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, 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, 2020Meta 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, 2020It 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, 2020What’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, 2020Darkness falls around 4 p.m. every day in late November when you’re as far north as Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, whose annual Black Nights (PÖFF) nods to the presiding nocturnal mood. Most of the winter light is up on screen, where the festival’s vast programming unspools across 17 days that also are chock full with industry forums and meet-ups. A city of some 400,000 that feels like a village, the Tallinn most visitors experience divvies up between its tourist-speckled Old Town, whose medieval bonafides are rooted as far back as 1154, and the modern design/tech neighborhood Teleskivi, with acres […]
by Steve Dollar on Jan 14, 2020Cinephiles looking to cook up a zesty decade recap of the best in American indie film could have taken a Polish holiday this fall and landed in the eastern European cultural capital of Wroclaw for the 10th annual American Film Festival. The intensive marathon nods to red-white-and-blue archetypes in branding, which makes festival avatars of such staples of American mythology as motorcycle cops, 18-wheelers, Afro-sporting disco queens, football running backs, astronauts and desperadoes. Its mission, however, is at once more incisive and expansive than all that apple-pie iconography, distilling highlights and discoveries from the year’s major U.S. film gatherings, sprinkled […]
by Steve Dollar on Dec 30, 2019This was the year Cameraimage brought it all back home. The much-vaunted Polish cinematography festival, which launched in 1993 in Toruń—a UNESCO World Heritage site whose history dates back to the 8th century—returned to its native soil after two decades away (first in Łódź, the industrial locus so close to David Lynch’s heart and host to the national film school, and for the last nine years in Bydgoszcz). The homecoming inspired a comical short starring two of the festival’s best-loved regulars on a mission to “save” Cameraimage, with the wiry and wild-haired Chris Doyle wheeling Ed Lachman, signature fedora firmly […]
by Steve Dollar on Dec 19, 2019