A sweltering summer in the Bronx serves as the backdrop for Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo), director Joel Alfonso Vargas’s first feature film. Expanding on his 34-minute short film Que te vaya bonito, Rico—which debuted at Locarno last year, receiving the Pardo di Domani best director award—the Sundance-premiering feature picks up where the short left off in the life of 19-year-old Rico (Juan Collado), a naive yet headstrong young man who makes a meager living selling nutcrackers on Orchard Beach. After he impregnates his teenage girlfriend, Destiny (Destiny Checo), he brings her home to […]
While “stunning directorial debut” is an overused description that seldom lives up to the Sundance hype, in the case of Brittany Shyne’s Seeds it’s also quite precise. The lush, B&W-shot doc is a gorgeous portrait of what may very well be the last in a long line of generational Black farmers in rural Georgia, one in which Shyne’s camera serves as both portal and means of preservation. By quietly and patiently embedding with two extended families in the small town of Thomasville, Shyne is able to capture everything from the languid rhythm of daily work, from harvesting cotton to repairing […]
David Borenstein’s Sundance-premiering Mr. Nobody Against Putin stars Pavel “Pasha” Talankin (also credited as co-director), an “unlikely hero” in an even more unlikely collaboration. A jokey primary school teacher in his Ural Mountains hometown of Karabash (which has the dubious distinction of being one of the most polluted cities on the planet), Pasha spends many days mentoring the kids who use the thirty-something’s open door office as a hangout/safe haven. That is, when he’s not documenting their young lives as the school’s videographer. Which is why things get rather complicated for this pro-democracy, but non-activist, educator. For once Putin decides […]
Albert Birney has been busy since 2020. On top of releasing 2022’s Eyeballs in the Darkness, a second feature in his series about a pair of 8-bit inspired animated best friends, Tux and Fanny, in, after releasing a video game incarnation of those characters the year before, and premiering his second collaboration with Kentucker Audley, Strawberry Mansion, Birney has now completed his first live-action film as a solo director. OBEX started its humble, black-and-white production with resources Birney had on hand: his house, his bulldog-chihuahua-pug mix (what he calls a “Bullchug”) Dorothy and his affinity for the ‘80s technology of […]
The following interview of Steven Soderbergh about Presence was originally published last year when the film premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. It is being reposted today as the film is released in theaters from NEON. — Editor A heady, elegantly-constructed ghost story, Steven Soderbergh’s Presence has a bunch of half-buried threads, a couple of perfectly-timed scares, and a horrific close-up of an act of violence that mesmerizes the camera—just as horror films mesmerize their audience. The camera is the star here, and not merely because its sustained, floating movements, its sudden turns and retreats, its anxious hovering display […]
Drawing upon a 1983 interview the actress Maria Schneider gave to the French TV show Cinéma Cinéma, Elisabeth Subrin’s short film Maria Schneider, 1983 premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival and went on to win in 2023 France’s César award for Best Documentary Short. In Subrin’s film, three actresses — Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga and Isabel Sandoval — progressively interpret the text of Schneider’s interview throughout the 25-minute piece, with Issa strictly recreating Schneider’s original answers while Maïga and Sandoval adapt the text to reflect their own experiences in the film business, turning the work into, as I wrote […]
Grand Theft Hamlet, which took the Documentary Feature Jury Award at last year’s SXSW, is groundbreaking cinema to say the least. The first documentary to win an Innovation Award at The Stage Awards in London back in 2022, the film’s production probably also marked the first time a filmmaker jumped into an online avatar and then shot her doc entirely within a video game (one in which conditions often resembled a war zone to boot). The project was born out of the UK’s third Covid lockdown in 2021, when abruptly out-of-work theater actors Sam Crane (who co-directed along with his […]
Delwin Fiddler Jr., star of Jonathan Olshefski (a “25 New Face” of 2017) and Elizabeth Day’s Without Arrows, grew up on the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Reservation in South Dakota, where he found his calling as a grass dancer (which led to championships on the pow-wow circuit and eventually even international fame. His work can be seen not only in the film but also in a continual loop at the Museum of the American Indian in D.C.). And then he spent over a decade in Philadelphia, making more money if not a better living. Having had enough of big city […]
It’s been a busy year for Kamal Aljafari. One of the most innovative voices working in contemporary found footage cinema, the Palestinian filmmaker’s latest feature, A Fidai Film (which premiered this past spring at Visions du Reel in Nyon, Switzerland, where it won the Jury Award of the Burning Lights section) has propelled him to a wholly new level of fame – and deservedly so. Often traveling alongside his latest short film, UNDR (which premiered at IFFR), A Fidai Film has been screened in almost three dozen festivals, while Aljafari has been the subject of two major retrospectives at Anthology […]
The face of Leonard Fife (Richard Gere) is a slab—gaunt, ashen, with a firm, unsmiling mouth. In front of the camera, he’s at once impassive and confessional before his two interlocutors, Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill). They’ve recruited the old man, a celebrated American documentary filmmaker now wasting away from cancer, to recount his life for posterity, in the process conjuring the young man (Jacob Elordi) Fife once was. Or was he? I’m not sure where Fife the Elder and Fife the Younger begin and end in Paul Schrader’s latest film. Nor could I tell you at which […]