Love and revolution fuel Neptune Frost, an Afrofuturist musical that condemns injustice as much as it inspires joy. The project is a co-directing effort between American poet, musician and actor Saul Williams and Rwandan playwright, actress and filmmaker Anisia Uzeyman—the film’s DP and also Williams’s wife. Chronicling the passionate union of Neptune, a runaway intersex hacktivist (played alternately by Elvis Ngabo and Cheryl Isheja), and coltan miner Matalusa (Burundian-born, Rwandan refugee rapper Kaya Free, credited in the film as Bertrand Ninteretse), the film takes place entirely in Rwanda (the world’s largest coltan exporter) and also features actors from the nearby […]
In 2017, the formerly obscure Pavement B-side “Harness Your Hopes” became their number one track on Spotify. It currently has 70 million plays, over twice the amount of “Cut Your Hair,” the group’s highest charting and arguably most popular song during their original run. At Stereogum, Nate Rogers looked into why exactly “Harness Your Hopes” became as prevalent as it had and all signs point to Spotify’s Autoplay feature, which “cues up music that ‘resembles’ what you’ve just been listening to, based on a series of sonic signifiers too complex to describe.” At this point, “Harness Your Hopes” has crossed […]
Five years after the Music Box Theatre’s previous David Lynch retrospective coincided with the television premiere of the highly anticipated Twin Peaks: The Return, the Chicago-based arthouse now presents David Lynch: A Complete Retrospective – The Return, a week-long celebration of Lynch’s work that also pays tribute to his many collaborators, friends and, in one particular instance, offspring. Running through April 14th, the retrospective also includes several in-person appearances, one being from Duwayne Dunham, Lynch’s editor on Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: The Return. An industry veteran who has continued to work extensively for both Lynch and […]
Eddie Marsan first came to my attention with his now legendary performance in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky. He has so many layers at play under Scott’s anger, gives so much depth to that character; It is a wonder to behold. He kept doing it in films like Tyrannosaur, Still Life, Sherlock Holmes, as Terry in the Showtime series Ray Donovan, and now in his newest film, The Contractor, opposite Chris Pine. In this half hour, Marsan talks about the formative influence of Leigh on his work and the meaning of the command “dig a hole and sit in it.” He shares […]
In keeping with its 50/50 gender balance pledge, this year’s DOX:AWARD program—CPH:DOX’s international main competition showcasing an all-premiere lineup—featured six male- and six female-directed films from a range of countries. And, as in years past, I agreed to watch and rate them all on a scale of one (not my cup of tea) to four (brilliant!) stars for the Danish film magazine Ekko’s international film critics’ jury grid. It’s an annual duty I’ve come to grudgingly love. On the one hand, I have to watch a dozen films that weren’t necessarily on my must-see list (that I’d carefully whittled down from […]
In the latest Scream installment, “elevated horror” and “requels” are among the contemporary genre trends affectionately deconstructed. The movie also lobs a little friendly fire toward the 1990s slasher revival that birthed the series—a character quips, “It was really over-lit and everyone had weird hair.” There’s not much cinematographer Brett Jutkiewicz can do about the latter, but the former served as a gauntlet thrown down. “When you have a line like that in the script, as a DP you think, ‘I guess I better not over-light this thing. I don’t want to end up as the butt of my own joke,’” […]
Ahed’s Knee, Nadav Lapid’s latest feature, takes its title from the teenage Palestinan activist who became a media sensation (and was then imprisoned) for squaring off against Israeli soldiers in 2017. Heralded for his Gold Bear-winning Synonyms and The Kindergarten Teacher, a tw0-hander that produced a Netflix-distributed American remake, Lapid’s work remains consistently critical of, and in opposition to, the oppressive Israeli government. Even so, he remains, in J. Hoberman’s eyes, “the most internationally acclaimed Israeli filmmaker in recent memory…and perhaps ever.” While promoting The Kindergarten Teacher in 2018, Lapid was invited by Israel’s Ministry of Culture to participate in a […]
“We call them dumb animals, and they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.” – Anna Sewell, 1877 Andrea Arnold, director of Fish Tank and American Honey, chronicles the travails of dairy cows in her first documentary feature. Upon giving birth—shown in viscous detail in the film’s opening scene—Luma and her calf are immediately separated. For 98 minutes, the camera, low to the ground, scuttles closely after them, as they’re herded from pen to pen, fed, milked, dehorned and even bred to establish the intimate, diurnal rhythm […]
Filmustage’s automatic AI-driven web service uses neural networks to speed up script breakdown routine from weeks to minutes. What comes next? Every film project starts with a piece of paper and a script breakdown. Professionals still have to manually go word by word, scene by scene, to break down all the necessary elements for shooting: props, costumes, talents, locations, sound, visual effects. That’s exactly where Filmustage comes into play, with a revolutionary, AI-powered solution that helps filmmakers reduce manual work through the power of modern text processing technology. Filmustage’s neural networks were trained on hundreds of existing, well-formatted scripts to […]
Dominique Fishback talks about the characters she plays as if they inhabit her rather than the other way around. This begins to explain the immense, yet subtle, and always authentic power on display in performances such as Darlene in The Deuce, Kenya in The Hate You Give, and Deborah Johnson in Judas and the Black Messiah. Now she stars with Samuel L. Jackson in the Apple+ series The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey. She talks about the interesting way her character, Robyn, disrupted her usual psychological preparation process; where she gets the courage to fiercely advocate for her characters; repairing […]