At the time of our Skype call, director of photography Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Call Me By Your Name, Cemetery Of Splendour, Arabian Nights Vol.1 & 2) was celebrating the news that Nakee 2, a film he shot in Thailand last year, had just broken box-office records. He was also celebrating a friend’s wedding party in Bangkok, his choice venue for the interview, and its jolly attendees enjoyed hollering their two cents in Thai from off screen. Spirits were high. It was midnight in New York and 11:00 AM in Bangkok. My questions were too prepared. I had mistaken Guadagnino’s complex reimagining […]
by A.E. Hunt on Oct 27, 2018I’m not sure whether or not Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is a masterpiece, but I’m certain that it warrants being compared to quite a few films that are. The one that immediately sprang to mind when the lights came up was The Godfather. With The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola took the gangster movie and attempted to expand its emotional range and social and political themes without sacrificing the visceral pleasures of genre filmmaking. Guadagino’s Suspiria attempts to do something similar with the horror film, with a startling degree of success. Here is a curious fact of film history. Though horror movies […]
by Larry Gross on Sep 17, 2018One thing independent feature films often aren’t able to deal with is very recent history. Films take so long to get developed, financed and produced, and by the time they arrive, whatever proximity they once had to the zeitgeist can be a step removed, which makes the exceptions to this problem thrilling. In this issue, Vadim Rizov interviews director Shevaun Mizrahi about her documentary, Distant Constellation, featuring the residents of a nursing home in Istanbul overshadowed by mega construction sites. Mizrahi shot the film over many years, and as news breaks now about Turkey’s currency crisis—which has its roots in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 17, 2018The Venice Film Festival’s main competition does not enjoy a reputation as a go-to place for adventurous cinema. So far, this year’s selection has been pretty much on brand: big-name directors, “important” themes and very little risk-taking. It’s safe to assume Venice will again be well represented on Oscar night. Against all expectations (or at least mine), the first film to break this frustrating mould proved to be Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria. Judging from the cast and crew — cinematography by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom!; music by Thom Yorke!; starring Tilda Swinton, Dakota Fanning, Mia Goth, Chloë Grace Moretz, Ingrid Caven and Angela […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Sep 3, 2018With the recent Berberian Sound Studio and now The Editor, we’re in a bit of a giallo revival. Or, more accurately, the gory, gloriously art decorated Italian horror thrillers of the 1970s have inspired a new generation to pay homage in the form of their own meta-commentaries. Interestingly, Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio and this year’s Toronto-premiering The Editor both feature post-production crew as their protagonists. In Berberian Sound Studio, it was a foley artist; in The Editor, Matthew Kennedy and Adam Brooks’ horror comedy, our hero is a once-vaunted picture editor who, following an accident, now must wield his […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 11, 2014