In 2013 I began watching over 500 movies and finished about half that number. (Film Critic Tip #1: don’t finish movies you plan not to write about that aren’t any good unless they are sublimely bad). Perhaps I’ve grown surly in my fourth decade or perhaps I always was. I just feel like I don’t have the time anymore. Sometimes I went weeks without watching a film, an unimaginable possibility in my recent past. Was this all driven by a sense that my life (and perhaps yours) will be shorter than we think, that the safeguards we’re building against the […]
2013 has been a tough year to sum up for television. If it could be characterized by one trend, it would likely be the sheer glut of content being produced. With more cable channels investing in their own programming, as well as the long-promised rise of online networks such as Netflix and Amazon, it often feels like you can’t go a week without hearing about a new buzzed about, “best series on television.” Add to that the increased presence of international series on American screens (thanks to the likes of Hulu, DirecTV, BBC America, and the Sundance Channel, among others), […]
Anchorman 2 is the best movie of 2013. In a year when I often left the theater wondering what the hell the the critics were talking about (All Is Lost, American Hustle, 12 Years A Slave, Nebraska, Inside Llewyn Davis) here is a movie that is fun, deep, irreverent, and political. “Political” is the biggest surprise. Will Ferrell has made a career of not being political and not saying anything. He’s leaned towards the Jay Leno school of comedy a lot more than the Lenny Bruce school. Who else but Will Ferrell would come out with a comedy special on […]
Joe Swanberg has posted his Top Ten list over at Esquire, and in the top slot is Frank V. Ross’s deceptively low-key relationship drama Tiger Tale in Blue — nominated by Filmmaker as one our Best Films Not Playing at a Theater Near You in 2012. In an interview with Ross, Filmmaker‘s Nick Dawson called the film a “beautifully calibrated piece of observational cinema that is emotionally compelling without ever imposing itself upon the viewer.” And here’s Swanberg at Esquire: This is by a director named Frank B. Ross. It was nominated for a Gotham Award last year for Best […]
Despite the rise of the digital medium, its constant comparisons to film are not likely to die down any time soon. In this short video for PBS Digital Studios, Shanks FX produces several animated juxtapositions of images captured by a digital Canon 5D versus a Canon 7E film camera. A few of the results may surprise you: digital filters can render filmic qualities — specifically its grains and imperfections — rather accurately. From the other side of the equation, you may be surprised to see just how deep color schemes appear on film relative to high-quality video. Take a look […]
The following is a guest post from Colin Healey, whose film Homemakers participated in the 2013 IFP Narrative Labs. Just like you, dear reader, I believed the final days of the year 2012 A.D. would end with untold devastation and destruction, brought on by the fateful impact of a thousand mega-asteroids, rampant and untreatable avian pig-SARS, and the appointment of Nazi T-Rex as Speaker of the House. Certain the end was nigh, I convinced a ragtag posse of artists, actors and sassy interns to spend humanity’s last remaining summer crammed in a sweaty, dusty, tumbledown house on the east end […]
For us in North America, Winter formally arrives this Saturday, December 21. But the season has already changed — online, at least, and to Fall — for the arctic cowboys of Aatsinki Season, the hypnotic online collaboration between director Jessica Oreck and transmedia developers Murmur. For the last nine months, an online extension of Oreck’s documentary, Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys, has been streaming and scrolling online, with each quarter bringing a new set of meditative observations. When the project premiered, Oreck discussed the difference between the film and the site: The film is very pure, direct cinema—an immersive […]
Tis the season of the Top 10 list. In what I figured was an out-of-the-box alternative, I decided to compile not necessarily my favorite films of the year, but the scenes that have resonated with me most. Then, Nicholas Rombes had to go and prove that the “great minds” adage is alive and well. Perhaps fortuitously, our lists have nothing in common. Though Upstream Color would likely crack my phantom Top 10, there is no one individual moment from the film that begged my memory for recognition. The same can be said for Inside Llewyn Davis, Bastards, Viola, Like Someone […]
This review of Nymphomaniac is based on seeing both films back-to-back with a 25-minute interval, whereas it will be released theatrically in the U.S. in two parts, Volume 1 in March, and Volume 2 in April. As such, this review will try to take the two films as separate entities. I have tried to write them without containing spoilers, but some I fear, are inevitable. Nymphomaniac: Volume 1 Nymphomaniac arrives on the back of one of the best marketing campaigns in years. The first “() Opening Soon” poster was on its own pretty special, but it was trumped by the series of posters […]
“You always have to question when a director says, ‘Let’s go handheld.’” At Poland’s Camerimage International Film Festival a few weeks back, d.p. Sean Bobbitt gave an ARRI workshop keynote on the role of handheld cinematography in filmmaking. Far too often, directors, according to Bobbitt, resort to the use of handheld simply because they have no other ideas: “If we do handheld, it will feel kinetic!” and the like. But a knee-jerk instinct is not good enough — Bobbitt believes you should be able to justify every technical decision in the script: “The first and most important consideration is, does […]