6300 Results for “Open ”
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Interior Spaces: Writer/Director Maggie Gyllenhaal on The Lost Daughter
There is a moment early in The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s extraordinary debut film as writer/director/transgressive character whisperer. Leda (Olivia Colman) is on a solo summer vacation in Greece, lost in a reverie, walking on a rocky path. Then, something—a pinecone? a slingshot?—falls from above and pierces her back. Is this intrusion a piercing of persona, of psychic armor? Is it a portent of indignities to come, or perhaps, is it the shock to the system that triggers Leda’s ensuing momentum of memory? The occurrence speaks to everything and perhaps nothing at all. Leda is a British-born academic who has […]
by Madeleine Molyneaux on Jan 18, 2022 -
The Gigging Economy: Laura Parnes on Her Tour Without End
For more than 25 years, Laura Parnes’s multiplatform films, video installations and photographs have provoked and charmed audiences with genre-bending satirical narratives about teenage rites of passage gone terribly awry. From County Down, an episodic series about an epidemic of adult psychosis that coincides with a girl’s invention of a designer drug, to Blood and Guts in High School, which reimagines punk-feminist icon Kathy Acker’s titular book against the backdrop of early 1980s televised disasters, Parnes fuses comedy with pathos to probe social and political trauma. Her newest feature-length work, Tour Without End, has the feeling of an epic—think a […]
by Elisabeth Subrin on Jan 18, 2022 -
Hard Light and Shadows: Passing Cinematographer Edu Grau
Five weeks is not an unusually truncated preproduction period for a cinematographer on a modestly budgeted independent film like Passing. However, the interval between landing the gig and starting that work is typically longer than the time needed to pack a suitcase. That’s the extent of the notice Spanish DP Edu Grau had before hopping aboard the project—and a flight to New York—after a last-minute crew change left Passing director Rebecca Hall without a cinematographer on the eve of prep. “Rebecca called me on a Saturday, and I jumped on a plane the next day to start prepping the movie,” […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Jan 18, 2022 -
Hits and Misses, Pandemic Edition 2.0: Anthony Kaufman Breaks Down Six Sundance 2020 Films’ Theatrical Releases
According to Box Office Mojo, our contemporary plague ended on June 14, 2021—the last day the label “COVID-19 Pandemic” was included on its daily box office reporting. But don’t tell that to anyone trying to release a film in the second half of 2021, as viral variants spread widely across America, plunging the hopes of many filmmakers and distributors. Welcome to Pandemic: Year 2. The merciless persistence of the coronavirus and its wide-ranging impact on theatrical moviegoing and home viewing habits became more entrenched over the past several months—with indies on the losing end of the stick. Struggling to gain […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jan 18, 2022 -
The Wind is Your Enemy
Countless books, essays and stories have been written about legendary German director Werner Herzog—his various earthly escapades, his endless search for the ecstatic truth and, of course, his always entertaining meme-ability—which mostly make heavy-handed attempts at understanding that which is simply impossible to understand: What makes Herzog so unique? Even after spending two weeks alongside the man on the island of Lanzarote, I will not attempt to explain the unexplainable. I shot an interview with Herzog at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago in 2019. As someone described the video to him, he slowly turned toward me and extended his […]
by Curtis Matzke on Jan 18, 2022 -
Echoes
What is a sound if only you can hear it? And if you heard such a sound, would you think it came from outside, somehow bypassing everyone else as it enters your brain? Or would you think it emanated from within, never escaping your own field of perception and thus becoming your own private mystery—or, as Memoria director Apichatpong Weerasethakul writes, your own “sonic companion?” The Cannes-premiering Memoria, starring Tilda Swinton and now in release from NEON, originated from the director’s musings about his own auditory disturbances, a series of enormous bangs that erupted in his sleep and would put […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 18, 2022 -
Back to One, Episode 186: Eric Roberts
Barring any unforeseen circumstances, Eric Roberts will soon have more credits as an actor than anyone else who has ever lived anywhere in the world. An intensity matched only by raw talent on display in films like Star 80, The Pope of Greenwich Village, and Runaway Train established him as a respectable actor’s actor in Hollywood. And, as he talks about in this episode, once video replaced film, and more people began shooting, they wanted Eric Roberts in their movies. And once he became privy to how many offers were coming in, he started saying yes. Work begot work fairly […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Jan 18, 2022 -
“Requel”-ing Wes Craven: Radio Silence on Scream (2022)
There may be no horror franchise that opens with as simple and satisfying a tradition as Scream. As the production company’s logo appears on screen, we begin hearing the ringing of a landline phone—if you’ve seen only one of Scream’s now five installments, you immediately know whose voice will be on the other line. Reeling in a character with a false sense of comfort before swiftly posing a question everyone in the audience would affirmatively respond to (“do you like scary movies?”), the soon-to-be-victim begins to realize what we already know: if they can’t answer three specific slasher-film trivia questions, they’ll […]
by Erik Luers on Jan 14, 2022 -
“Oh No, Now It Will Be The Pink COVID”: Writer-Director Iuli Gerbase on the Inadvertently Prescient The Pink Cloud
“This film was written in 2017 and shot in 2019,” reads a title card at the very beginning of Brazilian writer-director Iuli Gerbase’s debut feature The Pink Cloud. “Any resemblance to actual events is purely coincidental.” As the film’s plot unfurls, it becomes clear why such a disclaimer is necessary. Set in a present-day Brazilian metropolis, The Pink Cloud begins with protagonists Giovana (Renata de Lélis) and Yago (Eduardo Mendonça) in the midst of a playful, seemingly inconsequential one-night stand. When they wake up the next morning, it’simmediately clear something is off. Yago shows Giovana a notification on his phone, […]
by Natalia Keogan on Jan 14, 2022 -
“He’d Kill You If He Got the Chance…”: Editor Walter Murch on Coppola’s The Conversation, the Nodal Concept of Montage and Our Modern Surveillance State
“If I really thought of the consequences all the time, I certainly wouldn’t have been in the business…” — Frank Terpil, Confessions of a Dangerous Man “Everybody has a public life, a private life, and a secret life.” — Pete Hamill There’s perhaps no greater contribution to the latter-day postmodern suspense genre than Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. An exhaustive study of a lone artisan drawn into a web of deceit and treachery, it has long been held as both a prescient cinematic landmark and a seminal Ur-text. And yet fifty years after its premiere, the film is still an […]
by Evan Louison on Jan 12, 2022
