William Burroughs’ explained the title of his 1959 masterpiece Naked Lunch as “a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” Director Lee Haven Jones appears to share the Beat novelist’s intention in his feature film debut (after a decade of UK television), The Feast. The Welsh-language shocker serves up a stomach-churning bounty of visceral delights and/or dread in its deliberate 90 minutes, as it builds to a jaw-dropping third act – steadily foreshadowed throughout the preceding course (er, courses) of events. Yet another entry in the resurgence of the folk horror genre, the film […]
by Steve Dollar on Mar 26, 2021I’ll never forget the first time I heard Poly Styrene. I was in college, hanging out at a buddy’s one evening. We were drinking beer, smoking pot and playing records. One of them was something new, a document of the current London punk-rock scene: Live at the Roxy London WC2, featuring now-legendary acts like Wire and the Buzzcocks. The songs were by turns arty or aggro, surging out of a mix that felt submerged in an ambient murk. And then this teenager’s voice cut through. Over the curdled notes of Lora Logic’s saxophone, drums clamor and the song explodes. “Bind […]
by Steve Dollar on Mar 23, 2021What began as a BTS feature for a home video release of The Blood on Satan’s Claw, a 1971 cult favorite about Satanic possession in a 17th century English village, premiered this week at the South by Southwest film festival as a three-hour opus on the allure and dread of folk-horror. “I started working on a half-hour bonus feature for Severin [Films] and it just kept getting really big,” says Kier-La Janisse, whose directorial debut Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched adds yet another hyphen to her endeavors as a film historian-memorist (The House of Psychotic Women), editor, curator and educator (she […]
by Steve Dollar on Mar 19, 2021Chiaroscuro is as good as a drug in Bebia, à mon seul désir, the striking debut feature from Russian-born, London-based writer-director Juja Dobrachkous, which premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) last week, in the Tiger competition. The impressionistic drama feels as if conjured out of smoke, dead leaves and rain clouds. Perhaps more to the point, its camera relishes the contrast between the pale skin of teenage model Ariadna (Anastasia Davidson), strutting the catwalk in London, and the Stygian hue of the mourning dresses worn by the women who loudly lament before her grandmother’s casket, back in rural […]
by Steve Dollar on Feb 10, 2021After so much meta-ness, it was practically relaxing to settle back in the waning hours of this year’s Sundance with a drama as solid and old-fashioned as Jockey. Not unlike The Wrestler, absent the self-consciously Dardenne-ian camerawork, this Southwestern slice-of-life follows an aging athlete – the titular jockey Jackson (Clinton Collins Jr.) – as he confronts the end of his long ride. On the racetrack, at least, although the aggregated damage caused by a series of back injuries now threatens to cripple him, or worse, if he keeps at it. Director and co-writer Clint Bentley, who previously co-wrote and produced […]
by Steve Dollar on Feb 4, 2021Something about sitting alone in my living room in the Florida Panhandle, staring at a 55-inch television screen, watching actors playing people alone in their homes staring at screens, while outside an invisible virus continued to wreak havoc on a world radically and irreversibly changed from only a year ago, really defined a lot of my experience with this week’s largely virtual Sundance Film Festival. Of course, festivals worldwide have made the pivot to online presentation, and they’re getting better and better at it. Meanwhile, it’s become almost habitual to describe a film as uncanny or prescient in the way […]
by Steve Dollar on Feb 2, 2021Putting together the perfect soundtrack for a film is its own art form. It’s a task that most often makes use of existing tunes and can achieve an almost magical symbiosis with the images onscreen. Think of Leonard Cohen’s ballads floating over the snowbound romantic folly of Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller or the way Simon & Garfunkel’s songs offer a suite-like metanarrative in The Graduate as two legendary examples. Filmmaker Haroula Rose mentions both in a recent conversation, which also touched on the way Paul Thomas Anderson drew on bespoke material in Magnolia, commissioning an original song cycle […]
by Steve Dollar on Jan 12, 2021Eight months since the pandemic forced (most) film festivals to pivot to video – striving, with varying success, to replicate their in-the-flesh experience via various digital platforms – some surprisingly viable models are coming to a laptop near you. One of them is the Camden International Film Festival, which engineered its annual autumn camp for non-fiction filmmakers, fans, industry and its coastal Maine community Oct. 1-12 by mixing an extensive online operation with a nightly drive-in, each matching the festival’s signature creative flair to the unique necessities of presenting a ton of films and workshops amid a global health crisis. […]
by Steve Dollar on Oct 27, 2020A glance back at the economic suffering of the post-crash Obama era that feels barely a day removed from the nation’s present multitude of crises, Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland is much more existential road movie than social tract. While it communicates something newsy about the pitiful state of things for the American worker, the story tracks an introspective quest, dramatized against the splendiferous, wide-open horizons of the American West. The odyssey of a Nevada woman who loses her home and takes to the road after the closing of her town’s gypsum mine, the film fits loosely into a body of work […]
by Steve Dollar on Oct 12, 2020While it’s doubtful anyone really wants to see their favorite film festival go virtual, in this year (and maybe more) when nearly everything is pivoting to online status, Montreal’s annual Fantasia marathon is one you’d expect to suffer the most from the transition. Yet, from the other side of a screen 1,500 miles away, the festival sure seemed to pull off the difficult feat of making it all work. No late-night Irish bar hangs, no traditional audience chants, no horror fan takeover of the utilitarian urban campus of Concordia University and its construction-riddled surroundings for three weeks of sleepaway-camp shenanigans. […]
by Steve Dollar on Sep 5, 2020