Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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The Quest, Amazon Women on the Moon and Pierrot Le Fou: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Brian Trenchard-Smith, who began making movies in the 1970s as part of the Australian New Wave that also included Peter Weir and George Miller, is not only one of the most talented and entertaining directors of his generation but one of the most versatile; his output includes lyrical children’s films and lowbrow sex comedies, disreputable exploitation flicks and tender romances, documentaries and low-budget disaster movies, and episodic TV episodes ranging from Flipper and Mission: Impossible reboots to the ’90s guilty pleasure Silk Stalkings. A filmmaker who freely admits that he never met a green light he didn’t like, Trenchard-Smith is a craftsman whose best work […]
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Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Improved by COVID-19
The original Borat wasn’t really a movie so much as a cultural flashpoint, with Sacha Baron Cohen trolling average Americans into casually revealing their racisms (it doesn’t take much!) in between public provocations, many of which invited the possibility of an ass-beating. Fourteen years later, it’s hard to recapture the charge of that very particular cultural moment and nobody really wants to hear “My wife” ever again, so what are we doing here? Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (full subtitle: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan) is mostly tedious or borderline unwatchable for much of […]
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25 New Faces of Film 2020
Filmmaker is now out with its annual 25 New Faces, our picks of directors, writers, producers, editors and cinematographers who are exciting us right now. Click here to read this year’s list.
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Requiem for a Dream, The Haunting and Sergeant York: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
This month marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. theatrical release of Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky’s visually dazzling and emotionally shattering adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel about doomed addicts. When it came out in 2000, Requiem for a Dream more than delivered on the promise of Aronofsky’s 1998 debut feature Pi, taking that film’s ambitious experiments with subjective point of view to a whole new level; in Requiem, Aronofksy utilizes split screen, speeded up and slowed down motion, multiple exposures, impressionistic digital and practical special effects, unnatural lighting and clashing color temperatures, extreme focal lengths at either […]
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Graveyard of Honor, ivansxtc, The Gunfighter, The Pale Door: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
When director Kinji Fukasaku adapted the yakuza novel Graveyard of Honor for the screen in 1975, he was coming off of an extraordinary streak of Japanese gangster films that began with Street Mobster in 1972 and ended with New Battles Without Honor and Humanity in 1974. In between were six other yakuza pictures that transformed the genre in the same way that Francis Coppola reinvented the American gangster movie with the Godfather films. Like Coppola, Fukasaku was intent on deepening and critiquing the conventions he was working with, and in placing his stories at an intersection between myth and socioeconomic […]
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The Great American Lie, John Lewis: Good Trouble, Eli Roth’s History of Horror and More: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
This week is a good one for documentaries, with several excellent non-fiction films on a wide array of subjects newly available on demand and/or DVD. First up is Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s The Great American Lie, which opens today on most major streaming platforms. The film examines class inequality through the lives of five people: a public school principal in an underfunded and forgotten district; a social justice advocate fighting for low-wage women workers; an attorney devoted to criminal justice reform; a steelworker whose community has been decimated by layoffs and opioid addiction; and a Southern conservative single mother working to […]
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“The Emotional Arcs of Our Characters are Tied to the Stakes of the War…”: Director Lydia Dean Pilcher on A Call to Spy
During World War II, Prime Minister Winston Churchill put a network of spies behind enemy lines to aid the Resistance in Nazi-occupied countries. The SOE (Special Operations Executive) was set up to train women for the role. A Call to Spy, an IFC release opening in theaters and on demand October 2, follows three women who played crucial roles for the SOE in France. A Call to Spy is the first solo feature credit for director Lydia Dean Pilcher, after co-directing Radium Girls with Ginny Mohler. A veteran producer, Pilcher has worked in a wide variety of genres for the […]
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Shining a Light on the Politics of Public Lands: David Garrett Byars on his Documentary Public Trust
David Garrett Byars made his feature documentary debut with No Man’s Land in 2017, a riveting chronicle of the the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon (I spoke with him about it during its Tribeca premiere). In the largely verité film he manages to not only paint empathetic portraits of both the occupiers and their government opponents, but communicate the larger social and political movements that caused his characters to behave as they did. This eye for explaining complex topics comes to the fore in his sophomore film Public Trust, out September 25 from Patagonia Films. This new […]
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Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, The Deep, Night Falls on Manhattan, and Havana: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project has been discovering and restoring vital international films since 2007, and in its 13 years of existence has preserved 42 movies from 25 countries. Scorsese’s mission is not simply rescuing and protecting these movies, many of which would likely vanish into obscurity and physical deterioration without his Film Foundation’s assistance, but making sure they are widely available to be enjoyed by world audiences. Scorsese’s latest effort in this regard is the indispensable new Criterion boxed set Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project 3, which, like the two collections that preceded it, gathers six seminal works from […]
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“You’re a Storyteller”: Ted Hope on Being a “Holistic Film Producer” in an Ever-Changing Industry at IFP Week 2020
Ted Hope describes himself as a “holistic film producer.” What he means is this: When he signs up for a project, he’s there from the very beginning. And he’s there throughout it all, every step, even well into its streaming after life. Every stage is interconnected, and no parts works without the other. A holistic film producer is one that lives not only in the present but in the past and the future. They also try to advance the film ecosystem and what they perceive as their community in meaningful ways. It’s to see a production from all angles at […]
