Interviews
Interviews
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Mirror Mirror: Lucile Hadžihalilović on Berlinale 2025 Premiere The Ice Tower
We didn’t have to wait too long after Earwig (2021) for Lucile Hadžihalilović’s enigmatic new offering, The Ice Tower. The whistling sounds of mountain winds announce the arrival of the Snow Queen (Marion Cotillard), both to the set of a film she’s leading in 1970s France and in the life of 16-year-old runaway orphan Jeanne (Clara Pacini). Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Snow Queen,” the script—co-written by Hadžihalilović together with Geoff Cox—explores the subterranean tensions of loneliness and womanhood in various shapes and forms. While it may as well be considered the most “legible” Hadžihalilović film […]
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Taking Everything to Extremes: A Conversation Between Michael Almereyda, Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold on The Brutalist
“Architecture is a language. When you are very good, you can be a poet.” So wrote the spectacularly good Brutalist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It’s a fair guess Brady Corbet and his longtime co-screenwriter Mona Fastvold have encountered this quote, and that they recognize the affinities between architecture and movies. Being good in either medium requires a sure knowledge of your materials, an ability to translate imagined designs into physical reality, to assemble and guide teams of inspired collaborators and to know or intuit more than a little about visual textures, space and light and how to move […]
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Inspired by Springfield and Sesame Street: Osgood Perkins on The Monkey
“Everybody dies, and that’s life,” one character proclaims in Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, approaching the inevitability of suffering with a wink and a grin. In between executing a real-estate agent via shotgun blast and setting fire to an occupied baby stroller, this more deliberately comedic outing from the writer-director behind Longlegs is all about the strange catharsis of helplessly laughing through life’s horrors. Adapted from Stephen King’s short story of the same name, The Monkey follows twin brothers Bill and Hal (Christian Convery in childhood, Theo James in adulthood), who discover a sinister wind-up “organ grinder” monkey toy among their […]
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You Can Never (Maybe?) Break the Chain: Rebecca Lenkiewicz on Berlinale 2025 Premiere Hot Milk
Spanish seaside entanglements, a combustive mother-daughter relationship, mysterious, painful malaise, the veiled threat of healing and new currents of love trail Ingrid (Vicky Krieps). Nearby, watching her life pass by is Sofia (Emma Mackey), a doctoral student in anthropology and caregiver since she was a young girl to her defiant mother Rose (Fiona Shaw), mostly restricted to a wheelchair. A story of self discovery, queer kindling and medical melancholy among these three fascinating women in a sun-baked setting, Hot Milk, premiering at the 75th Berlinale, is one of the most buzzed new titles in the Competition section. The directorial debut […]
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“1.66 Just Felt Good”: DP Jarin Blaschke on Nosferatu
Over the course of his four feature films, Robert Eggers has gained a reputation as a filmmaker obsessed with meticulous period accuracy. After listening to Jarin Blaschke talk about moon size as a mathematical equation, it’s easy to see why Eggers has enjoyed working with the equally meticulous cinematographer for almost two decades. “I’m kind of a stickler about how big a moon is when a CG moon is in frame,” said Blaschke. “It needs to be 1/80th the width of the screen, because the moon is a half a degree wide and our lens takes in 40 degrees. So, […]
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“Genocide Brain”: Christine Haroutounian on Berlinale 2025 Premiere After Dreaming
The title of Christine Haroutounian’s first feature, After Dreaming, suggests a waking state, but the whole film hangs in a region where the divide between facts and hallucinations is never entirely clear. A follow-up to her 2020 short World—a cantankerous, Armenian-set study of end-of-life caretaking centered on a young woman and her dying mother—Dreaming sees the Los Angeles-born filmmaker return to her ancestral turf for a surreal road trip across a country still haunted by ongoing clashes with neighboring Azerbaijan. Dreaming, however, “is not a war film,” Haroutounian told me before her feature travelled to Berlin, where it premiered in […]
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“Meredith Understood That I Needed the Freedom to Create My Own Interpretation of Her Work and Life”: Billy Shebar on his Berlinale-Premiering Meredith Monk Doc, Monk in Pieces
Billy Shebar’s Monk in Pieces stars Meredith Monk, an artist so singular as to be unclassifiable. (A collage of Zoom-interviewed academics who expound on the titular composer-singer-director-choreographer – and creator of new opera, music theater works, films and installations – is like watching proverbial blind men describing an elephant.) A progenitor of what we now call “extended vocal technique” and “interdisciplinary performance,” Monk began her career in the downtown NYC art scene of the ’60s and ’70s — a time and place not all that kind to female boundary busters. (Indeed, New York Times reviews ranged from scathing to the […]
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“The Film is Not a Resistance Film”: Juanjo Pereira on Berlinale 2025 Premiere Under the Flags, the Sun
A row of men sit proudly on horses as a white flag drifts languidly in the wind. The beating sun lights the crowd, who applaud dictator Alfredo Stroessner’s ascent to power in 1954, and with it, the promise of “peace, progress and fraternity.” Time slows down as an ominous atmosphere envelopes this scene, foreshadowing what the future holds for Paraguay. Juanjo Pereira’s debut feature film, Under the Flags, the Sun, is a profound exploration of Stroessner’s dictatorship almost entirely made with archival footage, the film crafts a portrait of the open wounds of the 34-year dictatorship. The film premieres tonight […]
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“It Carries the Weight of Improvisation but Also Inevitability”: Liryc Dela Cruz on his Berlinale-premiering Where the Night Stands Still (Come la Notte)
Liryc Dela Cruz’s Where the Night Stands Still (Come la Notte) takes the simplest of storylines and renders it infinitely complex. Three Filipino siblings, all domestic workers in Italy who’ve not seen each other for years, reunite at an extravagant villa the elder sister inherited after the death of her longtime employer. They reminisce about childhood over Filipino delicacies the younger sister and brother have brought, and stroll the vast grounds that the new owner meticulously preserves as if she were still a servant and not the lady of the house. But as the languorous day draws to a close […]
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“We Couldn’t Find that Exact Beige — It Was a Real Struggle”: Production Designer Louisa Schabas on Designing Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language
Driving around Montreal on a gray November day with Universal Language writer-director Matthew Rankin, production designer Louisa Schabas noticed an elementary school with a row of stark, monolithic concrete walls facing the playground. The slabs were at an angle, allowing for a series of black metal doors to open into the yard. “This is perfect for the market,” she said. With some painted signs indicating a random assortment of mom-and-pop shops, including a bakery and an office supply store, Shabas would later transform the building facade into a ramshackle Winnipeg mini-mall, with the striking anomaly that all of the signage […]
