17801 Results for “”
-
Until the Last Beat: Nick Emerson on Editing Conclave
In Conclave, corruption, betrayal and clashing ideologies turn the selection of a new pope into fertile ground for a taut political thriller as English cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is caught in the middle of the struggle between a conservative caucus wishing to return the Catholic church to its dogmatic past and a liberal wing pushing for a more open-minded future. As dean of the proceedings, Fiennes is tasked with shaking off his own crisis of faith in order to guide 120 fractious cardinals sequestered in the Vatican to a consensus on a new leader. The parallels between the film’s […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Dec 16, 2024 -
Gale Force Cinema: Studying with Luis Recoder and Sandra Gibson
On September 26, I flew from Los Angeles to Atlanta, then drove north toward Rabun Gap, eventually turning west on Bettys Creek Road to find the sprawling 600-acre campus of the Hambidge Center in the heavy rain preceding the arrival of Hurricane Helene. I had signed up for a workshop called “Cinema From Scratch: From Camera Obscura to Handmade Film,” with Brooklyn-based artists Luis Recoder and Sandra Gibson, and the urge to meet the pair, whose work with the materiality of cinema I’ve loved for two decades, overrode this Angeleno’s terror of foul weather. Carefully tracking what was being called […]
by Holly Willis on Dec 16, 2024 -
Talking About the Movies: Sigrid Nunez at the Cinema
When author Sigrid Nunez tells people that two of her recent novels, The Friend and What Are You Going Through, have been adapted into films, she’s amused by their inevitable reactions. “They say very somberly, ‘Are they faithful to the book? Have [you] been insulted?’” “It’s charming because it’s so naive,” she laughs. “You’d never want a transcription!” For a novelist who’s been publishing since 1995, that two strong adaptations suddenly exist—both auteurist affairs retaining their novels’ concerns and essential architecture—is quite remarkable. Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s The Friend is a warm, witty adaptation of Nunez’s 2018 National Book […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 16, 2024 -
Sentient Images: RaMell Ross on Nickel Boys
RaMell Ross’s 2018 feature debut, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, is a non-narrative portrait of its Alabama locale, shot entirely by the filmmaker over years of immersion, his instinctually captured material assembled into intricate juxtapositions. Few scale-ups for a second film have been more dramatic: Nickel Boys is a narrative feature adapted from a pre-existing text (Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys), proceeding in more-or-less linear order through an incident-filled narrative, with an on-record budget of around $23 million and production handled by Plan B Entertainment and Louverture Films. The latter’s Joslyn Barnes was also a producer and […]
by Vadim Rizov on Dec 16, 2024 -
Careless People: Mark Asch on Gamification, Impunity and 2024 in Film
Juror #2, which I saw the night before the presidential election, concerns a man who looks at his phone while driving, hits and kills a fellow citizen, and keeps going. A year later, summoned to serve on a jury at the trial of the man wrongly accused of the crime, the driver scrambles to escape responsibility for his actions while still telling himself that he’s a good person. Clint Eastwood’s film, a Southern courtroom thriller in the John Grisham mode, has been called a throwback. For one thing, the juror’s car is a midsize SUV from Grisham’s mid-1990s heyday, not […]
by Mark Asch on Dec 16, 2024 -
Striking Film Prints in a Digital World: Laser Printing, CRT Screens and a One-Stop Film Recorder from Norway
In 2006, Rune Bjerkestrand was on the Universal lot in Hollywood, far away from his home country of Norway. His brand-new invention, the Cinevator, could create a film negative from a digital file in real time—a vast improvement over other recorders that could take 10 days or more to craft a negative for a 90-minute film. But was the quality there? Technicolor set up a blind test to find out. “We didn’t really have a clue about film, about film technology, about the film industry, about film machines—nothing,” Bjerkestrand says. After the split-screen test footage ran, everyone in the theater […]
by Caleb Hammond on Dec 16, 2024 -
Unholy Melodies: Composer Robin Carolan on Nosferatu‘s Score
For Robin Carolan, working on his debut film score for Robert Eggers’s 2022 Viking epic The Northman was a “baptism by fire.” After closing his influential electronic record label Tri Angle in 2020, Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough (who records music under the name Vessel) dove headfirst into researching the ethnography of Nordic music to craft the film’s harsh, mythic sound. They used traditional Nordic instruments and modern experimental techniques to approximate the music of the era, a mandate Eggers routinely insists upon for his period genre films. That directive continues with Eggers’s longtime passion project, Nosferatu, a new telling of […]
by Vikram Murthi on Dec 16, 2024 -
All Protocols are Not the Same: Joanne McNeil on Bluesky
If you are a filmmaker, journalist, artist or someone else who creates work for an audience, most likely you’ve used social media to share it. Self-promotion is never fun, but it’s felt especially inconsistent (if not totally hopeless) ever since Elon Musk acquired Twitter, renamed it X and began throttling views to posts that include links. A number of users have escaped to new broadcast-based social media services that are “decentralized”—but what that word means depends on who you talk to. There are concrete differences between the AT Protocol, underpinning Bluesky, and ActivityPub, the protocol and standard for Mastodon as […]
by Joanne McNeil on Dec 16, 2024 -
The Final Outfits: Massimo Cantini Parrini on Maria‘s Costumes
A sumptuously shot psychological portrait of one of history’s greatest divas, Maria extends director Pablo Larraín’s explorations of iconic, tragically fated women in Jackie and Spencer. Angelina Jolie brings her own glamorous mythology to an impressionistic take on opera star Maria Callas’s final days before her death in 1977 at age 53. Like its predecessors, Maria eschews biopic convention, prioritizing an evocative aesthetic over a tidy narrative as, throughout, we see Callas onstage and off, in black-and-white and color and throughout various stages of her career from the 1950s onward. In all those phases, Callas is inevitably well-dressed in costumes […]
by Abbey Bender on Dec 16, 2024 -
Hits & Misses 2024: Case Studies of Six Sundance 2024 Premieres
In September, Variety declared, “Indie Films Are Staging a Box Office Comeback,” touting the success of the films Longlegs, Thelma and Late Night with the Devil as signs of life for a segment of the industry “crushed by COVID, strikes and streaming,” as reporter Brent Lang wrote. “And while it’s a long way from the arthouse heyday of the 1990s and early aughts, the turnaround is impressive.” Maybe not that impressive. Citing the more than $100 million global gross of Longlegs, a NEON-produced wide-release serial-killer movie, as some kind of indie darling misses the point. Thelma and Late Night are […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Dec 16, 2024
