Features
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Here Comes the Ocean: Ron Howard on In the Heart of the Sea
Ron Howard is one of those filmmakers who often feels like a throwback to the directors of the classical studio era, guys such as Victor Fleming and Michael Curtiz, who would jump from action flick to comedy to melodrama and back again without missing a beat. At the beginning of his career, he followed up an R-rated comedy (Night Shift) with a romance for Disney (Splash) and then went on to do an Oscar-winning biopic (A Beautiful Mind), Westerns (Far and Away, The Missing), prescient satires (Gung Ho, EDtv) and massive tentpoles (The Da Vinci Code, How the Grinch Stole […]
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Lost in a Dream
“I don’t think humans communicate well.” —Lisandro Alonso I agree with the Argentine director. In our present age — when everyone has to be “connected” all the time, doing more than one thing — the chatter, the noise, can be maddening. Encountering the work of Lisandro Alonso makes me recall the feeling of lying on the floor and listening to a record as a teenager: not texting or talking or answering emails, simply listening. Alonso’s films let the viewer pay attention and dream simultaneously. Spare in dialogue, attentive to landscapes, meditative in pacing, they allow one to get lost in […]
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From My Screen to Yours: Carlos Marques-Marcet on 10.000 KM
Technical pyrotechnics are a relative concept, to say the least. Hollywood-style CG can create alien worlds or giant explosions in tentpole films as well as illusorily seamless cinematography in mid-level independent dramas such as Birdman. Still, seldom do these applications seem to come from a place of necessity as opposed to an external, directorial flourish. The 23-minute unbroken take — realized practically, without effects — that opens Carlos Marques-Marcet’s quietly transfixing debut, 10.000 KM, is the best kind of pyrotechnic: scarcely noticeable and utterly essential. Over the course of these 23 minutes in a dimly lit Barcelona apartment, Alex (Natalia […]
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Vanishing Act: David Fincher on Gone Girl
Marriage might be an attempt at a lifelong emotional bond, but it’s also a contract enforced through mutual brutality. Disappointments mount, responsibilities shift, a struggle for power inevitably ensues between the partners; control is hard won and often gained only through compromises at best, coercion at worst. In most marriages, that brutality is only psychological, and the loss of the unmarried self — the version of you that attracted your significant other in the first place — never brings out the knives when you or your spouse realize what a lousy existence you’ve traded in for. (And we haven’t even […]
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Great Expectations: Alex Ross Perry on Listen Up Philip
Alex Ross Perry’s first feature Impolex was an oblique gloss on Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, while his higher-profile follow-up, The Color Wheel, stole the font of Philip Roth’s ’70s hardcovers for its credits, as well as that writer’s abrasive fearlessness and sexual disreputability. Literature hangs heavy over Listen Up Philip as well, not least in its subject: a young, New York novelist on the precipice of success being mentored by a Roth-like literary titan. That writer’s spirit is still present, but the major structural reference is William Gaddis’ behemoth debut The Recognitions, whose main through line is a pure-spirited and […]
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In the Eye of the Storm: Laura Poitras on CITIZENFOUR
Red tail lights glow in an inky black tunnel. In voiceover, a woman’s voice softly reads. “Laura,” the email begins. The sender writes of encryption, passwords, the government documents he intends to send and the reason he addressed this email to her. “You’ve been selected,” Laura speaks, as the sender goes on to explain that every phone call she makes, trip she embarks on, person she befriends will be observed, recorded, surveilled. “This is a story few but you can tell.” With this cool, measured voiceover, drawing us into her life at the moment it changed forever, documentary filmmaker Laura […]
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Fear of a Black Campus: Justin Simien on Dear White People
Justin Simien’s stylized comedy Dear White People takes place at the fictional Ivy League Winchester University, focusing primarily on four students but also capturing within its satiric gaze the campus as social microcosm. Each of the four undergrads takes on a different strategy for dealing with being a “black face in a white place.” Sam White (Tessa Thompson) is a biracial beauty who rocks a Lisa Bonet look. Perhaps in response to her own white privilege, she is trying on a radical identity: the school Angela Davis with a radio show called “Dear White People.” On her show, she leans […]
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A Roof over Their Heads: Jesse Moss on The Overnighters
When Jesse Moss headed to North Dakota to make The Overnighters, it was truly a one-man endeavor. He took no crew with him. He was on his way to meet Pastor Jay Reinke, who had been giving shelter to the many men who uprooted themselves and made their way to Williston, N. D., in hopes of finding work in the town’s booming oil industry. With so many desperate souls appearing in Williston, resources to feed and house them were quickly drying up. Soon, the offices, floor space and pews of Reinke’s church were filled with itinerant workers, and town residents […]
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Glory at Sea: Mike Leigh on Mr. Turner
Within a career that’s now in its fifth decade, Mr. Turner is only the third period film Mike Leigh has made, but, ironically, it’s the first he’s shot digitally. The picture captures the last 25 years of revered British painter J.M.W. Turner’s life — already famous, his days are filled with awkward visits from an ex-wife and daughters, confrontations with both artistic rivals and lesser painters, and the salon visits that constitute the business of being an artist in the mid-1800s. Timothy Spall deservedly won the Best Actor prize at Cannes for his turn as the eccentric Turner, who walks […]
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Positive Trauma: Editor Mathilde Bonnefoy on CITIZENFOUR
Paris-born editor Mathilde Bonnefoy has criss-crossed documentary and fiction, working with directors such as Wim Wenders (The Soul of a Man) and, most prominently, Tom Tykwer. Her first feature editing credit is the director’s time-bending international hit Run Lola Run, and she has continued to work with Tykwer on Heaven, Three and The International, among others. Long based in Berlin, Bonnefoy, as she relates below, was sought after by Poitras because of her work on Tykwer’s films and the “thriller” nature of CITIZENFOUR’s source material. Below, in the final days of post-production, I speak to Bonnefoy about encrypted workflows, working […]
