With Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade now in theaters, we’re reposting this interview with the writer/director conducted during SXSW 2018. The movie: Eighth Grade The Plot: Shy and uncertain (except when doling out life advice on her sparsely followed vlog), eighth grader Kayla (a revelatory Elsie Fisher) struggles through her last days of middle school. The Interviewee: Bo Burnham. Eighth Grade is the feature directorial debut for the multi-hyphenate writer/director/musician/stand-up comedian. Filmmaker: Let’s start by talking about opening shots. The way you open the Jerrod Carmichael stand-up special you directed for HBO — this extremely tight close-up with Carmichael already on-stage […]

The second-highest grossing Chinese film of all time, Operation Red Sea has earned over a half-billion dollars since its release this past February. Writer/director Dante Lam introduced the film at a New York Asian American Film Festival screening on June 30 and accepted the festival’s Daniel A. Craft Award for Excellence in Action Cinema. Operation Red Sea is loosely drawn from the real-life evacuation of Chinese hostages during the 2015 civil war in Yemen. In the movie version, Jiaolong, an elite task force, not only have to free hostages, they must also stop an attempt to sell yellowcake uranium to terrorists […]

When I speak to James DeMonaco, The First Purge is only 48 hours from hitting theaters, but the franchise’s creator is otherwise engaged. DeMonaco has two production days left on his latest film, Once Upon a Time in Staten Island. It’s a personal movie, a coming-of-age drama starring Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale. The film that exists because DeMonaco wrote and directed 2013’s The Purge, plus its two sequels. His latest is even funded by his boss of the last several years, Jason Blum, the namesake head of horror unit Blumhouse Productions, making it only the second non-genre picture they’ve handled […]

“The papers on the boardroom table were stained from corpses.” Those lyrics, from The Coup’s 2012 album Sorry to Bother You, offer some idea of the ideological imperative propelling Boots Riley’s wildly inventive, Brazil-meets-Afrofuturism satire of the same name. Struggling to make ends meet in Oakland, Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) takes a job with telemarketing firm RegalView, where he finds himself rocketing to the top of the corporate ladder after he uses his “white voice” to drum up sales. His activist girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson) disapproves, especially after Cassius comes to the attention of deranged tech bro Steve Lift (Armie […]

Madeline (Helena Howard) has a hospital bracelet on her wrist and a rehearsal to go to. One of the questions fueling Madeline’s Madeline, Josephine Decker’s third feature as a solo director, is how two of the biggest elements of Madeline’s life — some unspecified form of mental instability and her promise as a young actress — interact, or if they even can safely. Howard’s breakout performance as the troubled thespian is part of an unusual triangle. At one point is her mother Regina (the writer, actress and performance artist Miranda July), whose protective custody of her unstable daughter is unreadable: justifiable […]

In Desiree Akhavan’s feature debut, Appropriate Behavior, the cowriter/director was front and center as Shirin, a young, bisexual Persian Brooklynite trying to figure out how to live her life, one sexually impulsive bad decision at a time. It was in keeping with the of-the-moment nature of The Slope, Akhavan’s reputation-making 2011 web series about a year in a lesbian couple’s New York relationship, in which she again costarred. Her sophomore feature, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, tackles new territory: It’s Akhavan’s first time working from an adaptation, first period piece and first time staying offscreen in her work. Miseducation was […]