Bertrand Bonello, cinephile filmmaker, is not one to conceal his references. On War, with Mathieu Amalric in the lead as a director called Bertrand, quotes from Apocalypse Now at length, House of Tolerance transplants Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai to belle époque Paris and Nocturama concocts a beautiful synthesis of Carpenter and Romero. Yet, as the disparity of these citations indicates, Bonello’s shapeshifting, consistently surprising cinema makes it difficult to pinpoint what might have been his formative influences. Had I been pressed to try, I wouldn’t have come up with Pasolini, so it was a surprise to discover that his […]

Nabbing this year’s top doc prize at Cannes (as well as at SXSW), For Sama is a harrowing, on-the-ground look at the disintegration of a society through one young woman’s eyes. That woman, Waad Al-Kateab, also happens to be the film’s co-director (along with Emmy Award-winning, BAFTA-nominated filmmaker Edward Watts). Incredibly, and courageously, as her beloved city of Aleppo came under attack by Syrian forces, Al-Kateab decided to pick up a camera and create a heartfelt record — or rather “love letter” — to her unborn daughter Sama. What she captured was not just the clear-eyed reality of losing friends […]

The narrative in which New Hollywood was wiped out by Jaws, Star Wars and the rise of the blockbuster that followed, paralleling the elections of Reagan and Thatcher in a retreat from the rebellions of the ‘60s and ‘70s, is a very familiar one. J. Hoberman has written a trilogy of books exploring the interwoven histories of the US and its cinema: The Dream Life: Movies, Media and the Mythology of the Sixties, Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War and now Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan. Drawing on his […]

In 2011 the small town of Potsdam, NY was rocked by an inexplicable atrocity: 12-year-old Garrett Phillips was discovered murdered in his home. The tragedy in turn launched a manhunt, which led to the ex-boyfriend — or rather, one of the ex-boyfriends — of Garrett’s mother Tandy Cyrus being arrested for the crime. Which only led to more questions as this man, Oral “Nick” Hillary, happened to be the beloved soccer coach at Clarkson University. And also one of the few black men in town. Liz Garbus’s Who Killed Garrett Phillips? painstakingly follows the twists and turns that unfolded over […]

The following interview of Errol Morris originally appeared in Filmmaker‘s Fall, 1998 issue. In 1988, Fred A. Leuchter, an engineer from Massachusetts who made a living designing more “humane” electric chairs, was hired by Ernst Zundel, the publisher of several pro-Hitler, Holocaust-denying tracts, to conduct a forensic investigation into the use of poison gas in Nazi concentration camps. On his honeymoon, Leuchter travelled to Auschwitz and, with his wife sitting in the car reading Agatha Christie novels, illegally chipped away at the brick, collecting mortar samples which he transported back to the States. Testing these samples for traces of cyanide […]

When HBO pulled the plug on Deadwood a dozen years ago, it left the denizens of the lawless South Dakota boomtown dangling at the end of a Season 3 cliffhanger. The show’s ostensible hero (marshal Seth Bullock, played by Timothy Olyphant) and villain (saloon owner Al Swearengen, played by Ian McShane) were left equally battered and bruised by a common enemy in ruthless mining magnate George Hearst. Imagine if the original Star Wars trilogy ended after The Empire Strikes Back and you’ll get a sense of the incompleteness that has haunted Deadwood fans over the years – myself included. HBO […]

“I’m not an editor… I’m not a director. I’m also not an actress.” But Cindy Silver is the mother, teacher, and compliant subject of her son, writer and director Nathan Silver (Stinking Heaven, Thirst Street), who asks his mother to act in nearly all of his films. In his new docuseries Cutting My Mother, playing Anthology Film Archives today beside Exit Elena (also featuring Cindy), he asks more of her than he ever has before. He asks her to direct her own film. [Silver’s short, Solo, plays at the Anthology as part of the program.] As a child, Nathan drew […]

In her first feature, I Shot Andy Warhol, Mary Harron remembered the craziness of the ‘60s. With her adaptation of novelist Bret Easton Ellis’ satirical gorefest, American Psycho, she coolly captured the money-driven insanity of the ’80s. From our print issue archives, and appearing online for the first time, is this Winter, 2000 cover story: Peter Bowen talks to Harron about social satire, interior design, and Leonardo. In 1991, Bret Easton Ellis’ satirical novel American Psycho caused a minor scandal. Readers and critics could not agree as to whether its icy portrayal of the young, handsome, successful Patrick Bateman, an uber-yuppie who divided […]

One of the most complicated (and epic, as it feels much larger than the sum of its two parts) documentaries I’ve seen in years, P.A. Carter’s Behind Closed Doors is this summer’s not-to-miss film for true crime devotees. Debuting on HBO July 16th and 17th, Carter’s meticulously-crafted picture begins with the double murder of 13-year-old Aarushi Talwar and her family’s servant Hemraj Banjade in the Talwars’s upper-middle-class home — a mystery that immediately unleashed a media circus in the staid Indian town of Noida. But it was the whiplash machinations surrounding the subsequent investigations and interrogations, trials and appeals, that […]

In the span of just two features, writer/director Ari Aster and cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski have forged a signature style that cloaks the heightened emotions of melodrama behind the veil of the horrific. In last year’s Hereditary, the Ordinary People-esque family tragedy unfolded in a haunted house, where a matriarch’s sense of being cursed manifested itself literally. In the new film Midsommar, the crumbling relationship between two American grad students plays out against the backdrop of an isolated Swedish community whose harvest festival isn’t quite as benign as it first appears. With Midsommar out now in wide release, Pogorzelski talked to […]