Susan Skoog’s underappreciated teen drama Whatever opens on a moonlit image of two lovers on a field of grass, he on top of her, in what appears to be flagrante delicto — but which is revealed shortly after to be a train run on an unsuspecting teenage girl. Disenchantment is the bedrock of Skoog’s unsparing debut, released by Sony Pictures Classics in 1998 but taking place in the early ’80s. Liza Weil — most famous as Paris Geller on Gilmore Girls — stars as Anna, a 17-year-old who loves listening to Chrissie Hynde, smoking Newports, partying and painting. She dreams […]

Alice (Madeline Brewer), the star of Cam, sustains herself as a full-time webcam model at the top of the “FreeGirls.Live” leaderboards. She aspires to break Top 50, but to do so she’ll have to descend deeper into her on-screen persona and farther from her off-screen principles. The system of rewards in this cyber cranny conditions her to betray her standards; the more Alice caters to her audience’s desires the more her fan base grows and the bigger her tips get. When she’s pushed to go beyond her comfort zone, a digital doppelganger of Alice, named Lola, manifests and assumes control […]

The Blessing, the latest from the Emmy Award-winning team of Hunter Robert Baker and Jordan Fein, is the story of a Navajo coal miner and single dad as well as his teenage daughter, who navigate life on their reservation in northern Arizona. Other than Erick Stoll and Chase Whiteside’s stealthy stunner América, I can’t think of another documentary I’ve seen this year in which the simplest of premises yields such an emotional powder keg. The film’s a nearly Shakespearean drama, one in which a deeply religious father is forced to choose between sacrilege (taking part in the destruction of his […]

Laura Green and Anna Moot-Levin’s IFP-supported The Providers is a film I regrettably left off my must-see list at Full Frame, most likely because a doc that follows a doctor, a nurse practitioner and a physician assistant serving rural communities abandoned by our traditional (and traditionally broken) healthcare system sounded like something that might put this liberal urbanite to sleep. But in one of those lucky film fest coincidences, I ended up chatting with the doc’s co-director Laura Green on the ride back to the Raleigh-Durham airport, and mentioned I was returning to Santa Fe. Which is both a drive away […]

If you spent the 2016 election season trying to wrap your head around the surreal circus that passed for political campaigning, just imagine actually participating in it while studying for exams. Such was the situation for the students of Townsend Harris High School in Queens, which since 1996 has included in its curriculum an as-close-to-real-life-as-possible Election Simulation. Fortunately, filmmakers Alexandra Stergiou and Lexi Henigman were there to capture it all. On one side is Russian-American Daniel, aka Trump, trying to focus on making America great again instead of grabbing women by the pussy. On the other, there’s Pakistani-American Misbah, aka […]

With riveting performances in films such as Hell or High Water, The Messenger and 3:10 to Yuma, Ben Foster established himself as an intensely serious actor who goes all-in for a role. With this year’s Leave No Trace, Foster takes that same intensity and brilliantly turns it inward, portraying a laconic veteran who suffers from PTSD and survives in the woods of Oregon with his teenage daughter, played by Thomasin McKenzie. Foster talks about working with McKensie to establish the connection they needed, why he took performance enhancing drugs to play Lance Armstrong, and the “emotional erectile disfunction” of over-directing. […]

With Shevaun Mizrahi’s documentary Distant Constellation opening at NYC’s Metrograph today from Grasshopper Film, we’re unlocking from our print issue this feature with the director. It’s not news that nonfiction editing can be an attenuated process. Still, with footage so fully formed, I didn’t expect that Mizrahi would keep returning to Istanbul for three more years, logging more hours on the way to showing a nearly-locked cut at 2017’s True/False Film Festival, with her world premiere following later that year at Locarno. The additional time she took turned out to be crucial for capturing two additional strands that give the […]

In his book Making Movies, Sidney Lumet wrote that he once asked fellow director Akira Kurosawa why he’d framed a shot in his period epic Ran in a particular way. Kurosawa replied that if he’d panned the camera an inch to the left he would’ve seen a Sony factory. Panning an inch to the right would’ve revealed an airport. I don’t know if Halloween cinematographer Michael Simmonds has read Lumet’s book, but after chatting with him I’m confident he would appreciate that anecdote. Simmonds, whose diverse credits range from the horror sequel Paranormal Activity 2 to the acclaimed documentary Project […]

Elsie Fisher was not just some 13-year-old Bo Burnham plucked from Middle America to star in his debut feature Eighth Grade. She has been a working child actor in Hollywood since infancy. She did, however, just finish eighth grade in public school when filming began, and she managed to create a performance so vulnerable and true that the seams of the acting craft are invisible. In this half-hour, I attempt to get Fisher and Burnham to open up about the origins of this movie and how this young lady carried it so successfully that it just might be the performance […]

In 1989, Al Pacino returned to the screen after a four-year hiatus to appear in Sea of Love, a thriller that reinstated him as a major star and cemented novelist Richard Price’s status as one of the great American screenwriters of his era. Price’s script, which follows a detective (Pacino) who falls in love with a suspect (Ellen Barkin) in a string of murders of men placing personal ads, has a rock solid construction that allows for a multitude of tonal shifts and digressions, all of which are orchestrated to perfection by the film’s director, Harold Becker. In Becker’s hands, […]