At their fourth floor office in Gowanus, Brooklyn, directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin are preparing for the release of their second documentary feature, Citizen Koch. Outside their window is the neighborhood’s famous polluted canal but also a new Whole Foods that wasn’t there just one year ago. Gowanus, with its Superfund cleanup site, is a “neighborhood in transition,” but one that urban planners and TEDx speakers hope will be gentrification done right, retaining artists, artisans and small businesses amidst the fancy restaurants and incoming homeowners. A recent New York Times profile said Gowanus “seems poised to exist as an […]

Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s mesmerizing Manakamana is the kind of film that pushes us to confront the basic reasons we go to the cinema in the first place — and what compels us to stay and stare at a screen for two hours. Most of us go to be transported in one way or another; Spray and Velez’s film certainly delivers in this respect, both literally and figuratively. Set entirely within a cable car floating above the Nepali jungle, the camera trained on visitors journeying to a mountaintop temple, the film never stops moving. It’s an action movie about […]

In a few weeks’ time, I’ll be in Australia traveling the country with a small plush connected toy named Lyka. A robot scientist with a big heart, Lyka is from another planet decimated by climate change. Sent to Earth in a last desperate attempt to save her home, she relies on students to help her travel the globe. Together, the students and Lyka explore Earth as they search for insight that prevents her planet from dying. At its core, Lyka’s Adventure mixes purposeful storytelling and play. The project strives to teach 21st-century skills by utilizing collaborative problem solving, rapid prototyping, […]

There are too many movies, so says The New York Times, Salon.com and The Wrap. And that’s a bad thing. It’s that old law of supply and demand at work, they argue, with an abundance of titles over-saturating the marketplace and sabotaging the sustainability of the art film business. But some distribution professionals respond with a contrary and more nuanced view. There may be a lot of movies being made in the new millennium, but the ever-expanding entertainment universe is here to sort things out. “It’s like saying there are too many books or too many paintings or too much […]

Speaking April 30, 1999, at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, Werzog Herzog laid down 12 edicts on the pursuit of “ecstatic truth” in the documentary. “The so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité,” Herzog proclaimed in his “Minnesota Declaration,” announcing instead his devotion to “poetic, ecstatic truth” accessible “only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” He was speaking specifically about his 1992 masterwork Lessons Of Darkness: unfaked, awe-inspiring footage of Kuwait’s oil fields on fire after the Iraq War, framed by a made-up Pascal epigraph and narration from the perspective of an alien intelligence baffled by what it’s seeing. Herzog unrepentantly […]

Zack Parker’s immaculately twisty and disturbing Proxy is set in the filmmaker’s hometown of Richmond, Ind., where Parker has lived, worked and cultivated a base of crew, performers and investors for most of his adult life. It’s a film that stays with you even as it feels both familiar and remote. At once homespun and remarkably deft, it demonstrates an ambitious director who, in a place without obvious networks of filmmaking support, has figured out how to make remarkably accomplished work for peanuts in that now much sought-after “elevated genre” space. A scene of shocking brutality opens Parker’s fourth feature. […]

At the annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference, held in late March in Seattle, many of the conversations and panel discussions revolved around the disciplinary status of cinema, film, media, and screen studies. The cluster of terms jostling for territory in the conference’s program guide points to the crisis of identity sparked by the sweeping expansion of digital media, the emergence of the digital humanities, and the waning of actual film materials – 16mm film stock, film cameras, film editing systems – in “film” schools. “Film has died,” asserts the New School’s McKenzie Wark. “It’s decomposing. But […]

I have found myself disconcerted in writing about James Gray’s The Immigrant. I was immediately moved by the film and couldn’t fail to appreciate its elegantly controlled cinematic style, but I also felt there was something elusive and hard-to-pin-down about the many levels on which it attempts to address the audience. The film is consistently surprising in how traditional it is in some ways, how unabashed it is in its tenderness toward its characters, the milieu and historical period. Yet the film never succumbs to the twin dangers of stereotypical downbeatness or sugar-coated wish-fulfillment; it has an unusually complex level […]

Starting in fourth grade, Houston native Josh Wiggins acted, edited, written and generally pitched in small, goofy YouTube shorts with his friend Tommy Hohl. He didn’t perform professionally until last year, but since then Wiggins has quickly gone from low-budget filmmaking to big studio work in near-record time. One day before the world premiere at Sundance of Kat Candler’s third feature Hellion, Wiggins signed with UTA and Leverage Management. Hellion began as a short film in 2012 starring Hohl. Wiggins inherited his friend’s part as Jacob, a troubled 13-year-old whose mother is dead. While grieving father Hollis (Aaron Paul) turns […]

The 24-hour news culture of immediate reaction, Internet-enabled connectivity (from emails to Twitter) and the so-called “now generation” have impacted the way the filmmaking community reacts to real-life disasters, not always positively. After 9/11, the question was asked: How much time must pass before filmmakers can deal with such a destructive event? Films featuring terrorist activity, such as Collateral Damage, had their releases postponed to avoid offending sensibilities, while Sam Raimi deleted a Spider-Man shot of the Twin Towers. But other filmmakers raced to include, not exclude, 9/11. Spike Lee altered David Benioff’s script for 25th Hour to include a […]