In horror movies, kids are often exempt from the carnage. It’s a trope of the genre—the cute moppet that any experienced horror viewer knows is in absolutely no peril within the confines of the film. Andy Muschietti’s adaptation of It opens with a grade-schooler in a yellow rain slicker having his arm torn off by a sewer dwelling clown—a creature who then drags the child into the underground bowels of Derry, Maine. The film’s brutal ground rules are immediately established – anyone is fair game and no appendage is safe. “I am very conscious watching any film where the main cast […]
Paul Schrader returns to form with a deeply introspective film, First Reformed, which, following screenings in Venice, Telluride and Toronto, screens tonight at the New York Film Festival, where it was a late addition to the program. The writer of films including Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and director of films including American Gigolo and Affliction delivers a new work that both contains echoes of his previous pictures depicting “God’s Lonely Men” while also being quite unlike anything he’s ever done. (Plus, argues Vadim Rizov, something of a treatise on the role of Slow Cinema today.) Ethan Hawke stars as a former […]
One of the most underrated films by one of America’s most underrated filmmakers just arrived on Blu-ray in the form of Warner Archive’s 25th-anniversary release of John Landis’ Innocent Blood. To call Landis underrated might seem perverse given that he’s directed some of the most successful and enduring movies of the late 1970s and early 1980s – National Lampoon’s Animal House, The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London, Trading Places, Coming to America – but I still think his body of work has never quite gotten its critical due in this country, partly because his movies are so damn […]
Mia Lidofsky is the creator and executive producer of Strangers, a strikingly profound seven-episode series now in its first season on an intriguing new platform, Facebook Watch. Lidofsky is a former assistant to her series executive producer Jesse Peretz (director of The Chateau and My Idiot Brother and a producer on Girls), and an associate producer of People Places Things and Tig. In 2015, Lidofsky was selected for the AFI Conservatory Directing Workshop for Women, where she created the series pilot. The director and co-director of several episodes of the first season (along with partner/filmmaker Celia Rowlson-Hall, a 25 New […]
As the end credits rolled after my screening of Trey Edward Shults’s It Comes at Night, a perturbed woman behind me angrily groused, “This is bullshit. WHAT comes at night?” In her defense, the mesmerizing trailer for the film from A24 certainly leads you to believe something is in fact coming at night — a concrete something, not a metaphoric something. But no horrific, plague-mutated creatures ever arrive at the red door that separates the apocalyptic outside world from the isolated home of Paul (Joel Edgerton) and his family (wife Carmen Ejogo and son Kelvin Harrison Jr.). What does come […]
Recy Taylor walked home from church on a warm September night. A 24-year-old black woman in Abbeville, Alabama, a sharecropper and mother, Recy was the most religious member of her family and regularly went to church by herself. A full house awaited her at home: her siblings, her father, her husband, and her daughter Joyce. The year was 1944. On her way home, a group of seven white boys abducted Recy and forced her into the nearby woods. The young men gang-raped her at gunpoint. One month later, an all-white, all-male jury refused to indict any of these men. The […]
Nathan Silver has made eight films in eight years. That doesn’t include other shorts he’s written or executive produced. For anyone not in the business of film, that might seem standard. For anyone who is, it’s wildly impressive, especially taking into consideration the inclusion of pre-production time, when a script is written, money is raised and all the frustrating puzzle pieces of building a team have to fall into place. Silver’s latest film, Thirst Street, centers on Gina (Lindsay Burdge), an American flight attendant who becomes entwined in a toxic obsession. After landing in Paris, she falls for Jerome (Damien […]
“I think we have this profound misrepresentation around personal films being small,” said Cecilia Aldarondo, one of three filmmakers of personal docs who spoke at IFP Week 2017. The panel was called “When the Personal Gets Political and the Political Gets Personal.” In the case of all three filmmakers’ films, they’re both. “I’ve gotten so many responses from potential funders of people who think that way. They hear ‘personal’ and they hear ‘small.’ They think it won’t have an audience. With these projects, I think we’ve demonstrated that’s not the case. If we’re dealing with questions of social change and […]
David Gordon Green finds it difficult to focus on one type of project at any given time, and as a result, frustrates his agents in working out how to market him. But the Arkansas-born, South Carolina-based writer/ director, whose diverse filmography includes early aughts independent standouts like All The Real Girls and George Washington as well as mainstream hits like Pineapple Express, is okay with that — so long as he is aggressively working on projects that he is both passionate about and that challenge him. Opening today in theaters is his modestly-budgeted drama Stronger, which depicts the true story […]
If there’s a common thread that runs through any truly original work, it’s this: The creators saw something that wasn’t in the world, so they created it themselves. You hear that a lot in independent films. You also hear it, increasingly, in TV now too. The lines separating cinema and television are getting blurrier. For further proof, witness Julie Klausner’s appearance at IFP Week 2017. Klausner is the creator of Difficult People, which is not a movie but a hit TV show on Hulu. But the way she approached her TV show sounds a lot the way indie filmmakers talk […]