Drawers of marbles and buttons, a wall of picture frames with nothing in them, empty matchboxes, broken dice and a tray of antique doll eyes, irises fixed in hopeful stares beneath the swoop of their curled eyelashes. These are just a few of the uncanny items you’ll find in the Office of Collecting and Design, a museum full of, in the words of its creator, filmmaker Jessica Oreck (Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, One Man Dies a Million Times), “lost and forgotten objects, things that people don’t think are valuable but have too much charm to throw away. These are things […]
Matías Piñeiro’s sixth feature and seventh Shakespeare-related film, Isabella, begins with purely abstract images whose use here is new in his work: four different shades on the blue spectrum, alternately lighter and darker in smaller and smaller concentric rectangles. The smallest, central rectangle fades to purple before three different shades of that color pulsate outward to the largest rectangle. The rectangles then dissolve into one unified purple that fills the rectangular frame containing the film itself, which starts gently pulsating in different shades under silent opening titles. These abstract color studies (whose resemblance to the work of James Turrell was […]
Leos Carax’s Annette begins with a variant on Holy Motors’s “Entrac’te,” now split from one mid-film break into opening and (mid-end-credits) closing musical numbers that set a similarly grimly determined/celebratory tone. The director and his real-life daughter are among the first people seen, leading Sparks and the film’s main cast out of the recording studio and into the world. Adam Driver gets on a motorcycle and zooms into the night to begin his diagetic story proper as confrontational stand-up comic and antihero Henry McHenry, his castmates calling “good luck” after him. A slow-motion love triangle revolves McHenry and the Conductor (Simon Helberg) […]
“If I could log in right now I would,” Dawn Porter raved in one of the many enthusiastic testimonials sprinkled throughout Full Frame’s engaging “The Creative Power of BIPOC Editors,” an online launch/celebration of the BIPOC Documentary Editors Database. Expertly edited (surprise surprise), the swift-moving event (approximately an hour long) took place on June 3rd but is still well worth checking out. Whether you’re a veteran producer looking to hire beyond the usual (white) suspects or a student just beginning to build your reel, this database instruction manual/guide to best BIPOC hiring practices/panel discussion/showcase of the diversity of BIPOC work […]
Fifteen minutes into Brandon Colvin’s third feature, A Dim Valley, Albert (Whitmer Thomas) presents Ian (Zach Weintraub) with a generously packed bowl of marijuana, which the two proceed to light up. Shortly thereafter, they witness a surreal vision in the forest near the field research camp where they’re spending the summer, but to call this a drug-induced departure from realism would be inaccurate. From the very beginning of this whimsical backwoods tone poem, Colvin establishes something like a stoner ambiance: pacing is lethargic, odd bits of behavior are lingered on, glassy-eyed stares into the middle distance proliferate. There’s a sense […]
As the first major festival to return in person as the pandemic recedes, Tribeca gave us one more sign that New York is coming back. In the Heights, which opened the festival at the United Palace on June 9, was a joyful celebration of community (even for those of us who watched at home), and even in a reduced capacity the festival was a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with the movies. It also seemed that after shuttering the 2020 festival, this year’s event was fairly bursting at the seams with new types of content—of course the short and feature films […]
This article was originally published in Filmmaker‘s Spring, 2021 edition. It is being posted today online in conjunction with I Carry You With Me‘s release in theaters from Sony Pictures Classics. Arriving amidst a number of recent pictures exploring notions of hybridity—mostly documentaries that incorporate narrative or meta elements—nonfiction filmmaker Heidi Ewing’s feature dramatic debut, I Carry You With Me, deploys its formal invention in movingly unexpected ways. Taking the recounted memories of an undocumented Mexican couple living in New York, Ewing tells a swooning, deeply romantic period love story. And it’s one that achieves an arresting sobriety with contemporary […]
Working primarily with a hand-wound 16mm Bolex, Neelon Crawford made a series of experimental films from 1968 through 1980. Shot in the US, the United Kingdom, and South America, the films explored light and movement in a variety of landscapes. Crawford manipulated the image through film stocks, filters, frame rates, double- and triple-exposures, animation, editing, and printing, at times adding soundtracks to imagery that ranged from observational to abstract. Crawford’s films were featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s Cineprobe series in the 1970s and were distributed by Canyon Cinema, among others. After For the Spider Woman in 1980, he […]
Blood’s thicker than the mud in the family affair that is My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To, a contemporary vampire tale utterly stripped of the genre’s romance. In place of mythic hoohah, writer-director Jonathan Cuartas focuses on the grim, quotidian details of day-to-day caregiving for an extremely pale invalid named Thomas (Owen Campbell), a frail wisp of a young man who is wholly dependent on older siblings Dwight (Patrick Fugit) and Jessie (Ingrid Sophie Schram) for survival, sheltered inside a drab house on the forgotten edge of an anonymous city, its every window blanketed from fatal sunlight. […]
Since releasing his first documentary in 2009, Noah Hutton has kept busy. That film Crude Independence and its follow-up Deep Time (2015) were both about the consequences of oil extraction in North Dakota, and he followed them with a multi-platform installation at Times Square in 2015 and the science-fiction film Lapis, which he wrote and directed, in 2020. His new film In Silico was in production throughout the entire time that Hutton was working on those other projects. It’s a longitudinal chronicle that Hutton began in response to a TED talk by Israeli scientist Henry Markram in 2009, where he announced that his team […]