Intent to Destroy and For Ahkeem

Much as Americans love reality television, we tend to shun documentaries, especially issue-based ones, probably because many of us see film and TV as a form of escapism. So the $100 million left by Armenian-American billionaire Kirk Kerkorian to finance a film about the genocidal killing of as estimated 1.5 million Armenians by the Turkish government in the early 20th century went to a fiction film, Terry George's The Promise, which is currently playing in theaters nationwide. Meanwhile, Joe Berlinger's Intent to Destroy has no distributor or theatrical release date after its premiere at Tribeca. And that's a shame, because it's a far better film than George's stiff costume drama. Its depiction of the horrors of the genocide is more unvarnished, and therefore more accurate. More importantly, it explains the importance of that chapter in human history and examines the century-long denial campaign by the Turkish government that's all but erased the tragedy from the world's memory.

Interview: Jon Bernthal

Thanks in part to his hard body, soft eyes, and a formerly broken nose that gives him almost as distinctive a profile as Javier Bardem's, Jon Bernthal has played a lot of cops and ethnic roles, many of them alpha males, though he's been offered a bit more variety of parts since his breakout role as Rick Grimes's best friend turned rival, Shane Walsh, on AMC's The Walking Dead.

I met with Bernthal this week at a Tribeca hotel, where he was promoting two of his latest films, both playing in this year's Tribeca Film Festival. In Jamie M. Dagg's neo-noir Sweet Virginia, Bernthal plays Sam, a hotel manager in a sleepy town who's forced into action when a killer comes to town. He plays another reluctant hero in Brendan Muldowney's Pilgrimage, a grim tale of a group of 12th-century monks enlisted to bring the Pope a sacred relic they have been safeguarding, who embark on their perilous journey under the protection of Bernthal's mute former soldier.

Polite, sincere, and prone to searching for just the right word, Bernthal seemed a bit younger and more diffident in person than he does on screen. We talked about studying theater in Moscow, the surrogate-father bond Sam forms with a young woman that was Bernthal's favorite relationship in Sweet Virginia, and why Frank Darabont and I see him as a latter-day John Garfield.

Tribeca Film Festival: Manifesto

There's no dialogue in Julian Rosenfeldt's Manifesto, just recitations of manifestos about art—plus the excerpt from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's Communist Manifesto that kicks off the first scene. That may sound like a recipe for didactic miserabilism, but the film is vibrant and engaging, even entertaining. What it's not is particularly thought-provoking.

New Directors/New Films: Person to Person

Dustin Guy Defa's Person to Person started as a short film by the same name, a pungently detailed portrait of a certain slice of pre-gentrified New York in which Bene Coopersmith played more or less himself as a quietly charismatic Brooklyn record-store owner. The feature film is a collection of interwoven, sometimes overlapping character studies that encompass a wider swath of characters and locations with varying degrees of success.

New Directors/New Films: Happy Times Will Come Soon

In Happy Times Will Come Soon, Alessandro Comodin tries to work out a new filmic vocabulary that merges realistic fiction with fable—fracturing time, tracing out just the barest outline of each character and situation, sometimes mixing realism with surrealism, and lingering so long on shots in which the action barely changes that he all but forces us to be in the moment with him. But while the director creates many individual moments of beauty, his film is a mélange of gorgeous tiles that never quite comes together as a mosaic.

New Directors/New Films: Sexy Durga

Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s Sexy Durga generates a steady thrum of dread that builds to cringe-inducing levels as it follows a couple, Durga (Rajshri Deshpande) and Kabeer (Kannan Nayar), over the course of a night in the southern Indian state of Kerali. Though their body language and occasional urgent exchanges speak to the tender intimacy between the two, their minimal dialogue tells us almost nothing about them except that she’s a Hindi-speaking northern Indian, he’s from Kerali, and they’re trying to hitch a ride to a railroad station so they can catch a train north. This pointed lack of detail makes the story of one couple’s journey gone horribly awry feel universal, an allegory about the violent misogyny that plagues India.

New Directors New Films: Patti Cake$

As the bass-heavy, dance club-lit dream that opens writer-director Geremy Jaspers's Patti Cake$ makes clear, Patricia Dombrowski (Danielle Macdonald) is a legend in her own mind, a stadium-thrilling rapper who goes by Killa P or Patti Cake$. But to almost everyone else she's just a fat girl, so large that the bros in Bayonne, her down-at-the-heels hometown, call her Dumbo.

New York Film Festival 2016 Interview: Laura Dern

Laura Dern likes to tell the story of how, when she was a teenager, Martin Scorsese complimented her for having already started to build a body of work—a feat, as he pointed out, that directors often accomplish but actors rarely do. Since then, she's built an impressive portfolio of complicated women who experience life deeply. She's probably best known for Jurassic Park's highly competent Ellie, but her most memorable characters are those, like Amy Jellicoe from HBO's Enlightened, whose volcanic inner lives keep spitting up burning lava onto the character herself and anyone who gets close to her.

I spoke to Dern earlier this month about her latest role in Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women, a quietly bubbling cauldron of subterranean emotion that follows three tangentially related female characters. One of those women is Dern's Laura Wells, a lawyer with a troubled client (played by Jared Harris) whose life goes completely off the rails after he suffers an on-the-job injury his employer won't compensate him for. 

In person as on screen, Dern's warm, expressive voice conveys layers of feeling. She takes her time as she answers questions, her alert attentiveness a form of grace that makes the person across the table from her feel fully engaged with. She talked about, among other things, why she loves playing “difficult” women, what has changed in her personal and professional lives since she turned 40, and how Reichardt helped her overcome the challenge of playing a character whose emotions are hidden even from herself.

I read or watched a lot of your interviews in preparation for this. You always give very thoughtful answers and even seem to enjoy yourself.
That's nice to hear! Thank you. I've never had anyone say that to me. You know, I love movies, and my parents [Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd] love movies, and I was raised with a real love of being able to connect on a love of film. Some of my parents' dearest friends have been journalists and film critics. Sheila Benson at the Los Angeles Times was one of my first godmother-advocate supporters of the choices I was making and of my staying true to loving filmmakers and participating in a vision.

New York Film Festival 2016: The Unknown Girl

The Unknown Girl plays October 12 and 13 as part of the main slate of the 54th New York Film Festival. Sundance Selects will open the film theatrically in 2017. 

An excellent doctor, Jenny Davin (Adèle Haenel) pays close attention to her patients, treating them with a respectful warmth that puts them at ease. What’s more, she’s unafraid of standing up to disreputable patients who try to bully her into falsifying medical records so they can shirk work. The same skills that make her a good doctor also make her a gifted amateur detective when an African immigrant who had knocked at her clinic door after hours one night turns up dead the next day.

Interview: Sarah Paulson and Mark Duplass

The four-film deal Mark Duplass and his brother, Jay, made last year with Netflix is just one indication of how successful the prolific brothers have been at cranking out and marketing smart, talky, emotionally honest and sneakily funny movies and TV shows, in collaboration with an ever-expanding cohort of equally talented youngish actors and filmmakers. Blue Jay, directed by Alex Lehmann and written by Duplass, is the first of those four movies.

Improvised from a detailed but very short treatment and shot over just seven days, the black-and-white two-hander is about a reunion between two former high school sweethearts, Jim (Duplass) and Amanda (Sarah Paulson), and the distorting magnetic pull a lost love can exert on a person's life. Throughout the film, Paulson's centered warmth and slightly goofy humor make Jim's enduring infatuation plausible while showcasing a loose-limbed, charming side the actress has never quite unloosed before on screen.

At a Four Seasons restaurant in New York to publicize the film on the day of its theatrical release, the two exhibited the same chemistry they exude in the film, watching each other intently as they spoke, occasionally leaning into one another for a hug and often cracking each other up.

So, Sarah, Blue Jay was your first experience with improv. Do you want to do it again?

Sarah Paulson: Yes! Yes! And I didn't know that I would feel that way when I started.

What did you like about it?

New York Film Festival 2016: Julieta

Julieta played October 7 and 8, and will play again October 16, as part of the main slate of the 54th New York Film Festival. Sony Classics will release the film theatrically beginning December 21. 

Alice Munro, the author of the three stories on which he based his latest film, “inspired me to a different way of telling a story,” said director Pedro Almodóvar at the Q&A after the New York Film Festival press screening of Julieta, later adding: “I tried to make a drama, not a melodrama, which is my natural inclination.” No kidding. Almodóvar’s attempt to channel Munro may be in keeping with the shift visible in his work since 1999’s All About My Mother, as his female characters become more complex and less cartoonish, their inner lives almost as well-rounded as his pulchritudinous leading ladies’ tightly encased curves. Still, the flamboyant Spanish king of baroque plots and peacock exteriors is one of the last people you might expect to adapt the understated Canadian master’s realistic stories about resolutely ordinary people.

New York Film Festival 2016: Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, I Called Him Morgan, & Uncle Howard

Steve James displays his usual savvy for picking culturally resonant topics in his latest documentary, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail. This time it's the oddly underreported story of Abacus, the eponymous family-owned Chinatown business, which is the only U.S. bank ever indicted for fraud in connection with the subprime mortgage scandal of the late 2000s. The rest of the film's title comes from journalist Matt Taibbi, who explains that the banks actually responsible for the crisis were all deemed “too big to fail,” so none were prosecuted for their crimes. “Too big to fail translates to small enough to jail, and Abacus is small enough to jail,” he says.

New York Film Festival 2016: 13th

13th was the Opening Night film of the 54th New York Film Festival. The film is now available to stream on Netflix.

The past couple years have seen a creative outpouring of works, mostly by African Americans, that anatomize the systemic discrimination and violence perpetrated against black people since this country’s inception. These include books like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Ta-Nahesi Coates’ Between the World and Me and Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad; TV series like OJ: Made in America and the remake of Roots; and movies like 12 Years a Slave, The Central Park 5, The House I Live In and Ava DuVernay’s majestic Selma. DuVernay’s latest film, the feature-length documentary 13th, is an important addition to that lineup.

Tribeca Film Festival 2016: Hunt for the Wilderpeople

Taika Waititi's Hunt for the Wilderpeople is told from the point of view of a chubby, self-confident orphan, Ricky (Julian Dennison), with a rich inner life who composes haikus for fun. As the film begins, he's delivered to the last foster home willing to take him in, a small farm carved out of the edge of New Zealand's bush country. Ricky has a bit of trouble in his past and fancies himself an outlaw, but he's really a goodhearted kid, as his enthusiastic and intuitive foster mother, Bella (Rima Te Wiata), sees from the start.

Tribeca Film Festival 2016: Don't Think Twice

Writer-director Mike Birbiglia condenses years of experience in live comedy into this smart, affectionate take on the rivalry, love, ambition, and creative juices that fuel the lives of professional comedians. When one of members of a New York City improv group called The Commune gets hired at Weekend Live, an SNL-like kahuna of a TV show that represents the ultimate in ticket-punching success for a professional comic, his coup sends most of the other members into a frenzy of self-doubt, frustration, or attempts to ride his coattails into the limelight.

But Don't Think Twice isn't about success or failure as much as it is about the creative life, as experienced by a group of youngish comedians who've achieved a certain level of success, but still need day jobs or indulgent parents to support their comedy habit. As thirtysomething Bill (Chris Gethard) puts it: “I feel like your 20s are all about hope, and then your 30s are all about leaning how dumb it was to hope.” And most of the group's members are in their 30s.

There’s a real sense of family within The Commune, as evidenced not just in the ritual pre-performance group hug, but also in mind-meld moments like the group’s trip back from visiting Bill’s father in the hospital after the man suffers from a stroke, in which they get Bill to laugh by competing for the best impression of the one halting phrase his father managed to croak out. No wonder Samantha (Gillian Jacobs), perhaps The Commune’s most talented member, wants nothing more than to keep performing with her friends in their shabby little theater.

But everyone else in the group—including Sam’s boyfriend, Jack (Keegan-Michael Key), its most scene-stealing member—has at least one eye on Weekend Live. Their obsession with the show keeps putting them into comically embarrassing situations, like when guest host Ben Stiller comes to see their show, after one of them has joined Weekend Live, and they blow their big chance to connect with a star, peppering him with awkward questions when he comes over to their table in a bar afterward to congratulate them. It’s just one of many slightly painfully funny and truthful moments in this surefooted film.

The Tribeca Film Festival runs from April 13—24.

Written for The House Next Door

Tribeca Film Festival 2016: The Family Fang

There are a lot of surface similarities between The Family Fang and Arrested Development, another tragicomedy about an extravagantly dysfunctional family in which Jason Bateman's character reacts against his parents' high-handed neglect by trying to become a model of emotional health and stability. But where Arrested Development used a light dusting of sorrow to add shading to a gleefully absurdist romp, The Family Fang is an earnest story of redemption with a wacky veneer that doesn't quite fit.

Tribeca Film Festival 2016: Adult Life Skills

If it had bigger stars and a less quirk-dependent plot, Rachel Tunnard's Adult Life Skills would be right at home at the multiplex, probably starring someone like Kate Hudson. The romance here is relegated to comically awkward background, sparing us the trope of the hapless heroine whose messy life is all tidied up by the love of a good man, but the rest is dispiritingly predictable. Anna (Jodie Whittaker) is a kind of English Zoe Deschanel, a wide-eyed free spirit who doesn't realize how loveable she is. She lives in a shed in her mother's backyard, which she has crammed full of artsy detritus like pinwheels and homemade tinfoil rocket ships. When she's not working at a community center, she likes to draw a rudimentary face on each of her thumbs and then shoot video of them having a conversation.

New Directors New Films: Under the Shadow

Under the Shadow was screened in this year's New Directors New Films festival.

Like an Iranian take on The Babadook, writer-director Babak Anvari's Under the Shadow is an emotionally direct and realistic horror story centered around a socially isolated mother and child who are terrorized by eerie supernatural events. The paranormal happenings are very likely a combination of the mother's hallucinations and the child's way of making sense of the violence the mother perpetrates as her sanity ebbs and flows, but Anvari keeps things creepy in part by leaving open the possibility that there really may be something supernatural out there.

New Directors New Films: Donald Cried

Donald Cried was screened at this year's New Directors New Films festival.

In this emotionally astute debut feature, Kris Avedisian anatomizes a type of encounter that's much more common in life than in movies: an awkward reunion between two long-estranged friends that unearths a complex mix of guilt and shame in the one responsible for the estrangement. It would be easy for a filmmaker to either make such an encounter feel tediously uneventful or to pump it full of movie-ish melodrama, but Donald Cried does neither, remaining resolutely realistic while mining plenty of pathos, humor, and drama from the situation.

Miles Ahead

Miles Ahead played in this year's New York Film Festival.

Like the unruly spawn of The End of the Tour and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Miles Ahead is a fictionalized biography of a real artist that pairs its subject with a journalist turned sidekick of sorts. Unlike The End of the Tour's logorrheic David Foster Wallace, Miles Ahead's Miles Davis (Don Cheadle) is tight-lipped and enigmatic, too cool to ever spill his guts—except maybe literally, in one of the comically inept gunfights he keeps getting into. Instead of talking to Rolling Stone freelancer Dave Brill (Ewan McGregor), he makes him his wingman on a series of quixotic quests, pursuing a tape of the only music he's recorded during a long fallow period; the $20,000 he says his thuggish producer, Harper (Michael Stuhlbarg), owes him; and the mounds of cocaine that fuel his erratic, often violent, possibly paranoid behavior.