6576 Results for “production”
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Halftime Disappointment at the Venice Film Festival
In its first half, the Competition of the 72nd Venice Film Festival has been a let-down, failing to present a single truly great title. The Orizzonti and Out of Competition selections have generally proved a safer bet, and of course the excellent Venice Classics program, which so far included screenings of restored masterpieces by the likes of Fellini, Melville and Hou Hsiao-hsien, has been a reliable and most welcome morale boost whenever necessary. Following Birdman and Gravity in the last two years, the festival extended its string of star-studded, big-spectacle openers with Baltasar Kormákur’s Everest, a fictionalization of an infamous 1996 commercial […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Sep 8, 2015 -
Thinking of Tarkovsky While Making New Zealand Look Russian: DP Tim Orr on Z For Zachariah
The settings for Craig Zobel’s 2012 behavioral experiment Compliance and the director’s new post-apocalyptic tale Z for Zachariah couldn’t be more different. The former takes place almost entirely in the claustrophobic confines of a fast food restaurant’s employees-only areas. The latter unfolds amidst lush, bucolic tranquility. Yet at the heart of both films is a study of group dynamics. Set in an idyllic valley mysteriously immune to an extinction-level catastrophe, Z for Zachariah begins as a two-hander featuring Margot Robbie as a Christian farm girl who believes she’s the last person on earth until the arrival of an atheist scientist […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Sep 4, 2015 -
“One of the Basic Questions of Directing is When Are You with Someone and When Are You Not?”: Eskil Vogt on Blind
Blind, the feature directorial debut of Joachim Trier’s co-writer Eskil Vogt, is an aesthetically spick-and-span Nordic nightmare, a meditation on loneliness, illness and responsibility. If its effects are a bit sneakier than the wrecking ball to the chest approach of Oslo, August 31, it’s due to the meticulousness of its script, and the complex interplay among its many principal characters. Ingrid (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) has recently lost her sight, and spends her days cooped up with her computer while her husband Morten (Henrik Rafaelsen) is at work. Unable to relate to the outside world, Ingrid retreats into her imagination, crafting an interwoven tale of […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Sep 3, 2015 -
Microcinema Blues: What Happens When Corporations Sponsor Experimental Cinema?
The Mini Microcinema, in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine district, is perhaps the country’s only corporate-backed experimental microcinema. At least until today, when it has its final event in the subsidized pop-up location it has inhabited this summer. Screenings, at least for most citizens, have been held on the second floor of the former Globe Furniture building at 1805 Elm Street, a gorgeous structure that dates back to the 1890s. It sits across the street from Ohio’s oldest continually operating market. The first floor serves as a gallery and gathering space; adorned with old movie chairs, its white walls are covered with well-manicured posters […]
by Brandon Harris on Sep 3, 2015 -
Watch: Red Lighting in the Films of Martin Scorsese
A new site called Film Scalpel is devoted to not just the production of video essays, but also understanding their grammar and exemplary practitioners. Among their first handful of videos are four takes on different motifs in the work of Martin Scorsese, with a thoughtful look at his use of red as it historically relates to tinting and black and white compositions. Check that out above, and read below for some context. Just as silent movies were rarely silent, black-and-white films were not often simply black and white. In the silent era, the techniques of tinting and toning were commonly used to add a dash of […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Sep 2, 2015 -
Heaven Knows What
The line between fiction and real life has always been a bit blurred in Safdie productions, employing as they do a loose-limbed shooting style and streetwise physical production drawing on real locations and, sometimes, unsuspecting passersby. But this elision is particularly acute in their latest film, Heaven Knows What, which was literally borne of a chance encounter. While researching Uncut Gems, a larger-budget film set in New York’s midtown Diamond District, Josh spied on the street the 19-year-old Arielle Holmes. She had giant round eyes and high cheekbones, was wearing cut-off jeans and a comic book T-shirt, and seemed somehow different from […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 1, 2015 -
Women Directors in Locarno: Anne Émond, Athena Rachel Tsangari, Petra Costa and Lea Glob
Chevalier is a film about six men vacationing on a yacht in the middle of the Aegean Sea. After the world premiere in the main international competition at the Locarno International Film Festival, I climbed an arduous, though relatively small Swiss mountain to sit down with director Athina Rachel Tsangari during her final hours in Locarno. My own last hours in Switzerland were spent with Anne Émond, whose film Our Loved Ones also celebrated its world premiere in Locarno. Our Loved Ones is about how a suicide affects a family living in a small town outside Quebec. Both Our Loved […]
by Taylor Hess on Aug 31, 2015 -
“I Don’t Feel Like I Gave Birth to Jesus”: Wes Craven on A Nightmare on Elm Street
Wes Craven, one of the greatest horror directors of all time, a man who directed classics in almost every decade of his professional life,passed away yesterday, August 30, of brain cancer in Los Angeles. Last October, Craven spoke to Filmmaker‘s Jim Hemphill about perhaps his most celebrated creation, A Nightmare on Elm Street. As a way of remembering Craven, we are reposting it today. On November 9, 1984, Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street opened in American theaters and changed the movie industry forever. Serving as a bridge between the primal ferocity of Craven’s earlier work (Last House on […]
by Jim Hemphill on Aug 31, 2015 -
“We’re Not Very Good at Sharing in This Country”: David Simon on Show Me a Hero, Public Housing Today and Moving from Journalism to Television
David Simon (Homicide, The Wire, Treme) has a new miniseries on HBO, Show Me a Hero, and it’s about the fight for public housing and desegregation in Yonkers, N.Y. in 1987. And if you think that doesn’t sound dramatic or exciting, you’d be dead wrong. I watched all six hours straight through and found the series riveting from the first scene to the last. After watching the series I read the book (of the same title, by Lisa Belkin and equally riveting). The book has been out of print, but is being re-released with an introduction by Simon, in which […]
by Alix Lambert on Aug 30, 2015 -
Psyched: Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth
In his compact, unnerving new chamber film Queen of Earth, Alex Ross Perry packs a potent, inventively off-key punch with his combo of a brilliant pre-credit emotional breakdown scene and the baroque calligraphy of the main title and the credits themselves upon its completion. He holds the face of the anguished Catherine (Elisabeth Moss) in tight close-up in the former, her hair mussed, tears and mascara forming rivulets that slowly cascade down her cheeks. Her interior pain is palpable. Off-camera, longtime boyfriend James (Kentucker Audley) tells her it’s all over, justifying his infidelity and assailing her “suffocating overreliance.” Some of […]
by Howard Feinstein on Aug 26, 2015
