22 July is a difficult film. Any film about the 2011 terror attack and massacre on Utøya island in Norway would have to be. Less expected is the film’s strong political edge. In that sense, 22 July is something of a return to roots for Paul Greengrass. Before taking on the Bourne franchise, the director made a mark with his 2002 docudrama Bloody Sunday, about the Bogside massacre of Northern Irish protesters by British soldiers in 1972. In that film, as in his new one, Greengrass combined his trademark visceral, shaky-cam documentary aesthetic with a strong sense of political urgency. […]

Having now completed the long journey from upstart/wunderkind to venerated elder statesman, Peter Bogdanovich has amassed a lengthy CV that includes a celebrated career directing pictures, an early post programming films at the Museum of Modern Art, teaching, writing and, not unlike his mentor, Orson Welles, taking up the odd acting job. His contribution to the cinema in 2018 was twofold. First, he made the documentary The Great Buster, an interview-heavy appreciation of the pantheon silent filmmaker, Buster Keaton. His other project this year was, by design, one that required vigilant self-effacement—that’s the long-awaited post-production and release of Orson Welles’s The […]

A charcoal-black comedy about the early days of the Argentinean Dirty War, Benjamin Naishtat’s third feature Rojo accumulated a small but devout critical following after its world premiere at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival, then went on to win Best Director, Best Cinematography and Best Actor last week at San Sebastian. Naishtat’s 2014 debut History of Fear questioned the companionability of day-to-day life with lingering, suppressed trauma, while his black-and-white followup The Movement cast a brutally acerbic eye to 19th century nation-building in the Pampas, satirizing the belief (perennial in Latin America and other places) that a strong autocrat can bring order and stability, […]

At first, the notion of sibling filmmakers creating a doc about clearing out their recently deceased grandma’s house in New Jersey struck me as a potential recipe for a navel-gazing home movie. But the sister-brother team of Elan and Jonathan Bogarín, 25 New Faces alum, is not your average documentarian duo (even as their beloved Jewish grandmother is a familiar character — at least to those of us who grew up with idiosyncratic Jewish grandmas in Jersey. My physician grandmother in Teaneck likewise believed there was no wrong time for gefilte fish). Yet it’s this transformation of a very personal […]

I read a book on architecture and design in the subtropics, once, a long time ago, that described the region as inherently cozy. Palm trees and big-leafed plants, it said, are made for hiding; enough of them, bundled together, will look like home. Tiquan, the thirteen-year-old narrator of cinematographer Shabier Kirchner’s directorial debut, Dadli, has places to hide, the way teenagers need to. “I go far in the country,” he says. “Hunt, get high — nobody troubles me.” Dadli, a brief and searing documentary portrait of Antigua, where Kirchner grew up, is as short as Tiquan is young, but it […]

In The Old Man & the Gun, Robert Redford plays Forrest Tucker, a true-life outlaw who spent most of his 84 years robbing banks or biding time in prison, always on the lookout for the first opportunity to escape. Set in 1981, the film finds Tucker in his early 70s, living in Texas and pulling off a string of heists throughout the South. He and his partners, played here by Danny Glover and Tom Waits, became known to authorities as the “Over-the-Hill Gang,” and their m.o.–efficient robberies, executed politely and with style–became legendary. “That was when I was a really […]

With Reed Morano’s I Think We’re Alone Now in theaters, we’re running this short interview with its editor, Madeleine Gavin, conducted earlier this year before the film’s premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. For more on the film, see Meredith Alloway’s interview with Morano. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Gavin: I worked with Reed Morano on her feature directorial debut, Meadowland, and when I Think We’re Alone Now was getting set up, Reed sent me the […]

Reed Morano has had quite the year. She took home an Emmy this time last year for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series for The Handmaid’s Tale. She started working alongside Blake Lively and Paramount Pictures on The Rhythm Section and her second directorial feature, I Think We’re Alone Now, premiered at Sundance, and then in theaters this month. And then a few days after we interviewed her, it was announced that she inked an overall deal with Amazon Studios. Morano’s work, from her start as a DP to her rise as a director, maintains a visual excellency and attention […]

Steve James has never shied away from going big. From his 1994 breakthrough, the near-three-hour Hoop Dreams, through long-players like Stevie and The Interrupters, the filmmaker has never been afraid to blow well past documentary’s traditional 90-minute mark. (He’s also played ball, as with 2016’s Oscar-nominated Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, which clocks in at a brisk 88.) Still, even for James, America to Me is ambitious. It’s his second dalliance with TV, after 2004’s The New Americans, spanning 10 hour-long episodes, which begin on Starz on Aug. 26. But it’s not just size that matters. It’s the scope, and the […]

Early in Spike Lee’s collaboration with Chayse Irvin, the venerable director asked his cinematographer if there was anything special he needed for BlacKkKlansman. Irvin answered, “a third camera”—an extravagance on a low budget movie, but one Irvin believed would allow him “to take massive risks on every scene, whether it be a unique angle or the freedom to use a lens that was flawed.” Irvin embraced that self-imposed mandate for boldness by employing imperfect vintage lenses, “flashing” the image with a contrast-reducing filter and dusting off long-expired film stock. Never one to wilt in the face of risky choices, Lee […]