Widows
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Editor Joe Walker on Cutting Steve McQueen’s Widows
“A stroke, and then a slap,” says editor Joe Walker. That’s how director Steve McQueen described the tone he wanted in the opening scenes of Widows. The movie opens with a remarkable sequence, intercutting glimpses of the main characters’ family lives with images from a horrifically bloody heist gone wrong — showing, in effect, how four of the women at the heart of the film become widows. So, for example, we see Viola Davis’s Veronica Rawlings passionately kissing her husband Harry (Liam Neeson) and then suddenly we’re in the back of Harry’s van as police fire on it. We see […]
by Bilge Ebiri on Dec 20, 2018 -
Your Film is Too Long: 11 Tips on How To Get Your Film to Its Correct Runtime
I know, it’s maddening. People watch 10-hour series that take five hours to get good, but your 101-minute comedy is too long. Michael Bay makes three-hour Transformers movies, but your 95-minute drama is too long. Critics love seven hours of Sátántangó, but your 18-minute short is too long. Sorry, but it’s probably true. I learned this the hard way on my first feature film, Jake. After our initial 118-minute cut, we proudly got it down to 104 minutes. We couldn’t cut a frame more! We locked picture and sent out our perfectly formed film to festivals. Final runtime? 88 minutes. […]
by Doug Dillaman on Dec 17, 2018 -
Filmmaker‘s Look at the Below-the-Line Stars of Some of the Awards Season’s Best Films
Movies aren’t just willed into existence, however much Alfred Hitchcock might have wanted them to be. We love to talk about visionary directors, but we often fail to properly acknowledge the artists, craftspeople and technicians who make their works possible. Luckily, many of these individuals — the below-the-line talent, as they’re sometimes called — receive some recognition during awards season, particularly from the guilds and, ultimately, the Oscars. And those who look at the late-year awards rush only through the lens of who’s going to win the big prizes — picture, director, performance, etc. — risk missing out on some […]
by Bilge Ebiri on Dec 17, 2018 -
TIFF Critic’s Notebook 4: Widows
The first shot of Steve McQueen’s Widows is in keeping with the Master Shot Severity of Hunger, Shame and 12 Years a Slave: an overhead two-shot of Veronica (Viola Davis) and Harry Rawlins (Liam Neeson) in bed, held at great length, allowing for durational “naturalistic” acting in a rigorously defined space. “Severity” is descriptive, not necessarily a pejorative: the solemn Steadicam virtuosities and meticulously imprisoning static compositions of Shame only heightened the silliness of the story of a rich man who does zero work onscreen while having sex with an effortlessly accrued slew of partners but who, like Brian Wilson, sometimes still feels Very Sad. McQueen’s […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 9, 2018
