The Kids Are All Right
It seems an accepted truism that family secrets need to be explored, especially if it involves children tracking down biological or estranged parents. No one ever considers that there might be negative consequences – a proverbial monster lurking in the closet, so to speak. In Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right, fifteen-year-old Laser (Josh […]
Journal of Screenwriting #2
In the most recent issue of The Journal of Screenwriting (which unfortunately isn’t available online), Kathryn Millard has written a really terrific review of Paul Wells's screenwriting book Basic Animation: Scripting. In her review, she also cites my book Me and You and Memento and Fargo. Kathryn Millard is a noted filmmaker, writer, scholar, and […]
Greenberg
It was inevitable that if the young filmmakers associated with mumblecore couldn’t capitalize on the phenomenon at the box office someone else would. Films like The Puffy Chair (2006), Baghead (2008), and Humpday (2009) were all expected to become commercial successes, but all of them fizzled badly. Noah Baumbach, who somewhat surprisingly produced Joe Swanberg’s […]
Fish Tank
Andrea Arnold’s disturbing second feature, Fish Tank (2009), tells the story of a disaffected fifteen-year-old girl named Mia, who’s stuck in a dead-end life. She lives with her single mom, Joanne (Kierston Wareing), who constantly parties and drinks too much, and her younger sister, Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths), in a housing project in Britain. Brilliantly played […]
Daddy Longlegs
Josh Safdie’s French New Wave-inflected debut feature The Pleasure of Being Robbed (2008) centers on a sociopathic protagonist named Eléonore (Eleonore Hendricks) and played at the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. Eléonore robs people – purses, credit cards, cars, as well as pets from children – for the sheer fun of it. I’m not sure that […]
Beeswax
Andrew Bujalski’s much-anticipated third feature, Beeswax (2009), might appear to be about almost nothing at all, which is one of the risks of naturalism. I must confess that it took a second viewing for me to appreciate fully just how subtle and complex his new film really is. Beeswax explores the relationship between a pair […]
Munyurangabo
We tend to associate one strand of American independent cinema with regionalism. Jeff Nichols’s Shotgun Stories, Lance Hammer’s Ballast, Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, Ramin Bahrani’s Goodbye Solo, and Barry Jenkins’s Medicine for Melancholy serve as some recent examples. But a new trend rooted in globalism seems to be developing. Chris Smith made The Pool […]
In Between Days
As the typewritten title scrolls across the lower right portion of the screen, we hear footsteps crunching snow, which continue over black. Aimie (Jiseon Kim), a Korean-American teenage girl in a fur-lined parka, trudges toward us in closeup, as we see a couple of high-rise buildings in the background. Over an image of this desolate […]