Filmmaker

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Fall 2014

In the Eye of the Storm: Laura Poitras on CITIZENFOUR

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 […]

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Features

Vanishing Act: David Fincher on Gone Girl

Marriage might be an attempt at a lifelong emotional bond, but it’s also a contract enforced through mutual brutality. Disappointments mount, responsibilities shift, a struggle for power inevitably ensues between the partners; control is hard won and often gained only through compromises at best, coercion at worst. In most marriages, that brutality is only psychological, and the loss of the unmarried self — the version of you that attracted your significant other in the first place — never brings out the knives when you or your spouse realize what a lousy existence you’ve traded in for. (And we haven’t even […]

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  • Glory at Sea: Mike Leigh on Mr. Turner

    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 […]

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  • Digital Tableaux: Cinematographer Dick Pope on Mr. Turner

    “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 […]

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  • Freeze Out: Ruben Östlund on Force Majeure

    Amidst the red-carpet mayhem of any major international film festival, critics tend to adopt a sort of cinematic shorthand — a private language of allusions and descriptors. It didn’t take long for Force Majeure to earn its seemingly ready-made sobriquet: “the avalanche movie,” further confirmed by the film’s theatrical poster. Force Majeure does indeed revolve around an avalanche — a controlled blast in the mountains of a ski resort in the French Alps, watched by a vacationing Swedish family with awe until, as it hurtles its way toward the restaurant terrace where they are enjoying their breakfast, awe suddenly curdles […]

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Other articles

  • Great Expectations: Alex Ross Perry on Listen Up Philip

    Alex Ross Perry’s first feature Impolex was an oblique gloss on Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, while his higher-profile follow-up, The Color Wheel, stole the font of Philip Roth’s ’70s hardcovers for its credits, as well as that writer’s abrasive fearlessness and sexual disreputability. Literature hangs heavy over Listen Up Philip as well, not least in its subject: a young, New York novelist on the precipice of success being mentored by a Roth-like literary titan. That writer’s spirit is still present, but the major structural reference is William Gaddis’ behemoth debut The Recognitions, whose main through line is a pure-spirited and […]

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  • A Roof over Their Heads: Jesse Moss on The Overnighters

    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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  • Fear of a Black Campus: Justin Simien on Dear White People

    Justin Simien’s stylized comedy Dear White People takes place at the fictional Ivy League Winchester University, focusing primarily on four students but also capturing within its satiric gaze the campus as social microcosm. Each of the four undergrads takes on a different strategy for dealing with being a “black face in a white place.” Sam White (Tessa Thompson) is a biracial beauty who rocks a Lisa Bonet look. Perhaps in response to her own white privilege, she is trying on a radical identity: the school Angela Davis with a radio show called “Dear White People.” On her show, she leans […]

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Also: Filmmaking in Pairs: The Benefits of Directing Movies with Another Person (or Other People) Not an Option: The Ins and Outs of Shopping Agreements The Art of Narrative Deduction Has the Cinematic Water Cooler Run Dry? Dispatches from Toronto & Camden Film Studies for the 21st Century Load & Play Super 8 Goodbye to 3-D Rules Redrawing the Boundaries When Restoration Met Distribution Editor’s Letter

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