Durga Chew-Bose

Xavier Dolan’s Pleasure Principles

June 26, 2013

Xavier Dolan has already directed a few movies that have all screened at very known film festival, Cannes: I Killed My Mother, Heartbeats, and now, Laurence Anyways, which comes out tomorrow, executive produced by Gus Van Sant.

A Lily Grows in New York

April 18, 2013

Matt Creed’s debut feature, Lily, which premieres this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival is the story of a woman (played by co-writer Amy Grantham) who, approaching the end of cancer treatment, feels both an unwieldy sense of anticipation and uncertainty.

Derek Cianfrance and the Sins of the Fathers

March 28, 2013

As in Blue Valentine, director Derek Cianfrance’s attraction to stories about family is palpable in his newest feature, The Place Beyond the Pines, starring Bradley Cooper and Ryan Gosling.

Rebecca Thomas’ Electrick Youth

March 7, 2013

Rebecca Thomas’ feature debut, Electrick Children, is a gossamer dreamscape of middle-class teenage discontent. Shifting from Utah’s prairie and its crepuscular, gaslit interiors to Vegas’ neon make-believe, the movie follows 15-year-old Rachel (Julia Garner), who raised in a fundamentalist Mormon family and community, runs away after discovering she is pregnant by immaculate conception.

Joe Wright, in Stages

November 16, 2012

Director Joe Wright’s vision for the great 19th-century love story Anna Karenina is a remarkable collision of stage and screen, finely manoeuvring each discipline’s essence—the physical structure and fabric of theater, enlivened by film’s demiurgic extent.

Olivier Assayas’ Riot Acts

October 12, 2012

Growing up in the countryside just outside Paris, filmmaker Oliver Assayas was only 13 in 1968. He was too young to participate in the May protests or even understand what was happening. He did, however, come of age in its wake; and his most recent film, Something in the Air, follows a group of teenage friends who interpret for themselves through film, books, art, conversations with parents, dissent, sex, and travel, the revolutionary aftermath of ’68.

Abbas Kiarostami’s Tokyo (Short) Story

October 9, 2012

Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami (Close-Up, Taste of Cherry, Certified Copy)’s Like Someone in Love is an uneventfully captivating portrait of life as it happens. As it is expected to happen. And how the same heartbeat which meters our day, which maintains the humdrum, is the exact time it takes for everything to change.

Andrea Arnold in Brontë Country

October 5, 2012

Andrea Arnold, the British director who won an Academy Award for her 2005 short, Wasp, might at first glance seem like an unlikely purveyor of a Wuthering Heigths adaptation. Her two features are bleak contemporary portraits of women on the verge—disquiet brought on by obsessive retribution in Red Road and choleric teenage torment in Fish Tank.

Radnor and Olsen Close the Gap

September 14, 2012

She’s 13 in 1996, in Ted Demme’s Beautiful Girls. Her name is Marty, and she’s played by a post-Mathilda Natalie Portman. In Josh Radnor’s Liberal Arts, she’s 19, her name is Zibby, and she’s nothing like Lizzie Olsen’s Martha Marcy May.

Ashkahn Brings LA to NY

July 17, 2012

“I love LA, I love California. I love the history behind it, the palm trees, the sky, the convertibles,” says art director and illustrator Ashkahn of his city and its influence on his work. “The feeling of it; it’s really romantic to me.” Romantic, sure, but never sentimental.

Roman Coppola is Young at Heart

June 1, 2012

Founder of the production company The Director’s Bureau, and co-owner of American Zoetrope, Roman Coppola has directed numerous ads and music videos, all of which call upon his Rube Goldberg yen for imagining function, fantasy, and humor in a bubble.

Lynne Ramsay Frames the Picture

January 13, 2012

Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, based on the book by Lionel Shriver, is built like a puzzle.

John Hawkes’ House Rules

October 21, 2011

John Hawkes as Patrick, the leader of Martha Marcy May Marlene‘s farmhouse cult, is a gangly, guitar-playing father figure who veers away from the typical formula; his soft voice and sound encouragement nudge here, bait there.

Nicolas Winding Refn Revs Up

September 16, 2011

Wound up by James Sallis’s cinematic prose, Ryan Gosling sought out director Nicolas Winding Refn (Bronson, Valhalla Rising) to direct Drive.

Derek Cianfrance

December 10, 2010

Blue Valentine, which entailed a twelve-year odyssey for director Derek Cianfrance, tells the two-part story of Dean and Cindy: their quixotic courtship—his ukulele to her tap dance—juxtaposed with the heartbreak of an eroding present.

What’s the Story, Patrick Wilson?

November 9, 2010

A decidedly New York movie, Morning Glory brings to mind the screwball dueling banter of His Girl Friday.