Now that they’ve set the year’s best film for a December 10 debut, the Criterion Channel have unveiled the rest of next month’s selection. John Waters’ films are inseparable from John Waters’ presence, making fitting Criterion’s decision to pair an eight-film retrospective (Multiple Maniacs to Cecil B. Demented) with his own “Adventures in Moviegoing” wherein […]
The post December on the Criterion Channel Includes Bob Dylan, John Waters, MTV & More first appeared on The Film Stage.
To the sounds of cicadas during a Tokyo summer, 11-year-old Karin and her father Tetsuya leave the city by train to visit a countryside temple where the caretaker is the grandfather she has never met. It is a grand old property at the edge of a forest, near a sleepy little fishing village. Local spirits abound. Wait. Does this all sound kind of familiar? After 40 years of Studio Ghibli creating masterpiece upon masterpiece, the animation house was sold off to Nippon TV at the end of last year due to a lack of any successors to its founders: Miyazaki-san, who seems to have retired for real this time after many false attempts, and Takahata-san, who passed away in 2018. Given that there may not…
Payal Kapadia’s soul-stirring docudrama, A Night of Knowing Nothing, delicately weaved together India’s national politics, student protest movement, cinema, and its nostalgia in 2021. Her follow-up narrative film, All We Imagine as Light, proves that she is one of the most exciting new talents emerging in the current international cinema scene. All We Imagine as Light starts with the documentary style footage of bustling Mumbai, as its citizens start the day in a ‘city symphony’ style intro, paired with voice-overs of actual workers who came to the big city, looking for work: street vendors getting ready for their businesses, people hanging on the back of trucks in a packed traffic, large crowds milling into commuter train stations, filling in on crowded train cars, talking, sharing…
An unusual family lives an unusual life in Mark H. Rapaport’s Hippo, one of the stranger films that has played at the Fantasia Film Festival. Rapaport drops us into a suburban dystopic home where society’s rules don’t seem to apply, and no subject is too taboo to elicit nervous laughter. Hippo (Kimball Farley) and his Hungarian adopted sister Buttercup (Lilla Kizlinger) share a troubling relationship with each other and their mother, Ethel (Eliza Roberts), as they approach adulthood wholly unprepared for the world outside their doors. A young man on the verge of adulthood, Hippo is an odd duck. He spends his days playing video games, bossing around his mother, and searching for automatic weapons on the internet. It’s the late ‘90s, two of these…
In Andrea Arnold’s Bird, Irish actor Barry Keoghan plays a father of two teenagers. In the film, he had both children when he, too, was a teenager. He’s brash with tattoos everywhere, completely focused on an upcoming wedding with his three-month girlfriend. It’s a stellar performance from him, imbued with his own recent experiences of […]
The post Barry Keoghan on Young Fatherhood, Loving La La Land, and the Movement of Andrea Arnold’s Bird first appeared on The Film Stage.
Life in a lost country comes into focus in one of DOC NYC’s most acclaimed selections, There Was, There Was Not. Emily Mkrtichian makes her directorial debut with this documentary that follows the lives of four women in Artsakh, a […]
The post THERE WAS, THERE WAS NOT Trailer: Four Women Survive War in a Lost Country in Moving Debut Documentary appeared first on Hammer to Nail.
DOC NYC, the world’s largest documentary film festival, is making its return to NYC from November 13 through December 1 (in-person and online) for its 15th edition. It will screen more than 200 films, 110 of which are feature-length. Many […]
The post HtN’s 15 Most Anticipated at DOC NYC ’24 appeared first on Hammer to Nail.
This fall, Walter Salles finally returned with his first feature in 12 twelve years, the moving political/family drama I’m Still Here. Led by a powerhouse performance by Fernanda Torres alongside Selton Mello and Fernanda Montenegro, Sony Classics will give Brazil’s Oscar entry a qualifying run beginning next week in LA before opening on January 17. […]
The post U.S. Trailer for Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here Introduces Brazil’s Oscar Entry first appeared on The Film Stage.
“A Witch is born out of the true hungers of her time,” wrote Ray Bradbury in one of his stories from Long After Midnight (1976), as succinct a phrase as any to convey the cultural facets which historically plagued troubled or troubling women, almost always to forge their doom. The Devil’s Bath, the third feature from Austrian directing duo Veronica Franz and Severin Fiala, is not a film about witches, per se. However, their first period piece, set in 1750 Upper Austria, is most assuredly a horror story, taken from historical court records.… Read the rest
