In Desiree Akhavan’s feature debut, Appropriate Behavior, the cowriter/director was front and center as Shirin, a young, bisexual Persian Brooklynite trying to figure out how to live her life, one sexually impulsive bad decision at a time. It was in keeping with the of-the-moment nature of The Slope, Akhavan’s reputation-making 2011 web series about a year in a lesbian couple’s New York relationship, in which she again costarred. Her sophomore feature, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, tackles new territory: It’s Akhavan’s first time working from an adaptation, first period piece and first time staying offscreen in her work. Miseducation was […]

A few weeks ago my Twitter feed abruptly devolved into a long argument about The Canon: is it just an ossified collection of movies made by white men that should be junked? I don’t think The Canon is a fixed, immutable body of work, never to be added or subtracted to — it’s being constantly reshuffled, with films and filmmakers rising and falling in prominence. Repertory houses have a major part to play in that process, which I note while in the position of wanting to commend a smattering of series and screenings kicking off this weekend in NYC, none of […]

This is my fourth time rounding up the previous year’s US theatrical releases shot, either partly or in full, on 35mm, and it increasingly feels like I’m asking the wrong question. If the number of films originating on 35 has remained more or less consistent the last three years, they fall into an increasingly limited number of categories: auteur films by directors too old or stubborn to change and with the clout to follow through on that; period pieces; and enormous blockbusters. (To these we can now add the return of 70mm-originated and released films with Dunkirk and Murder on the […]

In 2014’s My Golden Days, Arnaud Desplechin revisited the childhood of Ivan Dedalus, brother of the anchoring protagonist of his 1996 breakthrough My Sex Life… or How I Got Into an Argument. With Ismael’s Ghosts, Desplechin continues toying with  the Dedalus brothers — in this iteration, Ivan is played by Louis Garrel in a movie being written by Ismaël Vuillard (Desplechin’s regular on-screen alter-ago Mathieu Amalric). Vuillard is a director writing his latest film on a severe, mood-altering constant cocktail of whiskey, wine and pills. His longstanding relationship with scientist Sylvia (Charlotte Ganisbourg) understandably takes a hit when first wife Carlotta (Marion Cotillard) — […]

New Directors/New Films concentrates on first/sophomore features on the more ambitious/undistributable side of the festival ledger; with that mission, it may be my favorite annual NYC fest, so all the more regrettable that deadlines and hellacious MTA/personal dysfunction limited my press screening attendance to three films. (I’ve written from elsewhere about the following titles: 3/4; Black Mother; Hale County This Morning, This Evening; Matangi/Maya/M.I.A.; The Nothing Factory. The latter is especially recommended.) When I finally made it out, Hu Bo’s Berlinale premiere An Elephant Sitting Still made for the kind of textbook intimidating object I crave: a nearly four-hour-long debut by a filmmaker who […]

Several months ago I got an email with the subject line “Pure Flix and Chill,” which raised three possibilities a) I was on the receiving end of algorithmic spam cycling through the tail end of the least plausible word combinations b) I was being targeted by an especially inept publicist c) someone had, as they say, “seen me.” The last option was correct: to my equal gratification and shame, the email cited my “appreciation for Pure Flix and the genre of ‘Evangelical Cinema’ as evidenced in your many thoughtful AV Club reviews.” This is true: I do write for other […]

In 1976, German screenwriter/producer Peter Märthesheimer wrote the punchily titled essay “What Can the Hero Do? He Can Change the World! A Few Problems Concerning Drama Production.” He began: Many television plays, good and bad, have come about because a drama producer or script-writer has said at some time or other, ‘Something ought to be made about…’ Then a so-called ‘theme’ usually follows, a ‘problem’ which the person who thought it so serious that he wanted to ‘make something about it’ considers relevant […] Now there would be nothing against this approach, which cautiously and discerningly commits itself to the […]

Foreign productions shooting in France have two options to obtain tax rebates. One is to officially become a French production, which requires a co-production treaty and going through the French Ministry of Culture’s CNC agency. For Nathan Silver’s Thirst Street, that wasn’t a practical option: the United States is one of the few countries to have no co-production treaty with France. (The United States has no coproduction treaties with any country, in fact, but that’s another story.) According to Thirst co-writer/producer C. Mason Wells, the production had to go the more common Tax Rebate for International Productions (TRIP) route. The […]

Context is everything — I’m writing this final Sundance dispatch at a remove of a day/continent from Park City, back in NYC, with a day’s pause between marathon-writing while reconsidering the chronological melange of what I saw and what, if any, narrative can be extrapolated about this year’s fest. My feeling, overall, is of a weak year, despite having (per usual) missed some of what appear to be the standout titles (Mandy, alas), which framed my response to Madeline’s Madeline, the last film I saw there. Is this a great movie? With a day to think about it, I’m not sure […]

During its many years of gestation, the only thing known about Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. was that it was a beyond-troubled production. In 2012, director Steve Loveridge wrote that he’d “rather die” than finish the profile of the musician/his friend since college; as of last March, M.I.A.’s official position was that she hadn’t spoken to Loveridge — a friend of hers since art school — “in years” and had no idea what, if anything, was happening with the film. Whatever was going on in the background of those statements, a finished film has emerged, both director and subject were there for its premiere, and the […]