Catherine Hardwicke’s razor-sharp blend of comedy and tragedy, Miss You Already, arrives on Blu-ray, DVD, and a variety of VOD platforms March 1. The story of best friends (played by Drew Barrymore and Toni Collette) struggling to deal with the fact that one of them has terminal cancer, it’s a film that walks a tonal tightrope: silly, devastating, sexy, angering, and bittersweet, the movie’s diverse range of effects is a testament to Hardwicke, her actors, and an ambitious script by Morwenna Banks. Pulling all of the elements together is editor Phillip J. Bartell, whose superb work on 2014’s Dear White […]
Few festivals do a better job of rounding up the year’s most enticing documentaries than the always charming Savannah Film Festival. During its 18th edition last fall, the festival — largely curated by publicist Steven Wilson and entertainment reporter Scott Feinberg on behalf of the Savannah College of Art and Design — brought many of the leading lights in documentary filmmaking to the northeastern corner of Georgia for its second annual “Docs to Watch” sidebar. The culmination of the program is a panel, moderated by Feinberg, that includes a smorgasbord of directors whose movies will figure prominently in the award season races to […]
Striving to become a professional actress is a lifestyle choice accompanied by feelings of extreme competitiveness and inadequacy. Each waking hour is a moment you could be attempting to improve your craft or desperately trying to secure more work. As endless auditions make way to too few callbacks, you may begin to reconsider the professional hell you’ve chosen for yourself, being judged as much for your skills as for your facial features and body type. It’s enough to make anyone grow a little bitter. Diamond Tongues, a dark Canadian comedy that premiered at last year’s Slamdance Film Festival, finds its […]
J. Todd Anderson likes to say that he’s the first person to see a new Coen brothers movie. As the Coens’ storyboard artist, Anderson is the conduit between the film in Joel and Ethan’s imagination and its first physical manifestation. “My job is to put down on paper what they see in their heads,” Anderson says. “I’m just an interpretive artist. Joel and Ethan come up with the shots. I just draw them.” Anderson has been “just drawing them” for every Coen brothers feature since 1987’s Raising Arizona. The Coens’ latest, Hail, Caesar!, follows a ’50s Hollywood fixer (Josh Brolin) as […]
“Are you the new festival director?” asks a woman after briefly interrupting our interview. She approached us to ask for directions to a screening room in de Doelen, the central hub of Rotterdam International Film Festival (IFFR). In his native Dutch, Bero Beyer provides what seems to be an elaborate route, but the woman is satisfied. “It’s a great one,” he tells her in English after learning the title she’s off to watch. All at once, the woman realizes who she’s talking to but asks for confirmation anyway. “It’s so nice to meet you, sir,” she blushes, rushing off to […]
Director Jon Cassar breathes new life into the Western genre while honoring its traditions in Forsaken, a beautiful, haunting piece of work that will be released day and date on February 19. In a story reminiscent of Shane and Pale Rider, Kiefer Sutherland plays John Henry Clayton, a reformed gunslinger drawn back into action when he returns to his hometown and finds it under siege by an unscrupulous land grabber (Brian Cox). While sparring with Cox’s hired guns (led by Michael Wincott in a rich, thrillingly entertaining performance), Clayton also reconnects with an old love who has moved on (Demi […]
Ciro Guerra’s third feature Embrace of the Serpent is bracing for the novelty of its setting alone: a feature hasn’t been made in the Colombian Amazon region for 30something years. Without leaning solely on novelty value or simplistic exoticism, Embrace tells two stories. One, set in the early 20th century, is of Theodor Koch-Grunberg (Bivjoet), a real German ethnologist/explorer; at the story’s outset, he’s gravely ill and needs the help of solitary warrior Karamakate (Nilbio Torres) to find a rare plant that can cure him. Another story, some 40 or 50 years later, finds older Karamakate (Antonio Bolívar) guiding Richard Evans Schultes (Brionne Davis), another […]
In Part I, David Simpson, author of the bestselling sci-fi novel series Post-Human, talked about how he became first an author and then a filmmaker by creating a short promotional piece for his series. The resulting video represents what Simpson thinks the opening sequence of a Post-Human film might look like. He accomplished this with virtually no experience, a tiny crew and a location that cost a third of his budget. In this Part II he talks about the equipment he used, and how he planned and executed the production. Filmmaker: How did you plan out what you were going […]
Ed Lachman has been the director of photography on a long list of visually stunning movies. He has worked repeatedly with director Todd Haynes. This year he is nominated for an Oscar for his work on Carol, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel that stars Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. For Carol, Lachman creates a beautiful pastiche of color and texture to invite the audience into the world of New York in the 1950s as well as the emotional state of two women suddenly and deeply in love. Lachman and I sat down in L.A. to talk about Carol and […]
When it comes to both geography and genre, the loose collective of American filmmakers made up of Gabriel Abrantes, Alexander Carver, Benjamin Crotty, and Daniel Schmidt favor radical destabilization. Their films are hard to categorize. They’re set in an array of countries, including France, Djibouti, Iraq, Puerto Rico, and underneath the US-Mexico border, and they’re not quite family drama, not quite political farce, and not quite science-fiction, though they borrow elements from each. The scenarios in their films often interrogate post-9/11 geopolitics and the legacy of colonization, but at the same time, the filmmakers approach these subjects with an absurd […]