You Were Never Really Here
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2018 As a Year in Double Features
Every year, when looked back upon in its final days, reveals patterns. For the past four years, I’ve capped the holiday season with a list of 10 double features from the year in film here at Filmmaker. Each capsule review is, in essence, a mini-thinkpiece on a cinematic trend from the year. This past year gave us many such boomlets: the year of the horse movie, the year of the “white voice” movie, the year of the movie set entirely on digital screens. A delightful interplay emerges when you watch, or think about, films in pairs. One movie brings out […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Dec 31, 2018 -
2018’s Ten Best Films Directed by Women
The films on this list represent only a small fraction of films from 2018 directed by female identifying filmmakers ranging greatly in production from impressive big budgeted masterpieces, to smaller, spirited low-to-no budget indies. One thing that emerged more than in recent years was that many films on this list implicate the audience in their inquiries and creativity; they reach into the senses to make sense of our unmoored present to provide meaningful connection. These directors remind how human the medium of film is and how our choices as an audience make us just as responsible as the filmmakers, artists, […]
by Donna K on Dec 18, 2018 -
The Explosions Within: Lynne Ramsay on You Were Never Really Here
Joe uses a hammer. A tough guy for hire — one who specializes in cases involving pedophilia and child trafficking — Joe owns a gun, of course, and he uses that, too. But for the jobs that truly matter, ones triggering the dark memories that clank painfully around inside his brain, he prefers the brutal simplicity of a simple hammer that can fell an adversary with one silent, well-timed swoop. Arrestingly embodied by Joaquin Phoenix in Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s fleet, impressionistic work of hardcore noir, You Were Never Really Here, winner of the Best Screenplay prize at last year’s […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 8, 2018 -
Trailer Watch: Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here
The U.S. trailer for Lynne Ramsay’s contemporary neo-noir, You Were Never Really Here, which won the Best Screenplay and Best Actor (for Ramsay and Joaquin Phoenix, respectively) at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, has just dropped. An adaptation of a Jonathan Ames story, it stars Phoenix as a modern-day gumshoe tracking down a kidnapped kid. Amazon releases in early ’18.
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 6, 2017 -
Cannes Dispatch #4: Thoughts on Prize Winners 120 Beats Per Minute, You Were Never Really Here, The Killing of a Sacred Deer
For the third year in a row, Cannes’s Main Competition jury — this year comprised of jury president Pedro Almodóvar, German filmmaker Maren Ade, and several celebrity industry professionals whose tastes in cinema had never previously been of much concern to anyone — awarded the Palme d’Or to a movie I didn’t much like. Considered by some to be True Cinema’s answer to the Oscars, the medium’s actual most prestigious prize has suffered some blows to its reputation in the last two years after being handed to mediocre films (Dheepan in 2015 and I, Daniel Blake last year) that weren’t […]
by Blake Williams on May 30, 2017
