Jr
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Back to One Podcast: John Gallagher, Jr. on the Importance of The Miseducation of Cameron Post, Sorkin, and the Success of Simply Surviving a Role
His performances in Spring Awakening and American Idiot are probably what John Gallagher Jr. is most known for at the moment (he won a Tony for the former), and are often what get him labeled a “musical theater guy,” but they were the only musicals he’s done in his 20-year career. I ask him about two recent play productions (Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Jerusalem) that I suspect were very formative for him, and his latest screen role in the important and moving indie The Miseducation of Cameron Post. And, of course, I couldn’t let him go without talking […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Aug 14, 2018 -
TIFF Critic’s Notebook 4: 3/4, Faces Places
Ilian Metev’s deliberately small-scale, extremely precise 3/4 puts a trio of non-actors through fictional paces. The family unit: teen classical pianist Mila (Mila Mihova), preparing for an audition that, if all goes well, will let her continue her studies in Germany; oft-annoying younger brother Niki (Nikolay Mashalov); physicist dad Todor (Todor Veltchev). (Mom is unseen: I’m the umpteenth to note that the title is both a time signature and way of noting that three out of four family members are present.) Mila’s stress over this impending potential pivot point in her life is transferred onto father and son, who react in different ways. Niki […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 11, 2017 -
Cannes Dispatch #2: Faces Places, Claire’s Camera, The Square
At some point the past year, Rive Gauche icon Agnès Varda and French photographer JR went on a road trip through rural France documenting whatever locals they encountered and, lucky for us, decided to make a movie about it. The main activity of their excursion involved producing pieces for JR’s ongoing Inside Out project, wherein he takes portraits of the subjects he happens upon (or lets them enter into his van-cum-photobooth to capture their own images), prints them out at a scale somewhere between life-size and mammoth, and then pastes the images onto a building or transportation vessel that is meaningful […]
by Blake Williams on May 22, 2017 -
Destin Daniel Cretton, Brie Larson, John Gallagher, Jr. and the Cast Talk Short Term 12
Winner of the 2013 SXSW Narrative Grand Jury Prize, Destin Cretton’s Short Term 12 is the entirely successful feature expansion of the writer/director’s excellent 2009 short about counselors and youth at a residential facility for at-risk teens. Flipping the gender of his protagonist from the short to the feature, Short Term 12 stars Brie Larson (a recent Actor winner at the Locarno Film Festival) as a savvy counselor whose spirit hasn’t yet been crushed by the bureaucrats above her. Of course, she’s challenged, not just by troubled teenagers but also by life changes and self-worth issues, the latter stemming from […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 23, 2013 -
FOUR TRIBECA DOCS: FROM ZEN TO MADNESS TO SEXY
At 85, Tony Bennett looks and sounds great. In The Zen of Bennett, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and will soon appear on Netflix, Bennett relies on a single word, repeated over and over throughout the documentary, to describe his life philosophy. That word is “quality.” For the clothes he wears, for the songs he sings, for the people who are his friends, for everything, quality is his guiding principle. Conversely, the elderly singer with the smoothest pipes in the business, disparages cheap songs, crude and outlandish behavior, and anger. “Everything you do should be done with love, […]
by Stewart Nusbaumer on Apr 30, 2012
