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Personal Effects: Boots Riley and His Collaborators on Crafting I Love Boosters
Boots Riley BTS on I Love Boosters
Boots Riley has directed two movies and one TV show over the past decade, but he’s been telling stories through music for more than 30 years. “I usually think about my songs the same way I think about movies,” said… Read more
Minnesota Fierce: Documentary Filmmaker Joua Lee Grande Reports From Operation Metro Surge
Image: Kazua Melissa Vang & Sheng Elizabeth Lor
Though Joua Lee Grande studied cinema and media culture in college, she built much of her early career in nonprofits based in the Twin Cities. “I was mentoring young people about how they should follow their dreams, and I was… Read more
Slow Your Roll: Can Durational Cinema Save Us?
Illustration by Johanne Licard
You know the feeling: the algorithm catches you one lazy afternoon, and hours melt in the blink of an eye. You come to, dehydrated, achy, struggling to focus. Or at night, your couch sucks you in. You bounce from Netflix… Read more
Reel to Reel: Is “Content” So Different From Edison’s Early Cinema?
Illustration by Johanne Licard
The churn is relentless. The demand, insatiable. The output, rushed and raw but undeniably compelling. Working with cutting-edge communications devices, a rotating cast of tinkerers comes together each day to produce new pieces of short-form visual entertainment, racing to keep… Read more
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Hooray for…Jerseywood?
In 2006, when Cameron Zonfrilli and John Welsh shifted their film production business, Parlay, to a full-fledged multistage Jersey City studio, their clients mainly consisted of small reality-based cable shows, multicams, and commercial work. At the time, there wasn’t a lot of film production in New Jersey. “A lot of little independent commercials and agency work,” Zonfrilli says. Twenty years later, the film landscape in the Garden State is experiencing a boom. Big state-of-the-art studios are being built, renovated, and expanded all over the state. And top Hollywood players like Lionsgate, Netflix, and Paramount are coming to town, teaming with […]
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Making Sense of Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Monumental Life’s Work
Last year, I stumbled on a bootleg copy of Twists in the Cord (1994), an experimental documentary shot on video by Lynn Hershman Leeson. I’ve followed the prolific artist for years, but I had never heard of the piece until it appeared in a search result when I was looking for something else. It’s classic Leeson, depicting technology as a catalyst to subvert identity and authenticity. She was an established—if unsung—artist in the 1970s when she started making films and videos, and her just-published memoir, Private I, reveals this turn was less of a second act than a lifelong pull […]
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How Ridgewood Became New York City’s Communal Cinema Hub
A white, windowless storefront in Ridgewood, Queens, has the distinction of being the neighborhood’s first new cinema in nearly 100 years. Co-founded last year by filmmaker John Wilson alongside collaborators Davis Fowlkes and Cosmo Bjorkenheim, Low Cinema features 42 seats (sourced second-hand), digital and 16mm projection, and even a papier-mâché E.T. Handmade by Wilson, the cheerful alien hovers beneath the ceiling by the front door. The day I visited the microcinema in late February, I was greeted by a veritable cinematic symphony. Corn was freshly popping, ticket holders poured in for an afternoon showing of Nirvanna the Band the Show […]
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Who Wants to Be White Famous?
After covering film and TV for more than 25 years, I’m still surprised at how long it takes some Black artists to become White Famous. What’s White Famous, you ask? It’s the state of being recognized by the mainstream media, something many Black performers experience long after first coming to the attention of Black audiences. Being White Famous has its benefits. Your IMDb ranking goes up, as does your salary quote for your next project. Your agents, managers, and publicists will be thrilled. “You’ve crossed over,” they’ll say, and they’ll mean it as a good thing. But White Fame can […]
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Northern Exposure: Chandler Levack and Sophy Romvari Chat Mile End Kicks and Blue Heron
Chandler Levack’s Mile End Kicks and Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron make time travel feel possible. Levack retreats into the beer-drenched, laissez-faire vibe of Montreal’s indie rock scene circa 2011; Romvari reflects on her Hungarian immigrant family’s domestic struggles on Vancouver Island in the late 1990s. In Mile End Kicks (Sumerian Pictures), 23-year-old Grace (Barbie Ferreira) is an avatar for Levack, a music critic at a Toronto alt-weekly who leaves her bro-dominated publication for a creative summer in Montreal. She’s supposed to write a short book for the 33 ⅓ series about Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. Instead, Grace loses herself […]
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Steven Soderbergh on Making The Christophers With Michaela Coel and Ian McKellen
Twisty as a Hitchcock movie but not a thriller, Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers is a two-hander for two great actors. Michaela Coel plays Lori Butler, a serious painter with a side gig as an art forger. Ian McKellen plays Julian Sklar, an art world star in the 1960s and ’70s who hasn’t made any work of note in decades. Julian’s children, who hate him, concoct a scheme in which Lori is smuggled into Julian’s dilapidated five-story house as a temporary assistant. She is tasked with finding “The Christophers,” a series of portraits that Julian began in his prime but never finished. If […]
