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Pop Star: Partisan
With the dark, seriously accomplished Partisan, first-time Aussie feature director Ariel Kleiman and co-screenwriting partner Sarah Cyngler have created an eerie and disturbing but highly effective hybrid that resists pigeonholing. This is a special blend, which not only pushes the envelope but rips it open as well. They sidestepped the usual: the staple of the British boarding-school coming-of-ager; the familiar genre of films about disturbed children housed in government and private institutions; and the regularly reinvented category of urban juvenile gang thrillers. Partisan is a most welcome black sheep. The film is not only about kiddies stuck in a cult; it is […]
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“If You Read the Script You’re Not Gonna Want to Do the Movie”: Mark L. Lester on Commando
Thirty years ago this month, director Mark L. Lester changed the course of action cinema forever when he solidified Arnold Schwarzenegger’s persona in the gloriously excessive Commando. Schwarzenegger was already a star thanks to the Conans and The Terminator, but Commando is the film that established the identity he would revisit in film after film – and that introduced the “bigger is better” combination of exaggerated action and comedy that producer Joel Silver would apply to his Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, and Predator series, among many other pictures. Those movies would be heavily influenced by Commando’s vivid palette and precise attention […]
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“Most of the Movies You’ll Want To See This Fall Will Be Independents”: Edward Zwick on Pawn Sacrifice
Writer, producer, and director Ed Zwick is a singular presence in the American media landscape – and a presence whose gifts become increasingly valuable as they become less and less common. He’s a filmmaker committed to serious, important subject matter who never succumbs to didacticism or pat conclusions; he has never once compromised the complexity of the issues his films address or the people whose lives are affected by them. What’s all the more remarkable about his work is that he achieves this complexity via mass entertainments that are as straightforward and involving as they are ambitious and adult – […]
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“Found Footage with Style”: Cinematographer Maryse Alberti on M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit
As a teenager in the south of France, Maryse Alberti’s first two trips to the cinema led her impressionable eyes to Duel and Harold and Maude. If she’d instead began her cinematic journey with The Barefoot Executive and Escape From the Planet of the Apes, maybe she wouldn’t have become the cinematographer of The Wrestler, Happiness, When We Were Kings and Crumb. But the combined spell cast by Steven Spielberg and Hal Ashby – the great populist entertainer and the iconoclastic humanist – set Albert on a path that has led to a four-decade career pivoting between documentary and fiction. Alberti’s latest straddles […]
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“I’m Not Qualified For Anything Else”: Writer/Director Steve Kloves on The Fabulous Baker Boys and Flesh and Bone
Twelve years before he became the screenwriter of the most successful franchise in film history, adapting all but one of the Harry Potter novels for the screen, Steve Kloves directed the first of two extraordinarily powerful and original films – movies all the more remarkable for how different they were from each other. Kloves had one produced screenplay to his credit, 1984’s Racing with the Moon, when he assembled the dream cast of Jeff Bridges, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Beau Bridges to create The Fabulous Baker Boys in 1989. Its story of two piano-playing brothers and the singer that upends years […]
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“I Wish Filmmakers Could Approach PR as Part of the Filmmaking Process”: Agata Burdzy on Festival Publicity
Athens was the first European Capital of Culture in 1985. For the 2016 title, Wroclaw, Poland and San Sebastian, Spain were both selected four years ago. Since then, various cultural projects and initiatives funded by the European Commission have been developed as both cities prepare for the tourism boosts and international attention in the coming year. One of the biggest arthouse cinemas in Europe called the New Horizons Cinema, for example, opened in Wroclaw as one these projects. And with more developments underway, city pride among local inhabitants, as well as possibilities of discovery for passing travelers, flourishes. I don’t […]
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As 4K Expands, Now Might Be the Time to Buy an HD Camera
The world of inexpensive 4K cameras is expanding rapidly. For $8,000 there’s the Sony PXW-FS7, and Panasonic will soon start shipping the fixed lens AG-DVX200. At $4,195 the DVX200 takes the sensor from their GH4 and puts it in a more traditional video camera body. If the fixed lens of the DVX200 is too limiting, you could always buy the GH4 itself, which at $1,400 is one of the cheapest ways to record UHD video. And if the sensor size of the Panasonic camera’s is too limiting, the $3,200 full-frame Sony a7RII is the current darling of reviewers. Yes, it’s […]
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Thinking of Tarkovsky While Making New Zealand Look Russian: DP Tim Orr on Z For Zachariah
The settings for Craig Zobel’s 2012 behavioral experiment Compliance and the director’s new post-apocalyptic tale Z for Zachariah couldn’t be more different. The former takes place almost entirely in the claustrophobic confines of a fast food restaurant’s employees-only areas. The latter unfolds amidst lush, bucolic tranquility. Yet at the heart of both films is a study of group dynamics. Set in an idyllic valley mysteriously immune to an extinction-level catastrophe, Z for Zachariah begins as a two-hander featuring Margot Robbie as a Christian farm girl who believes she’s the last person on earth until the arrival of an atheist scientist […]
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“We Couldn’t Do Our Jobs If We Weren’t Social People”: Diane Henderson on Festival Programming
I’m chastising two filmmakers for walking out of Nanni Moretti’s My Mother, the closing night film at the New Horizons Film Festival in Wroclaw. I make some argument about how films, even bad ones, deserve the attention of at least their running times, and I gloat about having suffered through the entirety of Moretti’s newest flop myself. Two weeks later, on my second morning at the Locarno Film Festival, while watching the World Premiere of Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie, which will premiere in the U.S. later this fall at the New York Film Festival, I’m almost amused by the […]
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Steering Away From “Ooga-Booga” Horror Movies: John McNaughton on The Harvest
In 1985, a pair of brothers who owned a video equipment rental business in Chicago offered local filmmaker John McNaughton $100,000 in financing if he could come up with a low-budget horror movie. They probably got a little more than they bargained for when McNaughton delivered Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, a chilling (though also blackly comic) character study loosely based on the experiences of real life sociopath Henry Lee Lucas. McNaughton eschewed slasher movie conventions in favor of an ultra-realistic, serious-minded film with no escape hatch for the audience; one of the greatest cinematic representations of the banality […]
