TIFF 2021
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“I Would Find Myself Wondering Why My Face Hurt So Much at the End of a Shoot Day, and It Was Because I’d Been Smiling the Whole Time”: Penny Lane on Listening to Kenny G
As with all of Penny Lane’s films, Listening to Kenny G, the idiosyncratic auteur’s TIFF-premiering, DOC NYC-opening, exploration of the beloved/reviled “smooth jazz” saxophonist and his globally ubiquitous sound (to this day “Going Home” signals closing time throughout China) turns a straightforward subject into an unexpected philosophical inquiry. In this case, Lane begins her journey down the G-hole with a simple question: Why does the bestselling instrumentalist of all time, our most famous living jazz musician, “make certain people really angry”? Using interviews with G as well as elite jazz critics and academics as well as archival footage, Lane arrives […]
by Lauren Wissot on Dec 2, 2021 -
“It’s Also a Story of the Power of the Media to Shape a Narrative in Ways That Do Disservice to the Truth”: Traci A. Curry on Attica
Attica (releasing in theaters on October 29 and on Showtime November 6) is the latest from nonfiction national treasure Stanley Nelson. Along with his co-director and producer Traci A. Curry, a longtime MSNBC producer, the Firelight Media co-founder and MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, who has previously chronicled organizations from The Peoples Temple to The Black Panthers, has now chosen to tackle a very different kind of institution: The prison industrial complex that was captured in one word and broadcast round the globe on September 9, 1971. The titular uprising that occurred at that correctional facility in Attica, NY a half century […]
by Lauren Wissot on Oct 29, 2021 -
TIFF 2021 Critic’s Notebook: Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Earwig
Lucile Hadzihalilovic*’s Earwig is, in broad outline, synopsizable with the same sentence as her first two features, Innocence and Evolution: a child (or group of children) grows up in deliberate isolation from the wider world under the watchful gaze of ambivalently motivated custodians, themselves operating under the direction of obscure masters. Intentions are unclear, but the fundamental fears—of puberty, parents, the body and its sexually-tinged conditioning for adulthood—remain clear and similar. The visual approach is always that of horror’s visual language without its traditional jolting sonic components—i.e., long walks down sinisterly lit hallways or down stairwells, no suddenly violent sounds. When I asked Hadzihalilovic […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 10, 2021
