Issues
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Lose Yourself to Dance: Mia Hansen-Løve on Eden
French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve makes movies about walking and not talking. About the unsaid stuff that underpins everyday life, that tacitly ferries us toward and away from life’s big dramas: love, first love, broken love, careers as they peak and wane, reunions and ennui, death, family. Hers is a world where the moving image, like life, is animated not by the noise that accompanies celebration and turbulent times, but by time itself. So much so that Hansen-Løve’s four features, All Is Forgiven, The Father of My Children, Goodbye First Love and her most recent, Eden, span years, sometimes decades — […]
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Talk, Write, Kill
Best Seller An old-school scribe who never met a genre he couldn’t work in, Larry Cohen honed his craft as a writer on ’50s and ’60s television before graduating to features via assignments like Return of the Seven and a series of unproduced treatments for Alfred Hitchcock (one of which would resurface decades later as the Colin Farrell vehicle Phone Booth). Cohen promoted himself to director in 1972 with Bone, a wickedly funny class satire in which a white couple’s repressed tensions are brought to the surface by an encounter with a black man who wanders onto their property. Shot, […]
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Stream or Screen: Are Film Festivals Still Worth It for Short Films?
Before the advent of streaming platforms, the festival circuit was practically the only option for distributing short form content. You’d ship your finished film off to Sundance and pray for that acceptance letter — and maybe even a feature deal made at the festival. But while some of today’s filmmakers still hold tight to that romantic ideal, others are capitalizing on the visibility and fan cultivation teased by the online sphere. They argue against festival submission fees and pricey DCP shipments and for the simplicity of an online premiere on Vimeo, YouTube, NoBudge, Fandor or another platform where audiences are […]
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Shakespeare in the Park: On the Set of Matías Piñeiro’s Hermia & Helena
Argentinian director Matías Piñeiro’s last three films have started from a Shakespearean source text: As You Like It for Rosalinda, Twelfth Night for Viola, Love’s Labour’s Lost in The Princess of France. In all these structurally playful and formally rigorous works, troupes of actors are working on new productions, and the films are given further continuity by a recurring ensemble cast and crew including actress Augustina Muñoz and d.p. Fernando Lockett. In Piñeiro’s newest production, Hermia & Helena, a young woman (Muñoz) comes to New York on a fellowship for a new Spanish translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, though […]
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Getting Strong Now: Andrew Bujalski on Results
Andrew Bujalski’s first three features — Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation and Beeswax — were all more or less of a piece: illusorily casual 16mm portraits of young people in ambiguously comfortable stasis in, respectively, Boston, Brooklyn and Austin. Computer Chess, released in 2013, was a total UFO both in relation to his work and in relation to just about everything else. Film was out, but instead of clean digital, Bujalski shot on three 1969 SONY AVC-3260 cameras, its unfamiliar type of black-and-white grain making even denser a complicated comedy about a computer chess conference happening sometime in the late […]
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15 Sexy Things You Get to Do When You Think Your Film is Finished
Okay, you’ve spent seven years making your indie opus, another two years playing the festival circuit, and somewhere along the way you even managed to sell your film and get distribution. Hooray, you’re done and the party’s over! Your goal by this point is undoubtedly to move on and start working on the next film. But, wait a second, just because you’ve “sold” your film and you “got” distribution doesn’t mean your job as a filmmaker is “done” (or that you need to stop using “air quotes”). On the contrary, you’re still staring at a 20-to-life sentence for your film. […]
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Dispatches from Sundance, Berlin, SXSW, True/False & Thessaloniki
Sundance SCOTT MACAULAY Check it out: the two top prize winners at Sundance this year, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack, both feature as central elements teenagers who stage and film their own versions of classic movies. There’s even overlap between the two films, although Moselle’s Manhattan shut-ins incline more towards Tarantino and Freddy Krueger, while Gomez-Rejon’s teen Pittsburgh auteurs shirk the Romero roots of their hometown for deep dives into the Criterion Collection. For film lovers of a certain age, both Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and The Wolfpack […]
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The Need for Speed
It was sheer stupid curiosity, I’ll admit it, that lead me to Jupiter Ascending on a cold, sunny afternoon in early March. With a mixture of shame and defiance, I shelled out my 10 hard-earned dollars and entered the newly carpeted theater, where the movie began to play to a grand total of three souls. I had been intrigued by the terrible reviews, the sort that actually make a film sound interesting. The comparisons to Dune (although completely misplaced, in my book) helped with the allure, as did the notion that this was a cult film in waiting. There’s also […]
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Parting Shot
There’s a great tradition of acclaimed French actresses crossing over into larger budget Hollywood films, both good and bad: Isabelle Huppert in Heaven’s Gate; Catherine Deneuve in Hustle; Audrey Tautou in The Da Vinci Code. And while there’s a tradition too of French actresses appearing in American independent films — Huppert again in Hartley’s Amateur and, more recently, Adèle Exarchopoulos in, briefly, Matt Porterfield’s I Used to Be Darker — French stars appearing in such uninhibited, ultra-low budget comedies as Patrick Brice’s The Overnight, a Sundance premiere headed to theaters via The Orchard this June, are a far rarer occurrence. […]
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Act Naturally
“Giving the movie its comic and poignant dimension is Brennan’s performance as Brennan.” In the wake of Albert Maysles’ death in March, I returned to this intriguing reference to “performance” in Vincent Canby’s 1969 review of Salesman, Albert and David Maysles’ landmark work of direct cinema. Canby was, of course, referring to Paul Brennan, affectionately known as “The Badger.” Brennan’s performance — if we can call it that — is indeed astonishing. A man of unremarkable looks, he holds the screen with an enthralling intensity. Of course, Brennan isn’t an actor but rather a “real person,” a documentary subject of […]
