Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Trailer Watch: Kristen Stewart in Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper
No film has stayed and resonated with me from Cannes this past year as much as Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper, an eerie ghost story/character study laced with dark forebodings entirely entwined with our current political moment. IFC has just dropped a new trailer which focuses aptly on Kristen Stewart’s riveting performance as a buyer and stylist to a Davos-set celebrity socialite. Intrigued with the paranormal in all its historical dimensions, Stewart’s character is grieving her recently deceased brother while exploring the possibilities of communication in an age in boundaries are increasingly blurred. IFC releases the film on March 10. (And […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 4, 2017 -
Watch: Martin Scorsese’s Romance with New York City
This new video essay by Leigh Singer from the BFI posits, not so controversially, that director Martin Scorsese and the location of New York City are one of cinema’s great screen couples: This video essay focuses exclusively on Scorsese’s features and argues that, in his hands, the physical place transforms into psychological space: an X-ray not just of a city’s psyche, but of a nation’s soul. It makes for often brutal viewing, rarely indulging the aspirational side of the American Dream (does the Statue of Liberty feature even once in a Scorsese film?); but few can deny its authenticity. And […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 3, 2017 -
I don’t feel at home in this world anymore, Dina Top the 2017 Sundance Film Festival Awards
In a ceremony last night hosted by Jessica Williams — and one marked by presenters, winners and festival reps denouncing, in ways subtle and direct, the Trump administration’s immigration ban — the winners of the 2017 Sundance Film Festival were announced. First-time feature director Macon Blair’s character-based crime thriller I don’t feel at home in this world anymore won the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize, while Dan Sickles and Antonio Santini’s comedy-tinged doc about a romance between a couple living on the autism spectrum, Dina, won the Documentary Grand Jury Prize. On the World Cinema side, Tarik Saleh’s The Nile Hilton […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 29, 2017 -
Watch the Sundance Awards Live
Jessica Williams, star of the Sundance film The Incredible Jessica James, is hosting tonight’s award ceremony, which you can watch live here at Filmmaker. Check back after the show for the complete list of awards.
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 28, 2017 -
Working Through Fear: An Interview with Blumhouse’s Jason Blum
Driving down Beverly, you head opposite Hollywood, away from Studio City, toward the nondescript, single-level, brown-bricked building that’s the literal Blumhouse — the offices of horror movie maestro Jason Blum. Since founding the company, Blum has produced dozens of films that have made varying degrees of impact on the zeitgeist: the found-footage scares of the Paranormal Activity films, the reinvented haunted house of the Insidious pictures, the social violence of The Purge series. And then, of course, there’s megahit Get Out, Jordan Peele’s ferociously intelligent satire on racism that, despite its share of lobotomies and knifings and violently applied white […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 25, 2017 -
Parting Shot: Tim Sutton
Over the course of three features, Brooklyn-based writer/director Tim Sutton has excelled in creating visually gorgeous, tonally mysterious works that find intriguing new atmospheric territories by drifting away from conventional narrative structures and character arcs. His debut feature, Pavilion, is a diptych about a teenage son shuttled cross-country between divorced parents. Follow-up Memphis exploded the “artist battling creative block” storyline into a tale of spiritual crisis set in that city’s streets, recording studios and forest parks. His latest film, Dark Night, released this February by Cinelicious, is his strongest and certainly most challenging work. In a world where the value […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 18, 2017 -
Editor’s Letter
A year ago in this space I introduced my story on the STARZ show The Girlfriend Experience. It was our first-ever TV cover, and it kicked off a year in which the cultural conversation flowed from Moonlight to Atlanta, from Cameraperson to OJ: Made in America. I guess the Winter is our future issue, then, because, a year later, illustrated by artist Kim Dong-kyu’s witty update of Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting, “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” here is our first virtual reality, or VR, cover. This time the writer is Google’s principal filmmaker for VR, Jessica Brillhart, and her […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 18, 2017 -
The Terror of the Text: Olivier Assayas and Kristen Stewart on Personal Shopper
Personal Shopper, Olivier Assayas’s latest feature, begins with a classic horror movie trope: an evening spent in a haunted house. Kristen Stewart plays expat Maureen — not a paranormalist or twentysomething thrill-seeker but a personal clothes buyer and stylist to Kyra, a celebrity socialite and member of the Davos set. Something of a savant, Maureen does this job with an instinctual certainty but little evident pleasure. Whether that’s due to her preternatural cool or an overlay of mourning is unclear. But several months earlier, her brother, with whom she shares a congenital heart condition, died in a drafty mansion somewhere […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 18, 2017 -
Watch: An New Clip from Celia Rowlson-Hall’s MA
A woman, a man, a car and the desert. Widescreen. That’s the gist of this clip for Celia Rowlson-Hall’s highly-recommended MA, which opens tomorrow at the IFC Center via Factory 25. Check out the clip, read the synopsis below and see the movie! In this modern-day vision of Mother Mary’s pilgrimage, a woman crosses the scorched landscape of the American Southwest. Reinvented and told entirely through movement, the film playfully deconstructs the role of this woman, who encounters a world full of bold characters that are alternately terrifying and sublime. MA is a journey into the visceral and the surreal, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 12, 2017 -
Listen: Brian McOmber’s Haunting Score for Celia Rowlson-Hall’s MA
Celia Rowlson-Hall made our 25 New Faces list in 2015 on the basis of her entirely original, stunningly assured and nearly indescribable feature debut, MA. A year later, we picked for the list her film’s composer, former Dirty Projectors drummer Brian McComber, who not only composed her amazing score but did similarly outre work for Trey Shults’s Krisha. As he relates in our profile, the experimentalism of Rowlson-Hall’s film let him go slightly wild with the score; hence, the evocative gongs and cymbals. Now, over at the Soundcloud page of the film’s production company, MEMORY (yet another 25 New Face […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 12, 2017
