An eccentric Southern tale that feels like a Harry Crews-scripted edition of Storage Wars, Finders Keepers tells the story of two men battling — in courts of law and public opinion — over the ownership of a severed foot. The foot belonged once to John Wood, amputated following a small plane crash that also killed Wood’s father. When Wood failed to make payments to his storage unit, it became the property of local North Carolina huckster Shannon Whisnant, who parlays his contested ownership of the foot into a roadside tourist attraction. Directed by Bryan Carberry and Clay Tweel, collaborating for […]
Documentary has a rich history of films by filmmakers who must honestly engage subjects with odious views. Directors Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher Walker stumbled across one such fellow in Craig Cobb, a white supremacist with a devious and possibly quite legal plan to produce a white power enclave in the American heartland. Premiering at Sundance in the Documentary Competition, their Welcome to Leith chronicles the story of the town of Leith against Cobb but also, implicitly, their own story of engaging their subject — who says he’s available for Skype interviews after the premiere. Welcome to Leith premieres Monday, […]
Let’s all be inspired by Rick Alverson and agree to ban the very concept of “sympathetic character” from our movie-viewing brain. We’re all fixated on this idea, that we have to “like” characters and “connect” to them. Instead, let’s just decide to be interested in watching what is put before us, and let’s let ourselves enjoy having our expectations for how we want to feel while we’re sitting in a movie theatre get subverted once in a while. Alverson — a musician as well as a filmmaker — has made three feature films before this, his latest, Entertainment. Each one […]
As a conceptual artist Michael Madsen doesn’t so much create nonfiction films as craft mind-blowing experiences, introducing even the most jaded of us docu-philes to people and places we’d no idea even existed. (Prior to IDFA 2010 I, for one, never knew about Finland’s nuclear waste storage facility Onkalo, the subject of Madsen’s Into Eternity and an underground cavern the size of a large city set for completion in the 22nd century.) In his latest The Visit the Danish director turns his attention and limitless imagination towards mankind’s first encounter with alien intelligent life. With the help of expert guides […]
Based on Amy Koppelman’s book published by the independent press Two Dollar Radio — a book depicting the destructive despair of a housewife spiraling into drugs and bad sex — I Smile Back is being touted here at Sundance as the feature dramatic debut of Sarah Silverman, the comedian whose shocking riffs are always delivered with an unnerving sweetness and sexy demeanor. Attempting to channel — or perhaps remold — Silverman’s persona to the demands of the novel (adapted by Koppelman and Paige Dylan) is Adam Salky, who returns to Sundance following his debut picture, Dare. I Smile Back premieres […]
“Ravishing cinema verite” is how the Sundance catalog describes the work of Bill and Turner Ross, whose elegiac American portraits crackle with a lovely lo-fi buzz. Following their New Orleans-set music travelogue Tchoupitoulas, the brothers immerse themselves here in Western within a world considerably tougher — two towns on either side of the Mexican border grappling with the sudden onslaught of cartel violence. Below, we ask them about incorporating that criminal storyline into their film and sticking with the same camera for three pictures. Western premieres today in the Documentary Competition of the Sundance Film Festival. Filmmaker: Your documentaries have […]
From set, the production executive was on the phone. “There are 10-year-olds saying the word ‘motherfucker!’ she said with concern. Would an “R” rating still ensue? None of us were sure, but we spent plenty of time on conference calls with lawyers trying to figure it out. So, then, when writer/director Jon Watts says below that ten-year-olds saying “the f-word… is a really big deal,” I know what he’s talking about. I haven’t seen Cop Car yet, so I don’t know whether his tyro f-bombs made the final cut. Regardless, though, I love adult movies about kids that are really […]
Appearing in Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list back in 2004 after their home run of a short, Gowanus, Brooklyn, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden have had what, from the outside, looks like one of the steadiest careers in American independent film. While others from that list struggle to make their second or third films, Boden and Fleck have moved from feature to feature, first turning that short into a well-received debut starring Ryan Gosling (Half Nelson), essaying the life of an immigrant baseball player in Sugar for HBO; and then adapting Ned Vizzini’s acclaimed memoir It’s Kind of a Funny […]
Kevin Macdonald’s Black Sea is a wonderfully entertaining action movie for adults, a hybrid of morality play and thriller that recalls the smart, terse genre films of John Huston and Raoul Walsh while referencing more contemporary issues relating to recent downturns in the global financial markets. It tells the story of recently laid off submarine captain Robinson (Jude Law), a man who has given his life to the sea and suddenly finds himself with no purpose and no way to make a living. When he hears about a WWII-era German U-boat filled with gold just sitting at the bottom of […]
Are you one to meet your heroes? By reading, watching, listening to their work, do you feel a connection to them? Or are they enigmas whose mysteries you need to crack? In the world of contemporary letters, few figures loom as large as David Foster Wallace, whose sprawling, wickedly funny, fiercely observant works grappled with both the necessity and near impossibility of sincere, non-ironic expression in the age of commodified mass media and a meaningless public discourse. In essays about punctuation and cruise ships, tennis stars and cooked lobsters, and in stories and novels including his protean cultural phenomenon, Infinite […]