By mere chance, The Friend has been a part of my life for quite some time now. I was first introduced to the book when Hal Hartley recommended it for my book club sometime around 2021, when I was just a girl with two cats. Fast forward and it’s 2024, now I love dogs and had just adopted a puppy named Variety Magazine. It was during that spring, on one of those early days of puppyhood, that he got street cast for a b-roll sequence in an upcoming film… that was to be an adaptation of Sigrid Nuñez's The Friend. I couldn’t believe it! I was especially touched by this because he is a quarter Great Dane, just like the… Read more
“We called it Field of Dreams in reverse: if you wreck it, they will leave,” writer and actor Nate Fisher told me of the selling pitch for Eephus, the melancholic baseball comedy he co-wrote with Michael Basta and director Carson Lund, which made its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival last Fall after debuting at Cannes, 2024. (The film is currently in theatrical release from Music Box.)
The unusual baseball film captures the last recreation-league baseball game played at a soon-to-be-demolished field in a deliberately ambiguous New England location, carried out by two teams—the Riverdogs and Adler's Paint—over the course of one long, surreal day.
The day before its New York Film Festival premiere last October, the cast and… Read more
The 54th edition of New Directors/New Films, co-sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art and Film at Lincoln Center, runs from April 2 to April 13. This year’s program includes 24 features and 9 shorts. As always, the slate is admirably international in scope, spotlighting work from 22 different countries, with many films making their U.S. premieres after screening at festivals such as Berlin, Cannes, Karlovy Vary, Rotterdam, and Venice. Although I’ve attended ND/NF for more than two decades, and reported on it for this website and others for almost half that time, I still get excited when the slate is announced each year — the chance to discover emerging new talent is a way of keeping faith with the… Read more
The incredible Lebanese actor Hadi Tabbal just finished the monumental Broadway run of Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play English. He originated the role of Omid, and performed in various iterations of this powerful and transformative play over the last few years. On this episode, he talks about the fascinatingly unique aspect of English that is unlike any other play he’s performed, and what he means when he says it is “alive” every night and “very delicate,” and he has to “take care” not to “derail” it. He explains the difference between “discovery” and “deciding,” talks about the “saddest” part of acting, describes his pre-show ritual, how it all comes down to “learning people,” and much more.
Back To One can be… Read more
There’s an episode in David Lynch’s memoir Room to Dream that I think of often, from his cross-country journey from Philadelphia to Los Angeles to begin his time as a student at the American Film Institute, where he would go on to create Eraserhead. At the end of the drive’s second day, David, his brother John and future collaborator Jack Fisk pulled over to the side of the road in the New Mexican desert:
It was a moonless night and we went down into these bushes to sleep. It was real quiet, then suddenly there was a whooshing sound and we saw a horse tied to one of the bushes. When we woke up the next morning there were Indians in… Read more
On day two of January’s Los Angeles fires, I took a picture looking east from the hills where I live. The zoomed-in, abstracted shape in the frame resembles a reverse hourglass; the dark plume rising from the center, Altadena, seems drawn up from the ashen ground to fully conceal the sky. The color of that central plume isn’t the rusty brown of wildfire smoke but an artificial black, like burning tires or the “SURRENDER DOROTHY” message the Wicked Witch writes across the sky with her broom—one of the great practical effects in The Wizard of Oz. I’ve read that David Lynch wanted to use black smoke in his Oz-homage Wild at Heart, but the chemicals used in the 1930s to… Read more
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Bing and Amalia Ulman (Photo: Amalia Ulman)
