The seven-episode Ouverture of Something That Never Ended has garnered millions of views since it was posted on YouTube in November. Sponsored by Gucci, the series marks the latest collaboration between director Gus van Sant and cinematographer Christopher Doyle, HKSC, following the features Paranoid Park and Psycho. (Overture is co-directed by Van Sant and Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele,) Shot on location over a three-week period in the fall, the series was Doyle’s first chance to work under new Covid-19 protocols. Extensive testing and social distancing were among the steps taken during the production. With over 100 films to his […]
From its double-entendre title to the hilarious sightgag of a closing scene, Emma Seligman’s debut feature, Shiva Baby, is universal in its uncomfortable awkwardness and specific in how it chooses to bathe in it. Adapted and expanded from her NYU thesis short, Seligman’s film follows Danielle (Rachel Sennott), a young Jewish New Yorker who has taken to sex work to solidify her funds. After concluding a session with a client, Max (Danny Deferrari), Danielle heads to Flatbush to meet up with her parents (Polly Draper and Fred Melamed) and attend the shiva of a family friend. Faced with unending nagging […]
“Dreamy visuals of teenhood — cool hair, telephones, starkly lit bedrooms, troubled outsiders — are laid over structured soundtracks that blend distinctive background ambiences with catchy songs,” is how Mike Plante described the early short films of Cam Archer for Filmmaker in 2006. The occasion was the release of Archer’s first feature, Wild Tigers I Have Known, which joined an emerging body of work that Plante called “art films for teens.” But when we next caught up with Archer, it was just after the Cannes Directors Fortnight premiere of his second feature, Shit Year, starring Ellen Barkin, and his focus had […]
A besotted cinematic sub-genre consists of films about drinking — liquor, bars and the imbiber’s life. Whether the lives portrayed are rowdy and boisterous ones, or, as is often the case, destructively out-of-control, these films — ranging from Days of Wine and Roses and The Lost Weekend to Leaving Las Vegas — usually map their character arcs alongside their characters’ physical and social deterioration; they wind up as cautionary tales. A recent film that took a different approach is the Ross Brothers’s hybrid documentary, Bloody Noses Empty Pockets, which captured the woozy exuberance of one intoxicated day/night while not eliding […]
In his extraordinary portrait of American tennis champ John McEnroe, In the Realm of Perfection (2018), French filmmaker Julien Faraut engineered a hypnotizing meditation on the intersection between sports, performance and the creation of images—not at all the conventional retread of history one might expect from anything with the “sports movie” label. In his latest, The Witches of the Orient, Faraut returns to the arena of athletic competition in similarly idiosyncratic fashion, profiling the women of Japan’s most famous volleyball team. Made up of former textile workers, team “Nichibo Kaizuka” nabbed gold at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and inspired a […]
“This is neither an adaptation nor a work of fiction,” an intertitle informs the viewers after five minutes of uninterrupted observation of the rural landscape through the window of a passing train. “Only the quoted lines from The Good Person of Szechwan are supposed to be fictitious.” Sabrina Zhao’s directorial debut The Good Woman of Sichuan is upfront when it comes to disclosing its hybrid nature—between documentary and fiction, the film borrows the little plot there is from Bertolt Brecht’s play The Good Person of Szechwan. Or does it really? After the first disorienting encounter with the film’s seemingly disjointed […]
What began as a BTS feature for a home video release of The Blood on Satan’s Claw, a 1971 cult favorite about Satanic possession in a 17th century English village, premiered this week at the South by Southwest film festival as a three-hour opus on the allure and dread of folk-horror. “I started working on a half-hour bonus feature for Severin [Films] and it just kept getting really big,” says Kier-La Janisse, whose directorial debut Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched adds yet another hyphen to her endeavors as a film historian-memorist (The House of Psychotic Women), editor, curator and educator (she […]
Repeat business: It’s a hallmark in the long career of Dariusz Wolski. If the Polish-born cinematographer shoots one movie for you, there’s a decent chance he’ll be back for another. He’s lensed two movies for Tim Burton, Tony Scott and Alex Proyas; four alongside Gore Verbinski; and six for Ridley Scott. Yet it’s a new collaboration with director Paul Greengrass—and a new genre, the Western—that earned Wolski his first Academy Award nomination after more than 30 years shooting features. Wolski picked up the Oscar nod yesterday for News of the World, a post-Civil War tale of a traveling entertainer (Tom […]
The Dead Sea is one of the unknown casualties of the turbulent politics of the Middle East. Population growth since the founding of Israel has diverted much of its source water for human use. Mineral extraction companies have reduced it even further, and of course global warming is continually increasing temperatures and making the region more arid. Since the watershed basin is shared between Israel and Jordan it requires international cooperation to address, and though there have been attempts to do so they have not matched the challenge that the Sea is facing. The result is that the Sea shrinks […]
Fifty-year-old Joshua (Rogelio Balagtas) still lives in the ease of his parents’ home. He probably hasn’t dated anyone seriously in years — if ever. His mom still cooks for him and tends to his father, whose health is declining and needs help getting around. Joshua’s dependent lifestyle is untenable. When his mother very suddenly passes away and his father’s condition worsens, Joshua can hardly take care of himself, let alone his father. The days are lonely and even grimmer since his dad can’t seem to remember that his mom passed away. This is the initial set up of writer/director Martin […]