The Toronto Film Festival is underway, the first purely in-person edition since before the COVID-19 pandemic. There are high profile premieres, including Ryan Johnson’s Knives Out sequel, Glass Onion, a number of films traveling on their awards march from Telluride and/or Venice (Florian Zeller’s The Son, Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed), as well as smaller acquisition titles that are always in danger of being overlooked amidst the galas. Below are a number of films, most but not all TIFF premieres, that we’re recommending you check out, whether that recommendation is based on pre-screening or just our knowledge […]
Despite making decades of fascinating film work and playing a pivotal role at Binghamton by founding the film department and bringing Ken Jacobs onboard, Larry Gottheim remains an under-celebrated figure in the American avant-garde. With Fog Line (1970)—an 11 minute single-take of fog slowly rising in a meadow, trees asymmetrically clustered, framed by telephone wire—he found a semblance of universal acclaim in the underground. The “first period” of Gottheim’s work (of which Fog Line is a crucial part) takes an approach largely inspired by the stoic film observations of Andy Warhol, a rubric of silence and static framing which trains […]
With their pronounced and callous violence, their serpentine studies of obsession, delusion, and identity, Patricia Highsmith’s hypergraphic body of work has by now become as much a part of the culture of literary fiction and cinema as that of her lionized male counterparts. But where the personas of Hammett and Chandler have been crafted into legend, the Fort Worth-born Highsmith has stayed a cipher. While in recent years a pair of biographies and the release of her excerpted private diaries have let some light into the picture, Highsmith’s peripatetic nature remains elusive and secretive. Expatriated from the States and then […]
Todd Field’s TÁR simulates ethical complexity to “call into question” cancel culture, which—no matter what Gina Carano, Peter Vack et al. have to say about it—is not an unprecedentedly bold or unthinkable move; millions of Americans are waiting to nod in vociferous agreement. The titular Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) first speaks at the New Yorker Festival, in onstage conversation with the magazine’s Adam Gopnik as himself. This prolonged opening (somewhere around 15 minutes) provides an excuse for a lot of expository background: Tár is an EGOT honoree, a revered modern conductor, a lesbian who’s also the first woman appointed to lead a […]
MUBI has released a new trailer for The African Desperate, the feature debut from acclaimed visual artist Martine Syms. Filmmaker previously interviewed Syms during the film’s premiere at this year’s edition of New Directors/New Films as well as for our most recent Summer print issue. The African Desperate follows Palace Bryant (Sym’s frequent collaborator Diamond Stingily) on her final day at an MFA program in New York’s Hudson Valley. During these last 24 hours of art school, Palace experiences the full gamut of grad school woes and (synthetic) wonders—including a racist final thesis review, encounters with her insufferable classmates and […]
Now in its second season, Untold—the Netflix documentary series executive produced by brothers Chapman and Maclain Way (Wild Wild Country)—continues to offer an intriguing selection of sports-centered stories. From covering the world’s most successful female boxer to the infamous “Malice at the Palace” brawl, Volume 1 of the series became popular for choosing to tell a side of a notable story you thought you knew—essentially a nonfiction offering of feature-length episodes packaged under the Untold umbrella. As a basketball fan, I was curious to see what Volume 2 would include. Having premiered on August 16th and rolling out an episode […]
The non-profit Sundance Institute has shared preliminary updates for the 2023 edition of the Sundance Film Festival, which will take place January 19-29. Most notably, the festival will pivot back to being a largely in-person festival, with screenings kicking off in Utah on January 19 in Park City, Salt Lake City and the Sundance Resort. Sundance will then introduce on-demand film streaming via its festival platform on January 24 for all of the competition titles (U.S. Dramatic, U.S. Documentary, World Cinema Dramatic, World Cinema Documentary, and NEXT) as well as episodic and short film titles. Also kicking off on the […]
After 11 years of residence in Greenpoint, co-founders Ed Halter and Thomas Beard are moving their microcinema, Light Industry—dedicated to screening film and electronic art in Brooklyn since 2008—to Williamsburg. Ed and Thomas found inspiration for Light Industry in Amos Vogel, who founded the New York Film Festival, pioneered early alternative film spaces such as Cinema 16 and once wrote that “the avant-garde’s delight in the unpredictable, its insistence on the deconstruction of ossified codes, its probing of the unacceptable, signify gestures of freedom in an increasingly commercialized cinema.” I would repeat this remark, word for word, about the indispensable […]
Netflix has released a teaser trailer for White Noise, Noah Baumbach‘s adaptation of author Don Delillo’s 1985 novel of the same name. Adam Driver plays Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies at a local liberal arts college, while Greta Gerwig plays his wife Babette. Both must confront their profound mortal fears when an “airborne toxic event” threatens their family and livelihoods—a catastrophic occurrence that reveals moments of mind-numbing mundanity. Once terrified of death, Jack becomes obsessed and consumed by it in the wake of this environmental crisis. Driver and Gerwig have collaborated with Baumbach extensively in the past, with […]
Director Owen Kline texted me recently to let me know he was in my neighborhood, so we linked up in Washington Square Park to see what was good. He’d just gotten back from Cannes where his debut feature, Funny Pages, was a smash hit. I was excited to hear some glamorous, and hopefully debaucherous, tales from the Croisette. Instead, the very first words out of his mouth were, “Pick a number between between one and a thousand. And don’t tell me what it is!” He looked me dead in the eyes, on some mentalist shit, scribbled furiously on a clipboard for […]