Columns
-
Recommended on a Friday: Gimme Danger, Dreamlands, The Fosters, Killer Party
This pre-Halloween weekend is unexpectedly light on new releases. For Filmmaker readers, the most significant of the newcomers is Jim Jarmusch’s Cannes-premiering documentary on The Stooges, Gimme Danger. If you’re any kind of Iggy Pop fan — and, although not an obsessive or a completist, I count myself as one — than this doc is a must-see. It’s certainly not a revolutionary rock doc, consisting straightforwardly of Iggy’s own present-day interviews; comments by fellow band members, other musicians, and various colleagues and music execs; fantastic concert footage (albeit less of it than you want); and a smattering of archival footage […]
-
Give Me Restrained Filmmaking, Right Now
I recently had the pleasure of watching two of the very best American films of the year on the big screen: Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women and So Yong Kim’s Lovesong. I’d been meaning to catch Reichardt’s film for months but had managed to miss it consistently at festivals. The opportunity finally presented itself this past Wednesday. I had plans in Fort Greene that evening to watch the third presidential debate, a spectacle that I was almost positive would be deeply stressful and troubling. But I, like most Americans, couldn’t bear to look away. Anyway, I had a few hours to […]
-
Recommended on a Friday: Moonlight, Fire at Sea, Criterion’s Boyhood Disk, Dessert, Chris Gethard and More
Our new “Recommended on a Friday” column is meant for us here at Filmmaker to throw some attention on films we love that perhaps we haven’t covered online and in print, but this week we’re just going to start by piling on a pick that you’ve already heard quite a bit about: Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight. Jenkins’s previous film, Medicine for Melancholy, was a Filmmaker cover back in 2009, and we’ve been eagerly awaiting his next film since. Moonlight — a bracingly tender, ambitiously realized and wisely provocative character study about the construction of African-American masculine identity — demands to be […]
-
Independent Film is a Meaningless, Outmoded Term, and We Need to Stop Saying It
What does the term “independent film” mean to you? To me, it’s my profession. It’s the field I’ve always worked in. I try not to talk about this much but when I was young(er) I took a brief gig in reality TV. It took me two months to realize that I’d choose low pay and long hours any day if it meant I got to work on projects that I loved. To others, “independent film” is a genre. Back in the ’80s, when the term was first coming into popular use, “independent film” was a signifier of a certain type […]
-
Recommended on a Friday: Little Sister, Christine, Tower, Certain Women and More
If you look at the long list of movies opening every weekend, not just in theaters but on digital platforms too, you probably feel like you can’t keep up. We feel the same way here at Filmmaker, with usually more films entering the marketplace then we’re able to devote meaningful editorial to. Invariably, some films slip through the cracks, while others may have been covered by us at their festival premieres months ago, with our coverage now buried in the depths of our CMS. So, we’re starting this “Recommended on a Friday” series of picks designed to help you navigate […]
-
Notes on Vaxxed (Or, Not Lying But Being Wrong)
The thought stabbed itself into my mind, an ice-pick of fear: But what if I’m wrong? This was back in March. I had taken a short vacation from the hell of constant uncertainty in order to write an open letter to the Tribeca Film Festival about an anti-vaccination film called Vaxxed, directed by Andrew Wakefield. The letter contained the following premises: 1. Vaccines do not cause autism. 2. Wakefield is a well-known anti-vaccination quack. 3. Vaxxed is bullshit. I wrote the letter bolstered by the conviction that my premises were right, so I was pleased the letter received so much […]
-
Body and Soul: New York Film Festival, Part III
There are fewer films to deal with in this last of a three-feature curtain raiser. Writing commentary on the selections in the other two — six and five films, respectively — is enervating after two-and-a-half front-loaded weeks of screenings, plus repeats. The potential for gratuitous collateral damage spikes and hovers precariously, which translates into: In a very few cases, one risks being harsher than intended. Some of the harshees might be worth reviewing when they open commercially, when everyone is more focused. In The New York Times‘ Critic’s Notebook (November 10, 2016), Manohla Dargis considers both the long- and short-term risks of […]
-
Kurt Kuenne on Shooting his First Television Episode, From Shadowing to Editing
I first became aware of Kurt Kuenne’s work when I saw his 2011 feature Shuffle on the festival circuit; that film, an audacious psychological thriller about a man who finds himself waking up each morning at a different stage of his life, was an extraordinary fiction debut for a director who, I later discovered, had also made one of the most powerful documentaries of recent years. Dear Zachary (2008) begins as Kuenne’s tribute to a murdered friend and develops into an excruciating portrait of a legal system gone horribly wrong; it’s touching, enraging, devastating, and inspiring in equal measures. Last year’s […]
-
Makeovers: The New York Film Festival, Part II
Every film not only tells a story but is a story. Lumping several movies together to find commonality is a perilous pursuit. For example, we have to determine if shared traits operate at the level of content, plot or characters. Or might they be more in the vein of form — style, perhaps, or generic membership? Last week, zeroing in on what I consider the six finest features screening in the first third of the New York Film Festival led me to a marked thematic thread, which we can file under “loneliness and the attempt to escape it.” From the […]
-
Shooting Film Against the Digital Wave: DP Paul Cameron on Westworld
Considering cinematographer Paul Cameron is responsible for a portion of the seminal digital photography in Michael Mann’s Collateral, one might assume Cameron is a proselytizer of the digital revolution. Not so — Cameron remains an ardent devotee of celluloid, extolling its virtues as an “elegant, eloquent” medium. With the blessing of series co-creator Jonathan Nolan, Cameron sped film through the gate on the HBO pilot for Westworld. An extension of Michael Crichton’s taut 1973 sci-fi thriller about an Old West theme park where “guests” indulge their baser desires through interactions with robot “hosts,” this new Westworld digs its spurs into […]
