“Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too.” — Jim Harrison For anyone — show of hands now — locked in an all too familiar, selfsame cycle of recurrent dread, it’s no great mystery that cinema can (and maybe even should) offer familiar, welcome respite. Allowing a sense of escape while borders are closed, cinema’s palliative possibilities also remind us of our unsteady balance, as we strive to outlast whatever this current period is.  In this mode, patience is currency. Yet, confined to our spaces and neighborhoods, we are all prone to a sense of restlessness. In the course of […]

“What kind of future does tourism portend?” wonders a Cuban character rhetorically in Epicentro, the latest work of cinematic nonfiction from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Hubert Sauper (Darwin’s Nightmare, We Come as Friends). “None! It is only devouring the future,” the Havana man declares. Indeed, it devours the “past and the culture,” rendering everything “superficial.” But then comes the real multimillion-dollar question, “How much does cinema resemble tourism?”
 Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Documentary at this year’s Sundance, Epicentro — an allusion to the northern Caribbean island’s place at the epicenter of the Americas, both geographically and politically — is […]

The struggles of outer borough working class folks is nothing new to NYC-set dramas. But, in the outsider eyes and busy hands of director/writer/producer/editor/actress Isabel Sandoval, one of the newest auteurs of Filipino cinema—who makes her English-language debut in her adopted city with her third narrative feature Lingua Franca—classic tropes are updated to reflect our current intersectional reality. The Venice International Film Festival 2019-premiering movie follows live-in caregiver Olivia (Sandoval), who, in the course of looking after an elderly Russian resident of Brighton Beach (Lynn Cohen), becomes romantically entwined with the woman’s ne’er-do-well grandson Alex (Eamon Farren), who labors under […]

The bored and lonely housewife embarking on a life of erotic pleasure has been a porn-movie trope since at least the days of the 8mm-stag film. But the Belle de Jour-style protagonist is never an unhappy Australian mom who goes from planning suicide, to radically reclaiming agency by hiring a male escort, to soaring to international fame as an award-winning feminist pornographer. Until now. Meet Morgana Muses, the unlikely star of Josie Hess and Isabel Peppard’s Fantasia Film Festival-premiering documentary Morgana. Hess, a filmmaker and pornographer, and her co-director Peppard, who is also an animator and visual artist, began collaborating […]

In his final book, The Weird and the Eerie, critic and theorist Mark Fischer differentiates between “the weird” and the supernatural as it appears in both literature and film. For example, the supernatural world of vampires, writes Fischer, “… recombines elements from the natural world as we already understand it….” These supernatural stories are contrasted with fictions based around suggestions and byproducts of natural phenomena, such as black holes. “… The bizarre ways in which [a black hole] bends space and time are completely outside our common experience,” Fischer writes, “and yet a black hole belongs to the natural-material cosmos […]

In the mid-1990s, director Mimi Leder revolutionized network television with her kinetic, elaborately choreographed long takes on the medical series ER. A master of complicated blocking and the use of camera movement to plunge the audience into viscerally charged suspense, Leder also knew when to pull the visual pyrotechnics back and generate power through restraint. Leder’s command of the medium has only become more impressive in the 25 years since; her most recent feature, the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic On the Basis of Sex, is a master class in composition and color, and her work on the Apple+ series The […]

Fifteen years ago I was touring the regional horror film festival circuit with my first feature when I discovered the work of John C. Lyons, a filmmaker based in Erie, Pennsylvania whose short Hunting Camp was one of the more inventive and compelling movies I encountered that year. It was also one of the most interestingly photographed, by cinematographer Dorota Swies, who formed Lyons Den Productions with Lyons in 2004; the two of them have been working together ever since. Their latest collaboration and first feature together is the environmental horror movie Unearth, set to premiere on August 25 at this year’s virtual […]

While recent right-wing attacks on the free press here in the US have rightly been sounding alarm bells, in a global context they are merely wake-up calls. Sure, Trump deeming the “lamestream” media “fake news” is dangerously juvenile, but it’s also a far cry from, say, the Duterte administration finding the founder and CEO of the Philippines’s top online news site Rappler guilty of “cyber libel” — a travesty of justice that happened just this past June. And the politically orchestrated verdict comes with both a hefty fine and potential prison time for “2018 Time Person of the Year” Maria […]

The Ohio River Flood of 1937 killed 385 people and left a million more without a home. That same year, the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) drew redlining maps of Louisville to decline mortgage insurance and credit to the Black and immigrant communities hit hardest by the floods. In the “Clarifying Remarks” of one of the HOLC’s area assessments they sum up a “D” rated region: “This area, known as ‘Little Africa.’ No paved streets – low type of inhabitants.” Disinvestment still cripples the West Louisville community today. The “ninth street divide,” the demarcation between West Louisville and downtown, places […]

To call HBO’s The Swamp a thrilling character-based portrait of three conservative white guys might seem oxymoronic, but in the capable hands and open minds of co-directors Daniel DiMauro and Morgan Pehme (Get Me Roger Stone) it’s a completely apt description. The doc is an unexpected, up-close look at the daily D.C. lives of a trio of House members who few subscribers to HBO would ever conceive of voting for: far right-wingers Matt Gaetz (R-FL 1st District), Thomas Massie (R-KY 4th District), and Ken Buck (R-CO 4th District). In other words, it’s exactly the caricature-busting film that progressives (like myself) really need […]