RaMell Ross’s 2018 feature debut, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, is a non-narrative portrait of its Alabama locale, shot entirely by the filmmaker over years of immersion, his instinctually captured material assembled into intricate juxtapositions. Few scale-ups for a second film have been more dramatic: Nickel Boys is a narrative feature adapted from a pre-existing text (Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys), proceeding in more-or-less linear order through an incident-filled narrative, with an on-record budget of around $23 million and production handled by Plan B Entertainment and Louverture Films. The latter’s Joslyn Barnes was also a producer and […]
Beginning in 1894, the Canadian government forced Indigenous children to attend segregated boarding schools. The schools were designed to “get rid of the Indian ‘problem.’” Most were run by the Catholic church. For years, students spoke of abuse and whispered about missing classmates. This explanatory text opens Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie’s Sugarcane, establishing the basis for a piece of investigative journalism and a portrait of healing familial catharsis. After unmarked graves were discovered in 2021 on land once occupied by the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, NoiseCat and Kassie became interested in making a film about […]
It’s appropriate that Halina Reijn, the Dutch actress-turned-filmmaker who previously directed the Gen Z whodunnit Bodies Bodies Bodies, would look to ’90s erotic thrillers as fodder for her next feature. After all, her countryman Paul Verhoeven (she has a supporting role in his Black Book) is considered the de facto master of this genre, bringing his penchant for the perverse to Hollywood with pictures such as Basic Instinct. Babygirl, Reijn’s English-language feature debut as writer-director, is less enamored with this bygone era than it is interested in deploying its framework within a personal, subversively feminist perspective. But make no mistake: […]
Micaela Durand and Daniel Chew met as undergraduate film students at NYU, where they honed a collaborative practice that responded to the high-budget, high-flown projects of their peers with DIY aesthetics and an emphasis on developing their own formal language. Folding in experiences from their respective careers in the worlds and subcultures of art, fashion, and publishing, First (2018), Negative Two (2019) and 38 (2023) form a triptych of canny portraits of New York subcultures and of personal lives unfolding in uneasy symbiosis with the internet. In advance of a series presented by Metrograph and MacDowell, where Chew and Durand […]
Mati Diop likes summoning spirits. In 2019’s Cannes-premiering Atlantics, the ghosts of young Senegalese men lost in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Dakar come back to haunt people in their bid to demand what is rightfully theirs. In her latest hybrid documentary, Dahomey—which won the Golden Bear at Berlinale this year—she exorcises the spirit of artifacts looted by the French from the West African kingdom of Dahomey between 1892-94. After centuries of lying inert in Paris’ Musée du quai Branly, 26 of these artifacts were restituted to Benin in 2021. Dahomey not only documents their long journey home […]
While the eruption of violence at the US Capitol on January 6th left most Americans dazed and confused — and too many journalists and talking heads scrambling to dissect the psyche of the rioters as if they were extraterrestrial beings and not our actual next-door neighbors — multimedia artist Michael Premo had been listening and filming throughout the summer of 2020 with open ears and eyes all along. His Venice-debuting Homegrown follows three diverse (yes, diverse) Trump-supporting “patriots”: an excited young father-to-be (to a biracial child) in New Jersey, an Air Force vet and rightwing organizer in “liberal” NYC, and […]
Caroline (Vic Carmen Sonne), a young factory worker living in abject poverty, serves as our window into the perilous post-war landscape of Copenhagen circa 1919 in The Girl with the Needle. Her dire situation is compounded by her social position as a working class woman, particularly since her husband, Peter (Besir Zeciri), has been out of the picture since he signed up to fight in the Great War (despite the country’s broader policy of neutrality). After she becomes pregnant by her wealthy boss, Jorgen (Joachim Fjelstrup), Caroline anticipates a new life of abundance and relative privilege. Of course, this inter-caste […]
Director David Lowery admits he loves Christmas (he was born the day after), and that’s part of the reason why he embarked on his latest project: An Almost Christmas Story, a CG animated short for Disney from producer Alfonso Cuarón, who conceived the film with writer Jack Thorne. Set during the holiday season, An Almost Christmas Story sees a young owl named Moon who unexpectedly taken from his family when she accidentally catches a ride in the Christmas tree destined for Rockefeller Center. At that famed location, Moon encounters a young girl named Luna, who is also lost and searching […]
Around sixteen years ago, the late great Filipino film critic Alexis Tioseco saw Antoinette Jadaone’s student short films ‘plano (2005) and Saling Pusa (2006) and began championing her work. In the words of critic Oggs Cruz, Tioseco thought Jadaone was “the person that is most qualified to give Filipino mainstream filmmaking that much-needed burst of novel inspiration,” given that her “shorts are all tightly packaged confections that marry the popular appeal of mainstream escapist entertainment and the unique wit of more adventurous fare.” Two years after Tioseco’s death, Jadaone made her feature debut—a love letter to and critique of Filipino […]
Based on the novel by Juan Rulfo, a key work in Mexican literature, Rodrigo Prieto’s Pedro Páramo follows several characters across decades as they search for answers to their lives. The story unfolds in arid villages and lush haciendas, against a backdrop of feudal aristocracy and a powerful Catholic church. First seen at a crossroads in a desolate landscape, Juan Preciado (Tenoch Huerta) sets out to keep a promise to reconnect with his estranged father Pedro Páramo (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo). In his journey Juan encounters others who have dealt with his father: criminals, priests, the deaf and blind, and above all, […]