“Film isn’t Meant to Solve Problems, It’s Meant to Create More”: David Osit on Predators
In Predators, three-time Emmy-winning filmmaker David Osit’s new documentary, the titular descriptor applies to multiple people: the pedophiles who found themselves the target of popular NBC sting series To Catch A Predator (2004-07), but also the makers of a show which packaged disturbing subject matter into mass entertainment while feigning moral superiority, the slapdash copycat series that have sprung up in its wake and the undiscerning audience for all of these. Osit divides Predators into three chapters. The first uses To Catch A Predator clips, chat logs and phone calls to build an introduction to the show, in which men […]
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Steven Soderbergh’s films routinely fixate on money—who has it, who doesn’t, what (illegally) acquiring it says about personal status and national identity within global capitalism. So, it’s mildly surprising he hasn’t set a film in the contemporary art world prior to The Christophers, though previous works deployed visual art for character definition (Laura San Giacomo’s character in sex, lies, and videotape is a painter) or as a plot engine (the Imperial Coronation egg as Ocean’s Twelve’s MacGuffin). In his latest two-hander, artmaking serves as a dramatic foundation for extended badinage about creative expression as an imperfect vehicle for immortality. The […]
The carefree, meandering pace of summertime suddenly takes the form of a depressive stupor in Forastera, the feature debut from Los Angeles-based, Spanish-born writer-director Lucía Aleñar Iglesias. During an annual vacation to visit their maternal grandparents in Mallorca, Cata (Zoe Stein) and Eva (Martina García) engage in typical teenage shenanigans: they aimlessly ride bikes along the coast, go to beach bonfire parties and flirt with the boys they encounter there. Basically, all is as it should be—at least until the day that Cata discovers her grandmother’s unresponsive body. The girls’ mother Pepe (Núria Prims) arrives in order to help with […]
In November of 2023, always-busy cinematographer Matthew Libatique embarked on a particularly prolific period that saw the three-time Oscar nominee lens a trio of films nearly back-to back. That grueling feat was predicated on the fact that a triumvirate of Libatique’s most frequent collaborators came calling: Spike Lee with Highest 2 Lowest (briefly in theaters, now on Apple TV+), Darren Aronofsky with Caught Stealing (now in theaters) and Bradley Cooper with Is This Thing On? (scheduled for release at the end of the year, premiering shortly at NYFF). “It wasn’t lost on me how rare of an opportunity it was […]
On the sad occasion of Robert Redford’s passing, filmmaker Eva Vives pens this guest post on her interactions with the legendary actor, director, environmentalist, activist and Sundance Institute founder. — Editor I first met Redford by chance. Pete Sollett and I had gone to meet Sundance Institute’s Michelle Satter, Founding Senior Director of Sundance Institute’s Artist Programs, at the Sundance offices in New York after our short, Five Feet High and Rising, had won the festival. There was some kind of snafu, and I was asked to wait in an office while they sorted it out. I don’t remember where […]
The “making of,” in which process is made visible through behind-the-scenes chronicles—documentaries, YouTube tutorials and explainers of all sorts—is its own journalistic genre. These pieces invariably fixate on the facts. When it comes to feature films, for example, this camera, this number of shooting days and this set of references are the currency exchanged between artist and reader. Offering transparency through specificity, these exchanges are a hallmark of this magazine, so, in his dialogue below with fellow filmmaker Azazel Jacobs, director Ira Sachs (Passages, Keep the Lights On, Forty Shades of Blue) comes prepared to share. Their conversation about the […]
Watching Ruby Cruz’s remarkable and seemingly effortless performance in her latest film, The Threesome, I got a hunch that she was engaging with the work on some kind of intuitive level where connection was paramount. I also sensed that this might not be easy to talk about. In one sense I was right, the gifted young actor, who’s credits include Bottoms, Willow, Mare of Easttown and The Sex Lives of College Girls, approaches the work in an elusive way, but, lucky for us, she still manages to speak about the intangible and slippery aspects with an eloquence that is inspiring. […]
In the 1999 mini-series Storm of the Century, a malevolent stranger (played by noted Canadian Colm Feore) shows up outside Stephen King’s longtime fictional community of Castle Rock and repeatedly says “Give me what I want and I’ll go away”—but he doesn’t tell anyone what he actually wants, instead telepathically manipulating people into suicide and other grisly events until finally unveiling his ask. Obviously this made a big impression on me when I was 13, but I’m told the series was in fact terrible, which isn’t hard to believe, and it’s definitely not what should have been coming to mind […]
On the evening of August 8, 1939, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels led a fleet of gondolas down the Canal Grande. He’d been invited to attend the opening of the seventh Venice Film Festival, which began in a lugubrious atmosphere. The specter of a new world conflict was haunting Europe; critics dispatching from the Lido wrote of an “empty” Venice, “long-faced people,” “little dancing” and “lots of play to chase away negative thoughts.” Back then, the festival functioned as a sort of political summit; the Biennale invited delegations from different countries, which would submit the films themselves. Sixteen nations took […]