Alex Thompson
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Five Films that Influenced Alex Thompson’s Hospital Thriller, Rounding
Rounding, the new film from Alex Thompson, who directed Saint Frances and, with 25 New Face partner Kelly O’Sullivan, Ghostlight, is in theaters today from Doppelgänger Releasing. Below, Thompson discusses five of the cinematic influences upon his darkly anxious hospital-set thriller. To say that Rounding is an experiment is an understatement. Borne in the backyard in Kentucky during the pre-vaccine days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rounding was an attempt take the same team and ethos that made Saint Frances and apply it to a different genre and specificity. These are five films that influenced us along the way. Bunny Lake […]
by Alex Thompson on Feb 14, 2025 -
“…Just Being Aware of How Much Grief There Is In Our Collective Experience All the Time”: Alex Thompson and Kelly O’Sullivan on Ghostlight
Back in January, Sundance 2024 couldn’t have started on a stronger note for those of us who have kicked it off with Alex Thompson and Kelly O’Sullivan’s Ghostlight, a gentle tearjerker and a surprisingly tender comedy, marking the duo’s follow-up to their 2019 feature, Saint Frances. A film on the healing properties of a community of artists and a love letter to the joys of scrappy artmaking, Ghostlight set the right tone from the start for the indie festival with a story about grief, familial bonds and the therapeutic beauty of the artistic process. Written by O’Sullivan and co-directed by […]
by Tomris Laffly on Jun 14, 2024 -
Alex Thompson and Kelly O’Sullivan
With Saint Frances, the debut independent feature that has been winning prizes all across the festival circuit — including the 2019 SXSW Narrative Feature Audience Award — director Alex Thompson says he and partner Kelly O’Sullivan knew the film they didn’t want to make. Writer, executive producer and star O’Sullivan says that’s “the Hollywood, super-cutesy ’woman learns tons of lessons from a precocious kid’ movie — a movie that feels too neat and saccharine and not very real.” On paper, though, Saint Frances sounds like it could be just such a film. The film’s titular six-year-old (Ramona Edith-Williams) is indeed […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 27, 2019
