Features
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Decisive Moments
“All you need for a movie is a gun and girl,” Jean-Luc Godard famously wrote in one of his journals. But, of course, to make a good movie, you need others things too. An observant, imaginative eye helps, as does fresh context and a director’s understanding of the community containing that gun, that girl and, inevitably, the guy who stands behind — or in front of — the trigger. Restless City, the exciting dramatic feature debut of Nigerian-born photographer and music-video director Andrew Dosunmu, has all of these elements, and it mixes them into a hauntingly sensual take on the […]
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Prophet Motive
Save for the beard, Vikram Gandhi resembles nothing of his fictional creation Sri Kumaré, “a revered yoga master known to his contemporaries as Adarsha or ‘The Mirror.’ He is the current torchbearer of the Kumaré lineage and a respected, charismatic teacher of Yogic Science. Sri Kumaré is known for his youthful energy, transformative philosophy and divine blessing.” (That’s all from the Kumaré website — yes, Gandhi’s made-up character has his own website.) Instead, Gandhi comes across as the humble and inquisitive New Jersey native that he is in real life — a guy whose mischievous curiosity about humankind’s search for […]
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The Weight of Water: An Interview with Jessica Yu
Jumping from social-issue documentary films — like her new Last Call at
the Oasis — to independent narrative to network television, director JESSICA YU has one of the most multi-faceted careers around. By NICK DAWSON. Photograph by Henny Garfunkel -
Twice Removed: Your Sister’s Sister Director Lynn Shelton
Following her acclaimed bromantic comedy Humpday, LYNN SHELTON travels to a cabin on a secluded island to examine female relationships in the insightful Your Sister’s Sister. Writer/director RY RUSSO-YOUNG learns more from the Seattle-based filmmaker. -
RELEASED
18 years after traveling to Arkansas to make a documentary about the gruesome murders of three young boys by alleged Satan-worshiping teenagers, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky bring their crusading story of the West Memphis Three to a miraculous conclusion with Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory. By Jason Guerrasio -
City Limits
Following up his impressive debut, Reprise, Joachim Trier uses a Pierre Drieu La Rochelle novel and the Norwegian capital to create the beautifully somber Oslo, August 31st. By Scott Macaulay -
Foreign Correspondents
Directors Joshua Marston (The Forgiveness of Blood) and Braden King (Here) discuss the making of their very different pictures through the prism of their shared experience — making an independent film in Eastern Europe. -
Sundance 2012
Robot and Frank (director, Jake Schreier) I got into film because I was spectacularly mediocre at everything else. I loved art and performance, but wasn’t much of an actor, was a pretty bad keyboard player and couldn’t draw at all. When I got to try out filmmaking at an NYU summer high school program, it was the first time where the things I made vaguely resembled the ideas I had in my head. That doesn’t really explain why Robot & Frank had to be a film, except that in my hands it would have made for a really cheesy song […]
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Released
On Aug. 19, 2011, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr. entered an Arkansas courtroom for the final time. This was the last place these men, known better as the West Memphis Three, thought they’d be on this summer day — Baldwin and Misskelley were currently serving life sentences and Echols was on death row. But 18 years and 78 days after being sentenced for murdering three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Ark., there was finally a glimmer of hope that the state would recognize that these now mid-30-year-old men were not the killers and let them go free. […]
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Let Me Out: Ti West on The Innkeepers
The problem with so many horror films today is that you feel like you’ve seen them before. I’m not talking about their plots or characters because ghosts, vampires and serial killers have been and will be dramatized again and again. No, I’m talking about the feeling of watching these films, the internal clock that prepares you for this jolt by minute three, that one by minute 10 and a final shocker just before, or after, the closing credits. Among the many excellent qualities of writer-director Ti West’s filmmaking is its refusal to be straitjacketed by the more programmatic notions of […]
