At last year’s Tribeca Film Festival I discovered two of my favorite films of the year, Alma Har’el’s Bombay Beach and Panos Cosmatos’s Beyond the Black Rainbow. I’m hoping for at least as good a track record this year, and in surveying the schedule I see more than enough potential candidates. Assuming I can successfully surmount my usual Tribeca challenge — getting into a film-festival headspace while working at home in New York — here are 25 films I’m interested in checking out. As befitting the mission of this magazine, there’s a heavy American independent focus, and I’ve also avoided […]
For many independent film directors, making commercials is just business. It’s a way to keep working, put a healthy sum of money in the bank — and, as likely very few people will know that they even directed the ad, it’s not something they need to worry about after the shoot wraps. Wes Anderson, however, is one of those rare directors whose commercials feel like a direct extension of his feature work. Anderson has been helming ads for a decade or so. His IKEA spots “Kitchen” and “Living Room” from 2003 — some of his earliest commercials — have a […]
1 The Chimerist If you’re a new iPad owner, you should know that there are reading options other than iBooks, the Kindle app and Instapaper. Indeed, while games and social apps get most of the iOS press, there are artists who are rethinking the book form for the tablet device. These innovators are chronicled at The Chimerist (thechimerist.com), a Tumblr blog by “two iPad lovers at the intersection of art, stories and technology.” Follow writer, editor and literary blogger Maud Newton and Salon co-founder Laura Miller and learn about new graphic novels (Eric Shanower’s Age of Bronze), storytelling game apps […]
How does one best measure the success ofa film festival? Are record-breaking ticket sales enough, or do other factors, such as quality of the films screened, quantity of A-list celebrities walking the red carpet and overall “buzz” generated, come into play? If revenue is the sole gauge, then there’s no question that the Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (colloquially known as the Berlinale) is one of the world’s most prosperous annual film events. By 7 a.m. each morning of the 10-day festival, hundreds of sleepy Berliners can be found queuing up at the makeshift ticket office in the Potsdamer Platz shopping mall, […]
Among the many things SXSW is known for — barbecue, the Alamo Drafthouse and long lines, for example — one is breakout apps. Twitter and Foursquare both got enormous boosts from launches or promotions during previous editions of SXSW Interactive. Last year, the buzzword at the tech fest was contextual search and, indeed, you’re seeing that functionality being built into products this year from Apple, Google and others. In 2012, the buzzed-about app heading into the fest was Highlight, a sort of social version of Foursquare. Installed on your phone, it alerts you to other Highlight users nearby. “You can […]
The majestic chords of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet blasted through the doors of the New Frontiers exhibition space at Sundance this year, beckoning viewers into a dark room with a wall-size screen and, in a bin, those staples of the modern multiplex, 3D glasses. Donning the glasses, you were confronted with a looped, three-minute mash-up of history as seen through the lens of Hollywood cinema. Composited across the 3D canvas, like some kind of American Museum of Natural History diorama on acid, were the great characters who, by our repeated viewing, resonate as deeply in our consciousness as real historical […]
Originally appearing in our Spring, 2012 print issue, my short report on Zona, Geoff Dyer’s fascinating critical memoir on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is being reposted today timed to the film’s run at Lincoln Center and forthcoming release by Criterion. — SM My first Tarkovsky film, my gateway picture, was his penultimate, Nostalghia, at the Olympia Theater near Columbia University in Morningside Heights. The seats slanted one way, the screen slanted the other, and there was a leak in the ceiling. Water dripped from the roof into a bucket on the floor, blending into Tarkovsky’s typically excellent sound design of distant […]
The 2012 Whitney Biennial, on display until May 27, has received a significant amount of attention for being the first in the series’ 80-year history to prominently include large-scale dance, music and theater productions within the museum itself. Artists from these various disciplines are in residence at Whitney’s Madison Avenue digs for shows and performances that will be premiered alongside the art survey’s customary installations and gallery work. But there’s been another change at the Biennial this year. While film has long been part of the show, curators Elizabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders enlarged the program and invited in programmers […]
There was an interesting exchange of views on the Filmmaker blog afew weeks back about documentaries and the changing nature of story. The posts had to do with Doug Tirola’s documentary All In – The Poker Movie, which won the Best Documentary prize at CineVegas a few years back but was then re-shot and re-edited for theatrical release just this year. The reason for all that extensive work was “Black Friday.” After the film’s premiere the Feds shut down multiple online poker sites, thus fundamentally altering (and dating) the world depicted in the movie. The blog posts had to do […]
For those of us excited by the advent of large-sensor motion picture cameras, this past year has been the Great Leap Forward. Signs are everywhere. ARRI’s ALEXA swept TV series production in the U.S. Canon harnessed Hollywood pomp for the November launch of its C300. RED placed an eight-page glossy fold-out to tout EPIC in April’s Vogue (“The camera that changed cinema is now changing fashion”). Sony shipped no less than 100 F65s, the first Super 35 camera with an 8K sensor. A year ago, in “Does Size Matter?” I surveyed the still-budding field of large-sensor cameras for Filmmaker and […]