Little Men
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Hits & Misses: The Theatrical Performance of the Sundance Class of ’16
How do you measure success these days? When more than two million people vote for you over the other guy and you still lose? When you receive no endorsements from a single major newspaper, your party’s leadership practically ignores you, and you still win? Or, perhaps, when your heralded Sundance acquisition earns a whopping $15.8 million at the box office, but you spend more than twice that in acquisition fees and prints and advertising costs to release it? (i.e., The Birth of a Nation). How about if your film isn’t released in theaters at all, but Netflix paid $5 million […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jan 18, 2017 -
Acting Out: Ira Sachs’s Little Men
Friendships have boundaries and limits. Aristotle wrote of perfect friends in his Ethics, noting that totals must remain low. Sounds much like romance to me: Is the new bff the one? The philosopher described the role played by villainous economic factors, which were still up for discussion 2000 years later by authors like Michael A. Kaplan in an academic text called Friendship Fictions. I don’t think the concept of friendship can be quantified, but the monetary value of some of its indicators, or their equivalents, can be guesstimated. Mercenary matters disrupt the bonds between tight male buds in Ira Sachs’s […]
by Howard Feinstein on Aug 5, 2016 -
Landlord Blues: Ira Sachs on Little Men
There are little men, and then there are big forces — economic tides, societal shifts, structural change. The beautiful strength of Ira Sachs’s recent work — his mid-career surge after the five-year gap that followed his larger-budget, mini-major film, Married Life — is that Sachs’s characters are such complicated, soulful men and women clearly impacted (but not defined) by the larger issues swirling around them. In his lightly autobiographical 2012 film Keep the Lights On, Sachs essayed the romantic life of a documentary filmmaker in a relationship with a drug-addicted lawyer, set against the backdrop of turn-of-the-millennium New York gay […]
by Rose Troche on Jul 25, 2016 -
The Wrong Box: Zach Clark’s Little Sister, MoMA’s Sally Bergerless Doc Fortnight
“I needed structure!” says former goth Colleen Lunsford (Addison Timlin, star-to-be) in a revelatory moment in Little Sister, the latest feature by Brooklyn-based Zach Clark (White Reindeer, Vacation). It is one of two unaffected masterpieces (the other is Ira Sachs’s Little Men, which I’ll review when the increasingly daring Magnolia Pictures releases it) screening at BAMcinemafest (Jun 15-26) that I was fortunate enough to catch early — two for two! Colleen is exasperated trying to explain to her estranged, self-absorbed mom, Joani (Ally Sheedy, better than ever), why she left home to seek out spiritual redemption in a cloistered New […]
by Howard Feinstein on Jun 14, 2016 -
Trailer Watch: Ira Sachs’ Little Men
Little Men, director Ira Sachs’ latest film, premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was warmly received. The story of a friendship between two NYC middle schoolers whose parents become embroiled in a real estate conflict, Little Men takes a personal look at the damaging effects of gentrification. Starring newcomers Michael Barbieri and Theo Taplitz as the titular boys and Greg Kinnear, Jennifer Ehle and Paulina Garcia as their parents, Little Men will hit select theaters on August 5, with a nationwide rollout to follow. The sensitive drama gets its first trailer (above) courtesy of distributor Magnolia Pictures.
by Paula Bernstein on May 16, 2016
