Keeping on top of the media conversation in 2017 has begun to feel more like an exercise in self-harm than consumption. The dirty laundry is exhaustive and exhausting; we are quick to expose and defile, but quicker to move onto the next victimizer, leaving little lasting resolution in the wake of the penultimate upheaval. At the movies, we look for meaning where we can get it. Plots are politicized to the point where the once ghettoized “issue film” is mutating into standard grade. Even if the latest Thor joint is raking it in at the box office, cotton candy escapism […]

Cinematographers right out of film school often get their feet wet by shooting short films, music videos, and commercials – brief subjects with lower budgets and ample room to experiment and make mistakes. There was no such toe dipping for Bojan Bazelli. He was dunked directly into the river of cinema and legendary New York auteur Abel Ferrara did the baptizing. The Yugoslavia-born Bazelli was just out of film school in Prague when Ferrara came across the DP’s thesis movie and tapped him to shoot his Romeo and Juliet variation China Girl (1987). Over the next decade Bazelli lensed 17 features, […]

To finish off 2016, I’d like to round up some of the year’s best Blu-ray releases that I didn’t get a chance to cover in my weekly column. It was an exceptional year for physical media thanks to labels like Criterion, Twilight Time, Arrow, Kino Lorber, and Olive, all of which continue to license neglected titles from studio vaults and give them the first-class treatments they deserve. While the list below barely scratches the surface of the efforts of these companies and others, it contains what I consider to be the most essential discs of the year — movies that […]

The major studios’ current preference for selecting the shepherds of their franchise properties is to pluck directors from the relatively obscurity of indiedom. Colin Trevorrow went from Safety Not Guaranteed to Jurassic World. Josh Trank moved from Chronicle to Fantastic Four. Jon Watts leaped from Cop Car to the reboot of the reboot of Spider-Man. Alex Ross Perry opted for the opposite approach. After his breakthrough film Listen Up Philip, Perry stripped down his budget, cast, and crew for a character piece about a pair of female friends (Elisabeth Moss, Inherent Vice’s Katherine Waterston) whose relationship unravels during a week-long […]

Indie maestro Abel Ferrara launched his latest film project in Cannes this week with his first ever foray into Kickstarter. Siberia, a new film with Willem Dafoe, explores the language of dreams, using the subconscious as a form of language. “There’s nothing more horrific than your own dreams and nightmares,” Ferrara promised the crowd of assembled journalists gathered on the top of the Silencio club in Cannes. “I’m going back to that kind of filmmaking, to my horror film roots.” He’s hoping to raise half a million dollars to begin financing for the new film. “This is Willem being Willem,” […]

Even the rain knocked down the Lions. When a storm hit the Lido island around the central-weekend turning point, delegates could be seen gleefully snapping pictures of the overturned statues outside the Casinò, a simplistic metaphor for the Venice Film Festival’s shaky status in recent years. You’d think the bronze lions themselves would be tired of hearing stories about Toronto and the shrinking circuit space for awards-season launchpads. However, with the Toronto/Telluride battle over world premieres turning nasty and some bolder picks than usual from the NYFF, Venice director Alberto Barbera was wise to renounce the star-chasing madness and to […]

“I’m going to be frank with you,” says Willem Dafoe’s Pier Paolo Pasolini in this trailer for Abel Ferrara’s keenly anticipated biopic of the Italian director, killed under still mysterious circumstances in 1975. “I’ve been to Hell, and I know things that don’t disturb other people’s dreams.” The musically-literally-operatic trailer for Pasolini is subtitled in French but mostly in English, save for a brief, easy-to-follow French passage (asked whether he considers himself a screenwriter, critic, actor, etc., Pasolini replies that on his passport it simply says writer) and a tiny bit in Italian. This is mildly NSFW, as there are […]

Perhaps the most salient feature of the Fantasia International Film Festival’s three-week schedule is its total aversion to mornings. In the interest of efficiency, most festivals promptly begin screenings, panels or press conferences at 9 or 10am each day; at Fantasia things get started around quarter past three. Official and unofficial festival after-parties, meanwhile — premiere celebrations, industry events, cocktail breaks, impromptu gatherings for drinks — customarily extend until dawn (or later), with many attendees migrating after last call from pubs to after-hours bars and diners willing to serve up flights of “special tea” (after-hours booze). Everything about Fantasia — […]

This one’s just for fun: while awaiting the premiere of Abel Ferrara’s keenly anticipated biopic Pasolini, you can watch the writer/director taking lead guitar and vocals with Italian band Statale 66 on a lightly bluesy number lyrically heavy on Louisiana swamps and other familiar images. Ferrara self-described himself as “a failed rock ‘n roller” in an interview earlier this year, where he recalled his youthful time with a band that “never made it out of the garage”: My uncle had a club and we were auditioning for him. When we got done he was like, “You wanna make money in […]