Articles
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The story of director Barry Jenkins’ rise from shoestring indie darling to Oscar winner is nothing short of remarkable. At a surface level, the narrative would seem that Jenkins earned himself a modest breakout on the festival circuit with 2008’s MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY, only to fall into silence for eight long years. When he re-emerged…
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As the creator of THE DIRECTORS SERIES, it’s been one of the great joys of my career bringing you a long-form documentary and text essay series about cinema’s most influential filmmakers. Now, I’ve written and am about to direct an original feature film of my own, and I need your help more than ever! Follow,…
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Academy Award Wins: Best Visual Effects Director Christopher Nolan has spent most of his career imagining and entertaining various apocalypses, manifesting them onscreen via a series of big-budget action spectacles. He probably never imagined that the 2020 release of TENET, his eleventh feature film, would arrive in the midst of a very real one— an…
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“Not my President!” This phrase, loaded not just with implicit political bias but with a readiness to reject the opinions of an entire demographic as inherently invalid, has been thrown around with reckless abandon over the past few years. We live in an extreme climate of political polarization, having nuked the common ground between our…
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Notable Festivals: Southwest, Toronto While the 1990’s are often (and rightfully) regarded as a heyday for independent cinema, the late 2000’s saw the proliferation of truly indie films— a microbudget wave fostered by the rapid advancements of digital video, the rise of democratic digital exhibition formats like YouTube, and a do-it-yourself ethos that made almost…
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In 2017, Time released its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world (2). Among the usual assortment of entertainment personalities, politicians, and various thought leaders, one name would stand out as a particularly noteworthy inclusion: Barry Jenkins, an independent filmmaker who had recently won the Best Picture Oscar for his film,…
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Academy Award Wins: Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects “Los Angeles, November 2019” When these words appeared at the start of Ridley Scott’s BLADE RUNNER in 1982, the cyberpunk dystopia that followed could not have seemed more alien to an audience that had just escaped the disco era by the skin of its teeth. Set forty…
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Notable Festivals: Cannes It’s often said that the 1960’s came to an end, not on New Year’s Eve 1969, but several months earlier, on August 9th— the night that film actress Sharon Tate and her houseguests were murdered in her home in the Hollywood Hills. The shocking event signified a collective innocence not so much…
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Notable Festivals: Venice Academy Awards: Best Sound Editing Alien invasions are a routine occurrence in the realm of cinema, as mundane an event as anything else on the day’s news cycle. Most compel us to look upwards in wonder, like Steven Spielberg’s CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), or in horror, like WAR OF…
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Notable Festivals: Cannes, Toronto The drug trade figures prominently in contemporary action films for the same reason that war does. The violent, aggressive nature of the arena lends itself to inherently dramatic situations and pulse pounding developments. This multi-billion dollar shadow industry is an unfathomably complex and predatory machine, often reduced to simplistic good-vs-evil morality…
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Notable Festivals: Toronto International Festival Since his debut in the American studio system with 2013’s PRISONERS, director Denis Villeneuve has steadily carved out a monolithic space for himself as that rare breed of big budget filmmaker who can effortlessly combine a mastery of visceral spectacle with a superlative storytelling intelligence. Films like SICARIO (2015), ARRIVAL…
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Notable Festivals: Telluride Following the international breakout success of his 2010 feature, INCENDIES, director Denis Villeneuve found himself perched on the precipice of a career in the American studio system. Before taking the plunge, however, he’d indulge himself with a pair of short experimental art films— neither of which appear to be available to the…