Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Critic’s Notebook NYFF: Faces Places, The Rape of Recy Taylor, Last Flag Flying
Seventeen years ago, Agnès Varda filmed her own hand in horror. The blotches, the wrinkles, the bulging blue veins: These may as well be the hands of a stranger. “My hair and my hands keep telling me that the end is near,” she says in her 2000 film The Gleaners & I. Despite the forebodings of death in Gleaners and 2008’s The Beaches of Agnès, Agnès is still with us; what a gift it is to have her still around. Varda, now 89, has partnered with French artist JR to co-direct another freewheeling, full-of-life documentary. Faces Places overflows with the […]
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Win Tickets to Hear Steven Soderbergh and Sam Esmail at this Weekend’s Future of Storytelling Festival
A conversation with Steven Soderbergh and a screening of the season three premiere of Mr. Robot followed by a talk with creator Sam Esmail are just two highlights of the Future of Storytelling Festival, to be held this weekend, October 6 – 8, at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center in Staten Island, New York. In a discussion moderated by Elvis Mitchell, Soderbergh will talk about his overall career as well as Mosaic, the new interactive project he’s making with HBO. In addition to Esmail, there are comedy performances, music events, and panels on truth in the age of digital journalism […]
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NYFF 2017: Hong/Garrel/Hong
NYFF’s second week of press screenings were scheduled in such an apropos way: over 36 hours, you could watch two Hong Sang-soo films sandwiched around Philippe Garrel’s latest. Two of my absolute favorite working filmmakers, they share at least two important traits: creating an illusion of verisimilitude so strong it’s near-impossible to catch anyone onscreen “acting,” and an obsessive return to the same super-straight-male preoccupations, with the Venn diagram decidedly overlapping at infidelity. (Claire Denis is a big fan of both, and her Let the Sunshine In acts as an unexpected companion piece to the films discussed here; more on […]
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Family Fortunes, Hard Choices and Master Manipulators: High Notes from the 2017 San Sebastian Film Festival
Last year, it was possible to pick up a bar snack named after Monica Bellucci during the San Sebastian Film Festival; this year cinemagoers at the most prominent event in the Spanish-speaking film world could see the real deal, as the actress arrived in town to pick up a Donostia Award for lifetime achievement. Ahead of the ceremony, she said: “I think that to receive a prize is not just a matter of ego, but a matter of love… My work is a way to know myself better.” Bellucci was one of a clutch of stars on the red carpet […]
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Ten Films and a Retrospective to Catch at the 55th New York Film Festival
Filmmaker‘s usual “films we’re anticipating” preview — opinions gleaned from early buzz or just pure enthusiasm — doesn’t work for the New York Film Festival. Always a collection of the best films from the prior months’ festival circuit, with a few world premieres thrown in, this year finds the latter — outside of the opening (Rick Linklater’s Last Flag Flying, reviewed here) and closing nights — in shorter supply. (The pluses and minuses of the festival’s curatorial approach receive a solid debate over at Indiewire morning.) That means we’ve seen a large swatch of this year’s selection, and the below […]
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NYFF 2017: Last Flag Flying
Until relatively recently, Richard Linklater’s hopscotching across genres and budgetary tiers had him generally pegged as an unpredictable magpie whose next move would never be clear; now, certain circles of online discourse have him basically pegged as the alpha male celebrator of white patriarchy (I did my song and dance on this a while ago, no reprise necessary). Setting aside those pejoratively-described constants, I think it’s true that starting with Before Midnight (the exact pivot point is arguable) the mandatory elements of A Film By Richard Linklater have become pretty fixed (put another way, I certainly don’t expect faithful filmings of mediocre plays […]
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Butler/Eno’s Thom Pain, Lynn Sachs’s Tip of My Tongue, Abel Ferrara Tribute and More: Indie Memphis Announces its 2017 Festival
On the eve of its 20th anniversary, the Indie Memphis Film Festival, presented by Duncan-Williams, has announced its 2017 selection, which spans world premieres, a recut indie gem and a special salute to Abel Ferrara. Oliver Butler and Will Eno’s adaptation of Eno’s Pulitzer Prize finalist, Thom Pain, kicks off Opening Night. Starring Rainn Wilson, it’s a film version of Eno’s monologue filmed at the Los Angeles’s Geffen Playhouse. Lynne Sachs’s Tip of My Tongue, which collects the reflections of a group of the filmmaker’s contemporaries on the occasion of her 50th birthday, is the closing night film. As for […]
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Challenging Five Untruths about Women in the Film Business at IFP Week’s Persona Project Panel
It’s been a wild summer for the film industry — and for anyone who has fucked with females. At IFP Week, I was happy to see Filmmaker contributor Taylor Hess touch, ever so delicately, on some of the issues around discrimination and mistreatment that have been plaguing us all. She hosted a panel version of her Persona Project column, which celebrates up-and-coming women in film. On the panel were Sara Kiener, head of distribution strategies at Cinereach; Taylor Shung, co-producer, A Woman, a Part; Aijah Keith, manager of acquisitions & production at IFC; and Dana Vladimir, head of communications and […]
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Personal Doesn’t Mean Small: IFP Week Filmmakers On Tackling Big Issues With Intimate Stories
“I think we have this profound misrepresentation around personal films being small,” said Cecilia Aldarondo, one of three filmmakers of personal docs who spoke at IFP Week 2017. The panel was called “When the Personal Gets Political and the Political Gets Personal.” In the case of all three filmmakers’ films, they’re both. “I’ve gotten so many responses from potential funders of people who think that way. They hear ‘personal’ and they hear ‘small.’ They think it won’t have an audience. With these projects, I think we’ve demonstrated that’s not the case. If we’re dealing with questions of social change and […]
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“Women Don’t Always Get to Play the Funny Parts”: Julie Klausner Talks Making Difficult People Herself at IFP Week
If there’s a common thread that runs through any truly original work, it’s this: The creators saw something that wasn’t in the world, so they created it themselves. You hear that a lot in independent films. You also hear it, increasingly, in TV now too. The lines separating cinema and television are getting blurrier. For further proof, witness Julie Klausner’s appearance at IFP Week 2017. Klausner is the creator of Difficult People, which is not a movie but a hit TV show on Hulu. But the way she approached her TV show sounds a lot the way indie filmmakers talk […]
