Sundance SCOTT MACAULAY Check it out: the two top prize winners at Sundance this year, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack, both feature as central elements teenagers who stage and film their own versions of classic movies. There’s even overlap between the two films, although Moselle’s Manhattan shut-ins incline more towards Tarantino and Freddy Krueger, while Gomez-Rejon’s teen Pittsburgh auteurs shirk the Romero roots of their hometown for deep dives into the Criterion Collection. For film lovers of a certain age, both Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and The Wolfpack […]

Given that Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel kicked off the Berlinale the last two years, the response was less than enthusiastic when Isabel Coixet’s Nobody Wants the Night was announced as this year’s opening film (though, predictably, many a Twitter wag delighted in the film title’s pliability for expressing what it is that nobody wants). The Greenland-set period drama stars Juliette Binoche as Josephine, the wife of arctic explorer Robert Peary, and follows her attempt to rejoin her husband on his mission to reach the North Pole. When an Inuit woman comes to her aid on […]

Reteaming director Isabel Coixet with her Elegy stars Patricia Clarkson and Ben Kingsley, Learning to Drive is an adaptation of Katha Pollit’s 2002 New Yorker essay about a Manhattan writer (Clarkson), facing a sudden break-up, who gains wisdom from a driving instructor (here a Sikh played by Ben Kingsley) going through his own relationship evolution. It’s Coixet’s eight film, and below she answers questions about the process of adaptation, her interest in intimacy and the challenge of shooting in moving vehicles. A world premiere, Learning to Drive screens at the Toronto International Film Festival on Tuesday, September 9. Filmmaker: Your […]

What most fascinated me about this adaptation of Philip Roth‘s short novel, The Dying Animal, is that it’s directed by a woman, Spanish director Isabel Coixet. As Roth is known best for his semi-autobiographical male centered stories with promiscuous themes, Coixet puts a refreshing twist on the womanizing David Kepesh character — who also appears in two other Roth novels, The Breast and The Professor of Desire. Not as well recognized as Roth’s other main protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman, Kepesh is a literature professor who has never had a problem attracting the opposite sex and often times is wooing more than […]