1: 1941 (1979) It’s Christmastime in L.A. and no one is really freaking out about the recent attack on Pearl Harbor (people just want to dance and get laid and watch movies) except for a few assorted loony hawks who end up turning Hollywood into a war-torn amusement park. Spielberg has publicly apologized for this epically expensive slapstick comedy made between Close Encounters and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but not for Hook or Always....
After the New York press screening of a revived Mickey One a few years back, a certain critic was heard to remark, “I guess that’s what you’d call Strained Seriousness.” And I guess the remark is what you’d call an inside joke. Deep inside. For those of you who don’t get the joke, and I expect many of you will not, it is language learned from a sacred text, officially dated at 1968....
Django Unchained Django Unchained is not so much a Western as an anthology of potential Westerns. By that I mean to say it is Tarantino doing again what he has done in the past when he proposed six or eight or 12 different ways of making a martial-arts movie or a war movie, some of the ways being elaborated at length and others tossed out as half-perceived jokes that glisten a moment before they melted....
If you’re looking for Bollywood song-and-dance, you’ve come to the wrong neighborhood. Miss Lovely, Ashim Ahluwalia’s first narrative feature, takes us deep into the gangland precincts of Bombay’s low-budget Eighties filmmaking scene. Staffing softcore porn and horror films with new recruits under varying degrees of duress, exploitation director Vikky shoots writhing young things in titillating sex scenes, enduring the whims of his producer-gangster boss. There’s no business like sleaze business—until his hapless gofer brother Sonu gets the idea to make his own opus with the girl of his dreams, an apparent ingénue....
Feast of the Epiphany (Michael Koresky, Jeff Reichert, and Farihah Zaman, 2018) Making a movie is like reaching out your hand into a void and hoping that someone else grabs it. This is reflective of the nature of cinematic collaboration, and I was lucky to have such amazing co-directors on my first film, Feast of the Epiphany, Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman. But it also feels like past art works were our secret collaborators as well: inspirations were always out there in the dark, holding our hands and steadying us when we least expected it....
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019) Masterfully crafted by cinematographer Claire Mathon, the images of Céline Sciamma’s 18th-century-set Portrait of a Lady on Fire vibrate with sensuality, grace, and warmth. Wielding the camera like a brush, Mathon thrillingly captures the growing passion between Marianne (Noémie Merlant), a free-spirited artist, and Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), the soon-to-be-married aristocrat whose portrait Marianne is commissioned to paint in her family’s secluded mansion off the coast of Brittany....
A Zed & Two Noughts (Peter Greenaway, 1985) Peter Greenaway’s decade-long collaboration with production designers Jan Roelfs and Ben van Os yielded some of modern cinema’s most stylized and idiosyncratic sets. Centered on the love triangle between two twin zoologists and the woman who lost a leg in the car accident that killed their wives, A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) marks the trio’s first time working together and epitomizes the precision, flamboyance, gravitas, and irreverence that permeate such films as Drowning by Numbers (1988), The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), Prospero’s Books (1991), and The Baby of Mâcon (1993)—all shot by master cinematographer Sacha Vierny....
Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet, 2023) Justine Triet’s fourth feature, Anatomy of a Fall, culminates a 10-year period in which the filmmaker has established herself as one of the most interesting and creative auteurs working today. Her body of work, which also includes Age of Panic (2013), In Bed with Victoria (2016), and Sibyl (2019), is a mosaic of prickly, powerful, and intensely complex female characters dealing with the stress of the contemporary world with sharpness, humor, and great intelligence....
Fifteen years later the filmmaker returns with Cymbeline, a distinctly unorthodox take on one of Shakespeare’s later, less familiar works. Cymbeline (Ed Harris) is the head of a drug-running Briton motorcycle gang, facing reprisal from the police force if he stops buying their silence. His daughter, Imogen (Dakota Johnson), has secretly married the indigent Posthumus (Penn Badgley), who, banished by Cymbeline, is compelled to wager on his bride’s fidelity by Iachimo (Hawke)—who in turn forges damning evidence through means Shakespeare could have never contrived....
Critic David Thomson once wrote that “a man like Costner would be killed by humor. The gravity stands high and bright, like an eagle on a peak.” In the Nineties, when the actor went all in on a pair of dystopian epics as grungy and bleak as they were earnest and admonitory, Thomson may have had a point. The everyman had become The Omega Man, and he bore the mantle nobly, playing stoic survivalists literally defined by their quests (The Mariner, The Postman)....
Harrill’s return to Sundance has been a long time in the making. After his first short, Gina, An Actress, Age 29, won the festival’s top prize in 2001, Harrill honed his craft on additional short projects—including Quick Hands, Soft Feet (2008), featuring one of Greta Gerwig’s first performances—and spent time teaching film (at Temple, Virginia Tech, and now University of Tennessee, Knoxville) and programming (at Knoxville’s Public Cinema). Of particular interest to Harrill is the rich tradition of regional cinema in the U....
Images from The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019) unless otherwise noted For our September-October issue’s Inspired feature, I spoke with cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto about shooting The Irishman with Martin Scorsese. The two had worked together before on Silence and Wolf of Wall Street, and I was especially curious about how Prieto approached this film’s particular challenges and his conception of its complicated main character, hitman/fixer/Teamster leader Frank Sheeran. Like many audiences, he seemed still bowled over by the performances, but he also went into depth regarding the use of colors to emulate the looks of different eras and the workings of memory....
Of course, the precision of these re-creations relies on a crackerjack team of like-minded artists, and Haynes has the closest thing to a troupe of regulars going. Haynes, and two of his recurring collaborators, cinematographer Ed Lachman and production designer Mark Friedberg, sat down with me to discuss their nearly miraculous work on the new film Wonderstruck. Following two deaf children—Rose (Millicent Simmonds) and Ben (Oakes Fegley)—born 50 years apart, but whose lives eventually cross paths in surprising ways, Wonderstruck, based on a young-adult novel by writer and illustrator Brian Selznick (The Invention of Hugo Cabret), mostly jumps between ’20s and ’70s New York, each story line requiring its own visual approach and identity, while at the same time needing to speak to one another across time and space....
So where are the great crime movies from the Philippines? For starters, they don’t have much of a literary tradition of crime fiction. While crimes have appeared in books there before, the Western-style detective story was relatively unknown until the 2000s when a tiny handful of titles flopped out of their body bags like The Trail of the Chop-Chop Lady of Makati and Smaller and Smaller Circles about two Jesuit priests going after a serial killer....
Kwaidan You have been watching a Japanese movie. A lot of people, if asked to reach for a single adjective to describe Japanese cinema, would go with “slow.” Directors like Takeshi Kitano, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Yasujiro Ozu, Shinji Aoyama, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa love to let scenes of people walking, sitting, staring, eating, and waiting unfold for minutes of screen time. Takeshi Kitano’s first film, Violent Cop (1989), was basically a supercut of shots of Kitano walking down city streets....
But why dwell on the past? Let’s catch up with what the big names of Thai cinema are doing today! Tony Jaa After a huge falling-out with the studio powerhouse Sahamongkol, who seemed to treat their contract with Jaa as equivalent to owning his soul, the star retreated to the forests of Thailand, toyed with becoming a monk, freaked out, disappeared, reappeared, and made Ong-Bak 3 for Sahamongkol. Now, with his old contract expired, he signed a new 10-year contract with Sahamongkol but only for movies he makes in Thailand, which meant that he immediately started making movies overseas....
I Knew Her Well Expecting your favorite famous person to share your beliefs has always struck me as a fool’s errand. Great artistry isn’t contingent on good politics, or vice versa. Any celebrity’s public persona is mediated and constructed by (most likely a team of) publicists, advisors, and agents, regardless of how casual and “real” it appears to be. While this seems like a painfully obvious point to make, it’s a fact that gets obscured by the false transparency that social media and interviews offer....
