Authors — Vikram Murthi
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Tension and Releases: Editor Ronald Bronstein on “Marty Supreme”
Ronald Bronstein premiered his feature Frownland at South by Southwest the same year as Josh Safdie’s short We’re Going to the Zoo played, and he felt a pang of insecurity when he saw it. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, there’s somebody also vying for the same kind of immediacy,” said the veteran writer-editor. “It was like my feet were made of lead; this guy was like a helium balloon.” Back in New York City, Josh introduced himself to Bronstein and convinced him to play a character based on his own father. Bronstein helped write and edit the project, which […]
by Vikram Murthi on Dec 22, 2025 -
The Notes of an Age: Composer Bryce Dessner on “Train Dreams”
Composers are often brought on to score a film very late into the process, but Bryce Dessner was writing music for Train Dreams before director Clint Bentley began production. A longtime collaborator of Bentley’s, alongside his creative partner Greg Kwedar, Dessner has scored every narrative film project of theirs, either alone or with his brother Aaron, beginning with Transpecos. “Because we’re old friends, I was aware that they were thinking about [adapting Train Dreams] for a long time,” explains the musician. “I had read the book [and] early versions of the script. There’s a lot of information in the early […]
by Vikram Murthi on Dec 18, 2025 -
FILM FEST KNOX 2025: 96 Hours in Knoxville
The last time I visited Tennessee, I was 15, traveling around Memphis with my parents, and spent most of the time listening to In Rainbows on cheap headphones; we ate barbecue, visited my grand-uncle and toured Graceland. 17 years later, I returned to Tennessee for the third annual FILM FEST KNOX, co-founded by filmmaker Paul Harrill and Filmmaker contributor Darren Hughes, and quickly realized my half-remembered teenaged experiences bore almost no relevance to this trip. For all intents and purposes, Knoxville might as well be in a separate state called East Tennessee, or so I’m told given the so-called Grand […]
by Vikram Murthi on Dec 4, 2025 -
“I Kind of Think Like a Rock Band”: Hal Hartley on Self-Distribution, Personal Filmmaking and His New Feature, “Where to Land”
Hal Hartley’s Where to Land, his first feature in 11 years, presents a familiar, potent lattice of miscommunication within a small community. Joe Fulton (Bill Sage), a filmmaker referred to as “the quiet and unassuming elder statesman of American romantic comedies,” decides to prepare his last will and testament while also jockeying for a job as a cemetery groundskeeper. The timing of his estate planning combined with the drastic professional pivot concerns some of the people in Joe’s life, most of whom assume that he’s near death. His actress girlfriend Muriel (Kim Taff) and niece Veronica (Katelyn Sparks) panic about […]
by Vikram Murthi on Sep 23, 2025 -
TIFF 2025: The Christophers, I Saw the Face of God in the Jet Wash, Rose of Nevada
Steven Soderbergh’s films routinely fixate on money—who has it, who doesn’t, what (illegally) acquiring it says about personal status and national identity within global capitalism. So, it’s mildly surprising he hasn’t set a film in the contemporary art world prior to The Christophers, though previous works deployed visual art for character definition (Laura San Giacomo’s character in sex, lies, and videotape is a painter) or as a plot engine (the Imperial Coronation egg as Ocean’s Twelve’s MacGuffin). In his latest two-hander, artmaking serves as a dramatic foundation for extended badinage about creative expression as an imperfect vehicle for immortality. The […]
by Vikram Murthi on Sep 19, 2025 -
The Burnt Century: Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar on Train Dreams
Originally published in 2002, Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams chronicles the life of a logger who slips in and out of the world without a trace. An orphan with no knowledge of his birthplace or family lineage, Robert Grainier doesn’t have a history as much as he merely lives through it. He helps build the railroads that crisscross the country; when physically unable to maintain his arduous, itinerant lifestyle, he performs a series of odd jobs in his adopted home of Bonners Ferry, Idaho. He marries a woman, has a child and just as quickly loses them both in a […]
by Vikram Murthi on Sep 17, 2025 -
“The Whole Movie is Doing an Impression of the Genre”: Akiva Schaffer on The Naked Gun
In the early 1980s, Jim Abrahams and brothers David and Jerry Zucker pioneered a niche of slapstick- and wordplay-heavy spoof-comedies with films like Airplane! and Top Secret!, which displayed straight-faced silliness as a creative modus operandi. Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker (or ZAZ) also produced the short-lived ABC TV series Police Squad!, which parodied police procedurals and starred Leslie Nielsen as the inept, overconfident Detective Frank Drebin. After Police Squad!’s cancellation, ZAZ took Nielsen’s Drebin character and molded him for the big screen with The Naked Gun film franchise, where the trio’s patented mile-a-minute visual gags could flourish on a wider […]
by Vikram Murthi on Aug 1, 2025 -
“Making a Movie is Just a Succession of On-Set Challenges”: Ari Aster on Eddington
Ari Aster previously used the horror genre as a lens to examine dysfunctional family dynamics in Hereditary and break-up messiness in Midsommar. He then pivoted to the manic surrealism of Beau is Afraid, which immerses viewers in the title character’s perma-anxious mindset, generated by his mother’s domineering hold on his entire world. In Eddington, Aster pivots again, away from individual psychological portraits towards a more panoramic view of recent political history. Set in the eponymous fictional New Mexico town during the initial months of COVID, Eddington uses a contested election between its bar-owning neoliberal mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) and […]
by Vikram Murthi on Jul 31, 2025 -
“False Histories. Corny Music Biopic”: Alex Ross Perry on Pavements
“I always was hoping that it was music for the future. I mean, I think everyone who’s not that successful in their time tries to think that,” says Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus early on in Pavements, a new hybrid music documentary about the band. The group was certainly successful during their heyday in the ’90s, at least in indie rock terms—a perfect discography that drew near-universal critical acclaim, multiple tours including major international festivals and a hit on MTV—but their stature and popularity has only grown since they broke up in 1999. Beginning in 2002, Matador Records slowly re-released every […]
by Vikram Murthi on May 1, 2025 -
Trade Wars: Ian Bell on WTO/99
The archival documentary WTO/99 functions both as historical document and prophecy of the future, chronicling the four days in 1999 when anti-globalization activists from multiple movements—labor unions, student groups, teamsters, anarchists, nonprofit organizations like Global Exchange and the Rainforest Action Network—took to downtown Seattle to protest the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference. While the King County Sheriff’s Office and Seattle Police Department initially took a hands-off approach to supervising the peaceful protests, they quickly adopted a more aggressive tack after protestors successfully blocked WTO delegates from reaching the convention center on the first day of the conference. Tear gas, pepper […]
by Vikram Murthi on Apr 4, 2025
