Appearing online for the first time, here is Scott Macaulay’s report on Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction, from our Winter, 1995 edition. It appears here in newly revised form. ***“Addiction will be our question: a certain type of ‘Being-on-drugs’ that has everything to do with the bad conscious of our era.” — Avital Ronell, Crack Wars “Look at this,” Abel Ferrara says, tracing his finger across the video monitor in his Manhattan office/editing room. On the screen: black-and-white images of blood-streaked, bullet-ridden Bosnian casualties. “This is the real thing.” These images, and others of Nazi concentration camp victims from Ferrara’s new […]

In Spike Jonze’s future, you will be famous for 15 minutes. The catch? You will only be famous as John Malkovich. Confused? Don’t be. Being John Malkovich, Jonze’s devious debut feature, creates from our schizophrenic celebrity culture an original comedy that is as affecting as it is absurd. Scott Macaulay ponders the meaning of it all with Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman in an interview that originally appeared in our Fall, 1999 print edition. There are auspicious debut films, and then there is Being John Malkovitch. Long a subject of film-geek gossip during its production due to its bizarre premise—a […]

From Filmmaker‘s archives, and online for the first time, here is our interview with Pedro Almodovar about All About My Mother as well as many other things, including Tennessee Williams, rejecting primary colors and the difficulties, sometimes, of being “Almodovar.” This piece originally ran in our Fall, 1999 issue. “Mainly women,” says Leo, the desperate, devastated, lovelorn romance writer played by Marisa Paredes in Pedro Almodovar’s eleventh feature film, The Flower of My Secret. “Adventurous, suicidal lunatics.” He might as well be talking about the characters found in Almodovar’s films, for his is a body of work dominated by actresses, […]

Watching writer/director Ari Aster’s debut Hereditary, I yearned for the horror to come, as if it’d help wash away the pain of the domestic trauma preceding. Then it came, but it painfully didn’t offer the relief I had been thirsting for. Aster’s horror films, full of pain and confusion, are mined from the director’s own traumas. Making them might be a form of exorcism. He coins his latest film, Midsommar — about a grieving woman who travels to a nine-day long festival in Sweden with her diffident boyfriend and his grad student friends — a breakup movie, and this time, […]

Filmed over one continuous 1977 day at Pride parades across San Francisco, Chicago, New York, San Diego and other metropolises, Arthur Bressan Jr.’s Gay USA is a tapestry of anecdotes, embraces, misconceptions and confused onlookers. It not only captures the optimism and palpable ecstasy of the LGBT attendees of Pride ‘77, but uses the homophobic agenda of Anita Bryant in Dade County, Floridato provide political context as to why these happy men, women and non-binary folks galavanting along Castro Street and Greenwich Village still had very much at stake.  Many of Bressan’s films outlined the political reality of being gay […]

While most independent films are birthed out of personal necessity, a time-crunch, and readily available locations, Diana Peralta’s De Lo Mio may represent a pinnacle of can-do gumption. Shot on location in the city of Santiago in the Dominican Republic, Peralta’s debut feature uses her late grandmother’s home as its central location and its truer-than-fiction narrative—following her passing, two sisters return to their grandmother’s cozy property before it gets bulldozed and the land sold. Shot last fall but percolating in the director’s mind for years, De Lo Mio is as much about the sisters in front of the camera (performed by Sasha […]