Paul Thomas Anderson gets super-technical about the stocks and lenses used in these Phantom Thread screen tests. Includes an in-character food fight between Daniel Day-Lewis and Lesley Manville.

“In Lynch’s own speech and in the speech patterns of his films, the impression is of language used less for meaning than for sound. To savor the thingness of words is to move away from their imprisoning nature.” Building off that observation, among others, from Dennis Lim’s fine work on David Lynch, video essayist Grace Lee examines the director’s ambivalent/averse relationship to language.

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 […]

This is clearly promotional material, but it’s good: the cast of Isle of Dogs doing their regular EPK interview duties, but animated as stop-motion dogs. See Jeff Goldblum sing Duke Ellington as Duke the dog! See Bill Murray talk about the sacredness of dogs in a weirdly Manakamana-esque setup on a cable car! The press release notes this took three months to shoot, and it shows.

“Christopher LaMarca and Jessica Dimmock’s The Pearl is a nighttime movie,” wrote Vadim Rizov out of True False in 2016, “all quiet, warmly illuminated interior spaces populated by a self-supporting community.” That community is one of older trans women living in the Pacific Northwest and coming out for the first time in their fifties and sixies, and LaMarca and Dimmock’s is indeed a beautifully shot and empathetic portrait. The film was selected for our 2016 “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” program, when we wrote: Dimmock and LaMarca’s debut feature documentary is an intimate portrait of a […]

Meredith Alloway’s interview with director and DP Reed Morano (one of our top posts of the year), where Morano explains the exhaustive preparation that led her to be hired to direct the pilot of Hulu’s Margaret Atwood adaptation The Handmaid’s Tale, also contained a section where the director broke down the camera and direction decisions she made for one crucial scene. Now, Nathalie Sejean at Mentorless has taken that section and turned it into a concise visual essay that allows you to see for yourself the work that Morano described to Alloway. Check it out above.