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A Restaurant’s Democratic Promise: Director Lisa Hurwitz and Her Doc, The Automat
When The Automat director Lisa Hurwitz left her family’s home in Southern California to go to The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, she found that the place where she was most comfortable was the school’s cafeteria, the Greenery. “I made new friends there every day and there was a different food every day,” she says. Hurwitz’s academic focus wasn’t film: “I took one documentary filmmaking course, just before I graduated.” But she also had a job projecting 35mm movies at Olympia’s Capitol Theater, aka the Picture Palace, which was operated by the Olympia Film Society and was the venue for […]
by Amy Taubin on Feb 20, 2022 -
Berlinale 2022 Critic’s Notebook: The Novelist’s Film, Both Sides of the Blade, Robe of Gems
2020 got off to a fine start. In February I made my first visit to the Berlinale, where I interviewed a couple of filmmakers and indulged in the competition lineup, a King Vidor retrospective and the 50th anniversary of Forum. Like all of my festival trips, I considered it a working vacation—a chance to see friends, explore a city and escape for a few days from my suburban, white-collar life. At the last press screening I attended, another critic asked if I was Italian before taking a seat a few feet away. Even in the cloistered environment of the festival, […]
by Darren Hughes on Feb 19, 2022 -
“I Believe that Valuing African Audiences Will Break the Pattern of Cliches That We Have Become Accustomed To”: Akuol de Mabior on Her Berlinale-Debuting doc No Simple Way Home
South Sudanese director Akuol de Mabior’s No Simple Way Home is a gorgeous example of what African filmmakers can accomplish if Westerners would just get out of their way. A world premiere in the Panorama section of this year’s Berlinale, the doc is produced by Kenyan filmmaker Sam Soko (Softie) and the South African duo Tiny Mungwe and Don Edkins of STEPS (Social Transformation and Empowerment Projects) as part of the organization’s Generation Africa initiative, “a pan-African anthology of 25 documentary films from 16 countries in Africa, on the topic of migration.” And it tells a tale not of folks […]
by Lauren Wissot on Feb 18, 2022 -
Outrage, Morvern Callar, Man on the Moon: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
In the 1940s, actress Ida Lupino was one of Warner Bros.’ most reliable contract players, a performer who exuded a tough intelligence in terse genre movies like High Sierra and They Drive by Night. As independent-minded as her characters, Lupino irritated the front office with her refusal to accept sub-par roles and was eventually fired, a development that might not have been great for her bank account but which instigated her most fertile period as an artist. Instead of waiting for the phone to ring, Lupino formed an independent production company and began directing her own pictures, some of which […]
by Jim Hemphill on Feb 18, 2022 -
Rotterdam 2022 Critic’s Notebook: Third Grade, Met mes, The Dream and the Radio
It’d been nearly a decade since I’d seen a Jacques Doillon film during its premiere festival run, but Third Grade almost immediately reminded me what his work, since at least 2003’s Raja (where I first came in), feels and looks like. Restless characters roam with the sharklike compulsion of actors determined to charge every single moment; the camera slowly pans or dollies to keep everyone just within the frame’s boundaries, resting during the occasional static composition but rarely for long. Conflict is everyone’s inevitable destination, and sooner rather than later; people begin at such virulent odds that you fear for both their physical […]
by Vadim Rizov on Feb 18, 2022 -
Via Chicago: Daniel Hymanson on His Documentary Debut So Late So Soon
Simultaneously a gentle portrait of two aging artists and an appreciative look at a bickering but loving couple, Daniel Hymanson’s debut feature, So Late So Soon, benefits from a level of access most documentarians would crave. Having known Chicago-based artists and educators Jackie and Don Seiden since he was a young boy, Hymanson sets himself and his camera inside the Seidens’s multi-storied, eye-catching home. Known locally as the Candyland House, the Barbie House and the Rainbow Cone Home, this Rogers Park residence has been occupied by the Seidens for close to 50 years, its interiors and exteriors closely resembling the […]
by Erik Luers on Feb 18, 2022 -
Watch: Jamie Stuart’s Tale of Cat Love and Loss, The Love Battery
Jamie Stuart’s cat SK, who accompanied him through a chunk of adulthood spanning New York to LA, passed away recently. Stuart’s new short, The Love Battery is an account of that passing, a tribute as well as introduction to his next pet chapter. From Stuart’s program notes: Cats. Love and loss. I made this as a crew of one over the past two months. Initially, I’d planned it as a tribute to my recently deceased cat SK — but then the story took a turn… This is NOT a documentary. It is a dramatic reenactment — that includes real live […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 16, 2022 -
Back to One, Episode 190: Chukwudi Iwuji
Chukwudi Iwuji has been celebrated for his stage work (particularly Shakespeare) on both sides of the pond. He got raves for his Henvy VI at RSC, Othello and Hamlet at The Public, to names just a few. The raves continued for his performances in The Low Road (Obie win) and Ivo van Hove’s Hedda Gabler. He has only recently been transitioning, in a concerted way, to film work. James Gunn rewrote Clemson Murn in Peacemaker after seeing Iwuji’s audition, then put him in Guardians of the Galaxy 3, and called him one of the greatest actors who has graced his […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Feb 15, 2022 -
“Images are Moving Away From the Eye”: Dane Komljen on Afterwater
The opening minutes of Afterwater, Dane Komljen’s second feature, might fool viewers into thinking they know what they’re in for. At a university, a young man sketches varieties of fishes preserved in jars of glass. A young woman attends class in a lab with microscopes on every table. They don’t speak, their expressions remain impassive. We observe them in static and meticulous compositions, as if they themselves were specimens. When a character reads from a book about limnology, i.e. the study of lakes, and the word “microcosm” cues a shot of Berlin’s central train station bustling with commuters, the cut […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Feb 14, 2022 -
“After a Promising Beginning, The Producer Absconded”: Dominik Graf on Fabian: Going to the Dogs
Erich Kästner’s Fabian: The Story of a Moralist (republished in 2012 by New York Review of Books as Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist), though less known in the West than the contemporaneous Berlin Alexanderplatz or the works of Mann and Rilke, was highly regarded in Germany in the aftermath of World War II for its depiction of life in Berlin just prior to Hitler’s rise to power. That life—as Kästner sees it—is degraded by sexual promiscuity and economic depression, and although Kästner uncritically reflects his protagonist’s tendency to dismiss the escapades of men as humorous and […]
by Forrest Cardamenis on Feb 14, 2022
