I eased into the opening hours of my second virtual Sundance Film Festival better prepared than at this time last year. The festival, of necessity, pivoted back to online-only mode with so little heads-up time that seasonal staffers evidently learned they were out of gigs at the same time everyone else on Twitter heard about the change of plans—financially devastating for the suddenly unemployed and uncompensated, very regrettable for filmmakers, logistically fairly easy to adjust to for everyone else after a few years’ virtual fest training. This time last year I had a projector, but also roommates and hence the […]

While he might be best known for his Oscar-nominated performance as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg’s preternatural ability for making unique characterization choices has won him roles in wildly original films, both indie and studio, such as The End of the Tour, Adventureland, Holy Rollers, American Ultra, Zombieland, and two of my favorites, The Squid and the Whale and The Double. Now he continues that trend with Riley Stearns’ The Art of Self Defense. In this half hour he talks about the effort he put into finding the right tone to play the absurdity in that film, […]

In Joachim Trier’s Louder than Bombs, Isabelle Huppert plays Isabelle Reed, a celebrated war photographer who, three years before the movie begins, has died, not while on assignment but in a car crash just miles from her home in upstate New York. Her absence in the family is very much a presence in the film. She’s seen repeatedly in flashback, and her death — a suicide, the fact of which has kept from her youngest son, Conrad, a withdrawn player of online roleplaying games essayed with compelling sullenness by Devin Druid — is the fulcrum by which the other actors […]

“Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking?” – David Foster Wallace The new tagline for the James Ponsoldt movie The End of the Tour is, “Imagine the greatest conversation you’ve ever had.” I initially took issue with this tagline. Ponsoldt’s film is based on a book arranged around a transcript of an unpublished interview […]

The North American premiere of Woody Allen’s To Rome with Love was the big to-do Thursday night in downtown Los Angeles, and not just because it opened the L.A. Film Festival: Allen doesn’t often visit the city (not even when nominated for an Oscar), making his personal introduction of this latest work something of a coup for the fest. And while it would be wrong to call a new film by the endlessly prolific director a cinematic “event” in the same vein as, say, the arrival a new Terence Davies project, so too would it be wrong to think it […]

Watching the trailer for Jay Gammill’s new comedy Free Samples, one can almost hear the ghost of Clerks‘ Dante Hicks echoing in the distance – complaining, “I’m not even supposed to be here today.” The latest in a long line of dead-end job dramedies, Free Samples follows slacker twenty-something Jillian (Jess Wexler) as she fills in for her friend handing out free samples all day from inside an ice cream truck. Premiering this week in Tribeca’s Spotlight section, Gammill’s film aligns an impressive ensemble of indie notables, including Wexler, Jesse Eisenberg, and Jason Ritter. Filmmaker: Can you talk a bit […]

Here’s part one of five from yesterday’s press conference of the New York Film Festival’s opening day film, The Social Network, at Lincoln Center yesterday. Parts two through five can be seen at the film’s YouTube site.

Starting with Jesse Eisenberg, stills from today’s red carpet and press conference by Jamie Stuart, whose filmic ode to this year’s New York Film Festival will be up on the site soon.