The lineup for the 79th Venice Film Festival is now live, one day after Noah Baumbach‘s adaptation of Don Delillo’s novel White Noise was announced as the opening night film. The films announced today include Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde, Darren Aronofsky‘s The Whale, Joanna Hogg‘s The Eternal Daughter, recently jailed Iranian director Jafar Panahi‘s No Bears, Frederick Wiseman‘s narrative turn A Couple and more. White Noise marks the first time that a Netflix film serves as the festival’s opening night film. The streamer is also present with Dominik’s Blonde, the Nicolas Winding Refn mini-series Copenhagen Cowboy and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Bardo (or False […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 26, 2022With Todd Haynes’s classic Safe now streaming on Criterion Channel (and seeming utterly prescient in its concerns), we’re reposting our Summer, 1995 cover story: Larry Gross’s interview with Haynes. — Editor Todd Haynes, director of Sundance Grand Prize Winner Poison and the underground classic Superstar, was inspired to make his latest feature, Safe, by his visceral response to New Age recovery therapists who tell the physically ill that they have made themselves sick, that they are responsible for their own suffering. Carol White, played superbly by Julianne Moore, is an archetypally banal homemaker in the San Fernando Valley who one […]
by Larry Gross on Apr 2, 2020Until filmmaker, novelist, and funnywoman Rebecca Miller weighed in with the invigorating Maggie’s Plan, the history of films addressing the impasse between order and randomness — in theological terms, the conflict between free will and determinism — has rested on the mature products of profound Western European minds. Bresson’s Au Hasard, Balthasar and Dreyer’s Gertrud, for example, are stark, minimalist, and melancholic, with a divine presence at the very least implied. In Miller’s movie, intellectual musings are negligible in the fate debate. Destiny, whether embraced or resisted, is built into something more palpable: the actions of her quirky characters. Her earlier […]
by Howard Feinstein on May 16, 2016Last night’s Gotham Independent Film Awards were highlighted by a series of tributes to luminaries of the film world. We’ve posted both the intros and acceptance speeches. Let’s start with Robert De Niro’s tribute to Helen Mirren: And the wonderful Helen Mirren, taking De Niro’s lusty testimonial in stride: Next up we have Dan Rather, who quotes Archibald MacLeish (!) while paying tribute to Robert Redford… But not until this part of the ceremony, which includes Redford’s speech, a probing look back at his career. Julianne Moore understandably gushed when introducing Todd Haynes: And Haynes followed up with a speech […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 1, 2015“Finding a way to produce this movie in 27 days was a riddle we were always solving,” recalled director Peter Sollett. “And doing it in a way that had integrity, the kind that Laurel and Stacie had, was a challenge and a mission statement.” Sollett was speaking at a Bloomberg/IFP “Business of Entertainment” breakfast, hosted by IFP board member and Bloomberg principal, Katherine Oliver, high above downtown Toronto and overlooking Lake Ontario on the eve of the world premiere of his latest feature, Freeheld, at TIFF. Oliver was introduced by IFP and Made in New York Media Center Executive Director […]
by Allan Tong on Sep 13, 2015Christmas cometh early now that the formerly out of print masterclass Safe is available from the Criterion Collection. To promote its release, director Todd Haynes sat down with star Julianne Moore to discuss the film’s forebears in female alienation (Red Desert, Jeanne Dielman, and DeLillo’s White Noise), as well as its unexpected Sirkian underpinnings. Moore also talks Safe‘s larger context, as a harbinger of the ’90s independent film boom, and how her first collaboration with Haynes ultimately defined the trajectory of her career.
by Sarah Salovaara on Dec 16, 2014To watch Julianne Moore portray a 49-year-old woman diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s might be as close as one can get to understanding the disease and its effects on patient and family without having oneself received a positive diagnosis. Make no mistake, though: Still Alice is no downer. It is a closely observed and brilliantly performed story of struggle and — how can I write this out without appearing trite? — love. Director-driven it is not. Yes, it is nicely shot (by Olivier Assayas’s frequent DP Denis Lenoir) and suitably edited. Filmmakers Richard Glatzer (whose battle with ALS since 2011 became […]
by Howard Feinstein on Dec 5, 2014In Still Alice, based on Lisa Genova’s novel, Julianne Moore plays a Columbia University linguistics professor with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, a diagnosis that threatens to erode her relationship with her family as well as the city she has long called her home. With a supporting cast including Alec Baldwin, Kristen Stewart and Kate Bosworth, Still Alice promises a realistic depiction of the disease by one of America’s finest actresses, and it’s a return to character-based human dramas by the directorial duo of Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, whose films include The Last of Robin Hood, the Sundance Grand Prize-winning Quinceañera […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 8, 2014Julianne Moore makes it terribly easy to like her. Her remarkable consistency has helped her remain a stellar screen presence for more than two decades. Her transformative abilities have morphed her into everything from a troubled hypochondriac (Safe) and a maternal porn star (Boogie Nights) to a 1950s housewife (Far From Heaven) and one half of a loving lesbian couple (The Kids Are All Right). And her singular, nature-defying beauty has continued to land her fashion cover shoots at the age of 52. All of this springs to mind when Moore greets an eager parade of press while promoting her new […]
by R. Kurt Osenlund on May 17, 2013As a child growing up in Scituate, Massachusetts, Nick Flynn (pictured here at left and below with director Paul Weitz) was often left to explore on his own, and he got into varying degrees of trouble. Flynn’s parents were divorced and he had no contact with his father, living instead with his mother, who worked in a bakery. She remarried to a 21-year-old Viet Nam vet, and, after their divorce, Flynn wound up living with her and a new boyfriend — a member of one of the largest drug smuggling rings in New England. Around the age of 18 Flynn […]
by Alix Lambert on Mar 2, 2012