A show like HBO’s Succession risks being either tone-deaf or ineffectual, especially at a moment of heightened sensitivity toward income inequality and billionaires’ amoral business practices. Armstrong’s background in unsparing British cringe/political comedy, namely acclaimed sitcoms Peep Show and The Thick of It, helped him adopt an intimately satirical approach to the story of the dysfunctional Roy family, nouveau riche owners of the fictional media/hospitality empire Waystar Royco (a la the Murdochs and News Corp or the Redstones and ViacomCBS). Armstrong filters Shakespearean and Grecian tragedy into the series’ premise—patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox) fights to preserve his empire from the […]

Filmmaker‘s Summer 2020 cover story, Ashley Clark’s interview with Time director Garrett Bradley is being published online today for the first time to mark the film’s New York premiere this coming Sunday (with virtual screenings continuing until September 25th) at the New York Film Festival. For over half a decade, New York-born artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley has been steadily building an impressively diverse yet tonally and stylistically harmonious CV. Bradley’s work has encompassed film, television and the gallery space; short, longform and multi-channel ventures; and ambitious explorations of the porous boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. It has often focused […]

Across U.S. film schools this spring, a similar scene played out. The novel coronavirus went from faraway topic to urgent local threat. As rolling stay-at-home orders were issued, administrators shut down campuses, students scrambled for transport home and film departments quickly improvised online teaching methods that would allow instruction to continue even as students couldn’t attend classes and screenings in theaters or crew each other’s shoots in person.  Three months later, we know much more about the coronavirus: its asymptomatic transmission, resistance to warm weather and ability to target multiple organ systems in the body. And with early, erratically applied […]

In Michael Almereyda’s pre-Katrina New Orleans–shot Happy Here and Now, David Arquette’s termite control specialist is preparing to shoot a film about Nikola Tesla in his off-hours. In a delirious rant, Arquette’s character muses about the Serbian-American scientist’s quest to slow the speed of light—enough so that you could go out for a coffee and return in time to see a beam complete its journey from one end of your apartment to another. In the climax of Happy Here and Now, one of Tesla’s signature inventions, the Tesla coil, is responsible for Arquette’s film-within-a-film experiencing the worst kind of production […]