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“Audiences Think They Want Answers, but They Don’t”: Screenwriter Sam Stefanak on The Woman in the Yard
The Woman in the Yard is the latest production from horror factory Blumhouse, but tones down the jump scares in favor of visualizing the dark imaginary of a woman battling depression. It’s not what audiences have come to expect from the studio, and it has garnered wildly divisive reactions from audiences and critics alike. Woman follows single mother Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler), grieving her husband’s death, who is haunted by a female specter in the backyard that is pushing her to self-annihilation. It was a very personal project for first-time screenwriter Sam Stefanak, who was channeling his own demons during the […]
by R. Emmet Sweeney on Apr 11, 2025 -
“What’s This Bright Guy Doing in a Pickle Barrel?” Peter Riegert on Crossing Delancey
[This is the second of three interviews with key collaborators on Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey. Click here to read the first part, an interview with screenwriter Susan Sandler, and click here to read an interview with co-star Amy Irving.] Filmmaker: You’d worked with Joan Micklin Silver before, on Chilly Scenes of Winter. What kind of an actor-director relationship did you have? Riegert: It was very comfortable. She was a very good writer—she wrote Chilly Scenes of Winter—and knew how to take [on] a script that she didn’t write. She knew how to cast. She had a wonderful eye for […]
by Mark Asch on Apr 10, 2025 -
“I Found My Pickle Man”: Amy Irving on Crossing Delancey
[This is the second of three interviews with key collaborators on Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey. Click here to read the first part, an interview with screenwriter Susan Sandler, and check back tomorrow to read the final part, an interview with co-star Peter Riegert.] Filmmaker: Joan Micklin Silver is a filmmaker whose reputation has really grown over the past decade, and I’m curious what her secret sauce was, for lack of a better term. What do you remember about working with her? Irving: Joan spent a lot of time figuring out her cast. If you look at all her movies, […]
by Mark Asch on Apr 9, 2025 -
From the Jewish Repertory Theater to the Movies: Screenwriter Susan Sandler on Crossing Delancey
When Joan Micklin Silver died on the last day of 2020, cinephiles mourned the passing of a major American filmmaker, a status to which she may have begun to ascend in late 2014, when IFC Center presented a 35mm screening of her third feature Chilly Scenes of Winter with its original title and the director’s preferred ending—the first time in perhaps a decade that the film had resurfaced in New York’s repertory scene. At that time, Vadim Rizov spoke to Silver, then in her late 70s, about her struggles to break into the film industry (“‘At that point in time, […]
by Mark Asch on Apr 8, 2025 -
“I Love Television Because You Have To Continuously Evolve Your Character”: Jolene Purdy, Back To One, Episode 337
Jolene Purdy is always a standout. She gained recognition for her performance as Cherita Chen in the cult classic Donnie Darko, and later appeared in hit shows like Orange Is the New Black, Under the Dome, Breaking Bad, WandaVision, and The White Lotus. She now plays opposite Kevin Bacon in the new Amazon series The Bondsman. On this episode, she talks about how the collaborative nature of that production ignited her creativity and brought out the best in her. She tells us her secret to mastering the art of delivering exposition, why she loves to be directed, how she learned […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Apr 8, 2025 -
“The Biggest Challenge Was That Janis Has Led an Incredibly Interesting and Varied Life”: Director Varda Bar-Kar on Janis Ian: Breaking Silence
Even if you don’t count yourself has a diehard Janis Ian fan, the singer-songwriter’s songs, such as her 1967 hit “Society’s Child,” when they appear in Varda Bar-Kar’s compelling bio-doc, Janis Ian: Breaking Silence, will strike a memory chord, so ubiquitous they have been across radio playlists for more than half a century. It’s a real strength of Bar-Kar’s film, which is organized around several of Ian’s most memorable albums, including the eponymous 1993 release, that she weaves these compositions into a rich fabric that places Ian’s personal life story — her coming out, her relationship with and 2003 marriage […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 7, 2025 -
“Even Stalin on his Deathbed Thought He Was a Good Person”: Todd Solondz on Palindromes
With Todd Solondz’s Palindromes currently rereleased by Monument Releasing in a new 4K restoration on the occasion of its 20th anniversary, we are reposting Matthew Ross’s interview with Solondz from our Spring, 2005 print edition. The film opens today at New York’s Metrograph Theater before traveling to Philadelphia, Atlanta and Los Angeles in the weeks ahead. It was nine years ago that Todd Solondz took home the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance for his second feature, Welcome to the Dollhouse. One of the seminal indies of the late 1990s, the film earned more than $4 million at the box office […]
by Matthew Ross on Apr 6, 2025 -
Seven Documentary Organizations Sign Letter Decrying DOGE National Endowment for the Humanities Cuts
Seven filmmaker support organizations, including the International Documentary Association, Women Make Movies and Third World Newsreel, have signed a letter protesting Trump administration cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities that will affect both independent documentary filmmakers and non-profit organizations. In addition to funds for future grants, the administration is rescinding grants awarded during the Biden administration — monies that filmmakers and organizations had already planned to spend. The New York Times reported today: Starting late Wednesday night, state humanities councils and other grant recipients began receiving emails telling them their funding was ended immediately. Instead, they were told, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 4, 2025 -
Amalia Meets Bing: Walking with the Canine Star of The Friend and Talking to Owner Bev Klingensmith and Trainer Bill Berloni
By mere chance, The Friend has been a part of my life for quite some time now. I was first introduced to the book when Hal Hartley recommended it for my book club sometime around 2021, when I was just a girl with two cats. Fast forward and it’s 2024, now I love dogs and had just adopted a puppy named Variety Magazine. It was during that spring, on one of those early days of puppyhood, that he got street cast for a b-roll sequence in an upcoming film… that was to be an adaptation of Sigrid Nuñez’s The Friend. […]
by Amalia Ulman on Apr 4, 2025 -
“Field of Dreams in Reverse”: Baseball Movies, Eephus and One Last Game in East River Park
“We called it Field of Dreams in reverse: if you wreck it, they will leave,” writer and actor Nate Fisher told me of the selling pitch for Eephus, the melancholic baseball comedy he co-wrote with Michael Basta and director Carson Lund, which made its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival last Fall after debuting at Cannes, 2024. (The film is currently in theatrical release from Music Box.) The unusual baseball film captures the last recreation-league baseball game played at a soon-to-be-demolished field in a deliberately ambiguous New England location, carried out by two teams—the Riverdogs and Adler’s […]
by Madeline Ostdick on Apr 4, 2025
