Features
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Examined Life: Mia Hansen-Løve on Things to Come
There are only a few minutes of calm at the beginning of Mia Hansen-Løve’s fifth feature Things to Come. In a prologue two years before the film’s narrative kicks off, philosophy professor Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert) is on seaside vacation with longtime partner Heinz (André Marcon) and children, a stroll reminiscent of the family outing that kicks off her sophomore film, 2009’s The Father of My Children. In both films, this stroll prefigures much strife to come: shortly after Things’ opening, Nathalie — already frayed by the demands of looking after her elderly mother (Edith Scob) — finds out Heinz is […]
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High Tide: Kenneth Lonergan on Manchester by the Sea
“…If it is true to say that, in essence, the tragic hero is intent upon claiming his whole due as a personality, and if this struggle must be total and without reservation, then it automatically demonstrates the indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity.” — Arthur Miller, “Tragedy and the Common Man” (The New York Times, Feb. 27, 1949) How should we grieve? When faced with inconceivable loss, most of us become amateurs, fumbling in the hope of recovery. Grief tends more to ugliness than elegance, and it has a nasty habit of overstaying its welcome. For Lee Chandler, […]
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Locking Gaze: Kirsten Johnson on the Images of Her Thrilling Documentary, Cameraperson
Both memoir and essay film, Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson is an astonishing work of cinematic analysis and alchemy. Comprised of material shot by Johnson for 24 different documentaries over a span of 25 years, it’s a movie made up of fragments, globetrotting scenes that tumble one after the other, announced by title cards listing the location and year of the footage but not the director. Included, too, in the footage is personal material, some for film projects of Johnson’s that have yet to be realized and some home movies shot of her mother in the months before she died of Alzheimer’s. […]
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Time for Outrage: James Schamus on Indignation
Whether he is pitching a movie, essaying the work of Carl Theodor Dreyer or teaching his Columbia Film Program students Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, writer, producer and now director James Schamus understands the power of discourse. In fact, if you’re a longtime Filmmaker reader, you’ll have read his arguments in these pages over the years, from his “Long Live Indie Film” debate with Ted Hope back in the ’90s of their production company, Good Machine, to his more recent — and mortal — “23 Fragments on the Future of Cinema” just a few issues ago. Now, Schamus continues one […]
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In Dark Trees: David Lowery on Pete’s Dragon
David Lowery has directed love stories about siblings, spouses, parents and children, so it follows logically that his next film would be a love story between an orphan and his dragon. Pete’s Dragon, Lowery’s nominal remake of the 1977 Disney film, lives in a tender, magical world that exists outside of time, in the wilderness of childhood imagination. The wonder, lack of cynicism and strong imagery of the natural world evoke cinema of the late ’70s and early ’80s; The Black Stallion and E.T. come to mind. Lowery seems fascinated by the stories we tell ourselves, the tall tales, the […]
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When the Film Festival Comes to Town
Regional film festivals all start to feel the same after a while. There’s at least one feature dramatizing the life of a white guy in Brooklyn. The organizers tell you about a farm-to-table restaurant down the street from the movie theater with craft beer you just have to try. When you ask the volunteer driving you around if they grew up in town, they answer, “sort of,” and give the name of some nearby suburb. And usually there’s a VIP party in an antique store or a mansion owned by the town’s historical society where you meet white-haired locals wearing […]
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Danger Man: Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg on Weiner
From where we currently sit in the middle of the Great Reality Show Presidential Primary Race of 2016, it seems like a point so obvious as to be nearly mundane: Politics can be the greatest show on earth. And, since the birth of the technology, that show has played out in front of the camera. Picking apart the symbiotic relationship between the media and politicians is an old conversation, merely updated with an ever-evolving set of tools: From Andrew Jackson, who controlled at least one newspaper and also blamed the press for ruining his wife’s good name, to Gary Hart, […]
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Precision Moves: Anna Rose Holmer, Lisa Kjerulff and Saela Davis on The Fits
“Stop thinking as an individual and start thinking as a team,” says Legs (Makyla Burnam), one of the Lionesses — a dynamic Cincinnati high-school drill team — to a group of young recruits, who include the shy, diminutive, but quietly purposeful 11-year-old boxer Toni. Played in writer/director/producer Anna Rose Holmer’s terrific, formally assured dramatic feature debut, The Fits, by the self-possessed and emotionally transparent Royalty Hightower, Toni has been drawn away from the comforting routine of her boxing practice by the sounds, music and movement of the Lionesses and, by extension, the more adult world they represent. But soon after […]
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The Marriage Plot: Whit Stillman on Love & Friendship
In several ways, Love & Friendship has Whit Stillman coming full circle to his 1990 debut Metropolitan, which includes a heated discussion of Jane Austen’s merits. “I love anachronism, and this was the chance to film, essentially, a costume picture set in the present day or recent past,” he told Betsy Sussler in a 1991 BOMB interview. With this Ireland-shot adaptation of Jane Austen’s comparatively obscure epistolary novella Lady Susan, he finally discards the husk of the present, indulging his sentiment expressed on Twitter last summer that “The 18th century just keeps getting better & better.” The puckish opening introduces […]
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Human Highway: Daniels on Swiss Army Man
Some of the images and ideas that have turned up in the commercials, music videos, short films and feature films of Daniels are: A man gets his foot stuck inside another man’s ass; the more he tries to get it out, the deeper it goes. A grieving widow is relentlessly prank-called by a child. A man has bottomless pockets. A woman’s breasts begin to move and spin inside her shirt. A man dances so hard that he falls through the floor, where he meets a hard-dancing woman who crashes her ass into his face; together, they fall through the floor. […]
