Set in and around a children’s summer camp off the coast of New England in 1965, Wes Anderson’s captivating Moonrise Kingdom is a movie about two 12-year-olds, young lovers who escape the adult world of counselors, parents and social workers to find a few magical moments in the film’s eponymous beachside paradise. A movie about childhood, Moonrise Kingdom is also, more importantly, a movie that feels of childhood. With its evocatively off-scale production design, tempered adult performances and moments of playful abandon, Moonrise Kingdom is stuffed with feelings and visions that, no matter what your age, transport you through time […]

For many independent film directors, making commercials is just business. It’s a way to keep working, put a healthy sum of money in the bank — and, as likely very few people will know that they even directed the ad, it’s not something they need to worry about after the shoot wraps. Wes Anderson, however, is one of those rare directors whose commercials feel like a direct extension of his feature work. Anderson has been helming ads for a decade or so. His IKEA spots “Kitchen” and “Living Room” from 2003 — some of his earliest commercials — have a […]

1 The Chimerist If you’re a new iPad owner, you should know that there are reading options other than iBooks, the Kindle app and Instapaper. Indeed, while games and social apps get most of the iOS press, there are artists who are rethinking the book form for the tablet device. These innovators are chronicled at The Chimerist (thechimerist.com), a Tumblr blog by “two iPad lovers at the intersection of art, stories and technology.” Follow writer, editor and literary blogger Maud Newton and Salon co-founder Laura Miller and learn about new graphic novels (Eric Shanower’s Age of Bronze), storytelling game apps […]

BLANK CITY Lorber Films – available now A group of artist friends make no-budget, handmade films way outside the mainstream, often acting and crewing for each other while developing a defiant, totally alternative sensibility and star system. Mumblecore? No, I’m talking about the downtown New York No Wave film scene of the 1980s, a spirited and impossibly cool movement celebrated in Céline Danhier’s Blank City. Included are scenes from pictures like Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise, Amos Poe’s The Foreigner, and, from the subsequent Cinema of Transgression movement, Richard Kern’s The Right Side of My Brain. As interviewer, Dahnier provides […]

At the end of introducing their film Detropia at the 9th annual True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Mo., Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady directed compliments for the documentary festival at their peers. “It’s so great to hang out with all you filmmakers outside the environment of Sundance,” they noted, “which is kind of a pressure cooker.” SXSW got invoked even more; Janet Pierson’s name was frequently mentioned over the four days as directors swapped notes over their next stop there. It’s clear that True/False’s boons for festival-circuit-weary press and directors alike include the lack of film-affiliated publicists, barely visible industry […]

Terence Nance, the Brooklyn-based, wavily afro’d, avant-garde director of An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, remarked that Rotterdam, where his movie had its international premiere, was the only film festival with a 24-hour DJ. I can’t say whether he’s right or not, but I hope he’s wrong. Surely some other place knows how to put on a festival as dynamic. If such an event exists, however, I’ve yet to find it. The International Film Festival Rotterdam, now in its 41st edition, has garnered a reputation for its sprawling, catholic tastes and commitment to new media and the avant-garde. It is much […]

How does one best measure the success ofa film festival? Are record-breaking ticket sales enough, or do other factors, such as quality of the films screened, quantity of A-list celebrities walking the red carpet and overall “buzz” generated, come into play? If revenue is the sole gauge, then there’s no question that the Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (colloquially known as the Berlinale) is one of the world’s most prosperous annual film events. By 7 a.m. each morning of the 10-day festival, hundreds of sleepy Berliners can be found queuing up at the makeshift ticket office in the Potsdamer Platz shopping mall, […]

Among the many things SXSW is known for — barbecue, the Alamo Drafthouse and long lines, for example — one is breakout apps. Twitter and Foursquare both got enormous boosts from launches or promotions during previous editions of SXSW Interactive. Last year, the buzzword at the tech fest was contextual search and, indeed, you’re seeing that functionality being built into products this year from Apple, Google and others. In 2012, the buzzed-about app heading into the fest was Highlight, a sort of social version of Foursquare. Installed on your phone, it alerts you to other Highlight users nearby. “You can […]

The majestic chords of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet blasted through the doors of the New Frontiers exhibition space at Sundance this year, beckoning viewers into a dark room with a wall-size screen and, in a bin, those staples of the modern multiplex, 3D glasses. Donning the glasses, you were confronted with a looped, three-minute mash-up of history as seen through the lens of Hollywood cinema. Composited across the 3D canvas, like some kind of American Museum of Natural History diorama on acid, were the great characters who, by our repeated viewing, resonate as deeply in our consciousness as real historical […]

Originally appearing in our Spring, 2012 print issue, my short report on Zona, Geoff Dyer’s fascinating critical memoir on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is being reposted today timed to the film’s run at Lincoln Center and forthcoming release by Criterion. — SM My first Tarkovsky film, my gateway picture, was his penultimate, Nostalghia, at the Olympia Theater near Columbia University in Morningside Heights. The seats slanted one way, the screen slanted the other, and there was a leak in the ceiling. Water dripped from the roof into a bucket on the floor, blending into Tarkovsky’s typically excellent sound design of distant […]