most frequent source of illumination. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 15, 2021 -
Editor’s Letter
Thirteen months ago, I was writing this letter from Berlin, where I was attending the festival and working on the issue with one of our designers. And sure, I noticed all the people coughing at the DAU. Natasha premiere. And that my screenwriter tutor pal extended an elbow rather than a hand when we sat down for lunch. And how empty the plane was on my trip home, just one day before the European travel ban. In the next week, I attended my last party of 2020, a post-Sundance celebration with a number of local filmmakers. Surprisingly, the oncoming pandemic […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 8, 2021 -
Trailer Watch: Iva Radivojević’s Aleph
A world premiere I’m highly anticipating out of the upcoming 2021 edition of New Directors/New Films is the second feature from Iva Radivojević, Aleph. From New Directors: In her magical, unpredictable second feature, Belgrade-born, globe-hopping artist Iva Radivojević has created a labyrinthine vision inspired by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges. Using a variety of visual styles that miraculously cohere into one unified and unique aesthetic, the multihyphenate filmmaker and her collaborators offer an episodic structure bending time and space, in which one character seems to unwittingly pass the narrative baton to the next, fashioning a film whose scope extends […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 7, 2021 -
“Every Image is Goodbye”: Cam Archer on Grief, Walks Home and His MoMA-Premiering Short, His Image
“Dreamy visuals of teenhood — cool hair, telephones, starkly lit bedrooms, troubled outsiders — are laid over structured soundtracks that blend distinctive background ambiences with catchy songs,” is how Mike Plante described the early short films of Cam Archer for Filmmaker in 2006. The occasion was the release of Archer’s first feature, Wild Tigers I Have Known, which joined an emerging body of work that Plante called “art films for teens.” But when we next caught up with Archer, it was just after the Cannes Directors Fortnight premiere of his second feature, Shit Year, starring Ellen Barkin, and his focus had […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 2, 2021 -
“The Script Had to be Drunk — Drunk Alongside the Characters”: Director Thomas Vinterberg on Balancing Humor and Sadness In His Unexpectedly Life-Affirming Another Round
A besotted cinematic sub-genre consists of films about drinking — liquor, bars and the imbiber’s life. Whether the lives portrayed are rowdy and boisterous ones, or, as is often the case, destructively out-of-control, these films — ranging from Days of Wine and Roses and The Lost Weekend to Leaving Las Vegas — usually map their character arcs alongside their characters’ physical and social deterioration; they wind up as cautionary tales. A recent film that took a different approach is the Ross Brothers’s hybrid documentary, Bloody Noses Empty Pockets, which captured the woozy exuberance of one intoxicated day/night while not eliding […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 31, 2021 -
Trailer Watch: Moara Passoni’s Doc Fortnight Selection, Êxtase
Moara Passoni’s astonishing hybrid work of documentary, memoir and fiction, Êxtase, which has been making the festival rounds following a CPH:DOX premiere, arrives in the U.S. at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight. The film will be viewable online from March 28 until April 2 and is a feature debut for the director, who splits her time between her native Brazil and New York. From my 25 New Face profile of Passoni last summer: The hybrid work pulls from the director’s own diaries and interviews with other anorexics to capture the lived experience of anorexia, its social underpinnings and its use as an […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 19, 2021 -
13 Features to Look Forward to at the 2021 SXSW Film Festival
SXSW boasts the unenviable distinction of being the first major festival on the ’21 calendar to have its typical live edition disrupted for the second time by the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year the teeming Austin event, which encompasses not just film but music and interactive, was cancelled by the City of Austin as the pandemic spread. “The cancellation itself, it felt like a tsunami,” SXSW Film Festival Director Janet Pierson told The Texas Standard. “Waves coming at you, the ground underneath you. I mean, it was just so intense and the repercussions were so devastating for so many people and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 16, 2021
