Alma Har’el’s Honey Boy is an emotional prism, generating moments that are warm, traumatic, unsettling and scarring. So, it’s no wonder that the process of constructing such an intimate and emotionally shattering film was equally grounded in feeling. Har’el’s narrative feature debut (her previous features are the documentaries Bombay Beach and LoveTrue) contains Shia LaBeouf’s most gripping performance to date and showcases the two collaborators’ ability to make art containing expressive power and emotional wisdom. In Honey Boy, also written by LaBeouf, we meet Otis (Lucas Hedges), a movie star who’s sent to rehab and forced to confront his childhood […]

Knowing that Alma Har’el worked in a fluid, in-the-moment fashion, and that dancing with the actors in the scene was key to the story, DP Natasha Braier started prep by going through the script and asking the director for each scene, “Describe the scene with a feeling.” During prep and while shooting, Braier always wanted to root the camera in the emotions of each scene. In her previous work on films like The Neon Demon and The Milk of Sorrow, Braier tapped into her ability to capture human experience with stylized camera work and expressive lighting. We discussed how she […]

Paul Harrill’s Tennessee-set Light from Light, which premiered this year at Sundance, stars Marin Ireland as a paranormal investigator who may or may not believe in ghosts and Jim Gaffigan as a recent widower who still feels his wife’s presence in their house. Harrill is quick to point out that it is definitely not a horror film, and anyone expecting scares will be disappointed. Instead, Harrill investigates seemingly more mundane day-to-day Southern living (as he did in his previous effort, Something, Anything), and in it finds a delicate balance between reality and spirituality. I saw Light from Light at the […]

“This is so metaphorical!” Ki-woo’s metatextual reaction to the unlikely gift of a stone from his friend Min early in Bong Joon- ho’s Palme d’Or–winning Parasite isn’t the film’s most startling moment, but it’s an early jolt that both sets and undermines viewer expectations. Ki-woo (wide-eyed Choi Woo-shik—Okja, Train to Busan) lives in an underground apartment with his underemployed family, including humbled but unvanquished father Ki-taek (Bong regular Song Kang-ho, unsurprisingly great) and scheming sister Ki-jung (Park So-dam, cynical and hilarious). When Ki-woo becomes a tutor for the daughter of a rich family, the action settles into that family’s stunning […]

The following interview of Jim Jarmusch about Dead Man was published originally in Filmmaker‘s Spring, 1996 issue. It is appearing online for the first time. Dead Man was reissued last year by and is now available from Criterion. In Jim Jarmusch’s new Dead Man, Johnny Depp plays William Blake, a mild-mannered accountant who travels by train across the frontier West to work in a bookkeeping firm run by a crazed, gun-toting Robert Mitchum. When, as in a Kafka novel, the job vanishes before it’s even begun, Blake finds himself a hunted man, pursued for a murder he didn’t commit while […]

[Editor’s Note: The following piece was originally published as the cover story of our Spring, 1996 edition. It appears online here for the first time.] When we invited Go Fish director Rose Troche to interview Mary Harron, the director and co-writer of I Shot Andy Warhol, we hardly anticipated such a happy chain of coincidences. On the subject of bio-pics, Harron’s film explores the political and psychological contradictions of Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, while Troche is currently at work developing a film on Dorothy Arzner, perhaps Hollywood’s greatest female director. Both Solanas and Arzner, while ostensibly […]

Divisive. Vexing. Hilarious. Disturbing. Stimulating. Exhilarating. However one feels about the films of Rick Alverson, one thing’s for certain: the adjectives used to express that opinion will be strong. From The Builder (2010) to Entertainment (2015), Alverson has relentlessly challenged his audiences to confront—and dare to release—their preconceived notions of narrative cinema. At a time when the independent festival circuit has begun to feel more like a breeding ground for the major studios and television networks than a showcase for brash, defiantly original stand-alone works of art, Alverson is providing a desperately needed jolt—a reminder of what truly independent cinema […]