Issues
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Photographing Memory: DP Rodrigo Prieto on the “Three-Headed Monster” Used to Shoot Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman
Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, based on hitman Frank Sheeran’s (Robert De Niro) account of the murder of Teamster luminary Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), talks back to its characters’ memories as much as it does the director’s past films. It’s Sheeran’s perspective told from Scorsese’s, executed by his go-to cinematographer since The Wolf of Wall Street, Rodrigo Prieto. Sheeran confessed to murdering Hoffa, the dear friend he served as bodyguard. But Hoffa’s true cause of death is still subject to speculation, as are details of Sheeran’s recollection. “Some people are mulling over what’s accurate and what’s not accurate, and I don’t […]
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Dressing for Business: Costume Designer Mitchell Travers on the Sharp Period Style of Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers
Hustlers, Lorene Scafaria’s adaptation (from a 2015 New York article by Jessica Pressler) of the real-life tale of savvy strippers scamming their wealthy clients in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, is one of the year’s top crowd-pleasers, and its giddy garishness is expertly manifested in the costumes worn by the all-female primary cast. Early on, veteran stripper Ramona (Jennifer Lopez) wraps her sumptuous fur coat around the considerably less confident Destiny (Constance Wu) in a moment of feminine bonding and reassurance. The scene has elicited spontaneous clapping from audiences—not just for Lopez’s considerable charisma, but for her unforgettably […]
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The Regretful Viewer: Memory and Anxiety at the Multiplex
Time carries forward, seemingly interminable, as we plunge into a new decade. But with each new marker, we are reminded that time itself is terrifyingly finite. The unknowable possibility of heaven or hell—or the more likely chance of stark nothingness—looms. With the unnerving fact of human mortality comes mournful reflection of why life transpired as it did, and what could have been—a mood and narrative spark defining part of the cinematic output of 2019. Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is centered around two has-beens played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, relics of the Hollywood studio […]
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Sorry, We’re All We’ve Got: The Limits of Community in 2019’s Best Movies
In Ad Astra, Roy McBride travels across our solar system to reconnect with his distant father Clifford, only to find a driven man whose sole purpose is to determine whether intelligent life exists out there in that cold, empty universe. But his son already knows the answer: “We’re all we’ve got.” Brad Pitt’s line to Tommy Lee Jones doesn’t just neatly summarize James Gray’s sci-fi drama—it also serves as the unofficial theme of so many movies in 2019, a year in which the fleeting notions of community and family were the only things many characters had to hold onto. No […]
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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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Where Do I Go From Here?
I’ve had depression described to me as an obsession with the past, anxiety as a fixation on the future. In my experience with both, this has proven to be accurate. With my filmmaking, I feel in control, but when it comes to my own life and my influence over my mental health, often feel powerless. When framing a shot, there is a desire to capture a moment in time—emphasizing the particular light, the diegetic sounds, perhaps a slight breeze. This process is not unlike attempting to ground myself through meditative mindfulness: noticing my surroundings in detail, trying not to let […]
