Wim Wenders
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American Dreams and Nightmares
The Boost Released a year after the Partnership for a Drug-Free America’s “This Is Your Brain on Drugs” campaign frightened children into never eating their morning eggs, Harold Becker’s The Boost was this PSA’s cinematic equivalent for adults. An adaptation of political commentator and actor Ben Stein’s 1982 novel, Ludes: A Ballad of the Drug and the Dream, the film is a cautionary tale in which a real estate salesman and his wife grow addicted to wealth, entitlement and cocaine. In his review for The New York Times, filmmaker (and then freelance writer) Cameron Crowe noted that the book “winds up being largely about […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 21, 2016 -
TIFF 2015 Critic’s Notebook: Leaky Members in New Work by Wim Wenders, Kazik Radwanski and More
Two movies at the Toronto International Film Festival, which kicked off Thursday, made me think back to Ben Lerner’s year-old novel 10:04. In it, there’s a conversation about a specific male performance that supposedly begins around middle school and high school-age: “You take your dick out of your pants to piss in a urinal, you start bending at the knees just a little, or otherwise making a show as if you were lifting some kind of weight.” Men performing their maleness through a leaky member shows up in Wim Wenders’s Everything Will be Fine and Kazik Radwanski’s How Heavy This […]
by Whitney Mallett on Sep 13, 2015 -
Dispatches from Sundance, Berlin, SXSW, True/False & Thessaloniki
Sundance SCOTT MACAULAY Check it out: the two top prize winners at Sundance this year, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack, both feature as central elements teenagers who stage and film their own versions of classic movies. There’s even overlap between the two films, although Moselle’s Manhattan shut-ins incline more towards Tarantino and Freddy Krueger, while Gomez-Rejon’s teen Pittsburgh auteurs shirk the Romero roots of their hometown for deep dives into the Criterion Collection. For film lovers of a certain age, both Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and The Wolfpack […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 28, 2015 -
“Reality is Not, I Believe, a Fixed Entity…”: Michael Madsen on Alien Encounter Doc, The Visit
As a conceptual artist Michael Madsen doesn’t so much create nonfiction films as craft mind-blowing experiences, introducing even the most jaded of us docu-philes to people and places we’d no idea even existed. (Prior to IDFA 2010 I, for one, never knew about Finland’s nuclear waste storage facility Onkalo, the subject of Madsen’s Into Eternity and an underground cavern the size of a large city set for completion in the 22nd century.) In his latest The Visit the Danish director turns his attention and limitless imagination towards mankind’s first encounter with alien intelligent life. With the help of expert guides […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 25, 2015 -
On Both Sides of the Lens
Is there another contemporary documentary director who has so lovingly — and yet so quizzically — explored the work of his own artistic inspirations as Wim Wenders? With his patient, probing camera eye and, often, ruminative German-accented voiceover, Wenders has captured the work of filmmakers (Nicholas Ray, Yasujirō Ozu), choreographers (Pina Bausch), fashion designers (Yohji Yamamoto) and many, many musicians (Blind Willie Johnson, U2 and the players featured in Buena Vista Social Club, among others). Wenders approaches these talents humbly — in some cases as a colleague, but most often as a fan and admirer. And as much as Wenders’ […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 21, 2015 -
“Creation is Still a Great Adventure”: 5 Questions for Salt of the Earth Director Wim Wenders
Few modern photographers have covered as much of the planet as Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. For several decades, he travelled the continents to document major events shaping history: genocide, war, starvation, and exodus. Deeply affected by the intense trauma he witnessed, he put down his camera. He picked it up again for Genesis, a hugely ambitious project dedicated to the earth’s beauty, where he photographed areas of the planet untouched by humans. Filmmaker Wim Wenders joined forces with Salgado’s son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado to co-direct this intimate portrait of one our greatest living artists. The film won the Special Prize in the Un Certain Regard section […]
by Ariston Anderson on Dec 3, 2014 -
Cannes 2014: Mr. Turner, Salt of the Earth, Force Majeure and the Art of First Impressions
“What’s your elevator pitch?” people ask — the same people who’d recoil backwards, their body language flashing danger signals, if you actually collared them in an actual elevator and launched into a pitch of your movie. Indeed, it’s a paradox of the film business that the smooth-talking hustler is held up as some kind of model when most film industry types would prefer an approach by someone genuine — personable, even — who understands both the cultural and the transactional nature of their business. I watched one exec from an established production and distribution company last week at the 2014 […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 26, 2014 -
Ursula Meier and Agnes Godard on Sister
Switzerland’s submission for the best international picture is Ursula Meier’s Sister, starring the stunning and earthy Léa Seydoux as a Swiss hot mess and Kacey Mottet Klein as her weedy 12-year-old brother who supports them both through petty thefts. It’s a subtle, complex film that avoids obvious polarities of class, family, even landscape. As director Meier said to me recently of the mountain resort setting, and about finding her way into the script by focusing on the location of the ski lift cable cars, “It’s the place where he belongs, between two worlds. And it’s also the rhythm of the […]
by Miriam Bale on Oct 5, 2012 -
This is Where You Work: Braden King’s Office
“With all these devices,” Braden King says as he gestures to his iPhone, “you never have to be where you are at all.” The comment is overwhelmingly appropriate, since King’s first narrative feature, HERE, which opens on April 13th at New York’s IFC Center, is about nothing so much as having an appreciation and understanding of where one is. The moment is all the more interesting since King isn’t talking about his film at all; rather, he’s talking about his office space. A connection, regardless, begs to be made. HERE is a formalist reinvention of the road-trip romance, a film […]
by Zachary Wigon on Apr 11, 2012 -
Wim Wenders, Pina
German filmmaker Wim Wenders started taking photographs at the age of seven. Over the years he has turned his attentions to medicine, philosophy, painting, and engraving, but it is his four decades directing that has most often caught the publics’ attention. I first saw and loved his films with Wings of Desire; later I could be found carrying around a copy of his book Once religiously. His new film Pina, is a loving tribute to his 20-year friendship with, and admiration of, the dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch. It is a documentary that uses new 3D technology to exquisite effect. […]
by Alix Lambert on Dec 21, 2011
