Features
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Small Talk is Optional: Jim Jarmusch and Amalia Ulman Discuss “Father Mother Sister Brother”
Across his 45-year career, independent auteur Jim Jarmusch has continually returned to a particular type of film in which feature-length narrative is broken into a series of short, discrete episodes united by place (Mystery Train), time (Night on Earth) or activity (Coffee and Cigarettes). Through their internal correspondences and connections, and perhaps because of their fractured nature, these films, liberated from traditional three-act structure, produce sly epiphanies and unexpected pleasures. Jarmusch’s attraction to filmic miniatures continues with Father Mother Sister Brother, in which the connective tissue is, yes, the family. (In a clever bit of calendaring by MUBI, the film […]
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The Purity of Song: Mona Fastvold on “The Testament of Ann Lee”
What if Jesus already made his way back to us in the 18th century, and we just missed it? The titular British-born spiritual leader played by Amanda Seyfried in Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee believed herself to be the female embodiment of Jesus Christ and brought her scripture to Colonial America, enticed by its supposed promise of spiritual freedom. Co-written by Fastvold, who directed, and her partner Brady Corbet, and arriving only a year after their architectural epic The Brutalist, Ann Lee continues the pair’s interest in eccentric individuals who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of what […]
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Making The Mastermind: A Conversation with Kelly Reichardt Producers Neil Kopp and Anish Savjani
I’ve been working on film sets in New York, and recently Los Angeles, over the past decade, but my personal goal, shared with many friends and colleagues, is to write, direct and produce independent films that are impactful and culturally relevant—and to find financially sustainable ways to do so. Working multiple production jobs (2nd AC, carpenter, truck driver, key PA, line producer) on shorts, TV shows, commercials as well as features—the latter including Michel Franco’s Memory, Olmo Schnabel’s Pet Shop Days, Julian Schnabel’s In the Hand of Dante and Sean Baker’s Anora—I’ve tried to soak up as much knowledge as […]
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The Burnt Century: Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar on Train Dreams
Originally published in 2002, Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams chronicles the life of a logger who slips in and out of the world without a trace. An orphan with no knowledge of his birthplace or family lineage, Robert Grainier doesn’t have a history as much as he merely lives through it. He helps build the railroads that crisscross the country; when physically unable to maintain his arduous, itinerant lifestyle, he performs a series of odd jobs in his adopted home of Bonners Ferry, Idaho. He marries a woman, has a child and just as quickly loses them both in a […]
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Take Only What You Need: Kelly Reichardt Discusses The Mastermind with Yorgos Lanthimos
In 1972, a thief and two accomplices stole two Gauguins, one Picasso and a Rembrandt from the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. At the time, it was the largest art heist (and the first armed art heist) in American history; the thief, Florian Monday, would have entered the criminal pantheon had he not been swiftly captured after indiscreetly bragging about his crime. As she reveals in her conversation below with director Yorgos Lanthimos, Kelly Reichardt has kept an “art theft” file over the years, with an article on the 50th anniversary of the Worcester crime providing inspiration for her latest […]
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25 New Faces of Independent Film 2025
Click here to read this year’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film list.
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Childhood After Dark: Shih-Ching Tsou on Left-Handed Girl
Taipei first appears in Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Girl glimpsed indistinctly through a little girl’s kaleidoscope. A vivid, swirling combination of colors and shapes, it’s a fittingly vibrant entrance for Taiwan’s capital, a cultural center that Tsou—making her solo directorial debut more than 20 years after co-writing/-directing 2004’s Take Out with Sean Baker—captures as a layered panorama of neon-lit alleyways and crowded streets. Following a single mother and two daughters who return after several years in the countryside to carve out a new life for themselves in the big city, the film has been described by Tsou as a “neo-melodramatic tapestry,” […]
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Inherited Histories: Cherien Dabis on All That’s Left of You
Few films arrive with the urgency and necessity of Cherien Dabis’s All That’s Left of You, a work that positions itself as both historical epic and intimate confession. Emerging from the long shadow of displacement and erasure, it stands as one of the most vital contributions to Palestinian cinema in recent memory. Told through the voice of Hanan (played with piercing restraint by Dabis herself), the story begins with her son Noor, a teenager shot during a protest in the occupied West Bank, before spiraling outward to a multigenerational saga of exile, endurance and return. While Dabis’s Amreeka (2009) examined […]
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The Art of Arrival: Yashaddai Owens on Jimmy
Once in a while, never often, a film comes along that defies the protocols of the moment and delivers an unexpectedly wondrous impact. Thus it was that Jimmy sent this writer skittering down the internet hole in search of young Yashaddai Owens, writer-director-cinematographer-editor of this portrait of the young James Baldwin, about whom everything had seemingly already been filmed, revived, archived or written. Owens brings considerable powers of lyrical invention to the table in his debut feature, imagining and projecting himself into the past, 16mm Bolex in hand to capture the unfailingly imaginative contours of the young Baldwin (Benny O. […]
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Motherload: Mary Bronstein on “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”
With If I Had Legs I’d Kick You opening today from A24, we’re unlocking from behind our paywall Natalia Keogan’s interview with Bronstein, which is the cover story of our Fall, 2025 edition. — Editor “Something very bad is happening,” young mother Caroline (Danielle Macdonald) whimpers amid oncoming tears during a routine therapy appointment. In the throes of a severe bout of postpartum depression exacerbated by a lack of support from her husband, Caroline’s hour-long sessions at Montauk’s “Center for Psychological Arts” are a brief respite from a world that, in her mind, is more violent and evil than anyone […]
