At an unidentified, vestigially western community in rural Utah, two old friends, a real estate prospector named Wes (Tom Blair) and a struggling, third-generation rancher named Larry (Robert Ernst), sit at the counter of a diner and bide their unhurried morning over bottomless cups of hot coffee, reminiscing over their last, uneventful hunting trip and […]
Few filmmakers capture the complex landscape of rural America in all its strong-willed self-determination, insularity, and dispiriting sameness as pointedly and eloquently as Jon Jost. It is this conjured frontier image of all-or-nothing prospects and fickle fate that engenders wealth just as easily as it nurtures poverty that Jost alludes to in the implicit irony […]
In the review for Sara Johnsen’s understated and intelligently realized debut feature Kissed by Winter, Mode Steinkjer writes, “The last part of the film’s key moments are accompanied by Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah sung by Jeff Buckley in his version that is both beautiful and atmospheric. For me the song works to elevate the drama because […]
During the Q&A for Local Call, filmmaker Arthur Joffé expressed his great fondness and respect for the works of Nobel laureate author and playwright, Isaac Bashevis Singer, whom he credits as his primary screenwriting influence, and from the complex tragicomic, impassioned, affecting, and deeply humanist tone of the film, the affinity is easy to see. […]
In its portrait of a culture on the verge of erasure with the advent of redevelopment and gentrification, Jia Zhang-ke’s 24 City shares kinship with José Luis Guerín’s En Construcción, reflecting the idea of a city built from the rubble of abandoned, forgotten histories. Interweaving first person and composite, fictional interviews with workers, friends, and […]
Perhaps what is most striking about Jia Zhang-ke’s latest digital feature, Still Life, is its unexpected maturity, a marked evolution away from capturing the sad, eccentric tales of youthful indirection and cultural anachronism of contemporary Chinese life under an often contradictory, dual economy system that defined his earlier films towards a more somber – and […]