“We Can Keep Living in a Glacial World”: Sara Dosa on Time and Water
A splendid yet elegiac homage to dying, receding, failing, yet magnificent glaciers, Sara Dosa’s Time and Water, a documentary produced with National Geographic and Sandbox Films, is awe-inspiring precisely because it makes you feel helpless to move. That’s what awe is, after all. The film makes use of a treasure trove of archival materials, some of it supplied by Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason and his family, who lived a lot of their lives recording them and raising posterity alongside the glaciers. Standing still with these images and sounds (in front of the largest screen only, please) and catching snippets of […]
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Astrid Rotenberry has had roles on Law & Order SVU, The Four Seasons, and American Sports Story. Now she plays Catherine Kelly in the Netflix limited series His and Hers, and her performance is so authentic and affecting it runs the risk of being taken for granted. On this episode, she details what excited her about the role, and why trust is so important to her. She takes us back to her childhood and how parental encouragement impacted her, talks about some of the valuable nuggets she learned as an intern in a casting office, expounds on ways she combats self-doubt, and much more. Back […]
While the East digs out from under feet of snow and ice, Park City is dry as a bone. Desiccated slopes encircling Main Street are gray and bare, devoid of powder or skiers. Meanwhile, Main Street, a pedestrian mall during the festival, is buzzier than ever, packed with Sundancers under sunny skies reveling at the festival’s last rodeo in Utah. The only precipitation in the forecast is another blizzard of great indie films. Last night’s premiere of Once Upon a Time in Harlem was the film’s first public screening ever, and it was met with two standing ovations. Assembled from […]
In Filipiñana, tension often lives inside the image itself: a desiccated pine tree creaks against a bright blue sky; mangos left to rot on the branch. There is beauty here, but also decay. Rafael Manuel’s debut feature expands on his 2020 Berlinale-winning short (which is streamable courtesy of The Criterion Channel) to offer an extended yet precise parable about class, memory, and quiet violence in his home country, the Philippines—filtered through the microcosm of a golf course on the outskirts of Manila during a scorching summer day. The film follows Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto), a new tee girl, as she acclimates […]
Take Me Home is a film about a caregiver, and the spirit of caregiving infused the entire production. Writer-director Liz Sargent based the feature, her first, on her short of the same name, which premiered at Sundance in 2023. It stars Anna Sargent, her sister, as a woman with a cognitive disability who is the caregiver for her aging adoptive parents. In fact, this is a family of mutual caregivers whose routines are shattered during a central Florida heatwave. How Anna navigates her new emotional reality forms the story’s core, and in striving to locate her character’s need for autonomy, Sargent […]
Twenty three years have passed since Jay and Mark Duplass made a seven-minute short titled This is John for $3—yes, three dollars—that premiered in Sundance in 2003 and effectively launched their careers. This year, Jay (who recently directed the intimately sweet The Baltimorons) is back in Park City as a director with See You When I See You, a darkly funny dramedy about coping with PTSD—and your family. “It feels excellent,” Duplass says about his return to the Utah mountains that’s hosting the Sundance Film Festival for the final time, before next year’s move to Boulder, CO. “Some of my […]
Until now, the Silicon Valley hype cycle has defined the terms of the artificial-intelligence debate, with advocates predicting universal affluence and the end of all diseases while critics worry that computers will steal not only our jobs but our creative pursuits too. Valerie Veatch’s Ghost in the Machine proposes a different possibility altogether: that “AI,” if you can even call it that, is just the latest in a long line of grift-y attempts by powerful, exclusionary white guys to remake the whole world in their own image. Connecting the dots between AI’s origins and such lamentable historical low points as the discredited […]
The History of Concrete, John Wilson’s first feature-length film, is far stranger and more compelling than the title suggests—and a perfect continuation of his oft-meandering, always philosophical practice. Yes, there are novel factoids about Ancient Rome, the removal of gum from city sidewalks and the oldest concrete road in America, but the plot often shifts and transmogrifies, in true Wilsonian fashion, before circling back to the topic at hand. For some, this constant zooming—out, in, away entirely—can be frustratingly disorienting. For those who enjoy the visual approximation of falling down a (preferably weed-induced) Wikipedia rabbit hole, this is non-fiction at […]
“It’s been my own life that I’ve put on the screen,” pioneering artist Barbara Hammer says in VO as we witness her striking poses, flexing muscles, and standing defiantly naked before her lens. “My life has been lived in film.” Indeed, the taboo-shattering lesbian/avant-garde filmmaker, who died of ovarian cancer at the age of 79 in 2019, left behind an archive comprised of 80 films, along with a treasure trove of unreleased footage, audio interviews, personal photos and more. It’s an extraordinary body of work, put to skilled cinematic use by Brydie O’Connor—who likewise collaborated with Hammer’s widow Florrie Burke […]