For 36 years documentarian Jon Alpert followed three friends—Rob Steffey, Freddie Rodriguez, and Deliris Vasquez—through a Newark underground of drugs and poverty. We see them getting into trouble with the law, undergoing prison and rehab and reintegrating into society.  Alpert, a recipient of DOC NYC’s Lifetime Achievement Award, gained remarkable access to a closed-off world. Filming under a variety of conditions and on several formats, he gives a first-person account of our failed war on drugs. It is an unbearably sad look at lives falling apart. Alpert also captures moments of success, of uplift, of reconciliation and forgiveness. The film […]

Bryan Wizemann’s You Mean Everything to Me is the first feature film I worked on as an A.C  in New York. Before principal photography, production sent me the script and the lookbook, which introduced me to the abusive relationship at the center of the film. Nathan (Ben Rosenfield) comes off affable and attractive enough on the surface, but is dangerously worn inside from lying to others and himself. Perpetuating his particularly gangrenous insecurity, he habitually coerces partners into his ring of control. Cassandra (Morgan Saylor) just happens to meet him while she’s down on her luck,and finds herself spiraling into […]

Mass confusion and panic infected much of the world at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic as the deadly virus spread from country to country at an uncontainable rate. As many governments put temporary lockdown and quarantine orders in place (in addition to urging hospitals to boost patient capacity), New York City found itself the epicenter of the pandemic, ambulances constantly roaring as they raced to prevent the next round of deceased patients stored in meat trucks and disposed of in mass graves on Hart Island. With some distance from that horrific spring of 2020, new variants and vaccine hesitancy […]

One of the final scenes of director Michael M. Bilandic’s fourth feature, Project Space 13, involves a delusional Manhattan gallerist wearing yellow knockoff Balenciaga sneakers and a ridiculous polka-dotted blazer at the shoreline of his beach house. He’s talking on the phone, via Airpods of course, to one of the two private security guards hired to protect the solo exhibition of an equally delusional artist named Nate in the midst of lockdown and protests. Throughout the night, every storefront on the downtown block has been looted except the eponymous white cube, where the artist and armed guards have been sitting […]

“So abundant were the apples, we left them on the ground to rot. We regret the rot, but not the abundance.” These lines close “Tortoise,” one of the “fables” collected in Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Cheerful Scapegoat, the most recent of the 21 books he’s published across the last three decades. His written output—which ranges the terrains of prose and poetry, fiction and criticism, theory, memoir, and styles not yet named, typically collapsing as many of these terms as possible in a given sentence (his métier)—would alone qualify as an abundance. That he has, in more recent years, supplemented this body […]

Red Rocket throws a curveball to viewers who think they know what to expect from a Sean Baker movie. There are surface commonalities connecting it to his previous works—docu-realistic stylings, detailed worldbuilding and the centering of marginalized communities. Yet, unlike his last three pictures Starlet, The Florida Project and Tangerine—which marinated in the humanity of, respectively, a young female porn star, transgender sex workers and a family living with invisible homelessness—the man under the magnifying-glass this time is an increasingly disturbing presence.  Washed-up adult movie star Mikey Saber (played with real verve by Simon Rex) is selfish to the point of […]