Last week, Scott posted Dustin Guy Defa’s Person to Person, one of the first short films to be featured on The New Yorker‘s new shorts catalogue. Another 25 New Face, Bernardo Britto, has now joined the site with his Sundance Jury Prize-winning Yearbook. The animated film imagines a man who has been tasked with cataloguing the world’s history before an alien-sent missile destroys earth. It’s poignant, funny and quietly heartbreaking in equal measure.
You may recall that a decade ago, the ever-independent-minded Caveh Zahedi (A Little Stiff, I Am a Sex Addict) tried to launch a series, “Tripping with Caveh,” in which he and a guest would take hallucinogens and enjoy themselves. That didn’t pan out, for reasons Zahedi explains in this essay, so now he’s launched a lower-stakes version. You can get stoned with Caveh or not, and in this first installment Girls regular/Red Flag director Alex Karpovsky chooses to indulge. Not without a little prodding: “OK, so I’m gonna start getting stoned,” Zahedi says up top. “Maybe I’ll just wait a […]
As Borscht 9 — Miami’s delirious cinematic fete comprising afternoons spent in the middle of the ocean, machete fencing and bike rides to the multiverse — hits its midpoint, Borscht Corporation releases to Filmmaker one of its recent short films, Sea Devil. Sea Devil, directed by by Dean C. Marcial and Brett Potter of Calavera Films, was screened in work-in-progress form at Borscht 8 and now it’s having its online premiere here on the site. Winner of the Bronze Audience Award at Fantasia 2014, Sea Devil is the story of a fisherman smuggling Cuban immigrants into Miami, a mysterious stranger […]
Here’s the first trailer for the Zellner Brothers’ wonderfully idiosyncratic Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter. The one minute snippet goes a little out of its way to not reveal the narrative catalyst, conjuring a vague aura of suspense, though the film itself is far from your average adventure drama. Breaking your heart with a nearly silent performance, Rinko Kikuchi stars as the titular character who fleas her banal Tokyo confines in search of snowbound, stateside treasure. Amplify will release the film on March 13.
“To try to write love is to confront the muck of language; that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive (by the limitless expansion of the ego, by emotive submersion) and impoverished (by the codes on which love diminishes and levels it).” Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse. The muck of romantic language — spoken, inscribed on the body and splattered, along with images, on the screen — is the subject of Leah Shore’s latest short film, I Love You So Much. Shore made our 25 New Faces list back in ’13, and I Love […]
One of my would-be favorites of 2014 — it comes out next month — finally has a trailer. The Duke of Burgundy, Peter Strickland’s follow-up to the giallo homage Berberian Sound Studio, displays some of the best uses of repetition since Jacques Rivette. What begins as a fetishistic case of master and servant becomes increasingly murky as roles and hierarchy are blurred, then challenged. It’s a viewing experience that handily rewards the uninitiated so I won’t say much more, just that Sundance Selects will release it on January 23, and you’d do best to see it on a wide screen with surround sound.
Best not to spoil the twists and turns of Paul Harrill’s Something, Anything, and the trailer for his drama is accordingly cagey. All you need to know: Harrill’s well-received debut drama follows a newlywed bride in the wake of tragedy as she tries to rebuild her life through a program of ascetism. The next film in IFP’s “Screen Forward” series starts screening January 9th; more information here. For a little more background, check out the essay Harrill wrote for us last year.
Christmas cometh early now that the formerly out of print masterclass Safe is available from the Criterion Collection. To promote its release, director Todd Haynes sat down with star Julianne Moore to discuss the film’s forebears in female alienation (Red Desert, Jeanne Dielman, and DeLillo’s White Noise), as well as its unexpected Sirkian underpinnings. Moore also talks Safe‘s larger context, as a harbinger of the ’90s independent film boom, and how her first collaboration with Haynes ultimately defined the trajectory of her career.
The New Yorker streams short films — who knew? This discovery is particularly welcome because just posted on the magazine’s YouTube channel — and embedded above — is Dustin Guy Defa’s terrific Person to Person, one of the works that landed the filmmaker on our 25 New Faces list this year. Here’s Brandon Harris on the film here at Filmmaker: Speaking of throwback cinema that doesn’t simply appropriate but forges its own thing out of the familiar, Dustin Guy Defa’s Person to Person is a film one could watch a dozen times. Assuming he doesn’t change the Vimeo password and […]
The trailer for Terrence Malick’s next film, Knight of Cups, is both what you’d expect at this point — musing voiceovers, aggressively prowling cameras in constant motion, people on the beach — and some new developments, like much more flesh on display, aggressively digital cinematography and seemingly way more time spent in urban centers than usual.