Features
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Milk Money: Director Kelly Reichardt on the New World and Nascent Capitalism of First Cow
First Cow marks the fifth film in 14 years on which director Kelly Reichardt has collaborated with screenwriter–novelist Jon Raymond. I can’t think of a director–writer team in America that has produced so much superior work during this time period—Reichardt is one of the talents on whom hope for the creative possibilities of American filmmaking now rests. Like Reichardt and Raymond’s first partnership, the critically lauded, microbudgeted Old Joy (2005), First Cow is a lyrical tragicomic story of male friendship, emerging against the background of the almost intoxicating beauty of the Oregon woods. But this time, Reichardt’s telling a more […]
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Air Rights: Shooting with Drones, the Fine Print
In 2010, Eric Austin made a bold choice. The Texas-based father of three quit his day job as a sales rep to focus solely on his side hustle, flying unmanned aircraft systems (UAS)—commonly known as drones. He had a three-month job lined up on a Disney-produced show in Hawaii piloting his single-rotor helicopter adorned with a Canon 7D. In those few months, he would earn more than in a year at his old job. But before Austin ever spun his blades, he was grounded. Inundated by aerial permit requests and unable to get definitive guidance from the Federal Aviation Administration […]
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Her Decision: Eliza Hittman on Her Observational, Intimate and Necessarily Political Never Rarely Sometimes Always
“It’s so important for me to be thinking about a movie all the time,” says writer-director Eliza Hittman, reflecting on her creative process. “I don’t spend so much time sitting at a computer. I want to walk around, be in locations, spend my Saturday on a handball court or in a park or in Port Authority and respond to the environment.” Evidenced by the authenticity and truthful immediacy—laced with deeply neorealist touches—of her films, there must be something to this observational method of writing the burgeoning American auteur calls “experiential.” It births a singular high-stakes quality that guides It Felt […]
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There’s Something in the Air: With The Vast of Night, Director Andrew Patterson Reinvents the UFO Movie
Director Andrew Patterson’s film The Vast of Night, which premiered to great acclaim at the 2019 Slamdance Film Festival, is informed by many genres and influences but beholden to none of them. Part Twilight Zone–esque sci-fi tale, part young adult romance, part David Fincher–inspired suspense movie with a dash of The Last Picture Show’s small town poetry, it is most of all a haunting and startling debut feature that teaches the audience how to watch it as it progresses—which means it not only rewards but demands repeat viewings. Set over the course of one night in 1950s New Mexico, The […]
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Commodity Fetishism
The visual exquisiteness of Peter Strickland’s films has sometimes led to them being regarded as precious bon-bons—laced with strychnine—that favor style over substance. It’s an argument that applies no more to his self-financed feature debut Katalin Varga (2009), an unsentimental neo-Gothic rape revenge drama, than to his harrowing giallo homage Berberian Sound Studio (2012) or his depiction of an inverse Domme/sub relationship in The Duke of Burgundy (2014). Each of these movies is a penetrating psychological study of a character struggling to survive victimhood and the unfair hand she or he has been dealt. If you don’t sympathize with Katalin […]
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Economy of the Arcane: Pedro Costa on Vitalina Varela
Pedro Costa will not separate films from how they are made. We cannot escape that “how” from what we are seeing on screen, so we must make films the hard way. It is not enough for us to get them made: We must know our technicians closely, see that they are compensated fairly, ensure that our project is optimized for our tools and that those tools only operate at their zenith. Ease, Costa warns, is the sure sign of a “trap,” that, if succumbed to, will expose one’s work to “bullshit,” a word he does not use lightly. If we […]
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Every Day I Write the Book
Creating cinema without concern for the economic system in which you operate is a privilege few can exercise. Like most filmmakers I know, I make films not only as a form of expression but also as a means of financial subsistence. I wrestle with the impact this dependency has on my work on a daily basis. Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, a film that she pitched as being about “art and women and money,” examines the complex relationship between profit and power in storytelling. Gerwig’s adaptation of the century-and-a-half-old text boldly restructures the narrative and further blurs the line between author […]
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Disposessions
Mati Diop conjures films that can feel like half-remembered dreams. Blending documentary and fantasy, they are both uncannily lucid in their sensory detail and strangely hazy in their fragmented and elliptical narratives. Like most people, I first encountered Diop as an actress in Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum. Back in 2008, at the urging of her friend Grégoire Colin, Diop had reluctantly auditioned for the role. The experience working with Denis was transformative. She was only three months into her filmmaking studies at Le Fresnoy, but she left. That year also marked the 10-year anniversary of the death of […]
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Parlays and Teasers
I first learned of Josh and Benny Safdie’s Uncut Gems—a comedy/drama built around the self-delusions, self-destructions and unbridled compulsions of a midtown Manhattan diamond dealer—back in 2011. The brothers had just completed their first feature as a directing duo, Daddy Longlegs (Josh previously directed 2008’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed), and shared a 161-page early draft. Much of the ingenious plotting of their new film was missing, but the character of that dealer, Howard Ratner, screamed out. Indelibly portrayed by Adam Sandler eight years later, Howard is a perpetual motion machine of mishap, whose schemes spiral more and more painfully […]
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Trauma & Transformation: Alma Har’el on Her Shia LaBeouf Drama, Honey Boy
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 […]
