Authors — Tom Hall

The Color Wheel — A Hammer to Nail Review

(Distributed by Cinema Conservancy and Factory 25, The Color Wheel opens theatrically in NYC at BAM on Friday, May 18, 2012. It world premiered at the 2011 Sarasota Film Festival and co-shared the Best Narrative award at the Chicago Underground Film Festival before screening at BAMcinemaFest and many, many more festivals throughout the world. Visit the film’s official website to learn more. NOTE: This review was first published on June 22, 2011.) Full disclosure: I first met Alex Ross Perry in the autumn of 2010. We had attended a screening with a mutual friend and he mentioned to me that he was finishing a new film and offered me a look. As a […]
by Tom Hall on May 17, 2012
The Forgiveness of Blood — A Hammer to Nail Review

(The Forgiveness of Blood is being distributed by Sundance Selects and comes to theaters on February 24, 2012. It world premiered at the 2011 Berlin International Film Festival. NOTE: This review was first posted at Hammer to Nail in conjunction with its screening at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival.) The future of American independent filmmaking may not lie in America at all. In recent years, a number of filmmakers have turned their eyes away from the complexities of 21st century American life and toward the world beyond our national borders. The decision to engage another culture through filmmaking, to […]
by Tom Hall on Feb 23, 2012
Sundance 2012: Trophies And Laurels

Sundance announced their award winners on Saturday night and, as usual, the festival’s mission of inclusivity was in full bloom; over 25 films were handed a prize from the podium, which is great for everyone involved. There is no harm in recognizing great work, and the more Sundance laurels on trailers and posters going forward, the better for all, but given the festival’s reliance on very specific categories and competitions (World Dramatic, World Documentary, U.S. Dramatic, U.S. Documentary, Next, Midnight, Spotlight, New Frontiers and Shorts), several great films went unrecognized. I am not sure if the festival’s programming categories are […]
by Tom Hall on Jan 29, 2012
SUNDANCE 2012: POWER PLAYS

The role of authority in the lives of everyday people is a crucial question at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. From the first wave of documentaries examining the Arab Spring to fictional accounts of the personal and collective consequences of confronting our conception of power, Sundance filmmakers this year have looked at the state of our world and our culture and uncovered a complex battle for control. Of the standout films I have seen at Sundance this year, for one reason or another, the issues of control and responsibility have played a crucial part in giving this edition of the festival its distinctly dystopian tenor; there […]
by Tom Hall on Jan 27, 2012
SUNDANCE 2012: DOCUMENTARY MISSION CRITICAL

There is a longstanding debate in the non-fiction filmmaking community about the nature of documentary films; is the mission of the documentary to tell the truth and nothing but or do the requirements of cinematic storytelling allow for flexibility in the service of story? As a passionate viewer of non-fiction filmmaking, I have always drawn a line between cinema and reportage; on the one hand, reality must provide the underlying structure of documentary film, but unlike news gathering and reporting, films should have the license to manipulate things like chronology and the way in which information is presented in order to create […]
by Tom Hall on Jan 26, 2012
Sundance 2012: Sex, Drugs and Falling Apart

Snow is pounding Park City; people are hidden under hoods and hats, the snow burying everything under a deep pile of grey and white. This is perfect weather for introspection and so far, the narrative films at Sundance have done little to break the mood. I couldn’t be happier. Early on, Sundance has featured films united by loss, by the end of relationships, by heartbreak and the assertion of possibility. I am no glutton for sadness, but there is something about the dark skies and looming mountains that make the melancholy almost comforting. If you look hard enough, every festival unveils a thematic strain, and […]
by Tom Hall on Jan 22, 2012
SUNDANCE EXPECTATIONS: A PROGRAMMER’S PERSPECTIVE

This is my first year covering Sundance for Filmmaker Magazine, and the assignment has me thinking about things a little bit differently. As someone who has attended this festival in various capacities since 1998, I have a deep affection for the event itself, its geographic and organizational consistency and the persistence of its vision of a vital American independent filmmaking community. You’d be hard pressed to find a person who enjoys film who has never heard of Sundance; the festival’s identity is, for all intents and purposes, a brand, associated with certain types of films — low-budget American indies, socially conscious documentaries, formally […]
by Tom Hall on Jan 20, 2012
Secret Sunshine — A Hammer to Nail Review

(Secret Sunshine is available on DVD and Blu-ray through The Criterion Collection.) The history of Lee Chang-dong’s extraordinary Secret Sunshine is a textbook case of both the problems and the miracles at play in the current marketplace for international cinema here in the United States. The film, which premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival (winning the Best Actress award for Jeon Do-yeon’s devastating performance), was featured in the U.S. that same autumn at The New York Film Festival. But despite critical accolades (the film won indieWIRE’s 2007 Best Undistributed Film poll in a landslide), Secret Sunshine remained in limbo […]
by Tom Hall on Aug 25, 2011
Project Nim — A Hammer to Nail Review

(Project Nim is being distributed theatrically by Roadside Attractions. It opens in theaters July 8, 2011. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.) In December of 1973, a two-week old chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky was taken from the arms of his mother and given to a human family in the hopes of settling a raging intellectual debate. In a famous study, the linguist (and now-famous political philosopher) Noam Chomsky had asserted that language acquisition was solely the domain of human beings, an innate quality existing within and discovered by humans through experience and exposure to language, which combined to […]
by Tom Hall on Jul 7, 2011
On Festivals, Festival Programmers and Independent Film Week

It’s September, and after a long, scorching summer, the festival season has finally gotten under way; Telluride, Venice, Toronto are in the books, the New York Film Festival is just on the horizon and my job as a film programmer and artistic director has kicked off in earnest. The screenings begin, the landscape starts to take shape; acquisitions are tracked, release schedules scrutinized, and submissions and new films begin to make their way to us. So often, I read articles about film festivals as if they were these mysterious, unknowable institutions that make random, arbitrary decisions about which films they […]
by Tom Hall on Sep 20, 2010

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