Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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A Mysterious Pathway Into a Tormented Mind: Lucile Hadzihalilovic on Her Trance-Like Psychological Drama, Earwig
A young girl with melting ice for teeth bound to a mysterious protector, an older man who drains and refreezes those teeth each day — such a scenario, found in artist Frank Catly’s 2019 novel Earwig, provides the perfect source material for French filmmaker Lucile Hadžihalilović, whose films depict the uncanny transformations of adolescence in startling, near-surreal ways. In 1994’s medium-length La Bouche de Jean-Pierre, a teenage girl, ensconced at her aunt’s following her mother’s suicide attempt, is subjected to the menacing gaze of her aunt’s abusive boyfriend. In her feature debut, 2004’s Innocence, adapted from Frank Wedekind’s novella, Mine-Haha, or On […]
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“A Haunting Symbiosis”: On Ed Lachman’s Newly Restored Lou Reed & John Cale Concert Film, Songs for Drella
Not merely an addendum to Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground, Ed Lachman’s Songs For Drella is a ravishingly beautiful, sometimes thrilling audiovisual recording of a song cycle by Lou Reed and John Cale, the founders of the Velvet Underground. Cale and Reed’s early musical collaboration as the VU was inspired but unlikely – they had diametrically opposed musical roots and passions. Short lived as the band was, it became the source for punk, glam, and whatever followed from those fundamentally subversive pop genres. The VU began sliding toward death when Reed effectively fired Cale in 1968. (He had fired their first producer, Andy Warhol, […]
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“Sending Your Script to Someone is Like Asking Them to Never Speak to You Again”: Fran Kranz on the Making of His Grief and Reconciliation Drama, Mass
Two sets of parents enter a plain, drab room located down the hallway of an unassuming Episcopalian church. Their reason for meeting pertains to their respective sons, both of whom have died. One set of parents have lost their son to a mass shooter at his high school, the other set’s son was himself the mass shooter. That is the basis for Fran Kranz’s emotionally raw debut feature, Mass, a film that is necessarily an actors’ showcase but also an exercise in pared-down filmmaking that finds tension and release in the subtlest of camera gestures. As the parents debate everything […]
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Death Ride to Osaka, The Equalizer and Escape Room: Tournament of Champions: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Among graduates of the “Roger Corman film school,” Jonathan Kaplan doesn’t have the same level of name recognition as Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, or Francis Coppola, but he clearly learned the same lessons they did while plying his trade directing exploitation flicks for Corman’s New World Pictures. Although it might seem like the only thing Kaplan’s films have in common is that they have nothing in common – his filmography includes blaxploitation (Truck Turner), Oscar winning and nominated dramas (The Accused, Heart Like a Wheel), science fiction (Project X), Westerns (Bad Girls), and one of the greatest teen movies ever […]
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The Year of the Hybrid: 9 Ways to Make the Most of a Hybrid Festival Premiere
This is a very weird time for film festivals and filmmakers. During the first year of the pandemic, it was fairly simple: Almost every festival around the world became online only. There were a few exceptions, of course: The Göteborg Film Festival in Sweden stranded one person on a tiny island for a week to watch every film. The Oldenburg Film Festival in Germany had living room premieres. And many festivals pivoted to drive-in and other outside venues (especially where the climate allowed for that). By summer of 2021, the feeling among festival organizers was that now that we have […]
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25 New Faces of Film 2021
Click here to read this year’s edition of the 25 New Faces of Film.
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Out in the World: The Vital Role of the Social Impact Producer
Often I read the news and feel jaded about what I find there, desensitized to very real issues. Then, as a viewer, I’ll watch a film, or see a moving play or artwork, and feel the urge to do something—to learn more, to do my part. As a filmmaker, have you ever developed the concept for a film, or been in the middle of production, and thought more specifically about the change your film could spark in the world? Have you ever watched and thought to yourself, “What can I do?” Answering these questions with concrete initiatives that go beyond […]
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“This Film was Just 11 Days”: DP Maz Makhani on The Guilty
When cinematographer Maz Makhani met director Antoine Fuqua on a Lil Wayne/Bruno Mars video a decade ago, the rapport was instant. “It was really clear to both of us that we had a very similar aesthetic,” said Makhani. “We both liked the same compositions, the same type of lighting. Antoine juxtaposes the real and raw and gritty with style and beauty, and that’s also my aesthetic.” That simpatico relationship went from a luxury to a necessity on the new film The Guilty, when COVID forced the pair to shoot the Netflix thriller without ever being on set together. Days before the […]
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Drugstore Cowboy, Straight Time and Misery: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Gus Van Sant’s 1989 masterpiece Drugstore Cowboy is one of the seminal films of its era, a movie both timeless and completely of its time; like the 1940s noir pictures it echoes and expands upon, it’s a weary reaction to its moment (in this case the age of Reagan and the first Bush) that taps into enduring truths about marginalized and desperate people yet does so with surprising humor and vitality. Matt Dillon gives one of the best performances of his career as the title character, an addict who feeds his habit not by buying or stealing drugs on the […]
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Replay Again: On Daniel Chew and Micaela Durand’s NYFF Short, 38
She’s just like a sexy girl. You know the type… goth, horror, self-cutting. She’s like J Lo/Nosferatu. Typical. The whole trend. She’s pinup-y but poseur, like wannabe, like big ass. She probably doesn’t really have a big ass but looks like it in the photos — That’s how the protagonist in Daniel Chew and Micaela Durand’s new film 38 drags the woman who slept with her husband. The film’s action takes place post-affair, centering around the scorned wife (played by Curie Choi) online stalking the “other woman” (played by Alicia Novella Vasquez), an obsessive screen-based fixation uncomfortably relatable to probably […]
