Alfonso Cuarón
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Skip Lievsay and Craig Henighan on Designing the Sound of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma
You should be able to watch a movie with the sound off — even before Mac Miller’s 2013 album, this was a phrase you’d hear from some producer or director extolling the necessity of purely visual storytelling. But if this dictum is true, then the inverse should be true as well: You should be able to listen to a movie with the screen turned off. Anyone wanting to try this experiment should start with the soundtrack of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, which is an astoundingly artful, immersive and intoxicating work. In addition to the crystalline dialogue tracks, Roma uses bespoke background […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 17, 2018 -
Filmmaker‘s Look at the Below-the-Line Stars of Some of the Awards Season’s Best Films
Movies aren’t just willed into existence, however much Alfred Hitchcock might have wanted them to be. We love to talk about visionary directors, but we often fail to properly acknowledge the artists, craftspeople and technicians who make their works possible. Luckily, many of these individuals — the below-the-line talent, as they’re sometimes called — receive some recognition during awards season, particularly from the guilds and, ultimately, the Oscars. And those who look at the late-year awards rush only through the lens of who’s going to win the big prizes — picture, director, performance, etc. — risk missing out on some […]
by Bilge Ebiri on Dec 17, 2018 -
You Can Go Home Again: Alfonso Cuarón On Sound, Vision and Memory In Roma
Alfonso Cuarón reached the point in his career when he could do whatever he wanted. His last film, Gravity, was one of those that checked off all the boxes: It was a hit. It was critically adored. It won Oscars, including one for him. It was progressive, with a strong female lead (Sandra Bullock). It pushed the limits of filmmaking, commercial and otherwise. It used special effects in creative and innovative ways. It told a small, borderline minimalist story, focusing on at most two characters, but usually just one. And all this after such acclaimed pictures as Children of Men, […]
by Matt Prigge on Dec 17, 2018 -
Watch: Alfonso Cuarón’s Quartet for the End of Time (1983)
Now that Roma is available for all on Netflix, it’s as good a time as any to revisit the earliest work of Alfonso Cuarón. Made in 1983, when he was a 22 year-old film student in Mexico City, Quartet for the End of Time bares a strong semblance to the to the classics of the French New Wave. Named after the featured chamber music by Olivier Messiaen, the film explores the solitary life of a young man in and around his apartment. It was Cuarón’s last credited short before his 1991 feature length debut, Solo Con Tu Pareja.
by Sarah Salovaara on Dec 14, 2018 -
Venice International Film Festival 2013
To get to the Lido — the strip of beachy land upon which the Venice Film Festival is held every year — one must take the vaporetto (or water taxi) from the Marco Polo Airport. While waiting for the transport to arrive, one is stuffed into a rectangular holding pen that sways and jerks with the current, provoking a mild but unmistakable seasickness in the more sensitive among us. Little did I know I was to experience almost exactly the same feeling the following morning while watching festival opener Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón’s first since 2006’s Children of Men. It’s an […]
by Ashley Clark on Oct 21, 2013 -
A Rash of Survival Films
Well, Tom Hanks survived the Somali pirates. Sandra Bullock’s flying around trying to survive outer space. And almost every other dramatic movie I see is about survival. About staying alive. And that’s not even getting into the survival action films, like Hunger Games. The poster for Gravity says Don’t Let Go. Which sums up the message of all these survival films. Don’t Let Go! Don’t Die! Hold On To Yourself! Or, as Brian Wilson sang on Pet Sounds, Hang On to Your Ego. What about a surrender movie? A movie about letting go? What would that be like? Maybe instead […]
by Noah Buschel on Oct 15, 2013 -
“A Filmmaker Lives in a Suitcase”: Guillermo del “Toronto” Speaks During TIFF
At the end of a one-hour chat held on the first full day of TIFF, an audience member suggested that the Mexican director of Pan’s Labyrinth be renamed Guillermo del Toronto. The sentiment behind this fanciful idea lay in the fact that del Toro keeps returning to Toronto to film here, most recently the $250-million mega-actioner, Pacific Rim, and is now prepping the horror flick, Crimson Peak, before cameras roll next spring. “I’ve lived in L.A., Madrid, Budapest,” del Toro recalled before an invited audience at the Trump Hotel. “[A filmmaker] lives in a suitcase.” The Canuck version of the […]
by Allan Tong on Sep 15, 2013 -
Venice 2013 Critic’s Notebook: Gravity and Sorcerer, a Strange Alchemy
While international film festivals, especially those of the calibre and history of Venice (this year celebrating its 70th edition), are most commonly seen as a golden opportunity to catch new cinema from contemporary filmmakers, many offer meaty and mightily tempting repertory programmes loaded with restorations. This year’s Cannes festival, for example, featured restored prints of Vertigo, Hiroshima Mon Amour and Borom Sarret (the first film by a black African: Ousmane Sembene), among sundry others. Venice, as ever, has its own Classics strand, with 29 restorations (and documentaries on cinema), including works by Chantal Akerman, Nagisa Oshima and Satyajit Ray. However, the […]
by Ashley Clark on Aug 31, 2013 -
Trailer Watch: Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity
Long single takes are some of the most thrilling shots in cinema, and many would argue their thrills are reliant, in part, on the audience’s knowledge that they are choreographed and filmed in real time. But CGI-enabled single takes can be thrilling too, as this amazing trailer for Alfonso Cuarón’s upcoming Gravity proves. The film opens October 4.
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 24, 2013 -
Lady Vengeance: Rewatching (and Saying Goodbye to) Harry Potter
For the last ten days, the conclusion to the massively popular Harry Potter series has been jerking tears and dredging up boatloads of cash, and it seems its total box office domination is far from over. In honor of this momentous occasion I decided to undertake the unoriginal but ambitious quest of watching all of the previous films in the week leading up to the premiere. The Potter-palooza culminated in a midnight screening of The Deathly Hallows Part 2 in a strip mall multiplex near the rural Michigan town where I was vacationing, complete with buttered popcorn, limited edition 3-D […]
by Farihah Zaman on Jul 23, 2011
