“I can’t commit to a movie.” In the era of limitless streaming “content,” no phrase has more irrevocably warped our viewing habits. If a single film now represents a commitment, then a double feature might as well be a back-to-back life-sentence. Why trudge through all that first-act boredom, after all, when you’re already so behind on The Good Place? Despite the siren song of bingeable TV, the dual bill holds strong as a way to burn a night at the movies. Art-house theaters, digital programmers, and genre festivals still love them, as does any cinephile looking to hunker down with […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Dec 30, 2019
Paul Thomas Anderson gets super-technical about the stocks and lenses used in these Phantom Thread screen tests. Includes an in-character food fight between Daniel Day-Lewis and Lesley Manville.
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 4, 2018
Why not pair, rather than pit against one another, the great films of a given year? This was the question that led me to reconsider the year-end top-10 list in terms of double features. In 2016 and 2015 I ranked my favorite double features of the year on this very site. I love the double bill for its flexibility. You can pair films based on any connective tissue: style, setting, subject matter, theme, time period, director, star. Viewing and thinking about films this way urges you to consider them anew. What do we think of the suburban woes of Lady […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Jan 3, 2018
His last narrative feature, Inherent Vice, focused on disheveled hippies in 1970s Los Angeles. With his latest, Paul Thomas Anderson has swung to a wildly different milieu. Phantom Thread concerns Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) — a near-monomaniacal designer working during couture’s greatest age, the early 1950s — and Alma (Vicky Krieps), the young woman who is sucked into his orbit. With Anderson goes his longtime costume designer, Mark Bridges, here given a dream assignment: not only to design his own couture visions but also to dress the entire world that surrounds them. The film is about an artist, and Bridges’s […]
by Farran Smith Nehme on Dec 14, 2017
“There is an air of quiet death in this house.” In the 1950s London of Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest feature, Phantom Thread, Daniel Day-Lewis is an exacting dress maker and Vicky Krieps is his latest muse. In these two minutes, their relationship is marked by a guarded formality but there’s just enough here to suggest something more than a stately period romance of sorts. We’ll have to wait until Christmas — or the next trailer — to find out more….
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 23, 2017