Alex Ross Perry
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Our 16 Most Anticipated Films of the 2025 Tribeca Festival
Although the heat has yet to properly arrive, today’s kickoff of the annual Tribeca Festival, now firmly ensconced in its post-Cannes calendar slot, signals the unofficial start to the summer season among the New York City cinema-going sect. Running from June 4 through 15, the program this year boasts 118 feature films with an impressive 95 world premieres among them. Even if the word “film” is no longer centered in the festival’s actual title, it certainly remains the concerted programming focus. Though there are also plenty of offerings in their TV, games, audio, interactive and Tribeca X sections—the latter of […]
by Natalia Keogan on Jun 4, 2025 -
“False Histories. Corny Music Biopic”: Alex Ross Perry on Pavements
“I always was hoping that it was music for the future. I mean, I think everyone who’s not that successful in their time tries to think that,” says Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus early on in Pavements, a new hybrid music documentary about the band. The group was certainly successful during their heyday in the ’90s, at least in indie rock terms—a perfect discography that drew near-universal critical acclaim, multiple tours including major international festivals and a hit on MTV—but their stature and popularity has only grown since they broke up in 1999. Beginning in 2002, Matador Records slowly re-released every […]
by Vikram Murthi on May 1, 2025 -
How Alex Ross Perry and DP Robert Kolodny Made a New Video for Pavement’s “Harness Your Hopes”
In 2017, the formerly obscure Pavement B-side “Harness Your Hopes” became their number one track on Spotify. It currently has 70 million plays, over twice the amount of “Cut Your Hair,” the group’s highest charting and arguably most popular song during their original run. At Stereogum, Nate Rogers looked into why exactly “Harness Your Hopes” became as prevalent as it had and all signs point to Spotify’s Autoplay feature, which “cues up music that ‘resembles’ what you’ve just been listening to, based on a series of sonic signifiers too complex to describe.” At this point, “Harness Your Hopes” has crossed […]
by Vikram Murthi on Apr 13, 2022 -
“…The Void of Productivity From the Entire World Has Seized Me:” Alex Ross Perry on Writing During Quarantine
In April, as we began to put together the Summer, 2020 issue of Filmmaker, we asked directors, cinematographers, editors and other film workers to send us their thoughts on the quarantine and their own creative lives. The responses printed here were collected from April through mid-June — personal statements that speak variously to individual filmmaking practices, films halted mid-production, politics, art and life. Read all the responses here. — Editor What surprises me is how noticeable the absence of production and a pipeline of “contemporary cinema” is to my mental stimulation and creative process. I would not be shooting right now, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 8, 2020 -
Watch: Caveh Zahedi’s “Not Getting Stoned with Alex Ross Perry”
Alex Ross Perry, writer/director of the highly recommended and in-theaters Her Smell, is the guest in this latest installment of filmmaker Caveh Zahedi’s self-explanatory interview show,(Not) Getting Stoned with Caveh. As is the case with the show as well as its sister series, Getting Stoned with Caveh, Zahedi takes a few hits before drawing out his subjects in conversation. Here, the totally straight Perry discusses with Zahedi subjects ranging from small talk at parties to sociability to cinephilia in general. And, oh yeah, at the instigation of a cinematographer friend, Zahedi varies his practice here, switching from his usual two-camera […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 19, 2019 -
The Sound of a Panic Attack: Composer Keegan DeWitt on Her Smell
What does self-destruction sound like? In Her Smell, the sixth film from Alex Ross Perry, it takes many forms: a nasty laugh, a frenetic synth loop, a warble of radio static. The sounds come hard and relentless. A raw sound wave, warped to mimic the syncopations of a demented drum machine, serves as its palpitating heartbeat. For reasons I can’t fully explain, it’s a sound that induces instant anxiety. Her Smell sounds, and unfolds, like a panic attack. The urge to self-destruct hounds its central character, Becky Something (Elisabeth Moss), just as music dogs viewers for most of its 134 […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Apr 9, 2019 -
TIFF 2018 Critic’s Notebook 5: Her Smell, Rojo, A Faithful Man
World premieres x3, appraised in greater haste (and mercifully smaller word counts) than usual, starting with this morning’s viewing. I woke up to a slew of tweets saying that the first half of Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell is an impossibly testing experience that dares audiences to walk out; now that I’ve seen it, it appears people have a remarkably low tolerance for abrasion. Five real-time scenes tracking the disastrous, inevitable rock bottom and sort-of rebirth of ’90s riot/it-grrl-turned-serious-hot-mess Becky Something (Elisabeth Moss), Her Smell strays noticeably outside of ARP’s normal comfort zone, in which people are reflexively, casually bruising and vicious to […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 10, 2018 -
Inexplicable Traces: On the Beautiful Epiphanies of Mark Pellington’s Nostalgia
Mark Pellington, along with David Fincher and Mark Romanek, began his filmmaking career in what might be called MTV’s heroic age. After a series of music videos, which include Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy,” U2’s “One” and R.E.M.’s “Drive,” he made two skillful, flashy, mid-sized star-driven studio thrillers — Arlington Road and Mothman Prophecies. Over the last ten years, a succession of his indie films have all dealt in sometimes comic, sometimes melodramatic terms with people trying to manage death. Alex Ross Perry, perhaps at one point associated with the mumblecore movement, whatever that exactly was, has for the last eight years, […]
by Larry Gross on Feb 13, 2018 -
“Everybody Can Make Their Money Back and You Get to Make the Movie”: Mark Pellington on Nostalgia
Director Mark Pellington has long been one of the American cinema’s foremost chroniclers of the connection between mortality, memory, and identity; questions related to how we define ourselves in life and how those lives define our legacies have been key in films as diverse as The Mothman Prophecies (a thriller in which Richard Gere becomes obsessed with the supernatural ramifications of his wife’s death), Father’s Daze (a documentary about Pellington’s father’s struggle with Alzheimer’s Disease) and Of Time and Memory (an unconventional adaptation of Don Snyder’s novel about Snyder’s attempts to know his deceased mother). In Pellington’s last several features, […]
by Jim Hemphill on Feb 8, 2018 -
Inclusive Feelings at the Oak Cliff Film Festival
There’s an argument happening at the bar of the Texas Theater. No, it’s not about politics, as one might guess with a liberal film crowd taking over a small pocket of Texas. This is Oak Cliff, the blossoming cultural community north of the Dallas Trinity river, and no, the conversation is not about karaoke either. The Oak Cliff Film Festival opening night party was at Barbara’s Pavilion, a dive bar in a re-purposed home. As the film festival crowd rolled in around midnight, badges and conversations about Lemon and 35mm making the nerd fumes quite potent, the argument was about […]
by Meredith Alloway on Jul 19, 2017
