Aidan Gillen returns to the podcast (first time: Episode 40). You know him from some of the most beloved shows of the century: Game of Thrones, The Wire, Peaky Blinders, to name a few. Now he stars in the Irish neo-noir film Barber, where he plays a private investigator hired by a wealthy widow to find her missing granddaughter. He talks about why he doesn’t look at the lines until the day before shooting, how his latest venture on the stage affected his work, why he still doesn’t like rehearsal for film, what bothers him about an “actor-centric” production, and […]
Nothing I heard or saw at the 80th Venice Film Festival felt more momentous than the news that came from Berlin after four days of screenings. On September 2, Berlinale artistic director Carlo Chatrian announced he’d step down after next year’s edition, citing issues with the new management structure proposed by Germany’s minister for culture and media Claudia Roth. His premature departure will mark the end of a five-year journey that turned the festival into an event miles away from the tacky extravaganza of its Dieter Kosslick era. Shepherded by Chatrian and executive director Mariëtte Rissenbeek, the Berlinale had found […]
In the late 1980s, Gregg Araki began making movies. He made films on a shoestring budget with a do-it-yourself mindset–not due to any kind of loyalty to the auteur theory, but the constraints of what he had at his disposal. In 1992, he made The Living End, a tale of two HIV-positive gay men, a loner and a film critic, who set off on a bloody, ferocious adventure. The film was dedicated to “the hundreds of thousands who’ve died and the hundreds of thousands more who will die because of a big white house full of republican fuckheads.” From there, […]
My DOX:AWARD top pick for the Ekko jury grid I participated in at this year’s CPH:DOX, Margreth Olin’s Songs of Earth, was also number one in my critic’s notebook for the doc most needing to be experienced on the big screen. In this palpably loving portrait of the veteran filmmaker’s elderly parents and the country that shaped them (and her), “Olin juxtaposes jaw-dropping, drone-captured images of the awe-inspiring Norwegian landscape with closeups of her dad’s bald pate, his tender hand on her mother’s back, as the environment and humankind become one” (per that notebook, and my coverage). Thus, it comes as little surprise […]
In terms of acquisitions, the most financially significant screening of last year’s TIFF was an industry-only one of The Holdovers, a Miramax-developed title whose worldwide rights promptly sold for $30 million to Focus Features; this year, it returned for press and public inspection following its Telluride premiere. It is, as previously announced, a crowdpleaser directed by Alexander Payne, designed for career rejuvenation after the ambitious, unwieldy and expensive commercial failure of 2017’s Downsizing, and effectively written under his instruction by sitcom writer-producer David Hemingson. He cannibalized what was initially written as a prep school-set pilot by, among other things, following Payne’s directive to […]
This post is part of a series, Girlblogging. Read the introduction here. In the music video for The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” (1997), lead singer Richard Ashcroft walks down a blue-gray London street, bumping into passersby, bowling over the girls and pissing off the guys. When you’re famous and beautiful on film, these are things you can get away with. Ashcroft represents a thoroughly contemporary creature—the 20th-century star, who, on a small screen today, looks more or less like the 21st; the detached, ambivalent, self-involved face of the modern urban world; the flâneur with somewhere to go, or something to […]
For over 20 years, the Australian video artists Soda Jerk have been making work that samples film, music and other various forms of pop culture. Their films are kaleidoscopic and psychedelic, irreverent and constantly surprising. Their newest film, Hello Dankness, is no different. Set in a fictional suburbia populated by Tom Hanks, Annette Bening, Bruce Dern, and Wayne and Garth from Wayne’s World, Dankness is a response to–and a film about–the 2016 election and its aftermath. After all, an era of American history and politics that so ferociously shred away societal norms and imbued daily life with a lasting weirdness […]
Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s Evil Does Not Exist begins by removing every element that might be reasonably expected from his work by now. Instead of long group dialogue sessions and theatrical/ therapeutic role-play, Evil starts with a generously prolonged, people-free dolly shot through a forest, the camera pointed straight up at the sky as it’s broken up by branches passing overhead. With a higher-resolution camera and some fancy post work, the forest could be a formalist spectacle—tree limbs overlapping and dissolving, the lattices created in the process, etc. But visual high definition has never been one of Hamaguchi’s priorities, as his movies remain oddly […]
The Toronto International Film Festival is fully underway beginning today, and while the vibe will certainly be different without as many Hollywood stars on the red carpet — a number of films have qualified for SAG-AFTRA interim agreements while probably at least as many either were not able to or decided not to try — there’s as always a strong lineup of films to look forward to. Below, Filmmaker‘s editors have compiled a list of 20 films to watch out for, many of which ones that have premiered at other festivals along with several world premieres we are hearing particularly […]
“I literally finished the film at three in the morning last night,” director Matthew Heineman says on a video call with Filmmaker on Tuesday, just past the airport security on his way to the 50th Telluride Film Festival. “I’m barely alive right now.” Thankfully, Heineman is alive and well, and at the height of his powers as a documentarian with sharp instincts and artistic finesse with American Symphony, which marks the second time a feature of his world premieres at the annual Colorado gathering. The first was last year’s stunning Oscar-shortlisted Retrograde, on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. In a […]