While it’s been 35 years since the release of Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick’s U.S. Marines drama that featured R. Lee Ermey showering young male recruits with derogatory four-letter words, numerous films have sought to further emphasize the dehumanizing nature of military training bootcamps. At first glance, it might appear that The Inspection, writer-director Elegance Bratton’s narrative feature debut, fits comfortably within those expectations. Set in the early 2000s, the film opens as Ellis French (Jeremy Pope) has been kicked out of his mother’s (Gabrielle Union) apartment for being gay and finds himself at a homeless shelter in New Jersey. […]
Kit Zauhar, the writer-director-star of her debut feature Actual People, does not want you to refer to her film as “mumblecore.” Set in New York City, the plot revolves around the near-daily indignities suffered by a young woman named Riley during her last week of undergrad at NYU: she runs into a cheating ex, roommate tensions come to a head and her ability to graduate becomes increasingly uncertain. Above all, she’s consumed by a crush she harbors for a fellow Philly native she recently hooked up with, traveling to her hometown in a desperate attempt to seduce him. Predictably, nothing […]
In a year that saw the passing of Jean-Luc Godard, it’s astonishing to see a sometimes overlooked fixture of golden age European art cinema, Jerzy Skolimowski, directing one of his strongest films now—with a donkey for a star, no less. Boxer, poet, actor, painter: the 84-year-old director has brought a restlessness to his career, often expressed on film through a muscularly lyrical approach to mobile camerawork that remains unique in many ways. His classic Deep End (1970) heaves and wheels and gawps alongside its awkward, sexually frustrated teenage protagonist, Mike, who stalks a facsimile of curdled Swingin’ London shot in […]
In Maria Schrader’s She Said, two New York Times reporters investigate allegations of sexual misconduct against Hollywood producer Harvey Weintstein. Their work not only leads to a measure of justice for victims, but helps inspire #MeToo, an ongoing effort to improve professional practices for women in a male-dominated industry. Schrader and her crew shot largely on location, including inside the New York Times headquarters near Times Square. The heavyweight cast includes Carey Mulligan (Megan Twohey), Zoe Kazan (Jodi Kantor), Patricia Clarkson (Rebecca Corbett), Jennifer Ehle (Laura Madden) and Samantha Morton (Zelda Perkins). Director of photography Natasha Braier has worked on […]
The title of the new film Causeway refers to the 24-mile strip of road that cuts over Lake Pontchartrain to connect the New Orleans suburbs of Mandeville and Metairie, a thoroughfare holding the honor of the world’s longest bridge over water. It’s the site of a formative trauma for James (Brian Tyree Henry), one of two rudderless souls drifting through Lila Neugebauer’s low-key drama; convalescing Afghanistan vet Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence) is the other. They tentatively come together for the sort of downbeat healing not uncommon in the American indie, the process’s credibility bolstered by a lucid, precise awareness of the […]
Forget social and political issues—in documentaries, 2022 is shaping up to be the year of the volcano. There was Sara Dosa’s exquisite Fire of Love (which I fell in love with back at CPH:DOX in March, also screening at DOC NYC), in which a pair of lovestruck vulcanologists are quite literally consumed by their passion. Now we have not one, but two volcano-centric films debuting at this year’s DOC NYC. While I’ve not seen Herzog’s (pre-festival premiering) The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft, its title naming Dosa’s aforementioned protagonists, I’m guessing it’s likely the polar opposite of […]
Despite their dissimilar filmographies, I have great affection for both the arthouse friendly A24 and the drive-in exploitation of American International Pictures. That’s why I’m such a sucker for the story behind the making of A24’s Pearl, which follows AIP’s old philosophy that if you’re going to go to the trouble of hauling a cast and crew out to a remote location, you might as well make two pictures while you’re there. Pearl began life in a New Zealand hotel room in October of 2020. While in a government-mandated two-week quarantine ahead of making the 1970s-set horror film X, writer/director […]
Frustrated by her marriage, Sophia Tolstoy addresses her husband Leo in a series of letters that veer from bitter to defiant to pleading. Delivered by the French performer Nathalie Boutefeu, the letters and diary entries detail years of resentment and misunderstandings. A Couple marks a rare turn to narrative filmmaking by Frederick Wiseman, one of the world’s great documentarians. Shot over 17 days by Wiseman’s longtime collaborator John Davey—largely on Belle Ile, an island off the coast of Brittany—the film sets Sophia’s turmoil against the plants and animals that form a seaside garden. Wiseman spoke with Filmmaker before a screening […]
DOC NYC, the largest documentary film festival in the U.S., kicks off this Wednesday, November 9. Featuring more than 200 films among this year’s roster, the fest will run in-person and online from the 9th to the 17th, with New York City screenings and events taking place at IFC Center, SVA Theater and Cinépolis Chelsea. Additional virtual screenings will be streamable for audiences across the U.S. until November 27. Whether you plan on attending locally or from afar, we’ve compiled a list of 13 films to catch at this year’s 13th edition of DOC NYC, sourcing from our own previous […]
With You Resemble Me currently playing at the Angelika Film Center, Filmmaker presents two guest posts about the film’s self-distribution, one by the film’s writer and director, Dina Amer, and, below, one by producer Elizabeth Woodward. After a beautiful premiere in Venice, 30 festival awards from over 70 festivals around the world, our special film You Resemble Me did not have any meaningful distribution offers on the table. We could not believe that our only option was to take a deal that not only would place the film in a catalog of films that we didn’t feel were of the […]