“There’s Something Very Homoerotic About Intense Male Friendships”: Alex Russell on Lurker
The first time we see retail worker Matthew (Théodore Pellerin), it’s through the eyes of his new friend Oliver (Archie Madekwe), as the up-and-coming popstar films him with a camcorder. It’s an arresting opening image, given how much the rest of Lurker finds Matthew gazing at Oliver in adoration instead. “I need a real person,” the fickle musician says, soon after their chance encounter. He’s talking about seeking the honest opinion of a regular person on his music, not the blind adoration of a fan. Little does he know just how meticulously crafted Matthew’s personality really is. Having secured a […]
Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias’s Nova ’78 centers around the Nova Convention, a late ’70s avant-garde extravaganza that took place at NYC’s now defunct Entermedia Theater (Second Avenue and 12th Street) in honor of William S. Burroughs’s return to the U.S. after living more than 20 years abroad. It was also a great excuse to gather a who’s who roster of counterculture icons to perform in the presence of the postmodern wordsmith who’d profoundly impacted them all. That would include Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye, Laurie Anderson and Julia Heyward, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, Brion Gysin, Timothy Leary, Merce […]
A few black-and-white photos of Locarno’s first editions hung from the walls of the hotel that hosted me there for five days this month. Long before it began to stretch across several venues around town—none more iconic than the Piazza Grande, which every night turns into an 8,000-seat open air theater—the fest originally took place in the garden of Locarno’s Grand Hotel. This is where those pictures were taken. It is August 22, 1946, and they’re watching Giacomo Gentilomo’s My Sun—a crowd-pleaser with which the festival, just relocated from Lugano, opened the first edition in the city it’d be renamed […]
In my recent Filmmaker conversation with Julia Loktev about the making of her monumental documentary, My Undesirable Friends, I cited the work of the late documentary filmmaker Joel DeMott, because I believe there is a straight line between DeMott’s approach in the late 1970s to shooting vérité documentary using shoulder-mounted 16mm cameras and Loktev’s latter-day methods using iPhones. DeMott, who died in June, has been eulogized in obits in Documentary and The New York Times, so no need to recap her venturesome life and career here. Instead, my way of paying homage to the contributions of DeMott and her partner […]
The films of Julian Radlmaier have all been infused with a specific kind of longing for a better future in the sense of Marxist utopias. From his early films—A Spectre is Haunting Europe (2013) and A Proletarian Winter’s Tale (2014)—to the snappy meta-commentary Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog in 2017 and 2021’s Bloodsuckers, aptly sub-titled “A Marxist Vampire Comedy,” Radlmaier has perfected the political allegory for our day and age. Static tableaux paired with outrageously funny one-liners (“Germany is sinking like the Titanic and we’re Leonardo DiCaprio”) make the films meme-friendly without compromising their devotion to labor politics and community. […]
When cinematographer Larkin Seiple finished the Apple+ feature Wolfs, he was set on taking a well-deserved break. It was going to take a special project to coax him back behind the camera before he’d decompressed, especially for a project outside his home base in L.A. Then the script for Weapons arrived the day after wrap. “I read the script in like an hour and I was like, ‘Shit. It’s really good. I don’t know if I’ll ever get the chance to shoot something like this again,’” said Seiple. Unfolding in overlapping chapters, writer-director Zach Cregger’s follow-up to Barbarian follows a […]
You know the multitalented Sunita Mani from Glow, Spirited, Mr. Robot, or Save Yourselves! And now, just this year, she has roles in so many projects (like The Wild, Death of a Unicorn, A Nice Indian Boy, Government Cheese, His and Hers,The Roses) that one wonders how she has to time to do it all. On this episode, she takes us back to where it all started, improv comedy, and explains how being willing to fall down and get back up has served her work. She details the “emptying out” process that she needs to do before a new role, […]
After 15 years working in series television, writing shows including Longmire, Damnation, The Terror, and most recently, Pokerface, Tony Tost moves into the world of feature filmmaking with his road-trip western caper flick Americana, whose cast boasts Zahn McClarnon, Paul Walter Hauser and Sydney Sweeney. Tost spoke with Filmmaker about his upbringing, his journey from academic and published poet to screenwriter, showrunner, and sage of the narrative craft — his Substack, Practical Screenwriting, is an endlessly rewarding font of experience, narrative nuts and bolts, and honest takes about the industry at large — all while musing over westerns, identity and […]
U.S. in Progress is now through September 5 accepting submissions from American independent filmmakers with pictures in post-production seeking finishing funds. Accepted filmmakers and projects will attend the in-person event, November 4 – 8, in Warsaw and Wroclaw under the framework of Poland’s American Film Festival, where they will present the rough cuts of their narrative projects to European buyers and Polish post-production companies providing over $100,000 in post services. The program has had a great curatorial run the last few years. Recent projects that are alumni of U.S. in Progress include the recently released Familiar Touch, directed by 2023 […]
Grasshopper Film has acquired North American digital and non-theatrical rights to How to Have an American Baby, directed by Chinese-American filmmaker Leslie Tai, the company said in a press release. The company will release the film tomorrow, August 19, on digital platforms. From the press release: A decade in the making, the film is a haunting and intimate portrait of the shadow economy of Chinese birth tourism in the United States. With rare access and remarkable empathy, How to Have an American Baby takes viewers inside a hidden network of maternity hotels, expectant mothers, brokers, and medical providers operating at […]