Authors — Soheil Rezayazdi
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Critic’s Notebook NYFF: Call Me By Your Name, The Square, Western, Wonderstruck, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
For film writers who, like myself, remain chained to New York, NYFF marks the time of year when the much-hyped (or -hated) titles from the festival circuit finally pay us a visit. NYFF represents the last stop for many of the reliable sampler of films from Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, and elsewhere before they enter theaters and launch their awards season runs. At last, we get to see the films the more important writers have already grown tired of debating on Twitter. From Sundance this year comes Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, a coming-of-age queer romance set in 1980s Italy. A […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Oct 13, 2017 -
Critic’s Notebook NYFF: Faces Places, The Rape of Recy Taylor, Last Flag Flying
Seventeen years ago, Agnès Varda filmed her own hand in horror. The blotches, the wrinkles, the bulging blue veins: These may as well be the hands of a stranger. “My hair and my hands keep telling me that the end is near,” she says in her 2000 film The Gleaners & I. Despite the forebodings of death in Gleaners and 2008’s The Beaches of Agnès, Agnès is still with us; what a gift it is to have her still around. Varda, now 89, has partnered with French artist JR to co-direct another freewheeling, full-of-life documentary. Faces Places overflows with the […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Oct 4, 2017 -
“Women Were Afraid to Speak Up — That’s What Made Recy Taylor So Important”: Director Nancy Buirski on The Rape of Recy Taylor
Recy Taylor walked home from church on a warm September night. A 24-year-old black woman in Abbeville, Alabama, a sharecropper and mother, Recy was the most religious member of her family and regularly went to church by herself. A full house awaited her at home: her siblings, her father, her husband, and her daughter Joyce. The year was 1944. On her way home, a group of seven white boys abducted Recy and forced her into the nearby woods. The young men gang-raped her at gunpoint. One month later, an all-white, all-male jury refused to indict any of these men. The […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Sep 29, 2017 -
Sharon Van Etten and Katherine Dieckmann on Scoring Strange Weather
In 2015, the year this story begins, Sharon Van Etten had never scored a film. She’d also never heard the name Katherine Dieckmann. Van Etten had just released I Don’t Want to Let You Down, the follow-up EP to her exquisite 2014 album Are We There. Van Etten’s music does things to people, and it did a number on Dieckmann, a former music video director for Aimee Mann, R.E.M., and Wilco. Enchanted by her songs of muted melancholy, Dieckmann became convinced that Van Etten had to score her latest feature, a road movie set in the American South. The two […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Jul 25, 2017 -
Even Fire Walk With Me‘s Deleted Scenes Are Important to the New Twin Peaks
Warning: If you haven’t seen both seasons of Twin Peaks, Fire Walk With Me and the first five episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return – turn around. David Lynch warned us. Weeks before the revival of his surrealist soap opera, Variety reported that Fire Walk With Me would be “very important” to understanding Twin Peaks: The Return. Five episodes in, it’s clear Lynch wasn’t kidding. Even fans of the original series who plowed through the maligned second season – overcoming Confederate flags and pine weasels – have found themselves baffled by references to Phillip Jeffries, the Blue Rose, or the Owl Cave Ring. Fire Walk With Me, we’ve […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Jun 5, 2017 -
Turning 13 Installation Screens of Cate Blanchett Into One Single-Screen Feature: Julian Rosefeldt on Manifesto
A conservative mother leads her family in a lunchtime prayer on pop art. A tattooed punk screams about stridentism at a roomful of drugged-out partiers. A teacher stifles her students’ creativity with the harsh dictates of the Dogme 95 movement. Cate Blanchett, the preternatural shape-shifter who can slink into Bob Dylan or Katherine Hepburn with equal ease, embodies these and nine other souls in Manifesto, the art installation turned feature film from Julian Rosefeldt. Manifesto premiered in 2015 as a 13-screen sensory wonder at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. The installation asks viewers to move from screen to […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on May 9, 2017 -
Five Questions with Golden Exits Director Alex Ross Perry
The worlds of Alex Ross Perry tend to thrive on confrontation. In 2014, the writer/director arrived at Sundance with Listen Up Philip, an acerbic comedy that showcased his knack for characters at once repellent and compelling. He followed that film with Queen of Earth, a feverish two-hander that pitted Elisabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston in a cage match of sniping and passive-aggression. For his fifth feature, Perry gave himself a challenge: To write a film with no outward hostility. That film is Golden Exits. Perry calls it his “mellow drama.” An NYC-set ensemble starring Emily Browning, Mary-Louise Parker and Jason Schwartzman, Golden Exits premieres this week in competition […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Jan 23, 2017 -
Five Questions with Crown Heights Director Matt Ruskin
Colin Warner spent 20 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit. In 1980, police arrested Warner for the killing of a 16-year-old boy in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights. His imprisonment, based solely on a mistaken eye witness, robbed him of his freedom from the years of Jimmy Carter all the way to George W. Bush. Warner’s story is the subject of Crown Heights, the second feature film from writer/director Matt Ruskin. The film stars Lakeith Stanfield (Short Term 12) as Warner and Nnamdi Asomugha (Hello, My Name Is Doris) as Carl King, Warner’s best friend who devotes years of his life […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Jan 22, 2017 -
Sundance 2017: Five Questions with Landline Director Gillian Robespierre
Everything changed for Gillian Robespierre after Sundance. In 2014 she arrived at the festival with her debut feature, Obvious Child, a personal, provocative, NYC-set comedy starring Jenny Slate. Before the festival even wrapped, she had found an enviable distributor for the film in A24. Obvious Child would go on to play on 200 screens nationwide, earn more than $3 million and garner Robespierre a directing award from the National Board of Review. She returns to the festival three years later with Landline, an observant family comedy set in ’90s New York. Filmmaker spoke with Robespierre ahead of the film’s world premiere about her love […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Jan 19, 2017 -
Welcome to the Working Week: On Paterson and Groundhog Day
Every day begins the same: We wake up. Usually in a bed, often by an alarm. Sometimes a pet gets me, or a slice of sunlight, or the shrill beeps of a garbage truck. I awake with a slow fade, or maybe a jolt, or perhaps only after a series of false starts. We can delay our rise from bed, but the inevitable remains: A full day of consciousness awaits us. How will we use it? How do we live life so we can live with ourselves? For Phil Connors, he awakes at the strike of 6:00 AM to the […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Jan 9, 2017
