In the early 1980s, as Britain took a rightward turn that mirrored America’s own shift, the country’s bastions of righteousness took aim at the nascent videocassette market. Before home video releases were placed under the purview of the British Board of Film Classification, the job of protecting Britons from gory practical effects fell to the Director of Public Prosecutions. That office ultimately compiled a list of 72 films it believed were in violation of the country’s Obscene Publications Act. Films on the list became known as “video nasties.” Cinematographer Annika Summerson has seen her fair share of them. That’s largely […]
When I spoke to cinematographer Ben Richardson shortly before the season finale of Mare of Easttown, the first thing I said was, “Don’t tell me anything that happens.” Anything is the operative word here. I didn’t want to know the outcome of the show’s central mystery—who killed young mother Erin McMenamin—before I had a chance to watch the climactic episode. But, equally, I didn’t want to know the conclusion of the domestic dramas surrounding detective Kate Winslet and the denizens of her blue-collar suburban Pennsylvania town—a region with an accent so distinctive Saturday Night Live built an entire sketch around […]
In the middle-aged revenge fantasy movie, the protagonist’s onslaught of violence is a reluctant one. In your John Wicks or Takens, these are men forced back into action by a transgression so grievous it demands brutal retribution. They don’t want to, but they have to. As director Ilya Naishuller points out, Nobody is an inversion of that formula. When Bob Odenkirk’s retired assassin Hutch is jarred from suburban drudgery by a home break in, he loses only a few bucks, a kitty cat bracelet and some pride. Hardly a kidnapped daughter or a murdered puppy. Hutch doesn’t have to dust off […]
Thirteen months ago, I was writing this letter from Berlin, where I was attending the festival and working on the issue with one of our designers. And sure, I noticed all the people coughing at the DAU. Natasha premiere. And that my screenwriter tutor pal extended an elbow rather than a hand when we sat down for lunch. And how empty the plane was on my trip home, just one day before the European travel ban. In the next week, I attended my last party of 2020, a post-Sundance celebration with a number of local filmmakers. Surprisingly, the oncoming pandemic […]
Since 2015, I’ve annually rounded up interviews and features covering the previous year’s U.S. theatrical releases shot on 35mm, an inherently melancholy collation of (increasingly dead) links. (“This is your most quixotic project,” a friend messaged recently.) The 25-ish 35mm releases of 2020 I’ve tallied this time are in line with each previous year’s 30-or-bubbling-under features, a boutique fraction of the larger landscape. Each list builds toward a larger index of minor deaths. My first edition, covering 2014, noted the close of Australia’s last commercial film lab and Bong Joon-ho’s return home to South Korea after Snowpiercer, only to discover […]
Friday, March 13, 2020, two days after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, Jamin O’Brien had a check in his hand. The producer was headed to christen a new venture, an adaptation of the nonfiction bestseller The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace to be directed by Chiwetel Ejiofor. “I was literally going to deliver the deposit check for our production offices, which were going to open Monday, when we were shut down,” says O’Brien. Now, a little more than a year later, O’Brien is preparing to navigate the world of post-COVID film production for the first […]
Repeat business: It’s a hallmark in the long career of Dariusz Wolski. If the Polish-born cinematographer shoots one movie for you, there’s a decent chance he’ll be back for another. He’s lensed two movies for Tim Burton, Tony Scott and Alex Proyas; four alongside Gore Verbinski; and six for Ridley Scott. Yet it’s a new collaboration with director Paul Greengrass—and a new genre, the Western—that earned Wolski his first Academy Award nomination after more than 30 years shooting features. Wolski picked up the Oscar nod yesterday for News of the World, a post-Civil War tale of a traveling entertainer (Tom […]
Like The Searchers, Nomadland is bookended by a pair of doorways: on one side, the post-Baby Boom American Dream of domesticity and stability; on the other, the siren’s call of the wanderer, beckoning toward the unknown. In the film’s opening frame, Fern (Frances McDormand) stands in the doorway of a storage unit in Empire, Nevada. The Great Recession has swallowed the mining town whole; the 60-something widow takes one last glance at the remnants of her life, packed away in boxes, and climbs into her Ford Econoline van, headed toward the horizon. A year passes before Fern darkens another symbolic […]
In February of 1964, Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston at the Miami Beach Convention Hall to become the heavyweight champion of the world at the age of 22. He spent the night celebrating with Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke. Within two weeks of the fight, Clay announced his membership in the Nation of Islam and changed his name. Within a year, both Cooke and Malcolm X were shot dead. By the summer of 1966, Brown had retired from football at the age of 30. Based on the 2013 play by Kemp Powers, One Night in Miami offers a fictitious […]
“You still can’t beat reality,” says Matthew Jensen. That may seem like an incongruous proclamation from the cinematographer of a $200 million superhero spectacle that concludes with a flying goddess facing off against a half human/half cheetah. But instead of simply shooting the film’s opening Amazon Olympics flashback in a greenscreen wonderland, Jensen headed to Spain’s Canary Islands and put 10-year-old actress Lilly Aspell (as a young Diana Prince) on horseback on an IMAX-rigged process trailer. Instead of digitally returning a gutted Virginia mall to all its 1980s glory, the Wonder Woman team rebuilt more than 60 period stores. And for […]