Celebrating Community
If you take Hollywood at its word — and you absolutely shouldn’t — the last few years have been really good for female filmmakers. Wonder Woman, directed by Patty Jenkins, was the third-biggest film of 2017, earning more than $412 million at the box office. That same year, Greta Gerwig set the zeitgeist ablaze with her exceptional Lady Bird. Ava Duvernay has […]
We’re all familiar with the “One Crazy Night” format immortalized by classics such as “Dazed and Confused” and “American Graffiti.” The teen movie canon welcomed the newest member of the Class of 2019 this summer, “Booksmart.” Olivia Wilde’s (you know her from “The O.C.”, “Tron,” or a number of semi-forgettable romcom-adjacent films of the 2000s) directorial debut kicks into gear […]
Did somebody say High Concept? After a conk on the head (during a mysterious global blackout, no less), Jack Malik, played by th talented Himesh Patel, awakens to a world that never knew The Beatles. He alone, it seems, is aware of their very existence. He even Googles them. Nothing! Jack’s a musician, can play a few Beatles numbers, and […]
Great TV shows not only reflect the current culture, but also offers a subtle critique of it — avoiding heavy-handed, simplistic moralism in favor of deeply comic and profound reflections on the nuanced power structures and characters that create what issues the show critiques. Others are wholesome depictions of society as we wish it would be. There is not a […]
Hook Arts Media, the nonprofit formerly known as Dance Theatre Etcetera, is working to train a new generation of filmmakers in Red Hook. On May 18, a screening of short films directed by high-schoolers and young adults took place at the organization’s Van Brunt Street loft, concluding a seven-week afterschool filmmaking program, “In Transition: Media,” led by Jordan Campbell. The […]
Filmmaker Matty Rich was a 19-year-old kid from the Red Hook Houses when Straight Out of Brooklyn won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991. Without Hollywood connections or rich relatives, he’d gathered enough money from donations, investments, and maxed-out credit cards to make a feature film, for which he served as writer, director, producer, and […]
The title “Capernaum” (Capharaüm) comes from the Biblical city condemned to hell in the book of Matthew. The film is set in Beirut, a city also without order or peace. And certainly without mercy. The resulting chaos swirls in a world created by Nadine Labaki, one of harrowing circumstances, brought to life by the honesty and charisma of one little […]
Vice Adam Mckay’s latest film “Vice” begins with a dramatically posed question from an unspecified narrator: how is a man like Dick Cheney (played by Christian Bale)- a man who as the vice-president expanded executive power and drastically increased America’s foreign influence almost invisibly-made? For all its initial emphasis on Cheney’s subtlety and self-erasure from politics, the film mirrors none […]
On January 9, the NewFilmmakers Series at Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan screened Followed, a short by local filmmaker Georg Schmithüsen. New York’s longest-running year-round film festival, NewFilmmakers holds weekly events in the East Village, showing hundreds of movies a year by up-and-coming directors. A cryptic, visually expressive portrait of psychological instability, Followed begins at night at Pier 44, where […]
Netflix says that at least 45 million people saw Bird Box in its first week. If they’re not lying, they’re criminals–they just confessed to wasting the equivalent of 146 human lifetimes. In a just world, I wouldn’t even review this movie–it’s just a A Quiet Place knock-off, like those Transmorphers straight-to-DVD movies that only get made to grift gift-shopping grandmas. […]