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“Sometimes the Cinema is Here To Make You Watch Something You Don’t Want to Watch”: Director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire on Asphalt City
With his features Johnny Mad Dog and A Prayer Before Dawn — the former a breakneck, road-to-ruin chronicle of child soldiers in war-torn Liberia and the latter a visceral portrait of a British expat, imprisoned in Thailand on a drug charge and conscripted into a violent kickboxing competition — French-born director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire has consistently dropped viewers into extreme, ultra-violent scenarios, employing a mis-en-scene steeped in hyper-graphic realism to compel a one-to-one relationship between his audience and protagonists. His most recent feature, Asphalt City, is no different. Sauvaire’s first film to shoot in the US, where he has lived for over a […]
by Evan Louison on Mar 29, 2024 -
“Nine Pages a Day of Heavy Dialogue”: Bob Byington and David Krumholtz on Lousy Carter
In 2012, Bob Byington won a Special Jury Prize at the Locarno Film Festival for Somebody Up There Likes Me; last year, he returned with Lousy Carter. Writing about the festival, I said of the film: Introducing Bob Byington’s Lousy Carter alongside the writer-director, star David Krumholtz preemptively noted that while the film was shot and is set there, “Whatever you think of Texas, its politics have nothing to do with the film.” The disclaimer is accurate—this is another of Byington’s immaculately mean comedies with an underlying sentimental streak, a blend he’s been iterating with various degrees of sharpness for […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 28, 2024 -
“I Operate From a Trans Lens, or Frame, as Though It Is the Only Choice Available”: Jules Rosskam on Desire Lines
For me, watching Jules Rosskam’s Desire Lines, which won this year’s Sundance Special Jury Award in the NEXT competition, was a cinematic breath of fresh air. The experimental feature combines no holds barred interviews with transmen (of all shapes and colors) who are attracted to men, with a fictional storyline involving a real archive (one that includes shamefully buried history, like the story of author/ activist Lou Sullivan, probably the first transgender man to publicly identify as gay). The result is a riveting look back in time, and to the present and possible future, to reveal how, in the words […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 28, 2024 -
Shooting in ILM’s New StageCraft Volume Virtual Production Facility: DP Pierre Gill on Percy Jackson and the Olympians
In the first season of Disney+’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians, the titular teenaged demigod and his compatriots travel across the country, with stops from St. Louis to Las Vegas, on a mission to prevent war among the Greek gods. However, cinematographer Pierre Gill and his crew never left the vicinity of Vancouver. Percy Jackson is the first show to use Industrial Light & Magic’s new 20,000-square-foot StageCraft Volume in the Canadian city. Gill estimates 30 percent of his episodes were shot in the virtual production environment on its 95-foot LED wall. With the show now streaming in its entirety […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Mar 28, 2024 -
“We Go from 16mm to Super 16 to 35mm”: Alice Rohrwacher on La Chimera
Italian filmmaker Alice Rorhwacher’s puckish and scintillatingly tactile fourth feature is her most ambitious to date. Once again dramatizing the conflicting ideals of modernity and tradition, past and present, Rohrwacher continues to pay debt to forebears of Italian cinema like Ermanno Olmi while also infusing her film with a symbolic surrealism and neo-realist class consciousness reminiscent of the respective likes of Pier Paolo Pasolini Roberto Rossellini. La Chimera follows English archaeologist Arthur (Josh O’Connor), who possesses a mystical ability to divine the location of subterranean treasures. Freshly released from prison, he reunites with a band of tombaroli (essentially grave robbers) […]
by Elissa Suh on Mar 27, 2024 -
Critic’s Notebook: CPH:DOX 2024
After a few days at CPH:DOX 2024, the main lesson was not to know what to expect: the range of documentary approaches felt vast, and each filmmaker’s commitment tended to be rewardingly total. The 21st edition of the springtime Copenhagen festival screened 200-plus titles across several venues, with personal favorites including the Empire Bio in Nørrebro and the sanctum-like cinematheque at the Danish Film Institute. And if one of the strongest recommendations I have for any festival is that I would have felt deprived of a complete picture of the year’s work if I hadn’t seen its selections, then indeed […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Mar 27, 2024 -
Bodiless Entities, Body Politics and Bodily Functions: CPH:DOX Inter:Active 2024
Expertly curated (under the direction of Londoner Mark Atkin, who also serves as Head of Studies of the CPH:LAB), this year’s edition of the Inter:Active exhibition at CPH:DOX (March 13-24) featured the provocative theme “Who Do You Think You Are: The Body Reexamined.” As the title might suggest, the 17 XR works were wide-ranging and eclectic, both in form (VR yes, but also mixed reality and AI chatbots) and substance (perhaps unsurprising coming from a group of creators with myriad intersectional identities). Indeed, quite a number of the works I experienced on the top floor of the invitingly designed (palace […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 26, 2024 -
Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival 2024: European Disunion
One of the world’s leading forums for nonfiction work, this year the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival became a lightning rod for extremist rage. As widely reported, the opening night world premiere of Greek filmmaker Elina Psykou’s Stray Bodies happened under the watch of riot police amid a temporary ban on public protests after the film’s controversial poster — an image of a topless pregnant woman nailed to a cross —set off right-wing and religious figures and generated a volley of threats. The film also premiered in the wake of a massive public protest in support of a transgender couple that […]
by Steve Dollar on Mar 26, 2024 -
“All You Can Do is Give Your Offering” George MacKay, Back To One, Episode 284
You know the gifted actor George MacKay from films like 1917 or True History of The Kelly Gang. Now he has given us two absolutely incredible performances in Femme (in select theaters now) and The Beast (out on April 5th). On this episode, he takes us into his process of inhabiting these two extremely different characters. He explains why context is becoming more and more important to him in his preparation, talks about the actor as storyteller, the secret to appearing truly menacing, those sex scenes in Femme, a lesson about respect that he learned from Eddie Marsan, and much […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Mar 26, 2024 -
A Conversation with Luke Lorentzen from Mary Lampson’s The Cutting Room (A Work in Progress)
The following conversation is an excerpted chapter from The Cutting Room, an upcoming book by documentary film editor Mary Lampson tracing the story of a woman building a life and career as an editor in an industry hostile to both women and independent filmmaking. Traveling over the decades through massive changes in documentary storytelling and filmmaking technology, the book revisits her work with some of the great talents of the documentary form while chronicling major technological changes connected directly to her brother Butler Lampson’s groundbreaking work on the development of the personal computer. In a moment when the conversation about documentary film feels all too […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Mar 25, 2024
