Features
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The Masked Woman: Todd Haynes on Carol
A key movie to first understanding Todd Haynes is his Karen Carpenter “biopic” cast entirely with Barbie dolls, Superstar. This 1987 short that, due to Karen’s brother, Richard, and music rights problems will never be released, seems to define not only Haynes’s subsequent cinema, but also how much he understands the ways in which popular culture, music and memories interweave with the struggles of being a woman, the struggles of sexuality and the struggles of controlling ourselves in a world that won’t really allow it. Superstar goes beyond Karen Carpenter, digging into our own memories and insecurities. For those who first […]
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Man Down: Ira Sachs Interviews Writer/Director Oren Moverman about Time Out of Mind
The following interview was originally published in Filmmaker‘s Summer, 2015 issue. It is appearing online today for the first time. Time Out of Mind opens today via IFC Films. Alongside his biggest professional success as a screenwriter — he co-wrote Bill Pohlad’s hit Brian Wilson biopic, Love & Mercy — Oren Moverman returns to theaters this summer as a director with an equally striking yet very different film. Time Out of Mind, which premiered last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival, joins Moverman’s previous features — The Messenger and Rampart — in its politically aware depiction of compromised masculinity, […]
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The Anxiety of Influence: Director James Ponsoldt on The End of the Tour
“Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking?” – David Foster Wallace The new tagline for the James Ponsoldt movie The End of the Tour is, “Imagine the greatest conversation you’ve ever had.” I initially took issue with this tagline. Ponsoldt’s film is based on a book arranged around a transcript of an unpublished interview […]
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Survivor’s Song: Christian Petzold on Phoenix
The more you consider the nuances of German filmmaker Christian Petzold’s latest feature, Phoenix, the more difficult it is to articulate exactly what this mysterious and allusive drama is really about. It’s the director’s seventh feature for cinema (discounting the five he has made for television), and the fifth he has made in collaboration with actress and avowed muse Nina Hoss. While not quite stripped down to Bressonian levels of formal curtness, Petzold’s style is without fuss. As he explains below, his mode of storytelling is generally more reflective and assiduously built through alternating perspectives than it is literal or […]
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Corrective Lens
While promoting The Act Of Killing — his punchy, audacious, madly performative, deeply troubling masterpiece about the legacy of genocide in Indonesia 50 years later — Joshua Oppenheimer didn’t much let on that there was a second, complementary feature in the works. While editing the first film, and before his secondary subjects in the government and paramilitaries knew what a bold, damning document he had fashioned, Oppenheimer shot a round of elegant, formally restrained interviews with his earlier subjects through the offices of his collaborator, Adi Rukun, an optometrist whose older brother had been murdered. Among a range of substantial […]
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I Want to Take You Higher: Josh and Ben Safdie on Heaven Knows What
New York these days: There’s a chain store on every corner, Times Square is a paved-over pedestrian mall with $6 hot dogs and, if you want voyeuristic thrills, you peer into the bedrooms of the luxury condos flush against the beautifully manicured, elevated High Line that’s transformed the West Side. No one wants to reflexively cling to a misplaced nostalgia, but given the blanding of the city’s physical landscape it’s not hard to imagine that the number of urgently jaw-dropping stories in the Naked City is decreasing daily. Fortunately, for those of us who associate New York with subcultural energies, […]
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Lose Yourself to Dance: Mia Hansen-Løve on Eden
French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve makes movies about walking and not talking. About the unsaid stuff that underpins everyday life, that tacitly ferries us toward and away from life’s big dramas: love, first love, broken love, careers as they peak and wane, reunions and ennui, death, family. Hers is a world where the moving image, like life, is animated not by the noise that accompanies celebration and turbulent times, but by time itself. So much so that Hansen-Løve’s four features, All Is Forgiven, The Father of My Children, Goodbye First Love and her most recent, Eden, span years, sometimes decades — […]
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Getting Strong Now: Andrew Bujalski on Results
Andrew Bujalski’s first three features — Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation and Beeswax — were all more or less of a piece: illusorily casual 16mm portraits of young people in ambiguously comfortable stasis in, respectively, Boston, Brooklyn and Austin. Computer Chess, released in 2013, was a total UFO both in relation to his work and in relation to just about everything else. Film was out, but instead of clean digital, Bujalski shot on three 1969 SONY AVC-3260 cameras, its unfamiliar type of black-and-white grain making even denser a complicated comedy about a computer chess conference happening sometime in the late […]
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Act Naturally
“Giving the movie its comic and poignant dimension is Brennan’s performance as Brennan.” In the wake of Albert Maysles’ death in March, I returned to this intriguing reference to “performance” in Vincent Canby’s 1969 review of Salesman, Albert and David Maysles’ landmark work of direct cinema. Canby was, of course, referring to Paul Brennan, affectionately known as “The Badger.” Brennan’s performance — if we can call it that — is indeed astonishing. A man of unremarkable looks, he holds the screen with an enthralling intensity. Of course, Brennan isn’t an actor but rather a “real person,” a documentary subject of […]
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I’ll Come Running: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and Jesse Andrews on Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
Those are people who died, died! They were all my friends, and they died! — Jim Carroll Do you remember your first experience with death? Most likely it was a grandparent passing. Or maybe a parent? Or, quite possibly, someone you knew at school, whether or not that person was a close friend. I remember mine — the younger brother of an elementary school classmate. He’d always prank on his older brother in the line to get into school each day, sneaking up on him from behind and then grabbing his lunch bag. A tug of war would ensue, the […]
