Bluntly titled but mysterious all the same, John and the Hole marks the directorial debut of visual artist Pascual Sisto. Originally set to premiere at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival, the film finally premiered (albeit virtually) at Sundance this past January. Played by lead actor Charlie Shotwell (Captain Fantastic), suburban pre-teen John appears content with his suburban life. He lives in a beautiful Massachusetts home with his parents (Michael C. Hall and Jennifer Ehle) and sister (Taissa Farmiga), surrounded by nature and endless open space, complete with an underground bunker (the hole of the film’s title) built in the yard […]
After six seasons, Matthew Rhys won an Emmy for his stellar work on The Americans. Spielberg’s The Post, and A Beautiful Day in The Neighborhood (opposite Tom Hanks) followed, and now he’s nominated for another Emmy for his incredible work in Perry Mason on HBO. In this half hour, he compares the experience of building (and “wrestling”) his two major television characters into life. He talks about the humiliating way he learned the acting lesson that listening is just as important as speaking. He shares a few tools he uses when he can’t get in the groove, explains why he’s […]
For Leos Carax, stories of love—or really, most any story—mean finding a new language of filmmaking. For Caroline Champetier, Carax’s longtime director of photography, that means realizing dreams that might not at first seem possible. Annette is the story of a dream yearned for but not fully realized, the great love between opera superstar Ann (Marion Cotillard) and ornery comedian Henry (Adam Driver). They have a child who becomes a singing star herself, but their bond is undone in the dark crucible of Henry’s discontent, and Carax and Champetier craft a kind of handmade journey whose very nature expresses the […]
When we first meet X (Santiago Segura) in an extended moving camera shot that follows him exiting a state penitentiary, the length of the sentence he’s just completed is signaled by the contents of the box of vintage tech and media he carries: an outdated computer monitor with the clear plastic revealing its circuit board; tech-nerd, unfashionable over-the-ear headphones; the Trainspotting soundtrack CD. He takes the bus home — a one-room apartment minimalist in all the wrong ways (no “apartment therapy” here), which The Five Rules of Success director Orson Oblowitz, acting as his own cinematographer, captures with a kind […]
Barbara Crampton has been acting in horror movies for almost 40 years now and has classics like Body Double and Re-animator on her resume (alongside more recent cult favorites such as Lords of Salem and You’re Next), but she’s never had a part that utilizes her talents as thrillingly as the title role in Jakob’s Wife. An insightful meditation on the precarious difficulties of maintaining a marriage that also manages to deliver the horror movie goods with terrifying and often hilarious gusto (imagine Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage crossed with early Sam Raimi), Jakob’s Wife tells the story of […]
In The Green Knight, King Arthur’s hedonistic nephew Gawain (Dev Patel) leaves the comforts of Camelot for an epic quest to confront the titular verdant specter. Based on the anonymously authored 14th Century poem, the latest film from David Lowery (The Old Man & the Gun, A Ghost Story) invites a multitude of interpretations. I construed it as a journey from the imagined invincibility of youth to the shadow of mortality eventually cast upon us all—a reading no doubt colored by 18 pandemic months of wondering if a trip to the grocery store would kill me. Days after my screening, […]
Opening on a mountaintop, The Evening Hour pans slowly across a vast Appalachian landscape, soaking in birdsong and morning light. In the distance, a series of explosions disrupt the surrounding idyll, but only for a moment. As plumes of ash and debris hang in the still mountain air, the shot holds into a static composition, those ominous detonations newly part of the tableau. Braden King’s second feature, his first since 2011’s Here, maintains this painterly sensibility – one of observation over action, meditation over movement – throughout its patient, precise portrait of a Kentucky mining town, its inhabitants, and the […]
Festival director Tabitha Jackson announced today details of the upcoming Sundance Film Festival, which will take place in Park City, Utah and across various Satellite Screen venues January 20 – 30, 2022. Most significantly, after 2021’s virtual edition, Sundance 2022 will be an in-person event. The festival will require attendees of events in Utah to be fully vaccinated, with further details about health precautions and mask-wearing to be issued in the coming months. The festival will also be larger than last year’s scaled-down edition but still smaller than the pre-pandemic 2020 festival. For further details, read the complete letter from […]
Teeth, Somebody Up There Likes Me, Chained For Life, The Good Wife, are just a few of the great Jess Weixler’s credits. Ten years ago she co-stared in The Lie with Joshua Leonard. They played a couple with a baby and one big problem. He directed. Most of the dialogue came out of improvisation. Now they’ve done it again with Fully Realized Humans. They again play a couple. This time the baby is in utero and the laughs are bigger, the situations more absurd yet also more thought-provoking. Weixler is credited as co-writer. In this episode she details the improv […]
With two dozen films since 2008 and 60-odd years of comics, there’s a nearly infinite amount of source material to pull inspiration from when embarking on a new endeavor in the Marvel Universe. But what makes the new Disney+ series Loki such a visual delight is how it derives inspiration from beyond the bounds of that universe. Melding classic sci-fi and midcentury modern design, Loki is “Blade Runner meets Mad Men,” embedding the titular God of Mischief into a dystopian bureaucracy bent to the aesthetic peculiarities of Gilliam, Kubrick and Fincher. With the show’s entire first season now available on […]