One extraordinary passage among many in Peter Maas’s New York Times Sunday Magazine cover article on Laura Poitras and her role in the Edward Snowden story details the symbolic meanings of the documentarian’s most basic act: turning on the camera. By this point in the story, Poitras has been contacted by Snowden, has had a series of encrypted exchanges with him, but doesn’t know who he is. She, along with journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill of The Guardian, travel to Hong Kong to meet the source for what will be the most explosive national security tale of modern times. […]

An exploration of two couples — one black and gay, the other white and hetero — Rodney Evans’ The Happy Sad suggests with a light, deft touch the increasingly commonplace sexual fluidity that millennials are embracing as normative sexual categories fall away. Of course, there are difficulties. Partner swapping, open relationships, explorative homosexuality are nothing new, but even in the swingin’ hipster’d Brooklyn from which Evans tells his tale, complications arise, feelings are hurt, egos are shattered, these feelings only heightened by the ever present realities of race and class. A timely meditation on all of these things, the movie […]

In Nenad Cicin-Sain’s moody debut feature, The Time Being, Frank Langella plays Warner, a wealthy art patron who after buying a painting at an art gallery hires the financially strapped artist behind the work (Wes Bentley) to do odd, artistically tinged jobs for him. Daniel, a dedicated painter who’s dour work isn’t exactly flying off the walls, struggles to support his family  — to the increasing annoyance of his wife Olivia (Ahna O’Reilly). He is drawn to the  reclusive and mysterious millionaire as a potential new benefactor, but when Warner’s assignments for Daniel become increasingly bizarre surveillance excursions, Daniel senses that he may […]

Every mouse-stroke you make, every search query you use, is being recorded, one way or another, usually by powerful and insidious entities who have no incentive not to sell this information to the highest bidder. Its exchange for copious storage on your web-based email service, and cloud-empowered music players that allow you to play Gil Scott-Heron records, long out of print, night and day, comes a cost that is pervasive and hidden. Your privacy. Oh, and a tremendous amount of monetary value that you likely never knew you created. Shucks. Cullen Hoback’s thoughtful and, in the age of Snowden, all […]

Many filmmakers make a low-budget movie in the hopes of getting to L.A. and working on a big-budget movie. The Rasmussen brothers went in a different direction. Going out to L.A. they wrote and sold a script that was made into The Ward, directed by John Carpenter. But they wanted to do more than just write the script, so after completing their next screenplay they came back to Boston and made the movie Dark Feed on a shoestring. The Rasmussen brothers, Michael and Shawn, spoke to us recently about this experience, and what they have learned about making a movie […]

There is a camp for everything. Dance, wrestling, Jesus — you name it, your kid can camp it. In Judd Ehrlich’s charming Magic Camp, the kids have no desire to be the next LeBron James or Sidney Crosby, however; they want to be like one of the Davids, Blaine or Copperfield. Held each summer in Bryn Mawr, PA, Tannen’s Magic Camp, a spinoff of the famed Gotham magic store, teaches teenagers, mostly boys, the fine art of making a rabbit disappear into their ear or a wand suddenly appear in their hand. You think it’s difficult to saw someone in half? Just […]

Writer/director Russell Harbaugh is currently at the Sundance Directors Lab this month with his feature version of Rolling on the Floor Laughing, his short which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2012. (You can watch the short below.) The following is what Harbaugh wrote about his experiences at the Lab. Another round of advisors arrived to the mountain yesterday, Sunday, our “off” day, and now it’s Monday — Monday night — and our third week of production has begun and I’m feeling that feeling of, like, oh no, they are going to know. They are going to know. Someone in […]

Writer/director Pamela Romanowsky is currently at the Sundance Directors Lab this month with her adaptation of Stephen Elliott’s memoir The Adderall Diaries. The following is what she wrote about her experiences at the Lab. It’s just after lunch, and we’re driving up the mountain road to the house we’ve been rehearsing in. My actors Luke Kirby and Megan Boone are in the back seat. Luke cracks a joke and we all laugh. I turn around to announce that I’m stealing that line for the next scene, and through the frame of the back window, a man in a denim jacket […]

Recently, I was on a panel at the Little Rock Film Festival titled “Cinematic Nonfiction: Not Your Parents’ Documentary Film.” As our moderator Robert Greene, the director of Fake It So Real, and I waxed rhapsodic over the state of nonfiction filmmaking in Denmark, I realized that my own doc philosophy has evolved over the years – as I’ve noticed more and more that Americans lag behind much of the world when it comes to quality doc-making. While a lot of nonfiction aficionados like to chalk up this disparity to generous government subsidies in Europe, the problem actually lies much […]

Blue-Tongue Films’ name appears before such films as Animal Kingdom, Hesher, The Square and Kieran Darcy-Smith’s Wish You Were Here, released this week by eONE Films, but it’s not a production company. Rather, Blue-Tongue Films calls itself a “production collective,” with its members including one American and seven Australian filmmakers. It started in 1996 when a grainy black-and-white five-minute film introduced them to no one in particular, certainly not the world. Nash Edgerton was working as a stuntman — or at least trying to. The group’s first short film, Loaded, started as a chase sequence meant to be a show […]