I first met Zach Clark last October when his excitingly subversive, sex-scene-less SXSW hit Modern Love Is Automatic opened Pornfilmfestival Berlin (where my own short The Story of Ramb O had its premiere). Since we barely had the chance to chat in the buzzing, jam-packed Moviemento hub, I was thrilled when I heard recently that Clark’s follow-up Vacation! (pictured above) was already on the festival circuit and would be playing theatrically at Brooklyn’s own reRun Gastropub Theater in May. Finally I had an excuse to find out what makes this offbeat yet seemingly well-adjusted director of a feature about a […]

Few documentary filmmakers’ careers are as fascinating to follow as that of Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), and that’s not just because of the consistent quality of his films, but because of the astonishing rate at which he produces them. In the midst of three other projects — an untitled Wikileaks documentary in pre-production; The Road Back, about Lance Armstrong, in post-production; and the newly completed Magic Bus, about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters — Gibney was at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival with his sports documentary Catching Hell, which […]

Emotional and involving yet also clear-eyed and with a cool wisdom, Janet Grillo’s Fly Away is a sharply observed and strongly acted tale of a mother learning to allow her autistic teenage daughter to transition into the adult world. Beth Broderick plays Jeanne, a single mom with her own home-office corporate consulting business. Ashley Rickards is her daughter Mandy, and the two have a tight, well-ordered relationship, with Jeanne trying to grow her business during the day while Mandy attends a special needs school. But when Mandy begins a series of violent outbursts at that school, Jeanne’s almost preternatural composure […]

In the opening scene of Zeina Durra’s debut, The Imperialists Are Still Alive!, Asya, a young artist, poses naked for the camera. A hijab on her head, a machine gun in hand, she explains to an off-screen assistant her rationale for why the religious freedom fighter she’s portraying might have waxed her pubic hair.  It’s a scene that is as funny as it is politically loaded, much like the movie that follows. Although its milieu — the young, privileged and the artistic — is the stuff coming-of-age movies are made of, The Imperialists Are Still Alive! is more than just another […]

Josh Radnor, the writer-director-actor of, happythankyoumoreplease, has a day job: he stars on the hit CBS sitcom, How I Met Your Mother. (Radnor plays the titular “I”— perhaps the most famous “I” in pop-culture since Withnail & I.) happythankyoumoreplease is an immensely likeable New York ensemble film about young people trying to negotiate love and responsibility, and its Audience Award win at Sundance in 2010 marks Radnor, who makes his directorial debut with the movie, as a filmmaker to watch. happythankyoumoreplease features a number of outstanding performances by actors including Malin Akerman, Tony Hale, Zoe Kazan, Kate Mara, Pablo Schreiber, […]

Alice Munro wrote a short story once called “Deep Holes,” and it’s as fitting a title as any when one considers her body of work. Munro has made a career out of writing the same short story over and over again, but because that story is shot through with an incredible amount of depth, with endless bottoms of nuance and complexity and minor shifts and adjustments each time, it constantly amazes. Jonathan Franzen (who himself rewrote his 2001 classic novel The Corrections as the even better Freedom), reviewing Munro’s 2004 collection Runaway, nailed it: I like stories because it takes […]

In person, Abel Ferrara is a whirlwind of gestures and jokes, of quick smiles and vulgar asides, digressions piled upon digressions, even if he’s much sharper and in control of his staccato New Yorkese vernacular than he lets on. Ferrara, who will turn 60 this year, has had one of American indie cinema’s strangest and most fascinating careers, one which has taken the Bronx native from the old 42nd Street’s row of exploitation and porn cinemas to the Croissette in Cannes. Often we talk of middle-aged artists mellowing, but Ferrara maintains a manic, youthful energy that is both infectious and […]

One of the great joys of being a critic is the childlike sense of wonder that comes with being the first to discover something new (that, and as the esteemed music critic Lester Bangs once put it, getting free shit). I first met Zachary Oberzan after seeing his one-man show Rambo Solo, developed with Nature Theater of Oklahoma, in early 2009. (Yes, for the record the tickets were comp since I was reviewing for Theater Online.) At the time I wrote, “I have seen the theater future and its name is Rambo – or more accurately, one fearless thespian named […]

Starring True Blood‘s Ryan Kwanten, Red Hill is a suspenseful modern-day Western that uses Australia’s dramatic and vast landscapes to stage a drama of frontier justice with an antagonist right out of Halloween-style horror film. Kwanten plays a city cop assigned to a small outback town where he intends to raise a baby with his very pregnant wife. But his move coincides with the escape of Jimmy Conway (Tom E. Lewis) from the local jail. The indigenous Jimmy was wronged years ago, and his brand of frontier justice consists of non-stop mayhem. In my conversation with Hughes, he spoke about […]

It is both accurate and reductive to call Cam Archer’s Shit Year, which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in the Director’s Fortnight section, the story of a retiring actress grappling with the emotions produced by her move away from the Hollywood spotlight. Of course, on narrative terms, that is what it’s about. Ellen Barkin plays the actress, who has just given her final talk-show interview, moved to a cabin in the woods, and now spends her days avoiding her neighbors and flashing back to a brief affair she had with a younger actor (Luke Grimes) on the set […]