As pre-production was ramping up on his first narrative feature, the pressure to find the perfect shooting location was weighing on Pete Ohs. While he and co-director Andrea Sisson eventually shot the film several hours outside LA — Everything Beautiful is Far Away stars Julia Garner and Joseph Cross, and was released by The Orchard in 2017 — Ohs theorized that knowing his shoot location before coming up with his next story idea would relieve some pressure from the narrative filmmaking process and, in turn, win back invaluable time for creative exploration.  The result is Youngstown, Ohs’ sophomore feature which […]

With three features and several shorts and episodes of television series under his belt, director Reinaldo Marcus Green’s filmmaking career has quickly accelerated since the premiere of his debut feature, Monsters and Men, at the 2018 edition of the Sundance Film Festival. After directing three episodes of the British Netflix series, Top Boy, and a second feature, Joe Bell (starring Mark Wahlberg), Green’s latest film is King Richard, the Compton-set true story of Richard Williams, his wife Oracene Price, and their five daughters, most notably future tennis icons Venus and Serena Williams. As parents who want the best for their […]

For 36 years documentarian Jon Alpert followed three friends—Rob Steffey, Freddie Rodriguez, and Deliris Vasquez—through a Newark underground of drugs and poverty. We see them getting into trouble with the law, undergoing prison and rehab and reintegrating into society.  Alpert, a recipient of DOC NYC’s Lifetime Achievement Award, gained remarkable access to a closed-off world. Filming under a variety of conditions and on several formats, he gives a first-person account of our failed war on drugs. It is an unbearably sad look at lives falling apart. Alpert also captures moments of success, of uplift, of reconciliation and forgiveness. The film […]

Bryan Wizemann’s You Mean Everything to Me is the first feature film I worked on as an A.C  in New York. Before principal photography, production sent me the script and the lookbook, which introduced me to the abusive relationship at the center of the film. Nathan (Ben Rosenfield) comes off affable and attractive enough on the surface, but is dangerously worn inside from lying to others and himself. Perpetuating his particularly gangrenous insecurity, he habitually coerces partners into his ring of control. Cassandra (Morgan Saylor) just happens to meet him while she’s down on her luck,and finds herself spiraling into […]

Mass confusion and panic infected much of the world at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic as the deadly virus spread from country to country at an uncontainable rate. As many governments put temporary lockdown and quarantine orders in place (in addition to urging hospitals to boost patient capacity), New York City found itself the epicenter of the pandemic, ambulances constantly roaring as they raced to prevent the next round of deceased patients stored in meat trucks and disposed of in mass graves on Hart Island. With some distance from that horrific spring of 2020, new variants and vaccine hesitancy […]

One of the final scenes of director Michael M. Bilandic’s fourth feature, Project Space 13, involves a delusional Manhattan gallerist wearing yellow knockoff Balenciaga sneakers and a ridiculous polka-dotted blazer at the shoreline of his beach house. He’s talking on the phone, via Airpods of course, to one of the two private security guards hired to protect the solo exhibition of an equally delusional artist named Nate in the midst of lockdown and protests. Throughout the night, every storefront on the downtown block has been looted except the eponymous white cube, where the artist and armed guards have been sitting […]

“So abundant were the apples, we left them on the ground to rot. We regret the rot, but not the abundance.” These lines close “Tortoise,” one of the “fables” collected in Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Cheerful Scapegoat, the most recent of the 21 books he’s published across the last three decades. His written output—which ranges the terrains of prose and poetry, fiction and criticism, theory, memoir, and styles not yet named, typically collapsing as many of these terms as possible in a given sentence (his métier)—would alone qualify as an abundance. That he has, in more recent years, supplemented this body […]

Red Rocket throws a curveball to viewers who think they know what to expect from a Sean Baker movie. There are surface commonalities connecting it to his previous works—docu-realistic stylings, detailed worldbuilding and the centering of marginalized communities. Yet, unlike his last three pictures Starlet, The Florida Project and Tangerine—which marinated in the humanity of, respectively, a young female porn star, transgender sex workers and a family living with invisible homelessness—the man under the magnifying-glass this time is an increasingly disturbing presence.  Washed-up adult movie star Mikey Saber (played with real verve by Simon Rex) is selfish to the point of […]

Filmmaker and CU Boulder Film Professor Skinner Myers is in the middle of writing the long proposal for his dissertation, which will offer “a way of fighting Hollywood from one’s own cultural perspective.” Breaking from First, Second, Third and Fourth cinemas (Hollywood, European Art House, Third World and Indigenous Cinemas, respectively), his “Antagonistic Cinema Theory” eschews a numbered designation. In his feature debut, The Sleeping Negro, which he wrote, directed, produced and starred in, Myers pays respect to the Third and Fourth Cinema filmmakers who laid a path for him to stride—his dissertation records his own footsteps along the way. […]

Sterlin Harjo is a longtime Sundance alum who’s directed two docs, three dramatic features and a slew of shorts. He’s also a founding member of Native American comedy quintet The 1491s, and his first comedy series (for FX and streaming on Hulu), the terrifically titled Reservation Dogs, boasts a team exclusively made up of Indigenous writers, directors and series regulars (including EP Taika Waititi who co-wrote the first episode). In other words, Harjo’s identity is solidly Native American (Muscogee Creek/Seminole) and solidly creative artist. Which may make Love and Fury the veteran director’s most personal film yet. (Not to mention his […]