Labor was a theme binding many selections at this year’s New Directors/New Films, which concluded this past weekend at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art. That feels timely, in the wake of the success enjoyed and debates sparked by Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, about a loyal mestiza housekeeper and nanny caring for a well-off Mexico City family, and the high-profile arrival in the U.S. House of Representatives of progressive firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a proud former waitress whose working class roots have rattled the Fox News crowd. Not that world cinema attends to trending topics, but […]

[A selection of films from the ND/NF program, including Bait, are currently playing online for free on Festival Scope from April 8-April 22.] As it unveiled its 48th edition last week, New Directors/New Films—the annual collaboration between the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art—could justifiably tout itself as a fount of international cinematic discovery. Although most of its programming is cherry-picked from other major festivals, including Venice, Berlin and Sundance, its 12-day spree of screenings ushers a new wave of ascendent film talent into town for a Manhattan debut (or in some cases, an encore) as spring […]

Most film festivals can claim a thing or two: A dramatic location, a slate of coveted premieres, fancy fetes, unique guests, a platoon of industry heavies making the rounds, and, for better or worse, the media spotlight. I’ve never attended any film festival where I had the chance to wrap my arms around a tree–in a public park, no less, and in full view of pedestrians–and plant my ear firmly to its bark, as one of its official selections. And yet, there I was, in Camden, Maine, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, tree-hugging away. The four selected trees on the […]

Nothing else I saw at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival was as vividly out of its mind as the improbable sight of actor Robert Longstreet roaring across the neon-lit night in Shenzhen, China, rendered absurd in the Toni Erdmann-like drag of a white wig and dental prosthetics. The busy Texas character actor is part of the eccentric circus called Ghostbox Cowboy, which takes a satirical harpoon to the American Dream, parading its deflated form before the funhouse mirror of 21st century China. The writer-director-cinematographer John Maringouin (Big River Man) lathers the frame in a visual texture that captures the psychic […]

Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre is a 1926 Art Deco show palace that first hosted vaudeville shows and silent movie screenings accompanied by the bass-note oscillations of a Wurlitzer Hope Jones Unit-Orchestra Pipe Organ. The classic venue is symbolic of its city, which made it the ideal spot for the Bay Area premiere of a the debut feature by another Oakland icon: activist, musician and now writer-director Boots Riley, who came of age as a moviegoer at the venue. “I saw Star Wars here,” he told an audience that packed the house during the recent San Francisco International Film Festival, where the […]

Each year, the Points North Institute magnetizes the fog-kissed landscape of coastal Maine to lure the best and brightest of the non-fiction universe to the towns of Camden, Rockport and Rockland. The Camden International Film Festival offers an immersive overlay of screenings, panels, workshops, virtual reality installations, parties and intensive personal encounters that elevate the proceedings far above the standard festival formula of films and frolic. Exhibit A: What other festival turns a pitch session into a kind of centerpiece presentation? Staged under the banner of the Points North Institute, the festival’s umbrella organization, the program invites a group of […]