Here’s the first full trailer for Todd Haynes’s May December, which Netflix acquired at Cannes this year for a reported $11 million. At that time, contributor Blake Williams wrote that the “campy, provocative and sexy May December was the most fun I’ve had at this year’s festival, and stands as the filmmaker’s strongest work since Far from Heaven (2002), if not Safe (1995).” The film will show this Friday as the opening night selection for this year’s NYFF. May December will receive a limited release on November 17 prior to joining the streaming platform on December 1.
Todd Haynes’s May December, which premiered this year at the Cannes Film Festival and was snatched up by Netflix almost immediately, marks a return to the kind of expressive women’s drama for which the director is arguably most beloved. Think Far from Heaven (2002) or Carol (2015), two films about forbidden romance whose lush, stylized aesthetics both encourage nostalgia and destabilize easy emotional identification. As the title suggests, May December, too, concerns a taboo love affair—one whose throwback elements are anchored to the tabloid frenzies and true-crime obsessions of the 1990s. Written by Samy Burch, a casting director making her […]
Film at Lincoln Center has announced that the North American premiere of Todd Haynes’s May December will open the 61st edition of the New York Film Festival, to take place from September 29 through October 13. The rest of the 2023 lineup will be announced at a later date. “We are all so proud and moved to have been invited to open the New York Film Festival with the North American premiere of May December,” said Haynes in a press release. “It is a festival that plays a role in my work and life like no other in the world, since […]
It’s 1963: High-minded Welsh musician John Cale participates in a concert of Erik Satie’s Vexations—per the composer’s intent, 840 piano performances of the same piece, totaling 18 hours—alongside experimental luminaries like John Cage, La Monte Young and Tony Conrad. Later that year, Cale appears on the CBS game show I’ve Got a Secret, where guests are grilled by a panel that tries to determine what their particular secret might be. Cale’s performance of the Satie piece is eventually established as his in front of a slightly disbelieving host and audience. The not-so-politely implicit question: Why would anyone do something so […]
“The artist is not with society, he’s different,” says Mary Woronov in the just-dropped trailer for Todd Haynes’s fantastic documentary, The Velvet Underground. It’s an apt pull-quote for a film that’s more about the band and the culture they arose from, reacted to and fermented than any rise/fall/redemption-styled rock narrative. Set against a few of Velvet hits (“Sweet Jane,” initially in a drone-y, slowed-down live version; “Here She Goes Again”; “Venus in Furs”) the trailer gives a glimpse of the film’s elegant graphics, masterful use of archival (not just VU concerts but experimental films of the day) and smart musicology. […]
With Todd Haynes’s classic Safe now streaming on Criterion Channel (and seeming utterly prescient in its concerns), we’re reposting our Summer, 1995 cover story: Larry Gross’s interview with Haynes. — Editor Todd Haynes, director of Sundance Grand Prize Winner Poison and the underground classic Superstar, was inspired to make his latest feature, Safe, by his visceral response to New Age recovery therapists who tell the physically ill that they have made themselves sick, that they are responsible for their own suffering. Carol White, played superbly by Julianne Moore, is an archetypally banal homemaker in the San Fernando Valley who one […]
When the first trailer for Todd Haynes’s Dark Waters dropped, reactions were unprecedentedly tepid: what was this anonymous-looking crusading lawyer thriller? Was this really a recognizable Todd Haynes movie or, for the first time, a feature-length paycheck gig? From the get-go of the now-released film, Haynes and longtime DP Ed Lachman are certainly operating in their distinctive visual language, shooting, as with Carol, in Cincinnati, playing itself this time rather than period NYC. In the 1975-set prologue, a group of night skinny-dippers dive into local waters adjacent to a DuPont plant only to be chased off by company patrol. The camera bobs […]
Sundance always drops an announcement or two following their initial burst in early December, and today the Sundance Institute has done just that, releasing the titles of films and programs that cross the festival’s various programming categories. Honestly, when the first list came out without Tamara Jenkins’s latest, Private Life, I was expecting to see it slide into the schedule at a later date, which it has done today. The Slums of Beverly Hills/The Savages director’s new film stars Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti in a tale of a couple exploring assisted reproduction and domestic adoption as they try to […]
At 69, and with more than 90 movies on his CV, cinematographer Ed Lachman is on something of a roll this fall. He received recently the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographers, and will see his latest stunning collaboration with director Todd Haynes, Wonderstruck, released in theaters from Amazon Studios and Roadside Attractions. Shot on Super 35mm color and black-and-white stock, Wonderstruck follows Lachman’s ravishing work on Haynes’s Carol with another film in which the image carries a seductive charge and an analytic weight. An avid historian of visual history, Lachman dives deep into a story’s period […]
Led by IFP founder Sandra Schulberg, who serves as its president, the nonprofit IndieCollect is working to conserve independent cinema. In just two years, the company has rescued and archived more than 3,500 film negatives, according to Schulberg, the president of IndieCollect. IndieCollect recently located the master picture and sound elements for eight of the shorts Vachon and Haynes produced in the ’80s and ’90s with Barry Ellsworth under their non-profit Apparatus banner. Apparatus backed a number of other directors, including Suzan-Lori Parks, Mary Hestand, Susan Delson, Brooke Dammkoehler, Larry Carty, and Evan Dunsky. Now the company has launched a Kickstarter campaign with hopes of raising […]