In light of SXSW’s cancellation, a private “homespun” screening of the only local production in the festival’s narrative line up, Caleb Johnson’s The Carnivores, was arranged at its cinematographer’s (Adam J. Minnick) Austin residence on the night it was scheduled to premiere. The event hoped to encapsulate the spirit of the festival all at once. Upon entrance, invited press, programmers and audience got their photo taken on a polaroid against a classic yellow backdrop and laurels. That polaroid fit snug inside an imitation festival badge. After attendees stuffed themselves with Tacodeli they dragged over the red carpet to their seats […]
Premiering in the DOX:AWARD main competition at this year’s (now digital) CPH:DOX, Ecstasy (Êxtase) is the astonishing debut of Brazilian filmmaker Moara Passoni, a longtime collaborator of The Edge of Democracy Oscar nominee Petra Costa (who serves as the doc’s producer). It’s a mix of fiction and nonfiction, of historical images and staged scenes, of autobiographical diary entries obsessively developing a “geometry of hunger” even as political chaos grips ’90s Brazil (and it’s all tied together by a stunning soundtrack, including music by David Lynch and Lykke Li). It’s also a startlingly unusual coming-of-age story, one in which the director […]
The information landscape has transformed with vertigo-inducing speed since 2011, when Andrew Rossi last looked under the hood of the (reality-based) news business in Page One: Inside the New York Times. And now that Edward R. Murrow is rolling in his grave (and Geraldo Rivera is most likely looking for ways to monetize that), it makes sense that Rossi would be the filmmaker to tackle today’s crisis of media faith with his latest HBO doc, After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News. Executive produced by CNN’s Brian Stelter, the film takes a deep dive into the post-truth world that […]
In 2016, filmmaker Frank Beauvais was rudderless, living in a remote village in the French countryside without a driver’s license and riding out the wake of a breakup in rural isolation. Over the course of a few difficult months, he watched more than 400 movies at home, a torrential—and torrented—flood of film that both sustained and corroded him. Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream is a portrait of that time told through silent excerpts from Beauvais’s cinematic compendium. The films wildly span genre, nationality and time period, and are paired with a spoken first-person memoir narration track from Beauvais. The pairings […]
On October 30, 2015, at the Bucharest venue Colectiv, metalcore headliner Goodbye to Gravity bellowed lyrics denouncing widespread Romanian corruption, inadvertently foreshadowing what happened next. Fireworks were released, the highly combustible club went up in flames and people stampeded for the only, half-closed exit—Colectiv had received an operating license without also obtaining a permit from the fire department. Responsibility lay in part with the mayor of Section 4, the administrative district governing Bucharest, and protesters quickly called for his resignation, as well as that of the prime minister and minister. Inspections of more than 1,000 venues resulted in excess of […]
First Cow marks the fifth film in 14 years on which director Kelly Reichardt has collaborated with screenwriter–novelist Jon Raymond. I can’t think of a director–writer team in America that has produced so much superior work during this time period—Reichardt is one of the talents on whom hope for the creative possibilities of American filmmaking now rests. Like Reichardt and Raymond’s first partnership, the critically lauded, microbudgeted Old Joy (2005), First Cow is a lyrical tragicomic story of male friendship, emerging against the background of the almost intoxicating beauty of the Oregon woods. But this time, Reichardt’s telling a more […]
“It’s so important for me to be thinking about a movie all the time,” says writer-director Eliza Hittman, reflecting on her creative process. “I don’t spend so much time sitting at a computer. I want to walk around, be in locations, spend my Saturday on a handball court or in a park or in Port Authority and respond to the environment.” Evidenced by the authenticity and truthful immediacy—laced with deeply neorealist touches—of her films, there must be something to this observational method of writing the burgeoning American auteur calls “experiential.” It births a singular high-stakes quality that guides It Felt […]
Director Andrew Patterson’s film The Vast of Night, which premiered to great acclaim at the 2019 Slamdance Film Festival, is informed by many genres and influences but beholden to none of them. Part Twilight Zone–esque sci-fi tale, part young adult romance, part David Fincher–inspired suspense movie with a dash of The Last Picture Show’s small town poetry, it is most of all a haunting and startling debut feature that teaches the audience how to watch it as it progresses—which means it not only rewards but demands repeat viewings. Set over the course of one night in 1950s New Mexico, The […]
While release dates are often determined months in advance for a slew of reasons solely related to a film’s individual success, it’s striking to see how some can be placed in indirect conversation with one another. I recently revisited Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s debut feature Swallow just a few days after taking in Leigh Whannell’s feminist blockbuster adaptation of The Invisible Man. Both are about women in emotionally abusive relationships that have grown increasingly difficult to break free from. To complicate matters, each are pregnant with their lover’s child, and that the pregnancy is carried out to term is of utmost importance to […]
Bacurau is the name of an angry night bird that exists in many different parts of Brazil, but that is only called bacurau in the Brazilian Northeast. Bacurau, the latest film by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles—which gets a US release this weekend—uses the motif of the night bird to tell the story of a small village in the Brazilian Northeast that is facing imminent erasure, targeted by international hunting tourists that have teamed up with domestic predators. The film reprocesses motifs from Hollywood genre movies and Italian westerns in the landscape of the sertão, the drylands of formal […]