Ricky D’Ambrose
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All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: Ricky D’Ambrose Speaks with James Gray about Armageddon Time
Armageddon Time returns the American writer and director James Gray to his childhood—or at least to a version of it. While its treatment of grade-school-age protagonist Paul Graff (Michael Banks Repeta) and his dealings with the world of grown-ups in and around his home in 1980s Queens, New York, might not be, strictly speaking, autobiographical (Gray has been careful to distinguish between personal and autobiographical filmmaking), Armageddon Time draws upon the filmmaker’s childhood to fashion a story of a boy’s moral and aesthetic education that seems at once thoroughly lived-in and unsentimental. For nearly two hours, we watch as young […]
by Ricky D'Ambrose on Oct 11, 2022 -
“Originally I Had a 200-Page Script”: Ricky D’Ambrose on The Cathedral
Ricky D’Ambrose’s second feature, The Cathedral, begins in the mid-’80s, with a narrator outlining the history of the Damrosch family: father Richard (Brian d’Arcy James), mother Lydia (Monica Barbaro) and son Jesse (Hudson McGuire as an adolescent, Robert Levey II as a pre-teen, William Bednar-Carter as a teenager). The film begins shortly before the latter’s birth and continues into the mid-aughts, outlining an often difficult Long Island upbringing. Richard casts a dark shadow over Jesse’s upbringing. The years’ passing is concretized datewise by a plethora of broadcast news footage—a new element for D’Ambrose’s work in a feature full of them. I […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 26, 2022 -
“Perhaps It’s a Miracle to Make Films” | Ricky D’Ambrose, The Cathedral
The last two years have prompted much contemplation and reconsideration of the reasons why we make our films as well as the ways in which we make them. What aspect of your filmmaking—whether in your creative process, the way you finance your films, your production methodology or the way you relate to your audience—did you have to reinvent in order to make and complete the film you are bringing to the festival this year? Filmmaking has always been, since my earliest childhood experiments with a camera, a circumscribed activity—typically thankless, fueled by begrudging favors and cut-rate fees, a marginal and […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2022 -
Trailer Watch: Ricky D’Ambrose’s The Cathedral
Following its premiere at last year’s Venice Film Festival, The Cathedral, the sophomore feature by Ricky D’Ambrose (a 25 New Face of Film in 2017), makes its US premiere at this year’s Sundance. We’re pleased to share the first trailer for the film, an assured, highly compressed yet emotionally impactful portrait of a young man’s upbringing from early ‘80s childhood to late ‘10s college. D’Ambrose’s coming-of-age story boasts David Lowery as an executive producer. The film’s Sundance page is here, and D’Ambrose’s essay about acting as his own graphic designer is here.
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 18, 2022 -
Venice Film Festival 2021 Critic’s Notebook: Parallel Mothers, Il Buco and The Cathedral
In a tender moment in Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers, the opener of this year’s Venice Film Festival, the older of the eponymous mothers teaches the other how to peel potatoes while wearing a t-shirt that says “We Should All Be Feminists.” Since Janis (Penélope Cruz) is at the cusp of middle age, whereas Ana (Milena Smit) has only just turned 18, there’s a suggestion of baton-passing in this Jeanne Dielman reference. One wonders, then, what Chantal Akerman might have thought of the scene in which Ana relates, with a casualness pitched ambiguously between PTSD and nonchalance, that her pregnancy was […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Sep 5, 2021 -
Considering Microbudget: Six Filmmakers on The Reasons Behind Their Cinema Povera
During its early years in the mid-1990s, Filmmaker was noteworthy for its coverage of microbudget, or “no budget,” production. In articles by Peter Broderick, we printed the budgets of films like Clerks, El Mariachi and Clean, Shaven, as well as—later in a cover story I wrote—Pi. Microbudget filmmaking has continued as a Filmmaker focus, although the degree to which our articles have focused on budget numbers has varied. To accompany Mike S. Ryan’s article on microbudget productions, we asked several filmmakers whose work has been made in ultra-low-budget conditions to articulate for us their reasons for working in this model […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Mar 17, 2020 -
“It Certainly Doesn’t Hurt to Make Films For This Little Money”: Ricky D’Ambrose on Notes on an Appearance
Writing about Ricky D’Ambrose for last year’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film, Vadim Rizov described the script of his debut feature, Notes on an Appearance, then in postproduction, as “giv[ing] a sense of a disciplined, honed gaze refined over years of self-tutoring.” That autodidact’s precision manifests, in shorts like Six Cents in the Pocket (2015) and Spiral Jetty (2015), in straight-on close-ups of people against blank white walls or monochromatic wallpaper, or of pictures and texts and cups of coffee on tables as the sun streams through the window, and an almost monastic sound mix of epistolary voiceover and […]
by Mark Asch on Aug 17, 2018 -
Trailer Watch: Ricky D’Ambrose’s Notes On An Appearance
We’re pleased to host the online launch of the trailer for Ricky D’Ambrose’s first feature film, Notes On An Appearance. D’Ambrose was one of our 25 New Faces of Film last year; writing about his film—a tersely evocative look at a young man’s sudden disappearance, and its effect (or lack thereof) on his friends—at this year’s New Directors/New Films, I noted that “consistently clipped editing keeps the tone fluid: humor is in the cuts, and the film is never needlessly dour, deliberately refusing to dutifully find its way to a neatly summarizable Statement About The Zeitgeist.” The film begins a theatrical […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 24, 2018 -
New Directors/New Films 2018: An Elephant Sitting Still, Notes On An Appearance and Those Who Are Fine
New Directors/New Films concentrates on first/sophomore features on the more ambitious/undistributable side of the festival ledger; with that mission, it may be my favorite annual NYC fest, so all the more regrettable that deadlines and hellacious MTA/personal dysfunction limited my press screening attendance to three films. (I’ve written from elsewhere about the following titles: 3/4; Black Mother; Hale County This Morning, This Evening; Matangi/Maya/M.I.A.; The Nothing Factory. The latter is especially recommended.) When I finally made it out, Hu Bo’s Berlinale premiere An Elephant Sitting Still made for the kind of textbook intimidating object I crave: a nearly four-hour-long debut by a filmmaker who […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 28, 2018 -
Trailer Watch: Ricky D’Ambrose’s Notes on an Appearance
To date, Ricky D’Ambrose has completed five short films — he wrote for us about the making of Six Cents in the Pocket, which premiered at NYFF 2015 — and is now raising funds for his debut feature, Notes on an Appearance. A young man’s disappearance is at the center of a spare, tidy feature-length narrative film, set inside New York City apartments, subway stations, bookstores, and cafes as the supporters of an elusive political theorist embark on a covert program of indiscriminate violence and censure. But Todd and Madeleine, who search for the missing David, soon enter the company of strangers […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 2, 2017
