A few weeks back, we ran a trailer for The Drop, James Gandolfini’s final film. Philip Seymour Hoffman had a handful projects in the can at the time of his passing in early February, two of which premiered barely a week before at Sundance. There’s John Slattery’s directorial debut, God’s Pocket, and Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man, the latter of which released its first trailer today. Corbijn caught my eye with the somehow still underseen Joy Division biopic Control, and has since been swept up into Hollywood’s political drama camp, first with The American and now with A Most Wanted Man, which centers on post 9/11 German-American intelligentsia. […]
Premiering at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival is Regarding Sontag, Nancy Kates’ documentary about one of the 20th century’s most compelling and important critics and public intellectuals. From the website: REGARDING SUSAN SONTAG is an intimate and nuanced investigation into the life of one of the most influential and provocative thinkers of the 20th century. Passionate and gracefully outspoken throughout her career, Susan Sontag became one of the most important literary, political and feminist icons of her generation. The documentary explores Sontag’s life through evocative experimental images, archival materials, accounts from friends, family, colleagues, and lovers, as well as her […]
The New York Times recently ran a story on the newfound viral status of a 2010 French short called Majorité Oprimée (Oppressed Majority). The film depicts a day in the life of a schlub who goes about his duties in a parallel Parisian society where women reign supreme. While the daddies run day care, their wives run topless. The protagonist eventually shoulders his fair share of sexual harassment and abuse in an exercise that begins with a touch more subtlety. The majority of the article discusses arguments over the role of gender in France’s workplace, but also of note to filmmakers is the fact […]
Last fall Jamie Stuart was conducting interviews for his NYFF51. He ran into the publicist handling Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive and asked if he could get a sit down with Tilda Swinton. The answer: yes, but time was tight. The result is the following short interview in which Stuart asked Swinton to just… well, you’ll see. At the end, she did indeed say it was her best interview ever. Cage by way of Glazer? Only Lovers Left Alive opens this Friday from Sony Pictures Classics. Camera: Blackmagic Design Cinema Camera, 2.5k RAW, ProRes 422 post conversion Lens: Canon […]
Adapted from Dennis Lehane’s short story Animal Rescue, Michaël Roskam’s English-language debut The Drop also marks James Gandolfini’s final film appearance. Transposed to New York from Lehane’s preferential Boston setting, The Drop finds Tom Hardy (doing his best Ryan Gosling) and Gandolfini on the hunt for a stolen deposit from the nightly dive bar “drop.” Gangsters, guns, dogs and a Noomi Rapace romance ensue. Obviously no stranger to the mob, Gandolifini appears a bit softer around the edges here than in his iconic Soprano role. The Drop will be released by Fox Searchlight on September 19.
Emmanuel Lubezki, Christopher Doyle, Bruno Delbonnel, Roger Deakins, Robert Richardson, Janusz Kaminski all in one place? This video, strewn together by editor Erick Lee, features clips from the work of internationally illustrious cinematographers over the past decade. Interestingly, there is very little handheld to be had, with most of the stylized shots achieved on a dolly.
Ahead of its April 18 release at New York’s IFC Center, the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab’s latest outing, Manakamana, now has a proper trailer. Directed by Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez, the documentary captures several 10-minute tram rides to the titular Nepalese shrine through a fixed camera, mounted before the passengers. Spray spoke about the extended metaphor in a wonderful profile on the Lab in Boston Magazine. In the article, the reticent founder Lucian Castaing-Taylor also talks his plans to make a narrative-doc hybrid about sex and cannibalism. If it looks anything like Leviathan, it should be interesting.
Meet Luiz Stockler, a promising animator who’s recently graduated from the Royal College of Art. Born in Brazil, raised in Wales and now a London resident, this is his second RCA project; his first, 2012’s Home, played at Slamdance in 2012. Just under 1:30, that was a mildly stroboscopic freakout on the topic of domesticity. You can view it here (NSFW warning: contains line drawing breasts and genitalia). It’s got a definite early Don Hertzfeldt vibe, which is expanded in the much more ambitious Montenegro to include that animator’s increasing melancholy as channeled through a very British sense of humor. […]
Home to one of my favorite scenes of 2013, Nathan Silver’s Soft in the Head now has a delightfully cryptic trailer ahead of its April 18 release at New York’s Cinema Village. Roving, drunken mess Natalia (the loose-limbed Sheila Etxeberría) finds an empathetic respite from the city streets at a predominately Jewish male shelter, run by patron saint Maury (Ed Ryan.) Entirely improvised, Soft in the Head constructs its narrative from kinetic exchanges that bely the simplicity of the film’s storyline with their engrossing frenzy. More aggressive than his breakthrough Exit Elena (which will have its own run in April at Anthology), Soft in the Head teems […]
I’ve seen it over a dozen times, and Nostalghia‘s late, nine-minute shot of a homesick Russian poet carrying a candle across a pool in an Italian spa in tribute to his mad, suicided friend, still devastates. I always read the scene in Tarkovsky’s penultimate film as the poet’s final ritual, a symbolic act carrying its own final, life-or-death meaning. But the struggle to keep the flame lit while poised between wind and water is obviously a metaphor for life itself, which is how actor Oleg Yankovsky described it in a quote included in the text for a fascinating video based […]