Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood centers on New York–based journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), who’s assigned to profile Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) for Esquire in the late 1990s. For editor Anne McCabe, who cut Heller’s previous feature, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, and Beautiful Day, the process was fundamentally the same on both: She began cutting dailies on day two of production while working through familiar challenges. “Any movie I work on is a lot longer at the beginning,” she observes. “Almost always you’re working on the setup. There’s usually too much at the beginning, and you’re […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]