Michael Almereyda has two films this year, the curiously rhyming duo of Marjorie Prime and Escapes. The former, as I wrote from Sundance, is “a heavily modified adaptation of Jordan Harrison’s play, customized to fit the ever-adventurous Almereyda’s tastes and frames of reference. The premise is both simple and tricky: in the future, your deceased loved ones can be brought back as holograms for company. Marjorie (Lois Smith), aging and losing her memory, has her late husband Walter (Jon Hamm), eternally in his 40s, for company, a development which makes her daughter Tess (Geena Davis) a little nervous. From this low-key sci-fi […]
In 2015, the year this story begins, Sharon Van Etten had never scored a film. She’d also never heard the name Katherine Dieckmann. Van Etten had just released I Don’t Want to Let You Down, the follow-up EP to her exquisite 2014 album Are We There. Van Etten’s music does things to people, and it did a number on Dieckmann, a former music video director for Aimee Mann, R.E.M., and Wilco. Enchanted by her songs of muted melancholy, Dieckmann became convinced that Van Etten had to score her latest feature, a road movie set in the American South. The two […]
You wouldn’t typically catch me recommending a movie on the basis of its crowd-pleasingness or heart-warmingness, dead or alive. But we’re living in warped times, and it’s a travesty that Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel’s crowd-pleasing, heart-warming not-quite-documentary feature Mister Universo — which I caught by happenstance at last year’s Festival International du Film de Marrakech — didn’t have the good fortune of securing a US distribution deal after playing festivals around the world last year. The movie stars Tairo Caroli, a 19-year-old lion tamer from a real-life traveling circus in Italy, as himself. Among his few prized possessions is an […]
Recently receiving its online premiere after months of plaudits on the genre festival circuit, Will Blank’s Limbo is a beautifully executed fantasy short concluding with an unexpected philosophical gut punch. Adapted from Marian Churchland’s graphic short story, the set up is simple — a man coping with the detritus of a failing relationship heads to the desert, where he comes across a dying dog able to grant him one wish. The starkness of the environment and the pathos of the situation — nobly conveyed by Sam Elliott, who voices the (skillfully animatronic) dog — elevates this simple story into something […]
I have to admit I can no longer distinguish 35mm film from high end digital cameras when I go to the movies. I can spot 16mm or anamorphic lenses, but the line between digital and 35mm celluloid has become impossibly blurred. Wonder Woman cinematographer Matthew Jensen can still spot the subtleties, but for Jensen the aesthetics of film are only one of the reasons he enjoys working in that format. “It’s very hard to tell the difference, especially when you’ve gone through a DI (digital intermediate) process and you’re projecting digitally. We have some shots that are digital in Wonder […]
This year at the Cannes Film Festival, Christopher Doyle became the most recent cinematographer to be graced with the Pierre Angenieux ExcelLens In Cinematography Award, a prize given for a DP’s impact on the history of world cinema. Sponsored by the renowned lens maker, this year’s “trophy” was an Angénieux Optimo 15-40 zoom lens specially engraved with Doyle’s name. Born in Sydney in 1952, Doyle left his homeland as a teenager to begin an odyssey in Asia, where he has predominantly worked. He had a number of jobs — from oil drilling to cow herding — before his photographs caught […]
An iconic figure of brute force, wholesome values and exaggerated patriotism, the red-and-yellow bandana-wearing Hulk Hogan was a pop culture phenomenon throughout the’80s professional wrestling boom. The face of the World Wrestling Federation under Vince McMahon, Hogan (real name: Terry Bollea) was a childhood hero for many children of a certain age, bodyslamming giants and providing leg-drops to bad guys who threatened to disrupt the concept of a wholesome America. Things have changed. Hogan left the company several times over rampant steroid abuse scandals and larger paydays for other promotions, but he always returned for one final run to pay […]
This interview with João Pedro Rodrigues was originally conducted in 2016 when his new feature, The Ornithologist, premiered at the Locarno Film Festival. We’re reposting today on the occasion of the film’s U.S. release via Strand Releasing. The Ornithologist opens today in New York at the IFC Center and the Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center. The last few years have been truly a whirlwind period for Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues, with career retrospectives in the US and Japan, filmmaker residencies at France’s prestigious Le Fresnoy and at the Harvard Film Archive, and even a competition slot at Locarno for […]
Michael Showalter was a known quantity in the comedy world before he gave feature directing a shot in 2005 with the unassuming indie The Baxter. He started out in the early 90s on MTV’s sketch show The State, which spawned the careers of many talents with whom Showalter has continued to collaborate on shows like Stella and films like They Came Together and Wet Hot American Summer (which stars Showalter and has led to two Netflix follow-up series). Much of this work, as well as Showalter’s excursive, vaguely non-committal standup, is characterized by a warm disdain for the form. In […]
2016 might have been the year when the dire position of women film directors finally broke into wider consciousness. After a monumental effort, spearheaded by Maria Giese, the ACLU and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) agreed to hold major film studios, TV networks, unions and agencies to account, citing Title VII violations in all perimeters. 2016 was also the year the Cannes International Film Festival proudly announced that they showcased “only” 86% male directors — down from their average of 93%. Yet even as dismal statistics prove women are severely discriminated against at every level of film production and […]