Since her debut feature, My Sister’s Good Fortune (1995), Angela Schanelec has steadily established herself as one of the Europe’s most idiosyncratic filmmakers. Across nine features, Schanelec’s style has evolved but retained consistent qualities: stark, clean visuals and crisp editing combined with elusive narrative techniques that crescendo into unexpected moments of emotional catharsis. A subject of hardcore cinephile fandom since her 2019 feature I Was at Home, But…, Schanelec seems to be gaining broader acceptance. Still, the peculiarities of her approach can be off-putting for general audiences. I first encountered Schanelec’s work at the Locarno Film Festival, where I was […]
For a playwright, making their feature directorial debut comes with a certain degree of anticipatory hype, and the results are evaluated with a fine-toothed comb to make sure they aren’t too “wordy” or “stagey.” As with David Mamet’s House of Games, Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me, John Patrick Shanley’s Joe Versus the Volcano or Celine Song’s Past Lives, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker’s Janet Planet should put any fears to rest as to how the director would take to creating specifically for the screen. Not that there should have been any doubt: Her interests have long been steeped […]
Our Summer issue cover story, Between the Temples filmmaker Nathan Silver interviewed by novelist Jonathan Lethem, is being brought out from our paywall today as the film arrives in theaters from Sony Pictures Classics. — Editor In Between the Temples, Jason Schwartzman, looking suddenly on the verge of middle age, and with a disconcerting new depth to his eyes, plays a cantor unable to find his singing voice. “The cantor who can’t” might be the hook for any number of lively (or annoying) comedies set in a synagogue, but Nathan Silver has delivered not only the version I’d actually want, […]
The organizing principles of portmanteau films are often quite simplistic. A group of directors tackling a particular genre, for example, or films united by geography. An example of the latter is the straightforwardly-titled New York Stories, of which only Martin Scorsese’s “Life Lessons” is remembered much these days. Jim Jarmusch has made a few united around theme and setting — Coffee and Cigarettes, where famous actors sit down over a brew and a smoke; Night on Earth, where famous actors take cab rides in production-friendly cities around the world; and Mystery Train, where the stories are linked by a setting […]
It’s somewhat apt to say that Osgood Perkins owes much of his cinematic success to Satan. His 2015 debut as a writer-director, The Blackcoat’s Daughter, explores the sinister presence of the occult at a Catholic boarding school in Upstate New York. He leaned into a gothic ghost story for his 2016 follow-up, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, eschewing devil worship for a clear nod to novelist Shirley Jackson. Longlegs, his third effort as sole writer and director, veers staunchly back toward Satanism, this time revolving around a series of murders committed by the eponymous killer. […]
Leo, a 20-something aspiring actor, is navigating a creative crisis in Summer Solstice, the feature debut from writer-director Noah Schamus. More aptly, Leo (Bobbi Salvör Menuez) is frustrated with the reductive and trite roles he is constantly up for, compounded by the reality that these seem to be the only gigs available to him as a trans actor. It appears that much-needed distraction arrives when Elenor (Marianne Rendón), his best friend from college, pays a visit to his NYC apartment on her way upstate for a house-sitting job. After convincing Leo to join her, the duo drive to the Hudson […]
Back in January, Sundance 2024 couldn’t have started on a stronger note for those of us who have kicked it off with Alex Thompson and Kelly O’Sullivan’s Ghostlight, a gentle tearjerker and a surprisingly tender comedy, marking the duo’s follow-up to their 2019 feature, Saint Frances. A film on the healing properties of a community of artists and a love letter to the joys of scrappy artmaking, Ghostlight set the right tone from the start for the indie festival with a story about grief, familial bonds and the therapeutic beauty of the artistic process. Written by O’Sullivan and co-directed by […]
“What lives outside of the frames of this camera and your own eyes?” is the question the poet/comedian/actor/public speaker Alok Vaid-Menon challenges the viewer to ponder at the very start of Alex Hedison’s Sundance-premiering short Alok. Currently on the Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour, and premiering at IFC Center on June 14th (with both the nonbinary star and Hedison, who also happens to be married to her EP Jodie Foster, in attendance), the doc is based on footage Hedison shot during the performer’s recent international tour and is supplemented with highly stylized interviews with the spiritually enlightened artist and […]
From Elizabeth Nichols’s Flying Lessons, to Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s Union, to now Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg’s Emergent City (likewise EP’d by Stephen Maing), corporate takeovers of NYC and the inherent Gotham vs. Goliath battles they spawn seem to be in the documentary air this year. And while Flying Lessons and Union clearly cast entities like corrupt Croman Real Estate and anti-labor Amazon as the respective baddies, Emergent City is surprisingly not much interested in blaming Jamestown Properties, the conglomerate behind Industry City, the largest privately owned industrial property in New York, for the rapid gentrification of […]
Vulcanizadora, the latest film from Grand Rapids-based guerilla filmmaker Joel Potrykus, is predicated on a conceit that’s faithful to his overarching artistic interests. Two volatile buddies (Potrykus muse Joshua Burge and Potrykus himself) embark on an extended hike to a remote beach, where they plan to execute a plan fit for a Faces of Deathsequel (indeed, the film’s newly-released poster even emphasizes this parallel). While the complicated lives they’ve seemingly fled—a pending jail sentence and the crushing weight of having lost child custody—suggest warranted comeuppance, the men nevertheless retreat into childishness. They set off snake fireworks, gorge themselves on convenience […]