Red tail lights glow in an inky black tunnel. In voiceover, a woman’s voice softly reads. “Laura,” the email begins. The sender writes of encryption, passwords, the government documents he intends to send and the reason he addressed this email to her. “You’ve been selected,” Laura speaks, as the sender goes on to explain that every phone call she makes, trip she embarks on, person she befriends will be observed, recorded, surveilled. “This is a story few but you can tell.” With this cool, measured voiceover, drawing us into her life at the moment it changed forever, documentary filmmaker Laura […]
Within a career that’s now in its fifth decade, Mr. Turner is only the third period film Mike Leigh has made, but, ironically, it’s the first he’s shot digitally. The picture captures the last 25 years of revered British painter J.M.W. Turner’s life — already famous, his days are filled with awkward visits from an ex-wife and daughters, confrontations with both artistic rivals and lesser painters, and the salon visits that constitute the business of being an artist in the mid-1800s. Timothy Spall deservedly won the Best Actor prize at Cannes for his turn as the eccentric Turner, who walks […]
“Turner was progressive,” says cinematographer Dick Pope. “He was not a Luddite. He was very forward-looking. And if he was making the decision today, whether to shoot on film or digital, with all the tools and control of the palette [digital] offers, Mike and I felt that he would choose digital.” “Mike,” of course, is Mike Leigh, and “Turner” is J.M.W. Turner, the 19th-century painter of roiling seas and fiery vistas containing a near-religious quality of apocalypse. Together, Leigh and Pope have made Mr. Turner, a rare artist biopic that imbues within its visual strategies a sense of its subject’s […]
When Jesse Moss headed to North Dakota to make The Overnighters, it was truly a one-man endeavor. He took no crew with him. He was on his way to meet Pastor Jay Reinke, who had been giving shelter to the many men who uprooted themselves and made their way to Williston, N. D., in hopes of finding work in the town’s booming oil industry. With so many desperate souls appearing in Williston, resources to feed and house them were quickly drying up. Soon, the offices, floor space and pews of Reinke’s church were filled with itinerant workers, and town residents […]
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