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Escape Routes: Miguel Gomes on Grand Tour
Crista Alfaiate in Grand Tour
At its core the story of a man taking extreme measures to avoid his fiancée, Grand Tour originated when Portuguese director Miguel Gomes read W. Somerset Maugham’s The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930) just before his marriage to co-screenwriter Maureen… Read more
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Paging Peter Andrews: Steven Soderbergh on Being His Own DP
When Steven Soderbergh was 13 years old, his father enrolled him in an animation class taught by Louisiana State University students. Soderbergh could draw but quickly became bored with the tedious process of bringing those drawings to life. Instead, he pulled the film camera off the copy stand and began shooting whatever he pleased. From the very beginning, Soderbergh had no interest in doing things as prescribed. Whether alternating between the commercial and the experimental, challenging traditional release conventions or embracing new technologies in a quest to expedite the filmmaking process, Soderbergh has spent his career upending the status quo. […]
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Border Crossings: Paul Schrader on Oh, Canada
The face of Leonard Fife (Richard Gere) is a slab—gaunt, ashen, with a firm, unsmiling mouth. In front of the camera, he’s at once impassive and confessional before his two interlocutors, Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill). They’ve recruited the old man, a celebrated American documentary filmmaker now wasting away from cancer, to recount his life for posterity, in the process conjuring the young man (Jacob Elordi) Fife once was. Or was he? I’m not sure where Fife the Elder and Fife the Younger begin and end in Paul Schrader’s latest film. Nor could I tell you at which […]
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Sentient Images: RaMell Ross on Nickel Boys
RaMell Ross’s 2018 feature debut, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, is a non-narrative portrait of its Alabama locale, shot entirely by the filmmaker over years of immersion, his instinctually captured material assembled into intricate juxtapositions. Few scale-ups for a second film have been more dramatic: Nickel Boys is a narrative feature adapted from a pre-existing text (Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys), proceeding in more-or-less linear order through an incident-filled narrative, with an on-record budget of around $23 million and production handled by Plan B Entertainment and Louverture Films. The latter’s Joslyn Barnes was also a producer and […]
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The Truth Exhumed: Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat on Sugarcane
Beginning in 1894, the Canadian government forced Indigenous children to attend segregated boarding schools. The schools were designed to “get rid of the Indian ‘problem.’” Most were run by the Catholic church. For years, students spoke of abuse and whispered about missing classmates. This explanatory text opens Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie’s Sugarcane, establishing the basis for a piece of investigative journalism and a portrait of healing familial catharsis. After unmarked graves were discovered in 2021 on land once occupied by the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, NoiseCat and Kassie became interested in making a film about […]
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Order Fulfillment: Director Halina Reijn on Babygirl
It’s appropriate that Halina Reijn, the Dutch actress-turned-filmmaker who previously directed the Gen Z whodunnit Bodies Bodies Bodies, would look to ’90s erotic thrillers as fodder for her next feature. After all, her countryman Paul Verhoeven (she has a supporting role in his Black Book) is considered the de facto master of this genre, bringing his penchant for the perverse to Hollywood with pictures such as Basic Instinct. Babygirl, Reijn’s English-language feature debut as writer-director, is less enamored with this bygone era than it is interested in deploying its framework within a personal, subversively feminist perspective. But make no mistake: […]
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The Monster You Become: Coralie Fargeat on The Substance
Even for the most callous horror-heads, Coralie Fargeat’s debut feature, Revenge (2017), stunned with its gruesome rape-revenge plot and blunt-force style, announcing the French director as a genre talent on the rise, capable of invoking her cinematic inspirations while departing from them on her own frenzied, feminist terms. The Substance, which won the award for Best Screenplay when it premiered at Cannes earlier this year, somehow cranks up the madness even further, unfolding a dark Hollywood fairytale about aging and feminine beauty standards that stands among the most adventurous in the body horror genre. Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a […]
