It’s a rare thing for scholars to be asked to serve as advisors on studio films of any size, no matter the topic. (Hell, we’re usually not even asked to authenticate representations of academia itself.) So, it came as a pleasant surprise indeed for Brooklyn-based scholar and curator Leo Goldsmith and Georgia Tech film and media professor Gregory Zinman when they were asked by director James Gray to serve as advisors on his latest film, Ad Astra, scheduled for a September release by 20th Century Fox. Said to be a moody, existential science fiction film (Zinman and Goldsmith have read […]

Alma Har’el’s Honey Boy is an emotional prism, generating moments that are warm, traumatic, unsettling and scarring. So, it’s no wonder that the process of constructing such an intimate and emotionally shattering film was equally grounded in feeling. Har’el’s narrative feature debut (her previous features are the documentaries Bombay Beach and LoveTrue) contains Shia LaBeouf’s most gripping performance to date and showcases the two collaborators’ ability to make art containing expressive power and emotional wisdom. In Honey Boy, also written by LaBeouf, we meet Otis (Lucas Hedges), a movie star who’s sent to rehab and forced to confront his childhood […]

Knowing that Alma Har’el worked in a fluid, in-the-moment fashion, and that dancing with the actors in the scene was key to the story, DP Natasha Braier started prep by going through the script and asking the director for each scene, “Describe the scene with a feeling.” During prep and while shooting, Braier always wanted to root the camera in the emotions of each scene. In her previous work on films like The Neon Demon and The Milk of Sorrow, Braier tapped into her ability to capture human experience with stylized camera work and expressive lighting. We discussed how she […]

Paul Harrill’s Tennessee-set Light from Light, which premiered this year at Sundance, stars Marin Ireland as a paranormal investigator who may or may not believe in ghosts and Jim Gaffigan as a recent widower who still feels his wife’s presence in their house. Harrill is quick to point out that it is definitely not a horror film, and anyone expecting scares will be disappointed. Instead, Harrill investigates seemingly more mundane day-to-day Southern living (as he did in his previous effort, Something, Anything), and in it finds a delicate balance between reality and spirituality. I saw Light from Light at the […]

Ulrich Köhler’s In My Room begins with what looks like a DCP glitch. The view is from a handheld news camera entering a press conference scrum, its operator confirming in voiceover that he’s rolling while roaming from lectern to lectern. Each time an official statement is delivered, the image cuts to the aftermath—the as-yet-unseen cameraman, Armin (Hans Löw), has confused the “off” and “on” switch, and the inadvertent B-roll he shot is unusable. All of Armin’s life is similarly shabbily disarrayed: At a club, he picks up a young lady and brings her home, but an ill-phrased refusal to let […]

A road trip movie where the destination is clear but the intent is hidden, Ognjen Glavonić’s The Load is something of a taut genre film with political subtext. Set in Yugoslavia during the 1999 Kosovo War (that ultimately concluded with the catastrophic NATO bombing that went unapproved by the UN Security Council), The Load goes micro in its study of a truck driver who’s trying to make ends meet by driving unknown cargo from one destination to another. What he’s transporting, he doesn’t bother to ask and he certainly doesn’t want to know.  Drab and dreary, war-torn and ravaged, The […]

The original Dark Crystal was released on December 17th, 1982 , four days before my fifth birthday. I don’t remember exactly when my mom took me to see it. I can only tell you that when she did, the movie–and its lizard-like villains, the Skeksis—scared the crap out of me. There is a generation of kids who were similarly terrified and enthralled by the film, which was much darker than unsuspecting parents anticipated from Jim Henson, the man behind The Muppets and Sesame Street.  Erik Wilson—the cinematographer of Netflix’s new 10-episode prequel The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance—was not among […]

If you’ve heard much at all about Bait, the breakthrough feature of British filmmaker Mark Jenkin, it’s likely concerned the anachronistic means by which he’s constructed the experimental drama. Shot on a hand-cranked Bolex camera in black-and-white 16mm, then hand-processed by Jenkin himself with an assortment of unusual materials that lend scratchiness to the images, the film offsets potential accusations of gimmickry in making these aesthetic choices relevant to evoking something specific about where it’s set, an unnamed fishing village in the county of Cornwall in southwest England. As writer Ian Mantgani describes in his review for Sight & Sound, […]

In Ready or Not, a bride spends her wedding night playing a deadly game of hide and seek with her new in-laws, a clan of board game magnates beholden to a curse that requires them to dispose of the newlywed before dawn. The film unfolds almost entirely at the wealthy family’s estate, an opulent expanse shot mainly at the historic Parkwood Estate near Toronto. Ready or Not’s $6 million budget and 26-day shooting schedule are modest for a wide theatrical release, but for cinematographer Brett Jutkiewicz the scale is downright gluttonous compared to past efforts like Benny and Josh Safdie’s […]