Authors — Vadim Rizov
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My Best Work as (Mostly) an Editor
When I realized I’d be laid off (via: restructuring) from the publication I’ve worked at for 11+ years, I went back through the print archives to round up work I was proud of as an interviewer and commissioning editor. It holds up better than I hoped: I came out swinging in my second print issue with what I’m reasonably sure was the first non-video, written-out English-language interview with Roberto Minervini for Stop the Pounding Heart; his next film, The Other Side, is a defining work of the decade. There’s a solid mixture of European arthouse known quantities (Arnaud Desplechin, Mia […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 8, 2026 -
An Improved Revision: Gregg Araki and the Restoration Team Behind “Mysterious Skin”
Toward the end of my interview with Gregg Araki, I remind him of his scene from Michael Almereyda and Amy Hobby’s 1995 documentary At Sundance. Sitting on a couch next to Todd Haynes, Araki is at that year’s festival with The Doom Generation. “The first draft of Doom was done when The Living End premiered at Sundance in 1992” he says. “The hard part is always the money and the financing, and it gets worse, and worse and worse [….] I hate the fact that you write, you make a movie, it’s fresh and what you want to say and […]
by Vadim Rizov on Dec 22, 2025 -
Tokyo 2025: Mario Patrocínio on “Maria Vitória”
Mario Patrocínio’s Maria Vitória is the writer-director’s first narrative feature, but it brings the chops of his documentary background to ground the story of the titular young woman (Mariana Cardoso). Under the relentless eye of her controlling father Nacho (Miguel Borges), Maria is subjected to a rigorous soccer training regimen that makes having a social life nearly impossible. When her estranged brother Bruno (Miguel Nunes) unexpectedly returns to their small Portuguese village, the film expands from a father-daughter duo to a fraught triangle. Bruno’s queerness challenges his father’s stereotypical machismo; her brother’s former absence and her father’s constant presence are […]
by Vadim Rizov on Nov 14, 2025 -
Tokyo International Film Festival 2025: Echoes and Sermons
In 2021, the Tokyo International Film Festival decided to leap out of mediocrity. It was, acquaintances told me, previously the kind of place where they’d show Princess Diaries 2 for red-carpet celebrity purposes, and in terms of its relationship to local fare, The Hollywood Reporter’s Gavin J. Blair wrote that the other TIFF “faced criticism in the past that it was run mostly by, and for the benefit of, the ‘big four’ Japanese studios” (Toho, Toei, Shochiku, Kadagawa). With the 2021 appointment of programming director Ichiyama Shozo, Tokyo—like the Busan International Film Festival—is now designed to be a launching pad for […]
by Vadim Rizov on Nov 11, 2025 -
NYFF 2025: Duse, Gavagai
When I caught up with Martin Eden during the pandemic, I liked it pretty well but didn’t understand “what, exactly, is the value of […] a eulogy for the Western European project’s dissolution at this late date.” Whoops! I don’t know why I couldn’t grasp why Pietro Marcello wanted to delve into fascism’s allure for charismatic upstarts in 2019; I certainly get it now, so perhaps my positive response to his tepidly-received Duse is, in part, a delayed apology for spacing the first time round. This film’s project is, pretty precisely, gender-flipped Martin Eden (more succinctly, per my colleague Mark […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 15, 2025 -
Ken Jacobs (1933-2025)
Ken Jacobs wasn’t just a single (albeit huge) formative force in experimental film, but a river through which an array of streams flowed to their own artistic destinations. For New Yorkers, the Williamsburg native was an easily-sighted local legend: The first time I remember seeing him speak was in 2019 at a MoMI memorial screening of work by Phil Solomon, one of his many notable students at SUNY-Binghamton. Jacobs was in full stentorian mode, taking to the stage to proclaim, by way of sorrowful introduction, that “a teacher should not outlive his students.” Later that year, he was in the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 8, 2025 -
Busan International Film Festival 2025: Follow the Money
The first conversation I had in Busan was with a Malaysia-based genre film buyer who told me about the recent challenges of dealing with his adopted country’s famously rigid censor board while clearing promotional materials for a new Bollywood film, which he described as a less-violent John Wick. The poster showed the lead actor holding a bottle of beer and smoking a cigarette; unsurprisingly, the board nixed both elements and rejected the compromise of erasing them while leaving smoke still trailing out of the star’s mouth. In the end, the buyer was provided with an image of the hero on […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 3, 2025 -
TIFF(ty) 2025: The Fence, To the Victory!
In the 1999 mini-series Storm of the Century, a malevolent stranger (played by noted Canadian Colm Feore) shows up outside Stephen King’s longtime fictional community of Castle Rock and repeatedly says “Give me what I want and I’ll go away”—but he doesn’t tell anyone what he actually wants, instead telepathically manipulating people into suicide and other grisly events until finally unveiling his ask. Obviously this made a big impression on me when I was 13, but I’m told the series was in fact terrible, which isn’t hard to believe, and it’s definitely not what should have been coming to mind […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 15, 2025 -
TIFF 2025: Wake Up Dead Man, The Wizard of the Kremlin
The lights went down precisely at 6 pm, the designated starting hour for Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man, and people began murmuring in pleasant surprise: at premium TIFF screenings where a starry cast is the main attraction, kick-off time is understood to be more of a loose suggestion than an actuality you can make plans around. Director of Programming and Platform Lead Robyn Citizen briskly thanked the sponsors and brought out Johnson; he worked the room and had his intro done in 2.5 minutes. (Rian Johnson is a wise man.) The sponsor bumpers started at 6:05; “A TIFF miracle!” […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 12, 2025 -
TIFF 2025: Mare’s Nest, Blue Moon (Songs about Decline and Obsolescence)
Narratives of decline and obsolescence, frequently as a consequence of unforced errors made by the wealthy and unaccountable (the latter adjective redundant when paired with the former), are going to be a big theme this fall. The global political situation is self-evident; zooming down to the media tier, rumors of imminent firings and general bloodletting are swirling. (Wait for those quarterly reports to come in at the top of October and let the pain begin.) Zooming way down to the relatively parochial level of “one specific film festival,” TIFF was once a global powerhouse and automatic stop for the year’s […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 5, 2025
