Authors — Steve Dollar
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Bebia, à mon seul désir, The Year Before the War and Friends and Strangers: The 2021 International Film Festival Rotterdam
Chiaroscuro 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, 2021 -
Sundance Critic’s Notebook #2 (Steve Dollar): Jockey, Human Factors and President
After 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, 2021 -
Sundance 2021 Critic’s Notebook 1 (Steve Dollar): The Pink Cloud, In the Earth, Searchers
Something 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, 2021 -
“I Wanted to Infuse the Film with a Musical Storyline”: Writer/Director Haroula Rose on the Original Soundtrack to Her Once Upon a River
Putting 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, 2021 -
Drive-Ins, Sawed-Off Campers and Virtual Premieres: The 2020 Camden International Film Festival
Eight 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, 2020 -
Nomadland, Beginning and Slow Machine: The 2020 New York Film Festival
A 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, 2020 -
The Five Rules of Success, PVT Chat, Time of Moulting and Wildland: The 2020 Fantasia Festival
While 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 -
“It’s Not Mumblecore Sex”: Boaz Yakin and Bobbi Jene Smith on Dance-Driven Psychodrama Aviva
Meta on top of meta, the choreographic psychodrama Aviva is a romance in which the primary characters—star-crossed Israeli lovers-in-New-York Aviva and Eden—are each played by two performers, one of each gender, pairing and tripling and quadrupling off as the ecstasies and heartbreak of a relationship turn into a sometimes dizzying hall of mirrors. The film, which has its virtual world premiere today (June 12), is a collaboration between writer-director Boaz Yakin (Fresh, Remember the Titans) and dancer-choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith, formerly of Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company, and the irrepressible subject of the 2017 documentary Bobbi Jene. The masculine/feminine divide, embodied […]
by Steve Dollar on Jun 12, 2020 -
“People are Actually Reading My Scripts When I Send Them!”: Brea Grant on Tribeca Premiere 12 Hour Shift
It was to be a triumphant springtime festival run for Brea Grant. The actor, writer and director (who first won notoriety a decade ago on the NBC series Heroes), had not one, but two, premieres on her calendar at the season’s biggest film festivals, South by Southwest and Tribeca. Grant wrote and has the lead role in Lucky, a thriller about a self-help author besieged by a stalker. The SXSW selection got sidelined as the festival became one of the first to cancel amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Last week, 12 Hour Shift, the pitch-black comedy Grant wrote and directed, likewise […]
by Steve Dollar on May 13, 2020 -
Tribeca Critic’s Notebook: Socks on Fire, Sweet Thing, Kokoloko and Unemployable
What’s the point of a film festival if there’s no … festival? That’s the existential question we’re all asking ourselves right now, as organizations scramble to offset cancellations and postponements of physical gatherings in the wake of the global COVID-19 outbreak. In a bid to at least offer filmmakers some exposure, the Tribeca Film Festival is among those fests that made a pivot to online screenings for press and industry, representing maybe a quarter of its feature programming (supplemented by work in shorts, episodic and other categories). The funny thing is, this is how I often have experienced Tribeca – […]
by Steve Dollar on Apr 28, 2020
