Over nearly 20 years, film journalist Neville Pierce has collected bylines at most of the U.K.’s top film publications, including Empire (where he’s a contributing editor), Total Film (where he was the editor) and The Guardian. And while he worked as a reviewer early in his career, he’s best known for his long-form profiles of actors and directors, pieces that are deep dives into the art and craft of subjects like Michael Fassbender, Mark Romanek and, most consistently, David Fincher, whose sets he has visited and written about no less than seven times. But since 2011 Pierce has been building […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 5, 2018“Christopher LaMarca and Jessica Dimmock’s The Pearl is a nighttime movie,” wrote Vadim Rizov out of True False in 2016, “all quiet, warmly illuminated interior spaces populated by a self-supporting community.” That community is one of older trans women living in the Pacific Northwest and coming out for the first time in their fifties and sixies, and LaMarca and Dimmock’s is indeed a beautifully shot and empathetic portrait. The film was selected for our 2016 “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” program, when we wrote: Dimmock and LaMarca’s debut feature documentary is an intimate portrait of a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 2, 2018Meredith Alloway’s interview with director and DP Reed Morano (one of our top posts of the year), where Morano explains the exhaustive preparation that led her to be hired to direct the pilot of Hulu’s Margaret Atwood adaptation The Handmaid’s Tale, also contained a section where the director broke down the camera and direction decisions she made for one crucial scene. Now, Nathalie Sejean at Mentorless has taken that section and turned it into a concise visual essay that allows you to see for yourself the work that Morano described to Alloway. Check it out above.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 1, 2018Three fascinating but very different actresses star in Josephine Decker’s exhilarating Sundance feature, Madeline’s Madeline. There’s Molly Parker, the exceptional film and television actress currently seen in Wormwood, who plays Evangeline, an experimental theater director who develops her work out of immersive performance workshops, challenging her company to mine their own feelings and experiences while creating new ones through the sometimes cringe-inducing exercises that can be the stuff of the improvisatory creation. Miranda July, an artist, writer, director and one of the most significant performance artists of the last 20 years, plays Regina, the frazzled single mother of a teenage […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 1, 2018The Miseducation of Cameron Post, Desiree Akhaven’s drama about teenage gay conversion therapy, and Kailash, Derek Doneen’s documentary about Nobel Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi took home the two top U.S. prizes, the U.S. Dramatic and U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prizes, at tonight’s 2018 Sundance Film Festival closing night ceremonies. Nearly 30 awards were given out throughout the evening, prompting emcee Jason Mantzoukas, star of Hannah Fidell’s The Long Dumb Road, to chant, “10 more days, 10 more awards!” at the end of an evening that saw much diversity in the juror selections: Four out of the five top U.S. awards […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 28, 2018The documentary debut from fine art photographer Michael Dweck, The Last Race screens five times in competition at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. The film tells the story of Riverhead Raceway, a decades-old race track on Long Island. At one time Long Island hosted roughly 40 such tracks; today, Riverhead is the only one that remains. Filmmaker Gregory Kershaw served as both cinematographer and co-producer on the film. Below, he spoke with Filmmaker about the physical toll of filming at a loud and fume-filled race track, the influence of Errol Morris’ early films and the logistical madness of having “10 cameras mounted on […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 26, 2018Sundance starts tomorrow, and just before the curtain raises we’re squeaking in with a list of films our correspondents — Vadim Rizov, Meredith Alloway and myself — are excited to see. I’m about to start packing, and colleagues from other magazines and companies are Facebooking their SARS-mask covered faces on their way to the influenza petri-dish of Park City. I could spin this intro out longer — quote Sundance festival director John Cooper on how this year’s festival is full of “alternative voices” — or perhaps left-turn into some metaphor or another, but I’ll just do what we do here […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 17, 2018Cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s interview with Kaleem Aftab was one of our most highly-read pieces of last year, and in this concise interview posted at the ARRI channel, he discusses specific aspects of his methodology, including adapting his approach to his physical surroundings and the importance of camera ergonomics.
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 8, 2018In 1982, in the Hotel Martinez at the Cannes Film Festival, where Steven Spielberg’s E.T. was the closing night film, German auteur Wim Wenders set up a stationary 16mm camera in a room on the sixth floor and asked a succession of directors to film themselves answering a single question: “Is cinema becoming a dead language, an art which is already in the process of decline?” Respondents ranged from yes, Spielberg, to Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Michelangelo Antonioni, and topics covered included film vs. television, the rise of blockbuster “sensation-oriented” cinema, and the evolving theatrical experience. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 7, 2018A hotel left empty during wintertime, a stormy island and a lone caretaker are the poetic elements of Brian Bolster’s elegant Winter’s Watch, a short documentary screening on the Atlantic Selects. For 19 winters photographer Alexandra de Steiguer has worked as a caretaker of the Oceanic Hotel, an imposing structure located on Star Island, 10 miles off the New England Coast. The island’s lone inhabitant, she sinks into her solitude and makes images, although, it is clear that, in this instance, her artistic practice is a byproduct of her need to escape the noise of the mainland and exist, one-on-one, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 4, 2018