After Hurricane Katrina turned New Orleans into a wasteland, visiting film and television productions looked further north for their Louisiana gothic vibes. Over the years, the riverfront city of Shreveport, with a population of some 260,000 (including the adjacent Bossier City), has been a popular location, the backdrop for supernatural thrillers (The Mist, the series Salem), multiple actioners (Shark Night 3D, The Mechanic), comedies (Super, I Love You Phillip Morris) and everything Nic Cage (Drive Angry, Trespass, Season of the Witch). There’s been a lot less such activity in recent years, as the Crescent City got back on its feet […]
by Steve Dollar on Oct 14, 2019Every year, the Camden International Film Festival manages a nifty magic trick. Its ambition swells within the concise duration of what amounts to a holiday weekend (if the second Friday of September was deemed, say, National Non-Fiction Day), with the same handful of venues, including two opera houses and a gorgeous vintage bijou, in three adjacent towns in northern seaside Maine. Marking its 15th year this September, CIFF–produced under the umbrella of the Points North Institute – consistently ups the stakes for filmmakers and audiences, without suffering from the dreaded festivalitis: the condition that arises when film festivals become all […]
by Steve Dollar on Sep 27, 2019Cinematic overdrive takes effect every summer for an 11-day spree at the New Horizon festival in Wroclaw, Poland, a “best-of” assortment of festival bangers from Rotterdam, Berlin, Cannes and elsewhere that also splinters into provocative sidebars, career retrospectives and funky late-night fare. The companion festival to fall’s American Film Festival likewise unspools at Kino Nowe Horyzonty (New Horizons), a contemporary multi-level nine-screen movie complex embedded in the city’s nightlife hub, well-designed as a life support system for cinephiles embarked on 14-hour immersive viewing sessions. (Which is to say, espresso and marvelous pastries are never far from reach). I’ve gotten to […]
by Steve Dollar on Aug 26, 2019Arriving back in New York, a city with which he is synonymous, Abel Ferrara has been popping up everywhere the past few weeks: from the Tribeca Film Festival, where his documentary The Projectionist had its world premiere, to the Museum of Modern Art, where a near-complete retrospective unspools a half-century of unruly cinema through May 30. The victory lap comes as the Bronx-born expatriate, who now lives contentedly in Rome, ushers a cluster of new work onto screens, including the long-delayed domestic release of Pasolini, starring Willem Dafoe as the radical Italian filmmaker and kindred spirit, as well as the […]
by Steve Dollar on May 18, 2019Blood and guts in high school is a theme that never loses its appeal to filmmakers, even as its universality—from Zero for Conduct to Heathers—demands greater risk and originality from filmmakers who, arguably more often than not, are recasting episodes from their own diaristic memory banks. This year’s Tribeca Film Festival, which wrapped up last week, served up a predictable share of films that fit into the coming-of-age category, yet the most notable of those efforts proved to be anything but cookie-cutter. The best film I saw at the festival, Jennifer Reeder’s Knives and Skin, even felt like something brand […]
by Steve Dollar on May 13, 2019Now that every 10-year-old has a pocket-sized film studio and multiplex in their hands via the smartphone, and debates over the cinematic legitimacy of streaming platforms rage on, there’s a certain sweet nostalgia associated with dead formats of a less pixel-saturated age. VHS was perhaps the most physical—and vulnerable—of physical media: cheap plastic shells containing magnetic tape that could easily tangle in a faulty player. Yet, along with the camcorder, which likewise came into common use in the early 1980s, it has found a permanent niche in pop-culture consciousness that is, perhaps, greedy for a certain archival innocence—a throwback to […]
by Steve Dollar on May 7, 2019Few things at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM for short) felt more San Francisco than being at the packed-to-the-rafters Castro Theatre on Good Friday to cast one’s eyes recklessly into the image pool rippling across the 24-foot-high screen. The visuals belonged to Maya Deren, the mystical dynamo of American independent cinema, whose core of 16mm work (At Land, The Very Eye of Night, Ritual in Transfigured Time and Meshes of the Afternoon) is a motherlode of the avant-garde, and fervent evidence of a mid-century bohemia that bloomed on the West Coast, a legacy kept alive through outfits […]
by Steve Dollar on Apr 30, 2019Labor 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 […]
by Steve Dollar on Apr 10, 2019[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 […]
by Steve Dollar on Apr 1, 2019Most 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 […]
by Steve Dollar on Sep 24, 2018