Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Cannes Film Festival 2021 Critic’s Notebook 1: Section Openers Onoda, Ghost Song, Between Two Worlds, Cow
Cannes declared itself open for business earlier this week, 2021’s first major international film festival to do so in an entirely physical edition (save the partially-digital market). The irony has not been lost on some attendees that Thierry Fremaux and co. opted to launch its first Un Certain Regard selection in more than two years (the festival’s main opening film, Leos Carax’s Annette, was reviewed by Vadim Rizov earlier this week here) with an epic about a man who continued fighting a war for nearly three decades after it ended. Invisible enemies, lost time and interminable isolation: familiar pandemic phraseology […]
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Cannes Film Festival 2021 Critic’s Notebook: Annette
Leos Carax’s Annette begins with a variant on Holy Motors’s “Entrac’te,” now split from one mid-film break into opening and (mid-end-credits) closing musical numbers that set a similarly grimly determined/celebratory tone. The director and his real-life daughter are among the first people seen, leading Sparks and the film’s main cast out of the recording studio and into the world. Adam Driver gets on a motorcycle and zooms into the night to begin his diagetic story proper as confrontational stand-up comic and antihero Henry McHenry, his castmates calling “good luck” after him. A slow-motion love triangle revolves McHenry and the Conductor (Simon Helberg) […]
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Full Frame Documentary Film Festival Presents “The Creative Power of BIPOC Editors”
“If I could log in right now I would,” Dawn Porter raved in one of the many enthusiastic testimonials sprinkled throughout Full Frame’s engaging “The Creative Power of BIPOC Editors,” an online launch/celebration of the BIPOC Documentary Editors Database. Expertly edited (surprise surprise), the swift-moving event (approximately an hour long) took place on June 3rd but is still well worth checking out. Whether you’re a veteran producer looking to hire beyond the usual (white) suspects or a student just beginning to build your reel, this database instruction manual/guide to best BIPOC hiring practices/panel discussion/showcase of the diversity of BIPOC work […]
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New Paths Forward: The Immersive and Interactive Works at Tribeca 2021
As the first major festival to return in person as the pandemic recedes, Tribeca gave us one more sign that New York is coming back. In the Heights, which opened the festival at the United Palace on June 9, was a joyful celebration of community (even for those of us who watched at home), and even in a reduced capacity the festival was a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with the movies. It also seemed that after shuttering the 2020 festival, this year’s event was fairly bursting at the seams with new types of content—of course the short and feature films […]
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“You Can Do Anything with Film, Just Like You Can Do Anything with Writing”: At MoMA, the Experimental Cinema of Neelon Crawford
Working primarily with a hand-wound 16mm Bolex, Neelon Crawford made a series of experimental films from 1968 through 1980. Shot in the US, the United Kingdom, and South America, the films explored light and movement in a variety of landscapes. Crawford manipulated the image through film stocks, filters, frame rates, double- and triple-exposures, animation, editing, and printing, at times adding soundtracks to imagery that ranged from observational to abstract. Crawford’s films were featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s Cineprobe series in the 1970s and were distributed by Canyon Cinema, among others. After For the Spider Woman in 1980, he […]
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Tribeca Critic’s Notebook: My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To, Roaring ’20s, Italian Studies
Blood’s thicker than the mud in the family affair that is My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To, a contemporary vampire tale utterly stripped of the genre’s romance. In place of mythic hoohah, writer-director Jonathan Cuartas focuses on the grim, quotidian details of day-to-day caregiving for an extremely pale invalid named Thomas (Owen Campbell), a frail wisp of a young man who is wholly dependent on older siblings Dwight (Patrick Fugit) and Jessie (Ingrid Sophie Schram) for survival, sheltered inside a drab house on the forgotten edge of an anonymous city, its every window blanketed from fatal sunlight. […]
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“Resisting the Power of the White Gaze”: CJ Hunt on his Tribeca-Premiering Confederate Monuments Doc, The Neutral Ground
CJ Hunt is a NYC-based comedian and filmmaker, and currently a field producer on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. But back in 2015 Hunt was still a resident of New Orleans, having spent nearly a decade teaching in its school (and after-school) system, assisting in its public defender’s office — and yes, pursuing his passion for comedy at night. So when Mayor Mitch Landrieu announced he’d be asking the city council to remove four monuments to the losing side in the Civil War, the stand-up/educator immediately thought to call his good friend (producer Darcy McKinnon, a “25 New Face” […]
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“By Reconnecting Us to Our Humanity, I Believe Nostalgia Could Be the Very Thing That Saves Us”: Jenni Olson on Receiving the 35th Special Teddy Award
Filmmaker, curator, author and LGBT film historian Jenni Olson will be receiving the 35th special Teddy Award at the 71st Berlinale on Friday, June 18. An award dedicated to outstanding work in queer filmmaking that improves the social and political condition of the LGBT community, Olson will be joining past recipients such as Tilda Swinton and Cheryl Dunye in holding the honor. Known for her stylistically unique 16 millimeter films depicting urban landscapes with voiceover essays, Olson is responsible for The Blue Diary, which premiered at the Berlinale in 1998, and whose The Joy of Life (2005), and The Royal Road […]
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Critic’s Notebook: Tribeca 2021 Docs about Larry Flynt, Anthony Bourdain, A Child’s Death and China’s Industrial March
Real-life film festivals are back! Or so I hear. After its 2020 plans for public exhibition were scuttled by the pandemic, the Tribeca Film Festival – sorry, I mean “Tribeca Festival,” that increasingly problematic word “film” now scrubbed from the moniker for ease of branding – was back in New York City movie houses this week for its 2021 edition. Audiences could also take advantage of online screenings (Tribeca At Home) in a hybrid format that makes programming accessible across the country. The festival, consistent for years as a launchpad for strong nonfiction film, remained so. There were plenty of […]
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“An Overt Anti-Patriarchal, Anti-Assimilationist Gesture Within the Framework of ‘Queer Refusal'”: Angelo Madsen Minax on His Tribeca-premiering North By Current
One of the most thrillingly radical aspects of Angelo Madsen Minax’s astonishing North By Current, which premiered at the Berlinale and now makes it North American debut at Tribeca, is the film’s centering of absence, of its maker’s firm belief in the idea that “a viewer is not entitled to every piece of information.” Minax began shooting North By Current upon his return home to rural Michigan after the death of his niece, a toddler whose passing put Minax’s emotionally fragile sister and her formerly incarcerated husband in the crosshairs of Children’s Protective Services (which in turn led to law […]
