Movie Making

Alexander Payne’s Nebraska is an impressive achievement, a fresh and innovative take on that most familiar of genres, the road movie, one that takes conventions about the American heartland and turns them on their head. It’s also a story about a father and son learning to see and understand each other for the first time. The film opens with a shot of Woody Grant (Bruce Dern in what should be a performance that collects numerous awards) shuffling purposefully down a Billings, Montana, highway, his scraggly beard, limping gait and weathered face suggesting a man who has struggled for the little …

If Behind the Candelabra is Steven Soderbergh’s last film before he retires to pursue other interests, it serves as a fitting tribute to his fascination with celebrity and to his ability to depict complex emotional relationships in an accessible and engaging fashion. The film depicts the tumultuous relationship between Liberace (Michael Douglas) and his lover, Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), during the last few years of the pianist’s life, relating the story primarily from Scott’s perspective as he is welcomed to see behind Liberace’s widely recognized stage persona and to gain access to the person behind the image. When the film …

By some estimates, over half a million people play pick-up basketball in the playgrounds of New York each year. In Doin’ It in the Park: Pick-Up Basketball, filmmakers and pick-up basketball enthusiasts Bobbito Garcia and Kevin Couliau set out to create the most comprehensive document of New York City’s summer, outdoor pick-up basketball scene by visiting 180 courts throughout all five of the city’s boroughs. Shot in a breakneck 75 summer days during 2011, their debut documentary has an immediacy and intimacy that speaks to its homemade vibe, even amongst former and current NBA players like Kenny Anderson and Brandon Jennings, …

Portraits of purgatory dot this year’s Cannes Film Festival, with movies that run the gamut in terms of styles and techniques: epic drama, cheeky comedy, documentary, animation, and surrealism. No matter what the setting, the plight is the same, with characters stuck in a cycle of emotional limbo where hope for happiness floats tantalizingly but incessantly out of reach. The most accomplished of the group is The Great Beauty, Paolo Sorrentino’s voluptuously crafted riff on La Dolce Vita and a masterful study of 65-year-old Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), a dilettante journalist still coasting on the acclaim of a single early-career …

As a documentary subject, WikiLeaks couldn’t be in better hands than those of Alex Gibney. The Oscar-winning director of Taxi to the Dark Side, whose other films include Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Mea Maxima Culpa, has displayed an ongoing interest in exposing corruptions of power. WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website responsible for the largest leaks of classified documents in history, was founded on the same principle. Yet it is surprising that We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks explores the decline of the organization as it became a victim of its own beliefs. The documentary explores the …

While I was in graduate school, many years ago, I wrote a master’s thesis on William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and have always loved the novel’s rich layering of the multiple, fragmentary points-of-view. Faulkner used to this technique — which he once described as “thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird” — to depict the Bundren family’s mock epic journey from their little hamlet to the county seat of Jefferson, where they have promised to bury the family’s matriarch, Addie. Because of my knowledge of the novel, I approached James Franco’s adaptation with a great deal of trepidation. Add …

There’s a trend in actor-turned-director helmed films at Cannes this year, an impeccable direction of the people on screen. You can tell there’s a sense of trust and cohesive goal to create something great. One of the clearest examples of this is James Franco’s new feature film, As I Lay Dying, based on the great American classic by William Faulkner, the story of the death of Addie Bundren and her family’s quest to honor her wish to be buried in the town of Jefferson. The vivid characters have come to life on the big screen through Franco’s split-screen filmmaking, led by …

In James Nares’s 1976 film Pendulum, a large metal sphere swings ominously from a bridge in a desolate TriBeCa street. We watch with unease as the ball, viewed from multiple positions, traces a giant arc, pulling on the cable, which emits a low rhythmic groan on the soundtrack. This tense, hypnotic Super-8 film, which transforms a forlorn streetscape into existential theater, offers a strange love-letter to a city (at that moment) riddled with danger and alive with artistic possibility. Pendulum was made several years after Nares’s arrival in New York at age 21 from his native England. The city’s been …

Hirakazu Kore-eda’s Like Father, Like Son engages with questions of family and identity, exploring what it means to be a father, using a plot device in which children from two different families are switched at birth, a detail that is only discovered when the sons are about to enroll in school. The film’s primary point of identification is Ryota, a young father and ambitious businessman who strives to provide for his family and also to ensure that his son will have every opportunity for success. This desire for success is conveyed from the very opening shot, in which Ryota’s son, …

Glenn Frankel’s The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend (Bloomsbury) has received more attention from the mainstream press than the average film book, and for good reason: it is an exceptional piece of writing and research. What’s more, it isn’t just a look behind the scenes of a famous movie; the author explores the notorious real-life incident that inspired Western author Alan LeMay to write his novel: the abduction of nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker by Comanche Indians in 1836. Hers was not a unique story, but it took on added significance because of her family background, and one relative’s refusal to give up on finding her. Frankel is an experienced journalist and... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]