Features
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Kodak Moments: Rick Linklater on His Award-Winning Long-Game Masterpiece, Boyhood
This interview with Rick Linklater about his Boyhood originally appeared as the cover story of our Summer, 2014 issue. As the film wins Best Picture from the New York Film Critics’ Circle, is is posted online for the first time. Time, along with its cousin memory, are among modernity’s great artistic subjects, with the title of Proust’s masterwork, In Search of Lost Time, articulating the journey of countless authors, playwrights, and filmmakers to creatively capture the sensations and meanings of our rapidly receding past. Among the latter have been directors whose films have reached for these passing years with any […]
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All Together Now: Ned Benson on The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby
When Ned Benson started writing The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby 10 years ago, he had no idea his directorial debut would permutate into a unique creature, or, by present count, four unique incarnations, all of which are equally subjective movie-going experiences. Eleanor Rigby world-premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2013 as two features, Her and Him, joined into a 201-minute juggernaut. Her immediately immerses us into the sorrow of one Eleanor Rigby (Jessica Chastain), a woman who’s suffered a loss but cannot bear to talk about it, whether with her estranged husband, Conor (James McAvoy), her sister Katy […]
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Irregular Beats: Roberto Minervini on Stop the Pounding Heart
The third film in Roberto Minervini’s “Texas trilogy,” Stop the Pounding Heart, is his first to get American distribution. His debut feature, 2011’s The Passage, followed a terminally ill woman driving through the state in search of a faith healer, while the following year’s Low Tide focused on a mother and her solitary son in small-town Texas. The three films are realized by Minervini in collaboration with his cast, non-actors whose characters and story lines are drawn from their own life experiences. Sara Carlson was a supporting player in The Passage, while Colby Trichell had a bull riding scene in […]
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Separate Bedrooms
In conversation below with fellow writer/director Todd Solondz, Ira Sachs calls his latest work,Love is Strange, “a middle-aged film” — not because it’s focused on midlife issues, but because “it has perspective on both what youth felt like as well as what aging can lead to.” That’s a beautiful formulation by Sachs on this warm and generous New York movie that charms by unexpectedly opening its perspective across both neighborhoods and generations. Love is Strange opens with a flurry of activity as two older gay men — a music teacher (Alfred Molina) and painter (John Lithgow) — take advantage of […]
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The Power of the Purse
At their fourth floor office in Gowanus, Brooklyn, directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin are preparing for the release of their second documentary feature, Citizen Koch. Outside their window is the neighborhood’s famous polluted canal but also a new Whole Foods that wasn’t there just one year ago. Gowanus, with its Superfund cleanup site, is a “neighborhood in transition,” but one that urban planners and TEDx speakers hope will be gentrification done right, retaining artists, artisans and small businesses amidst the fancy restaurants and incoming homeowners. A recent New York Times profile said Gowanus “seems poised to exist as an […]
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Phantom Rides
Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s mesmerizing Manakamana is the kind of film that pushes us to confront the basic reasons we go to the cinema in the first place — and what compels us to stay and stare at a screen for two hours. Most of us go to be transported in one way or another; Spray and Velez’s film certainly delivers in this respect, both literally and figuratively. Set entirely within a cable car floating above the Nepali jungle, the camera trained on visitors journeying to a mountaintop temple, the film never stops moving. It’s an action movie about […]
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The New Americans
I have found myself disconcerted in writing about James Gray’s The Immigrant. I was immediately moved by the film and couldn’t fail to appreciate its elegantly controlled cinematic style, but I also felt there was something elusive and hard-to-pin-down about the many levels on which it attempts to address the audience. The film is consistently surprising in how traditional it is in some ways, how unabashed it is in its tenderness toward its characters, the milieu and historical period. Yet the film never succumbs to the twin dangers of stereotypical downbeatness or sugar-coated wish-fulfillment; it has an unusually complex level […]
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You Have To Laugh
The first words of Obvious Child are heard over black. Effervescent stand-up comedian Donna Stern (the pitch-perfect Jenny Slate) appears in flashes, lording over her audience as she addresses the myth of clean underwear in graphic detail. If it wasn’t already apparent from the mere premise of her Sundance breakout, director Gillian Robespierre knows how to make a first impression. A romantic comedy that upends all that the genre holds dear, Obvious Child, based on Robespierre’s 2009 short, is an irreverent, hilarious and touching examination of a woman’s brash misstep and her hesitant navigation through its domino-like ramifications. Impregnated during […]
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Gun Crazy
Revenge is a dish best served cold. That famous proverb has provided the template for many a revenge thriller, as steely protagonists emotionlessly hunt and mow down the enemies that have caused them pain and suffering. With a slight eyebrow raise or lip quiver, ’60s and ’70s icons Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin meted out their justice with a hypnotic intensity. Later, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steven Seagal and Robert Englund (as Freddy Krueger) added touches of black humor in the form of sardonic, post-killing one-liners. But by the early aughts, the revenge thriller would seem to have run its […]
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Eyes Wide Shut
French director Alain Guiraudie’s first feature, the 2003 coming-of-age film No Rest for the Brave, opens in a nondescript bar in a sleepy town where Basile, the agitated protagonist, is recounting a strange dream to his friend Igor. The disturbed young man believes the dream carries a fatal warning: if he falls asleep again, he will die. What follows is a Buñuelian picaresque that is shot in the style of social realism but structured as a series of narrative ruptures creating the filmic equivalent of the surrealist game of exquisite corpse. Guiraudie has, over the past decade, continued to probe […]
