Features
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Adult Friend Finder: Writer/Director Sean Baker on Starlet
Dree Hemingway is a sweet porn star and Besedka Johnson — Best Actress winner at the 2012 SXSW Film Festival — is the mysteriously bitter older woman she befriends in Sean Baker’s sun-streaked relationship drama, Starlet. Interview by Scott Macaulay.
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Troubled Assets
With the 2008 post-crash Presidential election as ironic backdrop, Andrew Dominik’s violent crime, Killing Them Softly, bitterly regards our crumbling American dream. Brandon Harris interviews the Australian writer/director.
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Physical Therapy
Jessica Yu revisits the subject of her own Academy Award-winning short documentary Breathing Lessons by speaking with writer/director Ben Lewin, whose The Sessions brings the story of the paralyzed poet Mark O’Brien to dramatic life.
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Love on the Outside
Ava DuVernay won the Best Director prize at Sundance for her second dramatic feature, Middle of Nowhere, a heartfelt and complex tale of a woman discovering her own identity while fighting for the parole of her convict husband. A writer, director and also distributor, DuVernay is releasing the film through a partnership between her own African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement and Participant Media. Producer Nekisa Cooper learns more.
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Body Blows
In Jacques Audiard’s tough-minded romantic melodrama, Rust and Bone, Marion Cotillard delivers a powerful performance as a woman struggling to rebuild her life after a devastating accident. Nick Dawson speaks with writer/director Audiard and co-screenwriter Thomas Bidegain.
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Touchdown Dance: Writer/Director David O’Russell on Silver Linings Playbook
David O. Russell makes bipolar disorder, dance competitions and the NFL the stuff of romantic comedy in Silver Linings Playbook, a seriously funny feature with star turns by Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. Miguel Arteta interviews writer/director Russell and executive producer/star Cooper.
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Love on the Run: Wes Anderson on Moonrise Kingdom
Set in and around a children’s summer camp off the coast of New England in 1965, Wes Anderson’s captivating Moonrise Kingdom is a movie about two 12-year-olds, young lovers who escape the adult world of counselors, parents and social workers to find a few magical moments in the film’s eponymous beachside paradise. A movie about childhood, Moonrise Kingdom is also, more importantly, a movie that feels of childhood. With its evocatively off-scale production design, tempered adult performances and moments of playful abandon, Moonrise Kingdom is stuffed with feelings and visions that, no matter what your age, transport you through time […]
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Flash Crash: Writer/Director David Cronenberg on His Don DeLillo Adaptation, Cosmopolis
In his 1977 novel Players, Don DeLillo told the story of a crumbling marriage amidst terrorism on the New York Stock exchange. In the 1973 Great Jones Street, he portrayed a wealthy rock star escaping the solar of his own fame by walking off his tour and hiding out in a downtown Manhattan apartment. And in Mao II (1991), he sent a reclusive, blocked novelist away from the world of cultural production into the zeitgeist of Middle East political violence. The emotional affect of a hypermediated society, the ways in which personal relations are shaped by the white noise of […]
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Of Time & The City
Artistry, despair and rage — the New York City of the 1980s and ’90s was defined by its fusion of these elements as artists and activists became frontline soldiers in the fight against the health crisis of AIDS. “Silence = Death” was the slogan of activist group ACT UP, an admonishment to all those who’d deny the severity of the epidemic by not taking a position. And as ACT UP members took direct action against fearful politicians, a generation of artists incorporated the movement’s anger and social critique into their own passionate work. These New York years form the backdrop […]
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Another 48 Hours
For years, people misjudged Julie Delpy. A screen actress since the age of nine, by her late teens Delpy was a gorgeous, willowy blonde who perfectly fit the mold of the French cinematic ingénue. After standout performances in films by Agnieszka Holland (Europa, Europa), Volker Schlöndorff (Voyager) and Krzysztof Kieslowski (Three Colors: White), Delpy decamped from Europe to America, where she worked both in mainstream Hollywood fare and in more distinguished indie productions, playing muse to directors such as Alan Rudolph, Jim Jarmusch and, most notably, Richard Linklater. But Delpy was far from just a muse. In addition to inspiring […]
