With Run Lola Run‘s 25th anniversary release this weekend in a new 4K restoration, we are reposting our Spring, 1999 cover interview with director Tom Tykwer. Among the last year’s festival staples, the most exhilarating may have been Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run. The self-taught 34-year-old Berliner’s third feature is a clock-driven, lighter-than-air romantic-action-comedy-thriller floating atop a percolating electronica score. The film plays out three potential narratives of what dangers and distractions the streets of Berlin hold just before noon for Lola (Franka Potente) and Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), two effortlessly cool, suddenly in trouble twentysomething lovers. Manni loses 100,000 marks […]
With Vanessa Hope’s recommended documentary Invisible Nation opening today in theaters, including NYC’s Quad Cinema, where Hope and producer Ted Hope will be doing Q&A’s tonight and tomorrow, we’re reposting Lauren Wissot’s interview with the director published last Fall. — Editor Though producer-director Vanessa Hope has spent her career zeroing in on China—from producing Wang Quanan’s The Story Of Ermei and Chantal Akerman’s Tombee De Nuit Sur Shanghai to directing her own short China In Three Words and feature-length debut All Eyes and Ears—Hope’s followup feature is nonetheless a bit of a surprise. An intimate portrait of Taiwan’s first female […]
When I last interviewed Estonian filmmaker Anna Hints it was to discuss her Sundance 2023-premiering Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, which would go on to win the World Cinema Documentary Competition Directing Award. (It also nabbed Best Documentary at the 36th European Film Awards on its way to becoming Estonia’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars.) The film offers quite a unique peek into a UNESCO-designated tradition that for centuries has allowed women like those the director (and contemporary artist and experimental folk musician) respectfully lenses to bond, heal and reveal in a safe space of smoke and sweat. And […]
Amidst wi-fi and cellular outages, a threatened workers’ strike, and dialogue around the #MeToo movement in France, the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival is underway. For Filmmaker, Vadim Rizov and Blake Williams are both back with on-the-ground reports and Critics Notebooks, and we begin with this list of 15 films that might be sliding under your radar. You don’t need us to recommend Coppola’s Megalopolis, Schrader’s Oh Canada, Cronenberg’s The Shrouds or any of the other titles from the higher-profile auteurs. Instead, we’ve focused here on debuting directors, U.S. independents, and arthouse auteurs who have dazzled us with […]
This year’s 31st edition of Hot Docs (April 25-May 5) was chockfull of drama, both onscreen and off. And while there were no protests (such as at IDFA) nor riot police dispatched (see Thessaloniki) there was quite an upheaval in the run up to the event itself. Which then led to much speculation as to the health and future of North America’s largest nonfiction fest. Indeed, before the event even began 10 programmers abruptly resigned and the artistic director stepped down. (Not exactly the type of news you want upstaging your press conference to unveil Dawn Porter’s Vandross biopic Luther: Never […]
Amsterdam-based, Bosnian-born filmmaker Ena Sendijarević’s two features to date, Take Me Somewhere Nice and Sweet Dreams, hone the filmmaker’s personal cinematic language while expanding the parameters of her own perspective. The former, her 2019 debut feature, follows a Dutch teen as she journeys to visit her ailing Bosnian father in the hospital. The latter, which will screen at NYC’s Metrograph beginning today, chronicles the decline of a wealthy Dutch family’s Indonesian sugar plantation at the turn of the 20th century. While her first feature explores the contours of Eastern and Western European relations—a subject Sendijarević is familiar with as a […]
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 […]
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 […]
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) […]
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 […]