In his extraordinary portrait of American tennis champ John McEnroe, In the Realm of Perfection (2018), French filmmaker Julien Faraut engineered a hypnotizing meditation on the intersection between sports, performance and the creation of images—not at all the conventional retread of history one might expect from anything with the “sports movie” label. In his latest, The Witches of the Orient, Faraut returns to the arena of athletic competition in similarly idiosyncratic fashion, profiling the women of Japan’s most famous volleyball team. Made up of former textile workers, team “Nichibo Kaizuka” nabbed gold at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and inspired a […]

“This is neither an adaptation nor a work of fiction,” an intertitle informs the viewers after five minutes of uninterrupted observation of the rural landscape through the window of a passing train. “Only the quoted lines from The Good Person of Szechwan are supposed to be fictitious.” Sabrina Zhao’s directorial debut The Good Woman of Sichuan is upfront when it comes to disclosing its hybrid nature—between documentary and fiction, the film borrows the little plot there is from Bertolt Brecht’s play The Good Person of Szechwan. Or does it really? After the first disorienting encounter with the film’s seemingly disjointed […]

What began as a BTS feature for a home video release of The Blood on Satan’s Claw, a 1971 cult favorite about Satanic possession in a 17th century English village, premiered this week at the South by Southwest film festival as a three-hour opus on the allure and dread of folk-horror. “I started working on a half-hour bonus feature for Severin [Films] and it just kept getting really big,” says Kier-La Janisse, whose directorial debut Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched adds yet another hyphen to her endeavors as a film historian-memorist (The House of Psychotic Women), editor, curator and educator (she […]

Repeat business: It’s a hallmark in the long career of Dariusz Wolski. If the Polish-born cinematographer shoots one movie for you, there’s a decent chance he’ll be back for another. He’s lensed two movies for Tim Burton, Tony Scott and Alex Proyas; four alongside Gore Verbinski; and six for Ridley Scott. Yet it’s a new collaboration with director Paul Greengrass—and a new genre, the Western—that earned Wolski his first Academy Award nomination after more than 30 years shooting features. Wolski picked up the Oscar nod yesterday for News of the World, a post-Civil War tale of a traveling entertainer (Tom […]

The Dead Sea is one of the unknown casualties of the turbulent politics of the Middle East. Population growth since the founding of Israel has diverted much of its source water for human use. Mineral extraction companies have reduced it even further, and of course global warming is continually increasing temperatures and making the region more arid. Since the watershed basin is shared between Israel and Jordan it requires international cooperation to address, and though there have been attempts to do so they have not matched the challenge that the Sea is facing. The result is that the Sea shrinks […]

Fifty-year-old Joshua (Rogelio Balagtas) still lives in the ease of his parents’ home. He probably hasn’t dated anyone seriously in years — if ever. His mom still cooks for him and tends to his father, whose health is declining and needs help getting around. Joshua’s dependent lifestyle is untenable. When his mother very suddenly passes away and his father’s condition worsens, Joshua can hardly take care of himself, let alone his father. The days are lonely and even grimmer since his dad can’t seem to remember that his mom passed away. This is the initial set up of writer/director Martin […]

Karishma Dube’s Bittu begins with sound before image, a vague squabble over black before it drops you into the middle of a world in motion. The opening shot is not held long before cutting to the next. It is one among many, does not announce itself as the beginning, and is not so contrived and defined that you can remember exactly when the film began. Suddenly, the viewer’s immersed in a story that started well before they became a witness to it. The opening shot introduces the film’s namesake little girl, Bittu, as played by the phenomenal first time performer […]

(Click here to read part one of Gerima and Asili’s conversation.) Gerima: Since we’re talking about the realities of Black cinema: when you don’t have time or money, a lot of times rehearsal plays an important part. I wanted to ask you about your process with your actors before you got to the studio. Did you have time to rehearse? Asili: Not as much as I would’ve liked, but what we did have, that I would say was even better than rehearsals was, I had written about half of the script, but I had pretty elaborate backstories. So, when I went […]

When I revisited the classic tearjerker Love Story last month, I was struck by the intimate connection between the actors and the camera; at every given moment, Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw’s doomed young lovers seemed perfectly showcased for maximum emotional impact, every gesture and expression captured from the proper distance and in perfect proportion from shot to shot—undoubtedly one of the reasons the film was the most popular of its year (1970), whether audiences were conscious of the delicacy of the framing or not. What’s all the more impressive about Love Story’s camerawork is how off the cuff some […]

As I wrote last year in my 25 New Face profile of Ephraim Asili, his first feature, The Inheritance, begins when “Julian (Eric Lockley) moves into his late grandmother’s house and initiates an experiment in Black collective living. The influence of Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, evident in the film’s poster onscreen and the house’s boldly painted walls, is mixed with Asili’s personal memories of Philadelphia’s MOVE members (the Philadelphia native first met them as a teenager) and living in a Black Marxist collective. Shot, per Asili’s usual practice, on 16mm, The Inheritance marks a shift from overtly experimental to essentially narrative work. […]