For Only Lovers Left Alive, Jim Jarmusch tapped production designer Marco Bittner Rosser. Here's what Bittner Rosser had to say about bringing to life this tale of the undead: http://www.thalo.com/articles/view/921/designing_jim_jarmuschs_only_lovers_left_alive
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Holi may be the official Hindi festival of colors, but for New York fans of South Asian and Indian-American arthouse cinema, a spring celebration that brings even more brightness is the New York Indian Film Festival. Last night over multi-hued dishes at Soho Tiffin Junction -- Modern South Indian Kitchen, NYIFF whetted appetites for its 14th edition, slated for May 5 - 10. The festival, which is the oldest and largest showcase of its kind in the United States, offers a rare chance to see indie...
Hany Abu-Assad doubts love means never having to say you're sorry. His Oscar-nominated film Omar makes his case. While still in L.A. after the Academy Awards, the Palestinian director shed light on this star-crossed love story that plays like a thriller and thinks like a Western:
http://www.thalo.com/articles/view/907/director_hany_abu_assad_explores_love_among_the
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With all due respect to Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, the distinction of true detective must go to history sleuth John Maloof, whose documentary Finding Vivian Maier smokes out one of the art world's most intriguing tales. Together with fellow director/producer Charlie Siskel, Maloof set about making sense of the late street photographer's life and work, ultimately launching her name among the pantheon of outsider artists. It's hard to imagine a less likely candidate for...
France's ruling elite has staged its share of psychodrama, but leave it to Bertrand Tavernier‘s new film The French Minister to replay it as farce. Adapted from the bestselling graphic novel Quai D’Orsay – Chroniques Diplomatiques, the film peeps behind the chaotic scenes at the Foreign Affairs Ministry and finds much to burlesque.
For starters, there's Foreign Affairs Minister Alexandre Taillard de Worms, an eccentric blue blood who's the very beacon of French E...
With each new Wes Anderson film, audiences get not only a highly stylized world, but also a chance to wonder how he concocted it. Now The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is playing in New York and Los Angeles, is the object of such head cocking.
Set in Eastern Europe from the pre-war years through the Communist 60s, the film traces the decline of a legendary spa hotel. Of its fragrant and fastidious concierge Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), the narrator says, "His world had vanished long befor...
The history of money is strewn with hoaxes and the anti-heroes who rise and fall by them. Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street sends up an especially bracing example based on the bestselling memoir of Jordan Belfort, played with Oscar-nominated flair by Leonardo DiCaprio.
To convey the debauched life and times of this high-rolling shyster who conned unsuspecting investors into forking over $100 million plus in the late '80s and '90s, the filmtakes us deep into the lairs ...
Patricia Norris knows a thing or two about costume design. A half a century in the business will do that. And now the 82 year old is poised to learn something else: whether she'll finally take home an Academy Award after being nominated six times. The work currently under consideration is for Steve McQueen's 12 Years A Slave, based on the true story of Solomon Northup, a free black man kidnapped into slavery for more than a decade. To stitch together what went into designing costumes f...
The tent protests that swept Israel during summer 2011 momentarily made unlikely bedfellows out of secular and ultra-religious activists confronting similar social issues. Gay rights were no such matchmaker, however, as seen in July 2011's Gay Pride Parade in Jerusalem and the sizeable counter-protest it spawned in that city's ultra-Orthodox Mea Sharim neighborhood. (The previous year the black-frocked Deputy Mayor brandished cardboard donkeys to condemn the “besti...
If you saw Matthew McConaughey claim Best Actor honors at the 2014 Golden Globe Awards, you know the story behind his latest movie Dallas Buyers Club. "For 20 years it was an underdog, turned down 86 times," he twanged. "We got the right people together five years ago, stuck to it, put some skin in the game and here it is."As hotted up as Texas, he swaggered on, "Really glad it got passed on so many times or it wouldn't have come to me."
McConaughey went ...
The Israeli family drama By Summer's End is bathed in warm sun tones of yesteryear. Yet for all its nostalgia, the film was conceived as an unsentimental critique of the past. Writer/ director Noa Aharoni calls out the country's male-centric traditions and laments the sins of the fathers visited upon the children.
Set on a rural moshava in 1978, the film opens as a young mother, Michal (Michal Varshai), struggles to handle her willful daughter, seven-year-old Maya (Bar Minali). Ma...
On a recent wintry night, the 13th snow storm of the season froze the Film Society of Lincoln Center's plans to host Alfonso Cuarón in a conversation about his new film Gravity. The acclaimed Mexican director, whose lift-off to New York was aborted, was instead astral-projected by video Skype.
Cuarón is perhaps best known to American audiences for his screen adaptation of the children's book A Little Princess; his Mexican road comedy Y Tu Mamá También; ...
Ever wonder what it'd be like to mix coming-of-age drama, romance and comedy with action adventure, fantasy, detective mystery and tragedy -- and top it off with musical numbers and a road trip? Add caper flourishes and you have The ZigZag Kid. Belgian director Vincent Bal's genre-defying screen adaptation of Israeli author David Grossman's beloved novel is a triumph of contradictions, as is its young hero, Nono Feierberg.
Nono idealizes his dad, Holland's top police detec...
Last year I had the guilty pleasure of interviewing my friends Kathy Brew and Roberto Guerra about their latest documentary, Design Is One: Lella & Massimo Vignelli. The film, which played to critical acclaim at Manhattan's IFC Film Center, explores the Italian-born couple's partnership that has distinguished them among the world's most influential designers.
On January 10, 2014, Guerra lost his six-month battle with pancreatic cancer. Brew had noted dur...
Even if The Act of Killing doesn't slay the 86th Oscars in the Best Documentary Feature category, it will still stand as one of 2013's most compelling and creative films. Director Joshua Oppenheimer came to the subject while making a documentary about efforts to unionize in Indonesia, where many workers had lost loved ones to the mid-60s purge targeting such "subversives" as union members. When Oppenheimer dared to speak with the killers, he was astonished to discover their exu...
How many female jazz musicians can you name? Judy Chaikin's documentary The Girls in the Band can help. By the time the credits roll, you will have met three generations of distaff players, composers, arrangers and conductors reaching back to the 1920s. Names like saxophonists Roz Cron and Peggy Gilbert, trumpeters Clora Bryant and Billie Rogers and drummer Viola Smith will roll off the tongue as readily as those of Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie.
To unders...
Not since Joseph interpreted a dream of Pharaoh's shaqahhas a butler been mythologized like the hero of Lee Daniels' The Butler. Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker), who worked for eight presidents from 1957 to 1986, takes his cue from the the true story of White House butler Eugene Allen. Yet this epic drama has its own master to serve, and both Daniels and screenwriter Danny Strong pledge allegiance to educating viewers about history rather than to dramatizing one man's bio.
At t...
Watching Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington is safer than covering combat, but the HBO documentary by author, journalist and filmmaker Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm) is not danger-free. It contains images of maimed bodies that may haunt you on a dark night.
But it also reminds you why you must miss the empathic British war photographer/filmmaker terribly. On April 20, 2011, scant
weeks after his and Junger’s chronicle of Am...
January 16th is rapidly approaching, and with it, the 86th Academy Award nominations. On the documentary feature short list are such box office and critical standouts as Blackfish, Stories We Tell and The Act of Killing. So too is Morgan Neville's tuneful 20 Feet From Stardom, which is pulling its share of the smart money.
Here's what Neville had to say about his frontrunning contender: http://www.thalo.com/articles/view/751/20_feet_from_stardom_filmmaker_neville_morgan
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When David O. Russell wanted to recreate New York of the late 70s and early 80s for his new film American Hustle, he knew what to do: call Judy Becker. The Manhattan-based production designer had collaborated with him on The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook, bagging an Art Directors Guild Award nomination for the former. Other credits on her CV include Brokeback Mountain and I'm Not There; and her work on HBO's Girls earned her an Art Directors ...
With his latest film, writer and director Spike Jonze gives science fiction fans a reason to celebrate. Yet Her, a gizmo-fueled meditation on love, loneliness and technology, is emotionally perceptive and slyly funny enough to beguile even hard core sci fi detractors.
Not that Jonze's prior poppings down worm holes have lacked insight into the human heart. However wild things were with Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Where the Wild Things Are, Jonze has always been up for ti...
The play-turned-movie August: Osage County follows one family's moral and emotional smack-down in the American Heartland. No one wins, though a shrink could clean up handily. The Westons of Oklahoma sure could use some counseling. And judging by the actors' comments at the film's New York press conference, they too may have some lingering traumas to be worked out from the ordeal of performing this Gothic melodrama.
Meryl Streep, who played the splenetic matriarch, and Ju...
"History repeats itself, "the first as tragedy, then as farce." Finnish director Arto Halonen apparently drew on Marx's famed maxim when he made his 2012 documentary about doping in cross-country skiing, When Heroes Lie, and followed it up with this year's black comedy on the same topic, A Patriotic Man (Isänmaallinen mies). How fitting that these two films also explore individuals as vehicles of collectives -- and how this ideal can zigzag off-piste.
A Patrioti...
Just as Japan seeks to amend its pacifist constitution, along comes a film that shows it had a belligerent force after all, until 1969. That's when avant-garde artist Ushio Shinohara hit the New York art scene with his "box paintings" using aggression he'd soon extend -- emotionally -- to his future wife. Two decades his junior, Noriko was an art student whose career would derail as she became his de facto assistant, handmaid...
The saddest scene in movie history isn't Mammy lamenting what's gone in Gone With the Wind or even the choice Sophie is forced to make in Sophie's Choice. It's the agonized bellow that killer whale Kasata lets rip when her calf,
Takara, is taken to entertain SeaWorld crowds an ocean away, as featured in Blackfish.
Gabriela Cowpwerthwaite’s documentary unfolds a damning exposé of the multi-billion dollar sea-park industry and the con...
