Marriage Story depicts the love two people can find in separation. It is not a rekindling, it is stepping back to respect the boundaries you crossed in your strangling embrace. The original love hardens. It dies and returns as something like an actual reverence. At this distance, you might actually be able to see each other again. If the separating lovers in question, Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), can learn to walk away from each other with nothing more than that knowing glance—“I accept that we will not be together. It is sad, but you are great. I […]

With Alistair Banks Griffin’s recommended second feature, The Wolf Hour, containing one of Naomi Watts’s best performances, in theaters, we’re running again our interview with Griffin following the film’s Sundance premiere. — Editor “I can’t get out but I look out the attic window and watch the world go by. I feel like an outsider. I am on a different wave length then everybody else….” — David Berkowitz In one of the Sundance Film Festival’s real discoveries, Alistair Banks Griffins’s 1977-set The Wolf Hour, Naomi Watts plays June, a novelist and cultural critic existing somewhere in the intellectual shadow of […]

When the first trailer for Todd Haynes’s Dark Waters dropped, reactions were unprecedentedly tepid: what was this anonymous-looking crusading lawyer thriller? Was this really a recognizable Todd Haynes movie or, for the first time, a feature-length paycheck gig? From the get-go of the now-released film, Haynes and longtime DP Ed Lachman are certainly operating in their distinctive visual language, shooting, as with Carol, in Cincinnati, playing itself this time rather than period NYC. In the 1975-set prologue, a group of night skinny-dippers dive into local waters adjacent to a DuPont plant only to be chased off by company patrol. The camera bobs […]

A well-meaning regional film festival can be welcoming and tightly curated—a true community endeavor. A bad one can be a deceitful scam. Such was the case with the Narrowsburg International Independent Film Festival, founded in 2001 by a couple from nearby New York City.  Things didn’t start out so rocky. After a successful first year and an inaugural picture show in the books, the husband and wife wanted to expand upon the event (and the town’s exposure) by featuring its setting and community in a low-budget indie, Four Deadly Reasons, about the mafia invading the town. Its star? The festival’s […]

I was loitering around the ticket office of the Pingyao International Film Festival, waiting for the day to begin. This was the second morning of the festival and, like all international delegates, I was still adjusting to being in China. That adjustment is at least threefold: to the time zone, to the food and to the place. Already I had seen Jia Zhangke, festival founder and one of the greatest of all directors, mobbed by legions of fans. I had seen Zhao Tao standing tall and beautiful in the queue for the opening film, apparently invisible to those around her. […]