6296 Results for “Open ”
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Cannes 2022: Final Cut
Ticketing catastrophes, internet outages at the badge claim station, and complimentary gold buttons featuring lame movie-related quotes from uncited sources in either French or broken English—“I swear to you: I had an eye contact with Timothée,” reads mine—in sans-serif font atop the number 75. A quick Google search tells me that the traditional gift to celebrate a 75th anniversary is diamonds, but two days into Cannes’ three-quarter century extravaganza I might’ve guessed it was lead. The inauspicious Opening Night Film selection, Michel Hazanivicius’s Final Cut, was in lockstep with the festival’s other launch fumbles. Scooped up by Thierry after the […]
by Blake Williams on May 19, 2022 -
Nine Films to Anticipate at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival
As, just before heading to the airport, I post this brief list of films we at Filmmaker are especially excited to see at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, cinema’s most prestigious annual event is already having something of a bumpy opening, with a new (for those who didn’t experience its debut in last year’s low-key mid-pandemic edition) ticketing system returning all manner of “504 Gateway” errors and obscure messages, some of which contain their own brutal poetry: “Validation of viewstate failed… Purpose, purpose…” (Press has seen some alleviation as those badges are now redirected to a new server, while market […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 17, 2022 -
On Set with Flamethrowers: Keith Thomas on Firestarter
Released in the fall of 1980, while Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of The Shining continued to horrify audiences in theaters, Stephen King’s eighth novel, Firestarter, tells the story of Charlie McGee, a young girl struggling to control her pyrokinetic powers. Her parents knew this would be an issue: years earlier, Andy and Vicky McGee participated in a trial run of a new chemical compound, Lot Six, that embedded telekinetic and mind-controlling powers that shady government officials now wish to end. A run in with Rainbird, who had also been experimented on and now acts as a hired assassin wiping out […]
by Erik Luers on May 16, 2022 -
Shooting in 100% Humidity: Michelangelo Frammartino on Il Buco
In 2007, Michelangelo Frammartino was scouting locations for Le Quattro Volte in Alessandria del Carretto, whose mayor took him to the Bifurto Abyss, one of the world’s deepest caves. That, along with a follow-up expedition in 2016, planted the seed for Il Buco, Frammartino’s third feature. In the time since, Frammartino has become an avid speleologist, and Il Buco is ostensibly a recreation of the initial exploration of Bifurto in 1961, at the outset of Italy’s “economic miracle.” Frammartino juxtaposes it with the day-to-day life of an aging shepherd, giving the film an elegiac tone as it mixes pastoral myth […]
by Forrest Cardamenis on May 12, 2022 -
Top Gun: Maverick: What If Colin Powell Wasn’t Lying to the UN?
Held back even longer than No Time to Die, Top Gun: Maverick is the last major film repeatedly delayed by the pandemic to see release. In that time, it’s already taken on multiple unintended resonances, like the irony of this sequel to an uber-patriotic property getting denounced for appeasing communism by Ted Cruz. In December 2020, Cruz took to the Senate floor to decry, among other films proving Hollywood’s unseemly deferral to China, Maverick. Referring—accurately in terms of enrollment rates—to the original as “maybe the greatest Navy recruiting film ever made,” he noted that the Taiwanese flag had been removed from […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 12, 2022 -
Visions du Réel 2022: Nuclear Power Plants and Lacanian Robots
With no conscious motivation, I was repeatedly drawn to films about Russia and the USSR’s former satellite states while sifting through this year’s Visions du Réel. The most formidable, Emilija Škarnulytė’s Burial, visually maximalizes the inherently spectacular structures of nuclear power plants. A sparse clutch of title cards contextualize the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant (INPP)—built as an equally large sister to Chernobyl, its decommissioning and dismantling now a requirement for Lithuania’s entrance into the EU. The cavernous interiors slowly being broken down include, most captivatingly, a control room wall scanned in a three-minute, smoothly sustained right-to-left dolly, its nodes, buttons, meters and […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 11, 2022 -
“I Definitely Tried to Shoot This Series Like a Six-Hour Movie”: Reinaldo Marcus Green on We Own This City
“An elite Baltimore police task force spent years plundering the city and its residents for hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, drugs, and jewelry” is how a 2018 Vox article began its explainer of the disgraced Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) of the Baltimore Police Department. Nine officers took part in the multi-year scandal, with two detectives, Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor, being convicted for their crimes, while another four pled guilty alongside two sergeants and one officer. All remain currently imprisoned. The severity and expansiveness of the GTTF’s crimes documented in Baltimore Sun journalist Justin Fenton’s 2021 book, […]
by Erik Luers on May 10, 2022 -
Ozu on Wheels: DP Florian Hoffmeister on Shooting Kogonada’s Half of Pachinko
The pilot of a series is typically its true north, the aesthetic guiding light of all that follows. However, in the new Apple TV+ series Pachinko, two very different director/cinematographer teams have both been given their own creative compass. Based on the 2017 bestseller, the familial epic unfolds over 70 years, tracing the story of four generations of a Korean immigrant family that settles in Japan following an oppressive occupation. The season’s eight episodes were split evenly between directors Kogonada (Columbus, After Yang) and Justin Chon (Blue Bayou). The filmmakers shared the same crew, camera, sets, costumes and locations, yet […]
by Matt Mulcahey on May 9, 2022 -
“We All Have our Unique Biologies, a Variety of Differences”: Phyllis Ellis on her Hot Docs-Debuting Category: Woman
Middle-distance runner Caster Semenya has won two Olympic gold medals and three World Championships in the women’s 800-meter competition. But no amount of endurance training could have prepared this South African Olympian for the long legal battle (a dozen years and counting) sparked by that very first 2009 World Championship victory. While other winning athletes were celebrating in Berlin, this Black woman from the Global South was undergoing “sex testing,” her right to even compete being thrown into question by a sports governing body made up almost wholly of white European men. But optics be damned. In the end, the […]
by Lauren Wissot on May 6, 2022 -
BAMcinemaFest Announces 2022 Program
BAMcinemaFest, which is returning with an in-person event June 23 – 30 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, announced today the complete 2022 edition slate. The film opens with Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee’s Aftershock, a documentary about the the ways in which the US maternal health system fails Black women and families, and it closes with Ramin Bahrani’s Sundance premiere, 2nd Chance, a portrait of Richard Davis, who invented the modern bulletproof vest while being something of an independent filmmaker and fabulist. Among the restorations are Ayoka Chenzira’s 1993 first feature film, the coming-of-age dramatic comedy Alma’s Rainbow, about […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 5, 2022
