Matthew Ross’ inspired, tense debut Frank & Lola wears its influences on its sleeve – De Palma, Polanski, echoes of Eyes Wide Shut. It makes the most of leads Michael Shannon and Imogen “Best Name In Show Business” Poots, both of whom are having banner years with Midnight Special and Green Room, respectively, and upends audience expectations at regular intervals.
If you know one thing about Hampton Fancher, it’s very likely either his early success on “Bonanza” or that he’s credited with co-writing Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s classic adaptation of Philip K. Dick.
But did you know he ran away from home at 15 to become a flamenco dancer, hopping a boat to Spain and renaming himself “Mario Montejo”?
In Ira Sachs’ new film Little Men, you can see the gears turning and wheels spinning the whole time.
It’s a message-machine about gentrification, couched in a fleetingly charming story of youthful friendship, that never once feels effortless or honest.
In 1980, the British theologian John Hull began to lose his eyesight permanently. Having struggled with vision problems his whole life, the process had irrevocably started toward total blindness. As he grappled with all that this would entail, he began keeping an audio diary, titled Notes On Blindness and eventually encompassing hundreds of hours of material – thoughts, reflections, anxieties, loneliness and isolation creeping in, but also a stubborn insistence: “If I was going to be blind,” he says, “then blindness must be understood.”
Jeff Nichols is a faith-based filmmaker, and Midnight Special is his religious E.T.
Before you throw up your hands in thinkpiece-allergic disgust, let me say: I have no idea what Nichols’ faith might be. I haven’t researched it, and don’t particularly plan to.
Anyone who has thought seriously about climate change has, at some point, reached the conclusion that we’re pretty well fucked at this point.
If you count yourself in this group, Gasland director Josh Fox’s new documentary – the half-charmingly, half-clunkily titled How To Let Go of the World: And Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change – is aimed straight at you.
Part of an ongoing effort to watch a set of films from non-White, non-U.S., non-male, and/or non-straight filmmakers and depart a little from the Western canon. The intro and full list can be found here.
Yuan Muzhi’s Street Angel (1937), not to be confused with Frank Borzage’s silent of the same name from 9 years prior, is an odd assemblage of filmic impulses.
Chet Baker is not an unlikely candidate for a biopic.
The very image of the dope-addled West Coast jazz cat undone by his vices, his biography is full of, shall we say, “incident.” Still, there’s a lingering sense of either lost promise or also-ran status that separates him from the usual towering figures we find in such films.
As all good sports fans know, yesterday was Selection Sunday, in which brackets for the NCAA tournament and March Madness were revealed. I did not know this, as I am not a good sports fan, until my sport-savvier girlfriend Carrie informed me a few weeks back.