Screening tomorrow night at New York’s BAM Rose Cinema is one of the real and under-screened discoveries of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, The Mountains Are a Dream That Call to Me, the transfixing debut feature from Cedric Cheung-Lau, who has worked for a decade in the New York independent film scene gaffing such features as Patti Cake$, Christine and Monsters and Men. Embracing slow cinema and tacking away from the dialogue-driven penchant of much U.S. independent film, The Mountains Are a Dream That Call to Me is as much about landscape as story, about the possible meanings delivered through the pauses […]

Filmmaker’s interview with Coda director Siân Heder originally appeared in our Summer, 2021 print edition, and is being reposted today following the film’s winning Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay at the 2022 Academy Awards. — Editor Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) belongs to a family whose business is selling their ground-fishing catch off the coastal city of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Her father Frank (Troy Kotsur), mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin) and brother Leo (Daniel Durant) all rely on the 17-year-old high school student to help negotiate the daily pricing of their catch so that the family isn’t taken advantage […]

Originally appearing here in July, 2021, Filmmaker‘s interview with Ryusuke Hamaguchi about Drive My Car is being reposted today alongside the film’s Best International Feature win at the 2022 Academy Awards. — Editor It might strike some as sacrilege when I say that the excitement I’ve felt around Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s run of recent work reminds me of watching (and catching up with) the films of Arnaud Desplechin in the 2000s. Drive My Car, which had its world premiere in Competition at Cannes, follows the ecstasies and agonies and everything in-between of Happy Hour, Asako I & II (worth singling out […]

I distinctly remember precisely where I was when I watched my first Ted Fendt film, his 2011 short Shattered Sleep. I can very easily envision the room (not my own) and where the laptop (also not my own) was positioned. My experience watching it is also very clear. I remember feeling somewhat befuddled at first—where did this film and filmmaker come from?—but soon that befuddlement turned into amazement. The work was funny, weird, genuine and utterly original—rare qualities then and even rarer qualities now. Since that fateful night, I’ve been thankful to share noodles, tacos, unending pastries and even an […]

In Pachinko, a Korean family struggles for a place in a hostile world. Born into poverty on occupied land, Sunja (played at different ages by Minha Kim and Yuh-Jung Youn) emigrates from Busan to Osaka just before World War II. Trying to keep her family together, she faces relentless bigotry, as well as the pressure to succumb to a criminal gang led by Hansu (Lee Minho). Stretching over several decades, with scenes set in Korea, Japan, and the United States, Pachinko was a gigantic production sidelined for a time by COVID. Based on the bestselling novel by Min Jin Lee, […]

The multiverse threatens to swallow up Evelyn, a wife, mother, and laundromat owner in Everything Everywhere All At Once. Written and directed by The Daniels (Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan), the film is a spectacular showcase for Michelle Yeoh, one of the great icons of Asian cinema.  Like their earlier feature Swiss Army Man, EEAAO is by turns experimental and defiantly audacious. But it also taps into a commercial sensibility that finds a way to combine social media supercuts, Russo brothers spectacle, and old school Hong Kong filmmaking. In addition to Yeoh, the cast includes Jamie Lee Curtis, Stephanie Hsu, […]

One of the most chilling moments in Beth de Araújo’s masterful and outraged Soft & Quiet occurs early on, before the film’s sickeningly violent chain of events formally begins. After shooting side eye at her school’s immigrant female custodian, blonde thirtysomething elementary school teacher Emily (Stefanie Estes) coaches a young boy to go back inside the lunchroom and tell the woman off — to tell her that she must wait to do her job until the school is totally empty. Emily is not just using the child to disrespect the custodian, she’s instilling in the boy the sort of racial […]

As its title implies, Paweł Łoziński’s The Balcony Movie, which closes this year’s First Look Festival on March 20, is a film shot entirely from a balcony. Which may sound like the worst elevator pitch of all time until one realizes that the balcony belongs to the acclaimed Polish documentarian behind the lens (who also happens to be the son of also esteemed Polish documentarian Marcel Łoziński). Less concept film than “secular confessional,” as the Warsaw-based director puts it, Łoziński spent over two years (beginning pre-pandemic) filming the many men and women of all ages, not to mention their dogs […]

One of the highlights of this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner’s 40-minute not-quite-documentary Constant considers how the meter was standardized. It’s a topic that sounds drawn from one of the numerous popular history bestsellers of the last few decades explaining how some obscure topic is actually the key to understanding how the modern world came to be—and, indeed, one of the three source texts Constant credits is Ken Adler’s The Measure of All Things, which tells the story of the codification of the metric system. That story, however, is wild, involving in part a seven-year, on-foot journey undertaken by […]

When Toby Amies emails me the Vimeo press link to his SXSW-premiering documentary on the band King Crimson, In the Court of the Crimson King, he appends a list of influences. There’s a documentarian (Ross McElwee), a pseudo-documentarian (Christopher Guest), a narrative filmmaker who is a real King Crimson fan (Vincent Gallo) and then a couple of directors whose impact remained a bit puzzling both before and after seeing the film: Ernst Lubitsch and Sam Peckinpah. But perhaps the cinephile (and King Crimson fan) in me was looking too closely, because after watching In the Court of the Crimson King […]