Cinematographer Matt Mitchell lensed Little Woods, which world premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival where writer/director Nia DaCosta won the Tribeca Film Festival’s Nora Ephron Award. Shortly thereafter, the film was acquired by NEON and is currently in theaters. Little Woods is a modern Western about two women in rural America. Shot in Texas, but set in North Dakota, the film is a carefully composed drama, while also very much feeling like an emotionally-charged thriller. I sat down with Mitchell before last year’s festival premiere to talk about how he went about creating the look and feel of the […]

One of the pioneers of independent cinema in the Philippines, Kidlat Tahimik has been tinkering away on his latest film since 1979. Like much of his output, the pugnaciously titled BalikBayan #1: Memories of Overdevelopment, Redux IV (2017), resembles as much a collage of moods, periods, film stocks and video formats as it does any kind of coherent movie. Working from an original 33-minute cut assembled in the early 1980s, the film is in part about Enrique of Malacca, a slave who accompanied his master Ferdinand Magellan on the first circumnavigation of the globe.  What showed at Play-Doc, the small […]

For one year now on this podcast, I have talked to dozens and dozens of actors about their approach to the craft of acting. There are few living non-actor directors whose thoughts on this subject I feel would be worthy for this archive. Mike Leigh is on the top of that list. Listening to actors talk about their working experiences has made me think of an analogy. They are like fish people, showing up on a set expecting some water to work in but mostly finding dry land everywhere, and, for the most part, having to supply the water themselves. […]

I first watched Pet Sematary on a family vacation when I was 11 years old—well, watched may be a bit of an exaggeration. My older sister and I made it through the second appearance of Pascow’s rotting corpse before we retreated beneath the hotel bed’s comforter. I eventually braved the entirety on my 13thbirthday, a memorable sleepover double feature with The Fly II. No movie ever scared me more than Pet Sematary. But while other horror flicks that sent me scuttling under the blankets as a kid now seem almost comically unthreatening in adulthood—your Silver Bullets and My Bloody Valentines—the themes of […]

Receiving its world premiere tomorrow in the Launch section of the 2019 SFFILM Festival, Tom Quinn’s sophomore feature Colewell stars Karen Allen, whose filmography runs from intimate dramas to some of contemporary cinema’s biggest blockbusters, as a clerk in a small town post office whose way of life — and, actually, her life itself — are imperiled when her branch is scheduled for closure. Inspired, as Quinn relates below, from learning of an instance in which a town was literally erased from a map, Colewell is a gentle, melancholic film, one inflected by bursts of real anger and sorrow, that […]

It’s not until you approach a genre of film from a new perspective, and as filmmaker Emma Tammi puts it, flip “the camera 180 degrees,” that you see how one-sided that genre’s films have been. In her narrative feature debut The Wind, out now in theaters, Tammi brings a unique point-of-view to the 1800s American frontier story and all of its psychological terrors. Combining well-crafted scares with the complexity of Teresa Sutherland’s script, the film takes us on a journey of solitude, loss and the demons that can be dredged up in the Wild West. Lizzy (a wonderful Caitlin Gerard), […]

Master Z: The Ip Man Legacy (2019) closes out Yuen Woo-ping’s fifth decade in martial arts filmmaking. It is an astonishing run in which he helped launch the careers of Jackie Chan (Drunken Master, 1978) and Donnie Yen (Drunken Tai Chi, 1984), while shaping the style of Hollywood action for a generation with his fight choreography for The Matrix (1999). Master Z is a spinoff of the Donnie Yen-led Ip Man franchise, following Cheung Tin-chi (Max Zhang), a kung fu master humbled by a loss to Ip Man who tries to rebuild his life as a grocery store vendor. Of […]

Leo (Félix Maritaud) never counts his money after he’s with a client. The gay sex worker at the center of Camille Vidal-Naquet’s film Sauvage/Wild is, honestly, happy to be there. Drifting from client to client and from place to place, the homeless hustler has one constant that is quickly disappearing: his unrequited feelings for fellow hustler (though “gay 4 pay”), Ahd (Éric Bernard). Leo’s intense yearning for human connection and affection, mixed with his somewhat paradoxical disinclination to be “kept” in a (facile) domestic situation, and ailing body but unrelenting spirit, are reminiscent of Giulietta Masina in Federico Fellini’s Nights […]

What does self-destruction sound like? In Her Smell, the sixth film from Alex Ross Perry, it takes many forms: a nasty laugh, a frenetic synth loop, a warble of radio static. The sounds come hard and relentless. A raw sound wave, warped to mimic the syncopations of a demented drum machine, serves as its palpitating heartbeat. For reasons I can’t fully explain, it’s a sound that induces instant anxiety. Her Smell sounds, and unfolds, like a panic attack. The urge to self-destruct hounds its central character, Becky Something (Elisabeth Moss), just as music dogs viewers for most of its 134 […]

He brought to life one of the most iconic TV characters this century, Omar Little on the acclaimed series The Wire. Then Michael K. Williams went on to work with some of the great directors of our day (Steve McQueen, Paul Thomas Anderson, Ava DuVernay, Todd Solondz) and turned in powerful work in series like Boardwalk Empire (where he played Chalky White) and The Night of, to name a few. He’s earning rave reviews for his latest performance in Emilio Estevez’s The Public. In this episode, he talks about one particular “all-in” moment during the filming of that movie, also […]