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 […]

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 […]

Click here to read this year’s edition of the 25 New Faces of Film.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Still Life: Notes on Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) Anna Backman Rogers 154 pages Punctum Books, 2021 One of the complaints made about feminist films of the 1970s and ’80s was that they were too experimental, too avant-garde, too elitist. They refused the pleasures of pop cinema. They skipped the well-told story and refused the escapism of character identification. And beauty? Forget it!  Take Barbara Loden’s Wanda, from 1970: it’s a desolate portrait of what New Yorker critic Paulene Kael dubbed an “ignorant slut” in a film described by Jump Cut’s Chuck Kleinhans as “flat and opaque.” Indeed, Wanda, who is […]

Filmmakers Richard Peete and Robert Yapkowitz were deep in Missouri, working in the prop department for Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, when they both became consumed with the legendary 1960s-era folk singer Karen Dalton. The artist, who died of AIDS in 1993, only 55 years old, was famously described by admirer and peer Bob Dylan as someone who “sang like Billie Holiday and played guitar like Jimmy Reed.” Her hallowed status on the Greenwich Village scene that launched Dylan and many others never elevated her to mainstream success. Drug addiction and emotional turmoil took a heavy toll, yet Dalton left behind […]

When screenwriter, director, producer, actor, novelist, stock options trader, playwright, musician, newspaper columnist and gallery artist Melvin Van Peebles died last week at the age of 89, he left behind one of the most varied and entertaining bodies of work in all of American (and French, thanks to his Parisian detour in the 1960s) arts and letters. He’s best known for his revolutionary 1971 feature Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, but that classic—important as it is as a point of reference and inspiration for generations of independent filmmakers—only scratches the surface of Van Peebles’s genius and audacity. Thankfully, the Criterion Collection […]