The camera pushes tight in on Natalie Portman’s distressed face, a layer of 16mm grain putting a slight filter on her perfect features. From the very beginning, we’re too close; the customary distance from an iconic first lady is gone. Also missing are biographical flashbacks, or early happy moments, or pretty montages locating Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy within the tapestry of her husband’s life and administration. No, Pablo Larraín’s Jackie, which follows the first lady in the days following John F. Kennedy’s assassination, begins in a kind of emotional media res, a heightened state accentuated by the dark chords of Mica […]
In the nearly ten years I have worked as a film critic and journalist, the sources and stability of my income have severely varied. Freelance movie reviewing for multimedia outlets, like The Rotten Tomatoes Show on the now-defunct Current TV, or Medium Rare TV in San Francisco, kept me afloat through film school. Then in Sydney, Australia, internships in advertising and radio paid well enough for me to start and support a boutique film blog, CineMalin: Film Commentary and Criticism. But in Austin, Texas, where I moved for graduate school some years ago, employment options for professional film writers are […]
Two nights ago I stopped by a party following a screening of Barry Jenkins’s superlative new Moonlight at the New York Film Festival. Jenkins was there, along with producer Adele Romanski, actress Janelle Monáe, and there was a mood of excitement as well as appreciation. Let’s face it: we in independent film need things to be excited about, and it’s great when those things are actually movies made by great people who we can unabashedly champion. Jenkins made our 2008 25 New Faces list and then, in 2009, our cover with his debut picture, Medicine for Melancholy, and it’s been […]
There are only a few minutes of calm at the beginning of Mia Hansen-Løve’s fifth feature Things to Come. In a prologue two years before the film’s narrative kicks off, philosophy professor Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert) is on seaside vacation with longtime partner Heinz (André Marcon) and children, a stroll reminiscent of the family outing that kicks off her sophomore film, 2009’s The Father of My Children. In both films, this stroll prefigures much strife to come: shortly after Things’ opening, Nathalie — already frayed by the demands of looking after her elderly mother (Edith Scob) — finds out Heinz is […]
Not that long ago, and certainly on my last feature, I would often find myself joking with the gaffer or the key grip: “So if this was a $20 million film, what would we do differently?” Most of the time the answer involved big lighting cranes, custom lightboxes, technocranes and time. Lots and lots of time. On an indie, we are constantly pushed to produce more with less. Thirty-five-day schedules are becoming 28-day schedules. Eight million dollar films are being produced for five. The bar miraculously remains the same — you simply need to squeeze more juice from a smaller fruit. If you […]
“…If it is true to say that, in essence, the tragic hero is intent upon claiming his whole due as a personality, and if this struggle must be total and without reservation, then it automatically demonstrates the indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity.” — Arthur Miller, “Tragedy and the Common Man” (The New York Times, Feb. 27, 1949) How should we grieve? When faced with inconceivable loss, most of us become amateurs, fumbling in the hope of recovery. Grief tends more to ugliness than elegance, and it has a nasty habit of overstaying its welcome. For Lee Chandler, […]
Toronto International Film Festival By Scott Macaulay Following 2013’s The Flag, Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker returned to the Toronto International Film Festival this year with an entirely different meditation on national identity, Karl Marx City. Here Epperlein, who emigrated to the States following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, travels back to her East German homeland, attempting to uncover the reason for her father’s suicide in 1999. Evidence he may have been a Stasi informant deepens the urgency of her journey, with a visit to Stasi archives revealing thousands of hours of footage, somewhere in which may be the clue […]
In August 2016 Bret Easton Ellis posted this on Twitter: It happened: HBO’s brilliant The Night Of effectively eradicates the notion of the two-hour American theatrical movie. By now this is a familiar refrain: that in the era of long-form television, the quaint notion of trying to tell a complex story in just a couple of hours is all but dead. It’s hard to write a “defense” of movies without coming across as reactionary, nostalgic, elitist, purposefully difficult or just cranky. (Under certain conditions, none of these are bad attributes.) So this isn’t so much a defense of movies as it […]
Kerry James Marshall: Mastry Running from Oct. 25 to Jan. 29 at the Met Breuer — the Metropolitan’s new space for contemporary art, in the building formerly occupied by the Whitney — this is the largest museum exhibition to date of Kerry James Marshall. Marshall, whose work since the early ’80s has encompassed painting and sculpture, has returned repeatedly to questions of African-American representation and identity. This exhibition will predominantly focus on his paintings (72 in all) and is complemented by a sidebar exhibition curated by Marshall from the Met’s holdings rounding up his many and varied influences. Belle Époque in Upper Volta […]
House of Eternal Return is an overwhelming — 20,000 square feet! — immersive experience dreamed up by Meow Wolf, a Santa Fe art collective turned production company. Upon its March opening, the interactive art piece — realized through a multimillion dollar investment by Santa Fe resident George R.R. Martin, who also happens to own the local Jean Cocteau Cinema arthouse — garnered national attention from such mainstream outlets as The New York Times and NPR (which called it “Pee-wee’s Playhouse on steroids”), and drew the likes of Martin and Neil Gaiman. Yet at this moment, when artists are scrambling to […]