War Witch is a film about resilience. Resilience of an individual, of a community and even of the architecture of a society. French-Canadian filmmaker Kim Nguyen tells a story that is set to become a benchmark in jungle films. From the painful, complex situation of the child soldiers, he weaves an intelligent movie which enables the viewer to penetrate their reality and the multi-level relationship these children create with their environment. Set in stunning natural landscapes, War Witch transports us from play to gunfire, from tenderness to abuse, from hardcore survival to ghostly magic. It also reveals the raw, powerful […]
It’s a strange paradox of today’s cinema that so many films feature lavish and eye-popping special effects yet are such ordinary viewing experiences. Sure, today’s VFX and surround sound are capable of overwhelming you, of beating you into submission, but, with a handful of exceptions, they seldom take you further. One film that does is Panos Cosmatos’ Beyond the Black Rainbow, an astonishingly ambitious debut feature that is as much an elegant art object as it is a science-fiction head trip of the highest order. Set in 1983 — and feeling as if it was actually made in 1983 too […]
I fell in love with Alex Holdridge’s gorgeous, smart black-and-white LA-set romantic comedy In Search of a Midnight Kiss when I saw it on the film festival circuit in 2007, and later interviewed Holdridge for Filmmaker when Kiss was released theatrically in 2008. In the intervening years, Holdridge and I were in occasional contact, and through Facebook I was aware that he had left L.A. and decamped to Berlin. But little more than that. When I read earlier this spring that he was in postproduction on his follow-up feature, Meet Me in Montenegro – a film co-written by and co-starring Holdridge […]
Steve Collins’ You Hurt My Feelings is the story of emotionally remote and unavailable people, a trio of wounded individuals who fail to connect with one another. Though Collins’ film deals with familiar subject matter, its tale is told with such clever minimalism and discernible sweetness that it goes down rather smoothly. While the characters may not be able to express themselves emotionally, Collins and his director of photography, Jeremy Saulnier (Septien, Putty Hill), find real poetry in the changing of the New England seasons, the passage of time providing an even greater window in the the failed lives on display. John […]
The line separating documentary and narrative film aesthetics has never been more porous than it is now, but Damon Russell’s revelatory Snow on tha Bluff lives comfortably on that line. An incredible combination of found footage, no-budget narrative ingenuity and pulled-from-the-streets doc immediacy, it discovers in its incredibly charismatic and troubled protagonist, Curtis Snow, an American life many of us would probably rather forget about. Easy to dismiss as “Cops from the perp’s perspective,” perhaps, this startlingly authentic document of the life of a young, black, crack-dealing single parent — and of the dangers that lurk in poor and working-class black […]
Sometimes the simplest premises can be the most devastating. Andrew Semans’ debut feature Nancy, Please follows Paul (Will Rogers), a Yale PhD student as he tries (or, kind of tries) and utterly fails to complete his dissertation. His excuse for this lack of productivity? He’s accidentally left an essential annotated copy of Dickens’ Little Dorrit at his old apartment. Worse still, the book is now in the care of his ex-roommate Nancy (Eléonore Hendricks), a woman who he views as something of a sociopath. As Paul’s attempts to get the book back grow more and more desperate, Semans plumbs the […]
Over the last few years, actor Alex Karpovsky has slowly grown into one of the most recognizable faces in American indies. And with a recurring role on Girls, Lena Dunham’s upcoming HBO series, he stands poised to break through to a wider audience. As if he wasn’t busy enough, Karpovsky has found time to migrate behind the lens for Rubberneck, his directorial followup to 2009’s Second City improv documentary Trust Us, This is All Made Up. A psychological thriller about an unhinged scientist (Karpovsky, directing himself) who grows increasingly obsessed with a co-worker he’s recently had a one-night stand with, […]
They say you have to know the rules to break them. And Drew Goddard is a man very familiar with how to write for genre, collaborating over the last decade with some of the biggest names in American horror and sci-fi. In 2008 Goddard penned the screenplay to J.J. Abram’s found-footage monster movie Cloverfield, and before that he served as a series writer on television shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lost, and Alias. So it should come as no surprise that his directorial debut, Cabin in the Woods, not only pays homage to the genre tropes implied in […]
Deeply shrouded in mystery, the election of the Pope is a strange amalgam of modern democracy and ancient ritual. It is also a circumstance that seems ripe for farce. At least Nanni Moretti, perhaps Italy’s most revered contemporary filmmaker, seems to think so. His newest film, We Have a Pope, which premiered last year in Cannes as Habemus Papam, is an often funny, sneakily moving investigation of the Vatican’s less-than-infallible process of choosing the divine, and one man’s rejection of his supposedly divine calling. Starring Michel Piccoli as a would-be Pope who disappears after his election and Moretti himself as […]
Originally posted during the Toronto Film Festival, here is a short video with the now former Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed and filmmaker Jon Shenk on their collaboration making the climate change doc, The Island President. The film opened today at Film Forum in New York. Over at Hammer to Nail, Daniel James Scott interviews Shenk. An excerpt: H2N: So for you, filmmaking starts with story. Yet all of your films coincide with social or political issues that can be affected by the emotional power you described. I’m sure that few filmmakers know more than you the delicate relationship between entertainment […]