Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Fix Your Heart or Die: Adrian Chiarella on Leviticus
Leviticus (2026)
Leviticus (2026), Adrian Chiarella’s debut feature, begins with an archetypal horror image: a “little death” that begets a big one. In this cold open, a lesbian lifeguard succumbs to the lubricious persuasions of an invisible lover in a poolside shower,… Read more
I Shot I Shot Andy Warhol
I Shot Andy Warhol
Before she brought the charismatic serial killer Patrick Bateman to life in American Psycho (2000) Mary Harron devised a portrait of another kind of New York pathology with I Shot Andy Warhol (1996). When I went to college, there was… Read more
John Travolta on Propeller One-Way Night Coach
Propeller One-Way Night Coach
When I was asked for my favorite discoveries at Cannes this year, “the Travolta” was high on the list. Propeller One-Way Night Coach (2026), John Travolta’s feature directorial debut, premiered on the frantic first Friday night, when no one knew exactly what… Read more
If Youth Knew: Chie Hayakawa on Renoir
Renoir
Chie Hayakawa’s Renoir (2026) focuses on Fuki (Yui Suzuki), a preteenage girl whose perspective on life is darkened and complicated over the course of her father’s terminal illness. The film is set in 1987, a year or so into Japan’s “bubble period,”… Read more
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The Day YouTube Wept: Marcus Batto’s Found-Footage Memorial to Michael Jackson
A day in the life of the internet is impossible to reconstruct as a feature film. The pace of the scroll is too quick; any given snapshot is too algorithmically myopic to be comprehensive. There’s too much that evades notice, and still more that evades preservation. With the slow obsolescence of search engines—lost first to advertisements, then to optimization, and now to artificial intelligence—our digital past gets blurrier still. With There’ll Likely Be Michael Jackson Vigils Throughout the Night, Marcus Batto attempts the impossible, reconstructing June 25, 2009, the day of Jackson’s death, exclusively through the found footage available online. Batto, […]
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Personal Effects: Boots Riley and His Collaborators on Crafting I Love Boosters
Boots Riley has directed two movies and one TV show over the past decade, but he’s been telling stories through music for more than 30 years. “I usually think about my songs the same way I think about movies,” said Riley, whose Oakland-based hip hop group The Coup started 35 years ago. “Music was a way for me to cheaply make movies.” Now, music fuels his movies in other ways, though he’s still on the lookout for inventive ways to stretch his budget. Riley officially transitioned into filmmaking around 2015, when his time at the Sundance Labs laid the groundwork […]
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Cannes Interview: Dominga Sotomayor on Her “Spontaneous and Liberating” La Perra
Dominga Sotomayor’s cinema is one of confined spaces. Her features tend to unfurl in tight, growingly claustrophobic settings. In her 2012 debut Thursday till Sunday, the action took place by and large inside a car en route to the beaches of northern Chile; her festival prizewinning breakout Too Late to Die Young (2018) never strayed beyond the confines of a bohemian commune at the dawn of the country’s post-Pinochet era; and her Netflix-produced Swim to Me (2025) zoomed in on an affluent villa in present-day Santiago. So it is for Sotomayor’s Cannes-premiering La Perra, a character study set on a […]
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“I Believe My Instinct”: Tony Leung and Ildikó Enyedi on Silent Friend
The Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai has worked with some of cinema’s most accomplished directors. Known for his collaborations with Wong Kar-wai and John Woo, Leung has also appeared in films by Johnnie To, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ang Lee, and Zhang Yimou. Most recently, he appeared in Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend, which finds characters interacting with a single German ginkgo tree in three disparate years: 1908, 1972, and 2020. Leung plays a neuroscientist during the final third, whose research on newborn brain activity is halted by the COVID-19 pandemic. During this professional sojourn, he becomes fond of the […]
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“A Growing Sense of Freedom”: Sho Miyake on Two Seasons, Two Strangers
Amidst a surge of interest in contemporary Japanese cinema in the West, Sho Miyake is not yet a household name—but his reputation is only growing. Since graduating from the Film School of Tokyo, Miyake has been building a body of quietly considered dramas. In 2012, Miyake released his first two low-budget features, Playback, an Alain Resnais-ian dive into memories of youth, and Good for Nothing, about a group of high-school boys working at a security company in Miyake’s native Hokkaido. His character-driven works often explore group dynamics, like his exceptional summer romance And Your Bird Can Sing. Miyake’s most recent […]
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Blue Monday: Elliot Tuttle Discusses His Transgressive Blue Film
Blue, as it pertains to the material and sociopolitical histories of cinema, is a color associated with legend, conjecture, and etymological ambiguity. During the heightened moral panic and puritanical tyranny of Hays Code–era Hollywood, blue grease pencils were used by censors to mark film stock for sequences considered obscene or ethically dubious, undermining artistic integrity and forcing directors into eleventh-hour cuts and re-shoots. Concurrently, the lápis azul was used by the Estado Novo dictatorship in Portugal to omit words or entire passages from texts that were deemed politically subversive, as well as to censor international films before they reached Portuguese […]
