Because the wheels of the movie machine turn slowly, timeliness is not among cinema’s primary virtues. Thus when a movie reflects an aspect of the cultural zeitgeist, it’s either an act of Nostradamian foresight or sheer luck. I don’t know which is the case with 10 Cloverfield Lane, but there’s something about this tense three-hander—which finds a paranoid middle aged white man (John Goodman) fighting to preserve his notion of American ideals inside a bomb shelter alongside a young woman (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) who refuses to accept his envisioned role—that feels right at home in a world where a President […]
Lily Baldwin is a New York-based filmmaker and dancer who uses movement of the body and unconventional narrative structures to tell human stories. Her short films (Sea Meadow, A Juicebox Afternoon, Sleepover LA, and Swallowed) have played at festivals like SXSW, Berlinale EFM, and the Lincoln Center and been featured on NOWNESS, Short of the Week, Fandor, Filmmaker and Vimeo Staff Picks. Baldwin fell into filmmaking when she was performing as a professional dancer in David Byrne’s two-year world tour, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. Baldwin often writes, choreographs, directs, edits and plays the leading role in her films, […]
A New England folktale envisioned by production designer turned director Robert Eggers has become a critical and box office darling. As striking as The Witch‘s imagery of a 17th century Puritan family exiled to live beside an ominous forest is, it is made even more haunting when combined with the score conceived by Toronto-based composer Mark Korven (Cube). Filmmaker: You must be pleased with the critical and box office reaction to The Witch. Korven: Both have been amazing. I certainly didn’t expect for the movie to go this far. When I started working on it I thought that a lot of people weren’t going […]
“When I’m out there, physically I’m not more gifted than anybody else. It’s just this desire. This hunger,” intones Ben Foster as Lance Armstrong in the opening narration of The Program. “My mom didn’t raise a quitter and I would never quit. That’s heart, man, that’s not physical. It’s not legs. It’s not lungs. That’s heart. That’s soul. That’s just guts.” That’s the great fallacy of the American underdog sports drama — if you have enough heart and enough guts, you can succeed. It’s the underlying myth of Rocky and even based-on-fact tales of athletic fortitude such as Hoosiers and […]
It was 1973 and Peter Medak was a hot director on the rise. Following the success of The Ruling Class, which had earned Peter O’Toole an Academy Award nomination the previous year, United Artists offered him Death Wish. But when the studio insisted on casting Charles Bronson instead of Medak’s pick, Henry Fonda, Medak passed on the project. Back in London, Medak ran into his friend Peter Sellers, who asked him to direct his next film, Ghost in The Noonday Sun, which was set to be filmed on the island of Cyprus. Somehow the idea of filming a 17th-century pirate comedy aboard real ships on […]
A video gaming experience therapeutic for both players and its grief-stricken creator, That Dragon, Cancer can currently be purchased for use on your Mac/PC and other devices. Created by Colorado-based developer Ryan Green, the independent video game serves as a reflection of a tragedy he and his family recently experienced: the death of Green’s young son, Joel, who passed away after a sustained battle with cancer. Working on the project as Joel was receiving treatment, Ryan and his family incorporated very real moments of personal history into That Dragon, Cancer, even going as far as to sample Joel and his family’s actual voices […]
Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation achieves the kind of cinematic alchemy one finds in Blood Simple or the best of Hitchcock, where genre meets philosophy and character to yield something both razor-sharp in its clarity and infinitely complex in its provocations. The script by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi follows a group of friends over the course of one night when they reunite after a tragedy that has affected all of their lives. The intentions of the hostess, Eden (Tammy Blanchard), are mysterious and only grow increasingly troubling as the night progresses, at least as far as her ex-husband Will (Logan […]
One of the busiest filmmakers at this year’s SXSW, documentary filmmaker Keith Maitland has two films premiering at the festival, both with roots firmly in Texas. A Song For You: The Austin City Limits Story is a loving look back at the PBS program that featured some of the music industry’s most iconic talent like Ray Charles, Willie Nelson, and Stevie Ray Vaughn. Tower, a partially animated documentary that incorporates archival footage and first-person testimonials, reconstructs the University of Texas campus shooting that took the lives of sixteen people in the summer of 1966. The Grand Jury winner for Documentary Feature, Tower has been praised for […]
An acclaimed short that developed into the filmmaker’s first feature, Donald Cried, a buddy comedy set in director Kris Avedisian’s home state of Rhode Island, had its world premiere last weekend in the Narrative Feature Competition section of SXSW. Jesse Wakeman and Avedisian (as the title character) reprise their leading roles as the odd couple pairing, friends reunited in their hometown thanks to the death of a grandmother. Taking John Hughes’ Planes, Trains & Automobiles as its road trip, structural inspiration, the film finds the two men sharing a van as tensions from their past arise. Donald Cried will next screen in the Film Society of […]
In his directorial debut Teenage Cocktail, director John Carchietta examines the plight of best friends Annie (Nichole Bloom) and Jules (Fabianne Therese), who just want to get out of their small town and move to California. Nothing is off the table, including webcam modeling, which places the adventurous young women in danger. In advance of the film’s premiere at SXSW, DP Justin Kane talked about his work on the project, going deep into the technical aspects. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being […]