The first thing I asked Thomas Torrey when I spoke with him by phone on February 23, 2017, was whether shooting his film, FARE, in three days, and entirely within a car, was necessity or personal challenge. Once that was out of the way, we went on to talk about the odd sort of intimacy… Read More »
AS YOU ARE — Miles Joris-Peyrafitte Interview
Mile Joris-Peyrafitte was only 23 when he made AS YOU ARE, and that was the first thing I brought up when we spoke by phone on February 22, 2017. This deeply affecting story, about three high school friends, two young men and a young woman, confronting volatile and confusing situations has a visual assurance and… Read More »
THE HANDMAIDEN (Ah-ga-ss)
Based on Sarah Water’s novel Fingersmith, Chan-Wook Park’s THE HANDMAIDEN hornswaggles its audience with its opening scenes, and then continues on for its running time to continually confound, shock, and gratify that same audience. Told in four separate chapters that each covers roughly the same action, reality becomes a series of preconceived notions that are… Read More »
THE ONES BELOW
There is definitely someone going crazy in THE ONES BELOW, and the wonderful thing about this astringent tale of mystery and suspense is that we have few doubts about who it is. The key word is few. Two couples who have layers, which may or may not be camouflage, experience tragedy, resentment, joy, and childbirth,… Read More »
THE NICE GUYS
Shane Black has the gift of making films that are nail-bitingly suspenseful and wickedly funny at the same time. He did it with KISS KISS BANG BANG, and he’s done it again with THE NICE GUYS, a stylishly acerbic and decidedly hard-boiled neo-Noir pitting nihilism against idealism during the candy-colored decadence of 1977 Los Angeles.… Read More »
PALI ROAD
The challenge when talking with director Jonathan Lim and co-producer Daxing Zhang about PALI ROAD is making sure that we don’t reveal any of the wonderful twists and turns this psychological thriller takes. The story of a woman who wakes up from a coma to a life she doesn’t recognize, but peopled with familiar faces… Read More »
Dennis Hauck talks TOO LATE
The most obvious thing to ask Dennis Hauck about his superb neo-Noir, TOO LATE, is his decision to tell the story in a series of five 20-minute long continuous takes. So, when I spoke with him on February 26, 2016, that’s the first thing brought up. I was curious both about what those takes could… Read More »
TOO LATE
Kierkegaard, noted Existentialist and proto-Absurdist, once opined that life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. As a cinematic exploration of the tragic and comedic implications of that, there is Dennis Hauck’s wistful neo-Noir, TOO LATE, a film that employs a strategic insouciance as it nimbly plays with the time/space continuum… Read More »
STRANGER BY THE LAKE
There is no getting around the prurient interest that STRANGER BY THE LAKE evokes. Set entirely on the rocky shore of the titular lake, it teems with beautiful young men madly in lust both with each other and with being in a state of nature. It is the stuff of porn flicks and of classical… Read More »
Dreary DARK PLACES
DARK PLACES is awash with dark moodiness as it tells a raggedy story that suffers from a failure of to find a narrative structure as strong or as compelling as the performance of his star, Charlize Theron. Based on the novel by Gillian Flynn, on whose novel of the same name GONE GIRL was based,… Read More »