Oh Canada
-
Watch: An Interrotron-Themed Clip from Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada
There’s a pivotal dramatic beat that occurs about 40 minutes into Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, out for rental and purchase on digital platforms today, that’s been less remarked upon in many of the reviews and interviews. In the film, Richard Gere plays terminally-ill documentary filmmaker Leo Fife as he gives a final interview for what will be a documentary about his life. Fife’s documentarian, former student Malcolm, is played by Michael Imperioli, who uses for the interview an Interrotron, a device invented by filmmaker Errol Morris that allows a subject to look down the barrel of the camera lens while […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 21, 2025 -
Border Crossings: Paul Schrader on Oh, Canada
The face of Leonard Fife (Richard Gere) is a slab—gaunt, ashen, with a firm, unsmiling mouth. In front of the camera, he’s at once impassive and confessional before his two interlocutors, Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill). They’ve recruited the old man, a celebrated American documentary filmmaker now wasting away from cancer, to recount his life for posterity, in the process conjuring the young man (Jacob Elordi) Fife once was. Or was he? I’m not sure where Fife the Elder and Fife the Younger begin and end in Paul Schrader’s latest film. Nor could I tell you at which […]
by Ricky D'Ambrose on Dec 16, 2024 -
Cannes 2024: Oh, Canada and The Shrouds
For decades, Paul Schrader’s taste in cinema has been widely known, particularly the Bressonian proclivities he’s repeatedly worked over—and, especially since becoming a Facebook poster, he’s provided an open invitation to make his problems ours as well. Watching Oh, Canada knowing of his recent health scares, my guess was that the topical draw of Russell Banks’s source novel Foregone was death; indeed, after several hospitalizations for long COVID, Schrader told himself, “If I’m going to make a film about death, I’d better hurry up.” Thus Oh, Canada, which reteams Schrader with his American Gigolo star Richard Gere (the writer-director jokes […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 24, 2024
