6300 Results for “Open ”
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“If Bresson Had Digital Cinematography, What Might He Do?”: DP Alexander Dynan on the Portraits, Inserts and VR Nightmares of The Card Counter
With The Card Counter, Paul Schrader has written another “man in[to] a room”: William Tell (Oscar Isaac), an ex-torturer turned professional poker player, lives hotel to hotel, making each unit his own by wrapping their furniture in his own sterile, white sheets—“essentially bleached muslin,” the film’s DP Alexander Dynan says. A little light went a long way when capturing these whitened rooms on the light-sensitive, medium format Alexa LF camera. Sometimes Dynan lit Isaac journaling with nothing but a bulb wrapped in diffusion—something he could not justify using on First Reformed, as pastor Toller (Ethan Hawke) did not diary near a fabric-covered lamp. […]
by A.E. Hunt on Sep 10, 2021 -
“In Switzerland, We All Benefit From the Bank”: Andreas Fontana on Azor
Andreas Fontana’s exquisite, quietly dazzling feature Azor answers a question we didn’t know we had: how to make a mystery—a thriller, even—set in the world of private banking. Partly: it’s about the arrival of a Swiss banker, Yvan De Wiel (Fabrizio Rongione), in early 1980s Buenos Aires, when Argentina is still in the grip of dictatorship. De Wiel is there to take on the wealthy (and suspicious) clients of a colleague, Keys, who has disappeared, leaving a flamboyant reputation. Often accompanied by his wife, Inès (Stéphanie Cléau), he’s left to navigate the already murky areas of hush-hush finance under the […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Sep 10, 2021 -
“…The Parts That Were Left out of the Ken Burns Documentary”: Tom Surgal on the “Historical Corrective” That is His Free Jazz Documentary, Fire Music
Many years in the making, Fire Music tells the many-stranded story of free jazz, a chronically misunderstood and often maligned expansion of the improvisatory African-American art form that exploded as a movement in the 1960s through the innovations of path-breaking titans like John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler and Sun Ra. Although this avant-garde has been around long enough to become its own tradition – its oldest living exponents are in their 90s – the music still remains somehow outside the mainstream. Even this week, Twitter was abuzz over Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon’s mockery of the German […]
by Steve Dollar on Sep 10, 2021 -
“What Would You Do?”: Writer/Director Michael Mohan on Screen Sex, Spying and the Making of His Erotic Thriller, The Voyeurs
The cinema of scopophilia is given a generational, technological and gender-reversing twist in Michael Mohan’s The Voyeurs, opening today on Amazon Prime. Pippa (Sydney Sweeney, of Euphoria and The White Lotus) and Thomas (Generation‘s Justice Smith) are a young couple who move into a gorgeous Montreal loft apartment sporting one ethically dubious perk: clear sightlines into an even more gorgeous pad occupied by an oversexed fashion photographer, Seb (Ben Hardy), and his striking girlfriend Julia (Natasha Liu Bordizzo). For the new couple, the action across the road is initially an aphrodisiac, a kickstart to libidos on the early wane. Soon, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 10, 2021 -
TIFF 2021 Critic’s Notebook: Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Earwig
Lucile Hadzihalilovic*’s Earwig is, in broad outline, synopsizable with the same sentence as her first two features, Innocence and Evolution: a child (or group of children) grows up in deliberate isolation from the wider world under the watchful gaze of ambivalently motivated custodians, themselves operating under the direction of obscure masters. Intentions are unclear, but the fundamental fears—of puberty, parents, the body and its sexually-tinged conditioning for adulthood—remain clear and similar. The visual approach is always that of horror’s visual language without its traditional jolting sonic components—i.e., long walks down sinisterly lit hallways or down stairwells, no suddenly violent sounds. When I asked Hadzihalilovic […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 10, 2021 -
Venice Film Festival 2021 Critic’s Notebook: Reflection and Captain Volkonogov Escaped
In a politically loaded gesture, the Venice Film Festival programmed the premieres of Valentyn Vasyanovych’s Reflection and Captain Volkonogov Escaped by Natasha Merkulova and Aleksey Chupov on consecutive days. The former Ukrainian and the latter Russian, both these competition entries contain significant scenes of torture by Russian officers and there’s no misreading the films’ implied message. Actually, in the case of Reflection, you can hardly speak of implying – films don’t get much blunter. There’s little room for subtlety in the tableau aesthetic that Vasyanovych has now used, with minimal variation, in at least three successive features. Always working as […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Sep 10, 2021 -
“The History of Your Community Affects Who You End Up Becoming”: Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr. on Wild Indian
The effects of trauma brewed and replicated over generations serve as dramatic engine for Wild Indian, a film about the radically diverging paths of two boys from the Ojibwe people after a fatal gun incident. Making his feature debut, director Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr. tapped into his tribe’s own ancient storytelling and recollections from family members, as well as his own, to carve out the story of Makwa and Teddo in two different storylines. The former character, a victim of parental abuse, grows up to rebuild his stoic identity around career success and material wealth, while the other falls into […]
by Carlos Aguilar on Sep 10, 2021 -
Memoria, on the Collapse of Cinema (a Book Review)
Memoria Giovanni Marchini Camia and Annabel Brady-Brown, editors Fireflies Press, 2021 The book begins with the word “memoria” handwritten in gold on the blue cloth cover. The word appears again on the book’s first page, alone, black type on the white page, suggesting with its flourish of vowels a portmanteau of memory, history and cinema and calling to us from another language. “Memoria” is also the second word on the second page, just before the type slips into description: of glimmers, a window, boats, darkness, the cinema. There is a bang, a snap, and the snap of a picture, and […]
by Holly Willis on Sep 8, 2021 -
Trailer Watch: Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island
Writing out of Cannes, Blake Williams reviewed Mia Hansen-Løve’s latest, Bergman Island, a meta-fictional drama about a female filmmaker’s marriage to a fellow director and the ways in which she mines her life, creative anxieties and influences for narrative material. About the film, which jumps between the filmmaker’s (played by Phantom Thread‘s Vicki Krieps) exploration of the Baltic island where Ingmar Bergman lived and shot several of his films, her conversations with her partner (Tim Roth) about her efforts to crack her third act, and imagined scenes from the film to be, which feature Mia Wasikowska and Joachim Trier-regular Anders […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 7, 2021 -
Back to One, Episode 168: John Pollono
John Pollono is a playwright, screenwriter, and actor. You know him from Mob City and This is Us. He wrote the film Stronger and the play Small Engine Repair, which had successful runs in Los Angeles and New York. The filmed version, which he also stars in and directs, is about to open after Covid delayed its release. It co-stars Jon Bernthal and Shea Whigham. In this episode, he talks in-depth about working with those guys, the changes that needed to be made from stage to screen that served to enrich the experience, and the factors that played a part […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Sep 7, 2021
