“I wanted to make something about a desire so intense that it destroys everything around it,” says Oscar-winning writer-director Emerald Fennell of Saltburn, her opulent sophomore psychodrama about class, obsession and longing set in an English countryside estate. “That locust cannibal obsession that I think we’ve all felt about someone that makes you completely lose your fucking mind.” In Saltburn, it’s Barry Keoghan’s humble and unknowable Oxford novice Oliver Quick who feels that fixation. His object of desire and fascination is Jacob Elordi’s dreamboat Felix Catton, an upper-class cool guy who welcomes Oliver into his inner circle, and later, to […]
Cinema Eye Honors announced its nominations today for the 17th annual awards ceremony, to be held on January 12, 2024 at the New York Academy of Medicine. As the press release notes, “Kokomo City, the debut feature from D. Smith led all nominees with six nominations. Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 Days in Mariupol, Sam Green’s 32 Sounds and Maite Alberdi’s The Eternal Memory each received five nominations. All four films are nominated for Outstanding Nonfiction Feature, where they are joined by Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters, Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson’s Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project and Davis Guggenheim’s […]
Sprawling in scope, observational in form and jaw-dropping in access, Leslie Tai’s How to Have an American Baby shows exactly what its title describes. The title is also the name of a sales talk one of the doc’s characters gives to Chinese moms with the financial means to travel and gift their future offspring US citizenship. The Chinese-American director takes her viewers on the wildest of rides through a birth tourism industry hiding in plain, sunny SoCal sight: underground maternity hotels run by shady operators and filled to the brim with expectant mothers, local hospitals employing doctors in on the […]
“I think the reason we’ve never pinpointed the real beginning to this genre is because we’ve never agreed on what the genre even is. Do we read nonfiction in order to receive information, or do we read it to experience art? It’s not very clear sometimes… I am here in search of art.” — Jon D’Agata When I interviewed documentary filmmaker Frances Henderson for Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2014, she discussed the above quote from author Jon D’Agata, noting that it held pride of place on the moodboard that hung above her desk. ” I am very much […]
Though I’ve not read Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s New York Times bestseller Stamped From the Beginning: the Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, I’m guessing the National Book Award-winner might not be the most obvious material for the big screen. Which is why I was a bit surprised when I finally watched the TIFF-debuting Netflix doc Stamped From the Beginning, Roger Ross Williams’ cinematic and often playful take on the professor-author’s quite heavy subject matter. Indeed, any film that opens with its (Black) director ambushing his (Black) talking heads with the query/salvo, “What is wrong with Black people?” is […]
Adapted from David Grann’s best-selling book, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is based on real-life crimes against the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma. In the film, Scorsese continues his collaboration with several key artists: actors Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, editor Thelma Schoonmaker and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC. This also marks the final film for Scorsese and musician Robbie Robertson, who died this past August. Prieto worked with Scorsese on three previous films: The Wolf of Wall Street, The Irishman, and Silence. He built a career in his native Mexico, earning international acclaim with Alejandro González […]
When I was a student at Bard, I spent a lot of time looking at a poster taped to Ed Halter’s office door for Matt Wolf’s 2008 film Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, about the composer, country-folk singer, disco trailblazer and avant-garde pioneer who passed away in 1992 of AIDS. Sometime later, I hosted a screening of Keep The Lights On by Ira Sachs, which is full of Russell’s beautiful music. Ira told me afterward that he had discovered the artist through Wild Combination, a film that introduced a lot of people to Russell but which also introduced […]
The ninth annual edition of Double Exposure, a festival celebrating investigative journalism, once again brought together an intensely engaged group of journalists, documentarians, lawyers and funders. Washington, D.C., where antennas prick right up when you start talking about how to influence public opinion, is the precise intersection for these different professional groups to find each other. So, it’s not surprising that this is an event where the (three-day) symposium is at least as important as the festival. The topics were tough. What does collaboration look like for newspapers used to honing their competitive edge and maintaining strict distance from “sources”? […]
As the US’s largest university-run fest, the SCAD Savannah Film Festival (October 21-28) smartly caters to an overwhelmingly collegiate audience, which means bringing in loads of celebrities for red carpet events (Kevin Bacon! Ava DuVernay! Eva Longoria!) balanced with veteran Hollywood craftspeople for numerous nuts and bolts panels (this year’s Artisans series included “The Creators of Worlds: The Artisans of Oppenheimer”). Not to mention there’s a puppy dog enthusiasm with which these young industry aspirants gobble up the eight-day “celebration of cinematic excellence.” It’s both contagious and, for someone like me long past their dorm room years, dauntingly exhausting. (FOMO […]
Sundance Institute announced today the 2023 lab fellows selected for their 10th Episodic Lab program, taking place at the Sundance Resort in Sundance, Utah. The selected eight artists are Daniela Bailes (The Letters), Elaine Hsieh Chou (Get Home Safe), Marissa Díaz (Cochinas), Sam Dunnewold (Guts), Laurie Hartung (Rabbit Hole), Farah Merani (The Painted Muse), Sylvia-Anne Parker (Blackbirds) and Hernando Cortes Watson (Horsepower). From the press release: Their eight projects include themes that explore family secrets, vengeance, sex positivity, magic, revolutionaries, and world-class stallions. Designed to bring together early-career writers with an original series IP that has not yet been produced, […]