Corey Feldman: "Then my wife says to me, 'Since [Jordan Peele] wants to work with you, you should show him The Birthday because that's your best work.” It was never released in theaters here.

Michael M. Bilandic: "I’d never heard of it. It really feels like a 'lost' film."

CF: "Yeah! So I invited him over, and that was really what sparked all of this—his instant love for the movie. He was like, 'Look, this is a cinematic masterpiece. Your performance is groundbreaking and mind blowing. And the world needs to see this.' Those were his words.

Then out of nowhere, a month later, I got a text from his producer. He says, 'Jordan is putting together this film series and wants to include your films.' There were originally going to be four Michael Jackson films in there too. Then they got rid of all those except for The Wiz. So originally, it looked kind of like a 'Michael and Corey' festival. That would have maybe been a little too controversial."

Michael M. Bilandic for Screen Slate.
Features 1/13/2023 on 35mm at Film at Lincoln Center as part of the series “The Lost Rider: A Chronicle of Hollywood Sacrifice.”

"Five years ago Kyle Edward Ball started making short horror videos inspired by people’s nightmares and posting them on YouTube. His debut feature Skinamarink—shot for just $15,000 in his childhood home in Edmonton, Canada—was the breakout hit of last year’s Fantasia Film Festival, and came from seemingly out of nowhere to become one of the most anticipated horror films.

Ahead of Skinamarink’s nationwide theatrical opening this Friday, Ball ed the Screen Slate pod over Zoom to talk about getting started as a filmmaker, developing his aesthetic, the YouTube analog horror movement, and how strongly the film has managed to resonate with audiences even before its release."

Listen to the Screen Slate podcast here.

"Inextricable from the gangsta rap phenomenon, Menace has a soundtrack featuring the likes of N.W.A. and DJ Quik, and the debates around the film’s portrayal of gang violence, sexism, and drug use mirrored those swirling around rap music."

"Its box-office success alone confirms that Menace’s appeal went far beyond Black audiences, grossing $30 million against a $3.5 million budget. Still, white people would be hard-pressed to find a flattering avatar in the film; the only white characters with any lines are abusive cops and a Westwood yuppie (Ian Davis) who hires Clifton Powell to steal a Nissan Maxima"

Cosmo Bjorkenheim for Screen Slate. Featured 1/11/2023 at Nitehawk Prospect Park on 35mm as part of the series “Adventures in Black Cinema.”

"The potentially deadly quality of that drama is underscored by the presence of two child actors who most poignantly represent the perilous heights and shattering depths of youthful popularity. Mark Rocco, in his second of three directorial efforts before his own untimely death, allows the camera to linger troublingly over the teenagers’ bodies, capturing their increasing awkwardness as they enter what today’s viewers know will be a wildly unforgiving adulthood for both. Seeing Feldman dress up as and mimic the then-ubiquitous dance moves of Michael Jackson throughout Dream a Little Dream only increases the vertiginous anxiety accompanying what should be a fairly lighthearted romp."

Madelyn Sutton for Screen Slate. Featuring 1/10/2023 at Film at Lincoln Center.

"While it sounds melodramatic, Kusijanović’s film is a quietly simmering, sun-baked affair (thanks to sparkling cinematography from Hélène Louvart). There are plenty of beautiful underwater scenes, including eel hunting—murina refers to a moray eel, the prey of the family’s spear-fishing enterprise and an apt metaphor for the slippery relationships at play—and an extended face-to-face between Julija and Ante."

Dana Reinoos for Screen Slate. Featured 1/8/2023 at the Museum of the Moving Image.

"Titus Kaphar is one of the most exciting figures in contemporary painting. His powerful and complex works on canvas challenge white supremacist notions of history and representation. By combining technical brilliance with transgressive daring, Kaphar is able to create a depth of ideas and feeling that have found a place in major museums and galleries. As a Black artist, however, his place in the art world is a complicated one. In Kaphar and documentarian Alex Mallis’s new film, Shut Up and Paint (2022), they explore the challenges that come with making uniquely personal work about Black life in America, and its place in the capitalist art market."

Chris Shields interviews Titus Kaphar and Alex Mallis for Screen Slate. Featured 1/4/2023 at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema.

"In the simplest , Mimic is a film about genetically engineered cockroaches in New York City. That logline alone is worthy of a modestly budgeted, R-rated, mid-’90s genre film. And that is the film that Miramax/Dimension ultimately delivered to audiences in the summer of 1997.

But, as anyone could tell who had seen Del Toro’s prior film, Cronos, before sitting down for 105 minutes with Mimic, something was missing. While some critics praised its breakneck pacing and creepy visuals, del Toro’s philosophical aspects were largely absent. Where the focus on the theatrical cut is indeed a battle between man and nature, pitting Mira Sorvino and Charles S. Dutton against a bunch of manlike mutant cockroaches, the director’s cut is much more apocalyptic in its scope."

Justin LaLiberti for Screen Slate. Featured 1/7/2023 at the Museum of Modern Art.

"In his condemnation of chivalry Bresson communicates a deep distrust of Western civilization’s ancient codes of honor, a misgiving that would evolve into a cynical critique of the world’s damned state in his last two films: The Devil Probably (1977) and L’Argent (1983). Far from romance, stripped of fancy, Lancelot du Lac is a solemn film disclosing a broken world, which turns to myth as a palliative from its constant misery."

Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer for Screen Slate. Featured 1/3/2023 at Light Industry.

"Henri begins a desperate pursuit of Jean, the mercurial object of his obsession and the symbol of his sexual awakening. He leaves his parents’ home and takes to the street like a feral animal in search of the man who kissed him, but also anything else he can find—encountering lust, humiliation, and beauty along the way. As Jean uses and eludes him, Henri sinks into a twisting underworld that unfurls in filthy ribbons of violence and missed connections."

Sara Fensom for Screen Slate. Featured on 1/5/2023 at Anthology Film Archives in a new digital restoration.

"Hitchcock creates an unconventional noir setting, sacrificing a chiaroscuro city of angular alleyways and streetlights piercing the darkness for the sunny, Norman Rockwell–esque town of Santa Rosa, California."

"...When Uncle Charlie arrives by train under a menacing cloud of black smoke, it’s as if a villain from a different movie is invading. While not pushed to salacious conclusions, the almost psychic connection between Charlie and her uncle—combined with Cotton’s looming, dominating physical presence in his scenes with Teresa Wright—implies a pseudo-incestuous rot at the heart of American life."

Stephanie Monohan for Screen Slate. Featured 1/2/2023 at Film Forum.

"Taken at face value, John Dahl’s 1994 neo-noir The Last Seduction would seem to have more in common with, or at least be intentionally capitalizing on, the decidedly erotic thrills of early-’90s thrillers like Basic Instinct (1992) and Indecent Proposal (1993); but outside of its title and some mostly clothed bouts of adventurous lovemaking, The Last Seduction is more interested in power than sex. In that, it bears striking similarities to Dahl’s previous film Red Rock West (1993), likewise set in a dead-end town, wherein a cast of men, from various walks of life, falls prey to the deceit of a woman smarter, stronger, and ultimately more determined than they are to leave the barren wasteland they call home."

Justin Laliberty for Screen Slate. Featured 9/22/22 at Nitehawk Cinema.

"The winner of the TIFF people’s choice award was Steven Spielberg’s The Fablemans, a rip-roaring film that plays like a celebrity memoir ghost-written by a real wit with a taste for the literal (in this case, Tony Kushner).

"... In all, the film is the best thing it could possibly be: a big-hearted blockbuster with laughs, tears, and winking fan service for the whole family. It feels strange to be piling more praise onto the auto-hagiography of the world’s most successful living purveyor of moving images, but there it is."

Maxwell Paparella for Screen Slate in TIFF 2022 wrap-up published 9/20/22.

"Drawing from transcripts of the 2016 trial of a Senegal-born Frenchwoman who drowned her fifteen-month-old daughter and subsequently claimed in court that a spell had been put on her, Alice Diop’s Saint Omer (2022), like Bertrand Bonello’s Zombi Child (2019), treats the unable power of witchcraft as a metaphor for the liminal sinkhole between the West and its former colonies."

Mark Asch for Screen Slate. TIFF 2022 review published 9/14/22.

"Indian filmmaker Achal Mishra lived in Darbhanga until he was ten, later studied in London, and now divides his time between Mumbai and his hometown. For his nostalgic debut feature, Gamak Ghar (The Village House, 2019), he turned to his childhood memories of carefree vacations spent with his extended family at their ancestral home in Darbhanga. Mishra's sophomore feature, Dhuin (2022), sees him returning to his hometown, but the milieu this time is different and doesn't inherit his personal space. In Gamak, the filmmaker ruminates on losing connection with one's roots and the longing to reforge it. Dhuin takes up the antithesis: capturing the ennui of Darbhanga's youth who are restless to migrate from it."

Arun A.K. for Screen Slate. Featured 9/16/22 at MoMA.

"Rob Zombie’s debut feature, House of 1000 Corpses did not make positive waves upon its troubled release in 2003, having been ed around by multiple distributors and undergone a bevy of cuts in order to avoid an NC-17 rating. While Zombie has gone on to hone his directorial skills and become somewhat of a horror auteur, his first film emits the sensation of someone throwing everything at the wall in anticipation of never getting another chance to do so. What results is part kaleidoscopic grindhouse homage, part meta black comedy, and yes, part Rob Zombie music video. However, the film’s faults are also what make it a fascinating work recontextualized nearly two decades later, as horror film fandom has calcified into the vision that Zombie purposefully presents: a pastiche of references and icons, merchandise, and images that traffic in nostalgia."

Stephanie Monohan for Screen Slate. Featured 9/12/22 at Nitehawk Cinema.

"Donald Cammell’s techno-natal-horror film Demon Seed (1977) turns a domicile of the future into a claustrophobic chamber of female oppression. In other hands, its concept would likely lend itself to brasher, more conventional sci-fi, but Cammell (then known for the controversial crime drama Performance, 1977, directed with Nicolas Roeg) creates a more artful social commentary piece by keeping the story rooted in the perspective of its main female character, in line with Dean Koontz’s original novel. What results is a horrifying look at the fragility of bodily and reproductive autonomy under technological control—strongly resonant decades later, while tech is rigorously weaponized against people capable of being pregnant."

Stephanie Monohan for Screen Slate. Featured 9/13/22 at IFC Center.

Emerson Goo for Screen Slate. Featured 9/17/22 at MoMA.

Mark Asch for Screen Slate out of TIFF 2022. Published 9/17/22.

From R. Emmet Sweeney's article "Action Item: iQIYI," published February 25, 2024 on Screen Slate.

• Exquisite Bodyguard
• Fight Against Evil 2
• Eye for an Eye
• The Comeback
• Angry Pursuit
• Love For Love's Sake
• Pit Babe
• Love in the Air
• For Him
• Fight Against Evil

A rolling list of Screen Slate's coverage of the 2023 New York Film Festival. View all coverage on our site or check list notes for links.

• Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell

  Review by Saffron Maeve

• Evil Does Not Exist

  Review by Elissa Suh

• Music

  Review by Mark Asch

• Orlando, My Political Biography

  Review by Mark Asch

• Nowhere Near

  Review by Sanoja Bhaumik

• All of Us Strangers

  Review by Stephanie Monohan

• In Water

  Review by Elissa Suh

• In Our Day

  Review by Elissa Suh

• Youth (Spring)

  Review by Jeva Lange

• The Human Surge 3

  Interview by Minh Nguyen

...plus 19 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

See also our "First Viewings and Discoveries" by filmmakers including including Elegance Bratton, Davy Chou, Ricky D'Ambrose, Daniel Goldhaber, Owen Kline, Sierra Pettengill, João Pedro Rodrigues, Cyril Schäublin, Paul Schrader, Martine Syms, Kit Zauhar, and Béla Tarr.

1. Crimes of the Future
2. EO
3. Aftersun
4. TÁR
5. Jackass Forever
6. Decision to Leave
7. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
8. Nope
9. Funny Pages
10. The Fabelmans

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

October 2016 at Anthology Film Archives

Not on LB:
Soda_Jerk, Undaddy Mainframe
Takeshi Murata, Untitled (Silver)
Max Almy, Lost in the Pictures
Cory Arcangel, SO SHINES A GOOD DEED IN A WEARY WORLD (DUNKINDONUTS.COM)

“The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.” –A.N. Whitehead, quoted in the epigraph of THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE

We’re half a century removed from the prolific decade in which Marshall McLuhan authored a string of million-selling treatises on the changes media and electronic communication had sown into our social and civic lives. While McLuhan’s influence and the prophetic nature of his work has continued to crystalize, it sometimes seems as though the culture at large interprets the observations and phenomena he describes of a more connected world as fundamentally utopian. While there are trace aspects of that thinking, McLuhan was more keenly attuned to the various and potentially troubling intersections of consumerism, state surveillance, the nuclear family, military technology, and the profound unease that accompanies each new “extension of man” succeeding the old. This is the McLuhan who wrote, for instance, “All new technologies bring on the cultural blues, just as the old ones evoke phantom pain after they have disappeared.”

In the spirit of phantoms and pain, THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSACRE is a series of filmic and televisual terrors that surveys the way horror filmmakers and artists have exploited various media to mine the ruptures created by technological advances in production, transmission, reception, and communication through the media of film, television, video games, and the internet. The guiding principle of their selection is that terror is rooted in the very media themselves, whether at the fringes of the frames, as spectres in the signal, or embedded in the ethernet. It dials between classics like POLTERGEIST, international cult gems ARREBATO and ANGUISH, arthouse provocations such as VIDEODROME and DEMON SEED, and recent fare like desktop horror film UNFRIENDED. Each are paired with artists videos and experimental films mining similar conceptual areas by testing the limits of their media through strategies like optical printing, glitch, screen capture performance, film-video hybridization, reappropriation, video synthesis, and early digital animation to evoke the unknown, uncanny, and horrific; in many cases, these works inflict violence on media to inversely expose or foreground the latent powers with which they envelop their recipient.

As McLuhan said, “Whenever the dragon’s teeth of technological change are sown, we reap a whirlwind of violence.” Horror is the arena – and cinema it’s most spectacular stage – in which successive media contend in the popular imagination.

• Videodrome
• Anguish
• Rapture
• Brainscan
• Demon Seed
• Demons
• Demons 2
• The Lawnmower Man
• Pulse
• Poltergeist

...plus 14 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A column by Cristina Cacioppo for Screen Slate

• Fun

  www.screenslate.com/articles/outskirts-fun

• Vendetta

  www.screenslate.com/articles/outskirts-vendetta

• Love Letters

  www.screenslate.com/articles/outskirts-love-letters-1983

• Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story

  www.screenslate.com/articles/outskirts-charts-song-poem-story

• Shopping

  www.screenslate.com/articles/outskirts-shopping

• Certain Fury

  www.screenslate.com/articles/outskirts-certain-fury

• Shadowboxer

  www.screenslate.com/articles/outskirts-shadowboxer-2005

• Dance with Death

  www.screenslate.com/articles/outskirts-dance-death

• The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit

  Guest post by Laird Jimenez www.screenslate.com/articles/outskirts-wonderful-ice-cream-suit-1988

• Lifeguard

  www.screenslate.com/articles/outskirts-lifeguard

...plus 19 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

February 2020 at Anthology Film Archives // Series info

The groundwork for interconnected global computer networks was laid in the 1960s, but it didn’t capture the public imagination until the mid-1990s, at which time a confluence of factors including the release of Netscape Navigator, the Windows 95 operating system, high-profile hacking arrests, and aggressive direct marketing campaigns by commercial service providers AOL, Compve, and Prodigy fast-tracked the information superhighway for mainstream traffic. Once the domain of scientists, hobbyists, hackers, and role-playing gamers, the internet had irreversibly broken into the public imagination.

Cinema’s relationship to networked culture follows a similar trajectory, with relatively little cultural representation – most notably 1983’s WARGAMES – until a glimmer of recognition with THE LAWNMOWER MAN and SNEAKERS in 1992. But 1995 opened the floodgates to a torrent of internet-themed films. Suddenly, the paying public was confronted with the radical new idea of Sandra Bullock ordering delivery by logging on to Pizza.net. Much as Hollywood valorized the Wild West, it was now pursuing a new kind of Manifest Destiny across the information superhighway at breakneck speed. Instead of their parents’ “Hi-yo, Silver!”, the young generation of keyboard cowboys had a new rallying cry: “HACK THE PLANET.”

This series is accompanied by a 72-page, full-color publication.

• Hackers
• Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age
• The Net
• RIP Geocities
• Screen Flicker
• Johnny Mnemonic
• Bye Bye Kipling
• Virtuosity
• Legendary Reality
• Ghost in the Shell

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

August 2017 at Anthology Film Archives // Series info

At the turn of the millennium, there was much speculation as to whether digital imaging would replace celluloid film as the predominant medium of motion picture production and exhibition. Regarded in hindsight not 20 years later, when film is often cited in of whether it might experience a “revival,” the debate seems almost amusingly quaint. For better or for worse, digital has permeated all aspects of cinema. For someone born the year THE MATRIX was released, seeing it on 35mm is a rarefied artisanal experience. As Keanu would say: whoa.

In this light, it’s interesting to consider a brief transitional period around the early aughts, when maverick moviemakers first embraced the mantle of digital tools with consumer or prosumer-grade standard-definition DV cameras. It was a brief but intense period teeming with possibility and uncertainty. The promise that, indeed, anyone could make a movie was inextricably linked with news of cameras like the Sony DCR-PC3, Canon XL-1, and Panasonic DVX100 being used for iconoclastic features that made waves in major film festivals. Lightweight cameras, more affordable stock, nonlinear editing, and relatively lower lab bills meant that filmmakers were at greater liberty to experiment with approaches to aesthetics, performance, documentation, and supposedly risky (or risqué) material.

Although they seem to point towards “the death of film,” these features might ironically be regarded as its unlikely last big blow-out. The manifesto of Dogme 95, largely regarded as responsible for initiating the first major wave of digital cinema, stipulates that the final film format must be 35mm. And owing to the near-absence of digital projection in cinemas, these movies were by necessity finished and distributed on 35mm. In this sense, they might be regarded not as purely “digital” features so much as hybrid works.

A full survey of DV as a creative medium encoming artist videos and independent documentaries is beyond the scope of a single series, so here we’ve focused on features that were widely distributed on 35mm. And final note for tech nerds: in the series title, “MiniDV” is an intentional misnomer; while many titles in the series were indeed shot on cameras using MiniDV cassettes, others were captured on different yet very similar standard-definition formats in the DV family. But however inaccurate, “This Is MiniDV (on 35mm)” seemed pithier than “These Are Various Standard-Definition DV Formats (on 35mm).”

• The Celebration
• Jackass: The Movie
• Colossal Youth
• 24 Hour Party People
• The Gleaners and I
• Julien Donkey-Boy
• Dancer in the Dark
• Ten
• Chuck & Buck
• Bamboozled

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Screen Slate Presents Watch the Skies: Ufology on Film at Anthology Film Archives
Nov. 4-15, 2022

Since the “flying saucer craze” of summer 1947, in which hundreds of reports of strange aerial discs flourished across the United States, UFO culture has occupied a peculiar and constant place in American life. Like many of this country’s favorite pastimes, ufology thrived first as an iconoclastic subculture, and its participants – many of them “experiencers”, dilettante investigators, and truth-seekers, made to look silly by mainstream media – fashioned fringe networks through DIY or less-than-venerable avenues such as Xerox newsletters, tabloid reports, AM radio shows, drugstore paperbacks, motel room conferences, and Usenet forums. WATCH THE SKIES considers an array of films and videos that have emerged from this subterranean movement, ranging from underground videotapes to Hollywood blockbusters, and encoming the stories of motley characters from ees, renegade scientists, and New Age mystics to conspiracy cranks and shifty opportunists.

• Fire in the Sky
• Communion
• UFOria
• The X-Files
• Endangered Species
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind
• Secrets of the Shadow World
• The Tower of the Astro-Cyclops
• A Strange Harvest
• IFO

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

From a 2018 Twitter thread:
twitter.com/ScreenSlate/status/1057704806972866562

1-32 are from the original thread, but I'll update with some more that currently have < 2.5k views as of Halloween 2020.

• Sleepwalker

  A British comedy of manners, class warfare, and Suspiria-style fantastical slaughter. Extraorindary.

• Litan

  Monty Python does The Wicker Man. A disturbing, absurdist nightmare unlike any other. First seen at Spectacle.

• Abby

  This deserves better than its reputation as "the black Exorcist." Extraordinary performance by Carol Speed. Sadly, I only know of a sole, poor quality 16mm print (and DVD transferred therefrom).

  Said print included in my series "Industrial Terror" at Anthology Film Archives: anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=10&year=2014#showing-43343

• Requiem

  Ambiguously non-fantastical, social-realist portrayal of an exorcism case in West . Anchored by Toni Erdmann's Sandra Hüller.

• The Demon

  Another spiritually ambiguous exorcism film done in a neorealist manner by frequent Fellini scriptwriter Bruenllo Rondi.

  Included in my 2013 Spectacle series "Sindays." Here's my trailer: vimeo.com/60308333

• Tenderness of the Wolves

  My favorite performance by "Herr R." Kurt Raab as an interwar German serial killer. Carsensen, Caven, ben Salem, Mira, Hermann... the whole Fassbinder gang's here.

• Morgiana

  One of the most tripped-out gothic films of the Czechoslovak New Wave. A must for cat lovers and fans of eerie woodwind scores.

  I programmed this in the 2013 Spectacle series SPEC3BER. Here's my trailer: vimeo.com/76019983

• Habit

  90s downtown NY indie as a lovesick drunken vampire flick.

  I programmed this at Spectacle in 2013 on 16mm with Fessenden in attendance. Here's a trailer from that screening, but I can't find who cut it... vimeo.com/76591335

• Don't Deliver Us from Evil

  A staggering masterpiece and the ultimate in incendiary say-you-love-Satan cinema.

  I programmed this at Spectacle in 2014, here's my trailer: vimeo.com/115608210

• The Dependent

  Another major personal favorite of mine - a suffocating portrayal of courtship and abject dread brutally punctuated with disturbing, absurdist humor. I programmed this in SPEC2BER at Spectacle in 2012, here's my (deliberately unfinished) trailer: vimeo.com/50807035

...plus 48 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

For the official release of Killers of the Flower Moon, we're bumping our Cannes podcast discussing the film with NY Mag/Vulture critic Bilge Ebiri.

🎧 LISTEN HERE

Ebiri s Screen Slate editor Jon Dieringer in Cannes go long on Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon. In this spoiler free-ish discussion, we cover how the film fits into the Goodfellas crime mold and smartly diverges from the book to center the Osage characters. We also talk about where DiCaprio and De Niro's performances fit within their body of work for Scorsese and its place in his overarching project of chronicling America through its corrupt institutions.

We also discuss the general themes of tyranny and absolute power running through the 2023 Cannes Film Festival (with shoutouts to the unintentional hilarity of Firebrand) and repertory film culture in Paris, including the joy of watching shitty torrent rips at La Cinémathèque française.

Ebiri's review of Killers of the Flower Moon

Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Screen Slate Podcast is ed by its Patreon . Sign up and get access to bonus episodes, our lockdown-era streaming series archives, discounts from partners like Criterion and Posteritati, event invitations, and more.

With the New York Film Festival wrapped, here's a look at the second leg of our reviews and interviews. For more, see our earlier post and our list of films.

The Pigeon Tunnel - Errol Morris Interview by Nicolas Rapold [LB] - "My interviews have a certain kind of character to them. Because from the very beginning, I tried not to direct my interviews. I call it the 'SHUT THE FUCK UP' school of interviewing, allowing something to just emerge." —Errol Morris

Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos) [LB] by Stephanie Monohan - "It’s hard to overstate the achievement of Stone’s performance; she communicates a complete character development—physical, intellectual, sexual, ethical, etc.—and conveys where Bella is at any given moment in her speech and physicality. Her work is bolstered by Holly Waddington’s costume designs, which mix exaggerated Victorian silhouettes with modern fabrics. Bella’s signature look is extreme shoulder coverage, from layers of ruffles to sculptural cocoons: they emphasize her humor as she bumbles around clownishly, barely capable of dressing herself properly, and also provide her with a sort of feminine armor. The anachronistic, futuristic elements of her wardrobe paint her as a woman ahead of her time and as a walking monster in the Victorian age. Her point of view is emphasized by Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s wide angle fish-eye lens, a tool they also utilized in The Favourite."

Maestro (Bradley Cooper) [LB] by Caroline Golum - "Cooper and Singer conveniently gloss over Felicia’s social activism with the New York Civil Liberties Union, and her philanthropic of the Black Panther Party scarcely warrants a mention. Instead, Mulligan is shoehorned into that too-familiar Hollywood trope: the faithful spouse, driven to wits’ end by the public ownership of her husband’s talent and persona. We’re treated to a glimmer of hope following their split, as Felicia returns to work on a televised variety program, but that victory is short-lived. The foundational tragedy here is not the bespoiled marriage bed, nor Felicia’s eventual fate as a woman wronged, but the increasing sublimation of her identity—as emigree, actress, and New York society doyenne—into the rich but narrow role of Mrs. Bernstein."

May December (Todd Haynes) [LB] by Stephanie Monohan - "Todd Haynes is a master of tone. May December is at once emotionally penetrating and cerebral, tragic and savagely funny. Throughout, Haynes manages to not undercut the seriousness of abuse. It’s a tough time for making art around themes of grooming and sexual assault; these concepts are in the cultural zeitgeist in ways that are politically polarizing and often exploitative. But May December speaks to this moment of unpacking trauma and relitigating sordid events from our past with a sense of independence, from a certain remove from the fray."

Pictures of Ghosts (Kleber Mendonça Filho) [LB] by Maxwell Paparella - "Pictures of Ghosts (2023) is the director's backlot tour of the setting for many of his films and much of his life, segueing from his apartment to the cityscape of downtown Recife, in particular its old movie palaces, which are now mostly abandoned or remade as supermarkets and churches. Though the film is in part a cinephilic hymn, it is about the built environment more so than the projected image, about the vanishing sense of one's home more so than the escapism offered by the silver screen."

The Beast (Bertrand Bonnello) [LB] by Mark Asch - "Arguably The Beast is an edgier Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a plea for painful, necessary human connection, newly irony-pilled, climate-anxious, and galaxy-brained for 2023."

AGGRO DR1FT (Harmony Korine) [LB] by Mark Asch - "Korine believes, or at least has said, that “the Call of Duty trailer .‌ . . looks better than anything that Spielberg’s ever done,” but EDGLRD has some distance to make up on Activision. Recurrent cutaways foreshadow the hitman’s showdown with the ultimate embodiment of evil, a swole mob lord who keeps women in cages and repeatedly humps the air and grunts while holding a katana, as if you spilled soda on your controller and now one of the buttons sticks."

Last Summer (Catherine Breillat) [LB] by Elissa Suh - "Over the last three decades, Catherine Breillat has clinically charted female sexuality and its intersections with power and intimacy. Last Summer (2023), a formidable return after Abuse of Weakness (2013) a decade ago, is marked at times by an uncanny tenderness and the golden nostalgia suggested by its title. Elegantly transcending its salacious premise—a middle-aged woman shtupping her husband’s 17-year-old son—the film offers a slippery study of desire and transgression, the line between which is both a permeable boundary and a treacherous descent."

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude) by Saffron Maeve [LB] - "Do Not Expect makes repeated reference to what Angela “small films,” a matryoshka of media offerings sprinkled throughout: Bobita’s lewd posts; the workplace-safety cell footage; Uwe Boll’s nonunion creature feature (featuring Boll, himself, stomping around a backlot); the clipped vignettes of Angela Moves On; a silent sequence of 100+ roadside crosses. Jude has never conceived a small film, only dense repositories for bedded connotations—or, big films made up of small ones. With Do Not Expect, his jabs at the gig economy and brawny, bootless conglomerates ricochet like projectiles, taking out the producer, the product, and the viewer all at once."

The Stranger and the Fog (Bahram Beyzaie) [LB] by Julia Gunnison - "Beyzaie came of age during a time when international cinema flourished in Tehran, and he soaked in all manner of influences. Viewers can easily associate The Stranger and the Fog with the films of Kurosawa and Tarkovsky—but perhaps also Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973)? In analyzing the film’s isolated rural setting and supernatural inflections, the scholar Farshid Kazemi posits that The Stranger and the Fog “may be considered the first folk horror film in the history of Iranian cinema,” a reading not incongruous with the recurring images of blades, shadows, cloaked figures, and villagers gathered in circles, performing rituals that Ayat cannot understand."

The Delinquents (Rodrigo Moreno) [LB] by Maxwell Paparella - "Moreno lands on an ecstatic faith in the power of great art to deliver us from life’s myriad captivities, calling upon music and poetry, in particular, to give meaning to the minutes that become years. The sense of intertextuality is zealous and unpretentious. And yet this movie also pays close attention to another sort of artifice: the elisions, anachronisms, and outright falsehoods that, having told once, we begin ourselves to believe."

Return to Reason: Short Films by Man Ray [LB] by Brittany Rosemary Jones - "Pedantic purists might be bothered by how dramatically SQÜRL’s often angsty accompaniment differs from what Man Ray originally suggested for the films. For Emak Bakia, “any collection of old jazz will do,” and he preferred “French popular music” for L‘Étoile de mer. Le Retour à la raison is typically screened in silence, as he produced the film so quickly that he was not able to arrange a soundtrack. But SQÜRL’s intention was not to historicize these films or preserve their original viewing experiences as much as it was to extend their current sphere of reference. The duo’s interpretation highlights Dada and Surrealism’s relevance 100 years later as enduring touchpoints for the avant-garde, namely post-psychedelic rock and contemporary independent cinema."

NYFF 2023 is halfway over, and Screen Slate has been covering a wide selection of titles from across the various programs. Here's what we've been up to so far:

Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi) [LB] by Elissa Suh - " A minor though not insignificant work, it is less an intentional spurning of the audience than a wandering artistic exercise, the success of which depends greatly on whether you find the film’s closing moments of piercing obliquity enriching or diminishing."

Currents Shorts by Lucy Sternbach - "In this year’s Currents program, the most experimental of the New York Film Festival’s offerings, short films are strung together as 'necklaces of interior worlds,' to borrow a phrase from Sonia Oleniak, the director of Coral (all films 2023). Taken together, they give careful, if combative, guidance: that the body must be understood expansively. Oleniak conjures an eternal song. Kevin Jerome Everson blurs in the interest of precision. Kim Torres touches on familial memory and experiments with collective storytelling. Ayo Akingbade s for material life within the factory. Taking care of fragmented memories, these artists and others put collective narrative practices, repetition, and improvised forms of movement toward a renewed mode of seeing and bearing witness."

Music (Angela Schanelec) [LB] by Mark Asch - "Angela Schanelec’s loose modern retelling of the Oedipus myth distills epic tragedy into an ethereal tone poem."

Orlando, My Political Biography (Paul B. Preciado) [LB] by Mark Asch - "With his first film, the author and theorist Preciado attempts to transform Orlando for a modern movement, making a polyvocal film that also avoids binaries of fiction and nonfiction."

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Pham Thien An) [LB] by Saffron Maeve - "There’s a sophistication and assuredness which thins out in the second and third acts; as Thiện leans closer to his faith, he seems to pull away from, rather than expose himself to, the audience—whether this is narrative unevenness or the cost of finding your god is cleverly inscrutable."

Nowhere Near (Miko Revereza) [LB] by Sanoja Bhaumik - "Revereza learns through his Lola but ultimately arrives at different conclusions. Lola’s fond recollections of the American encampment during World War II echo the celebratory nature of Binmaley’s war monuments. Revereza instead points to the violence of this history, linking Spanish colonialism and American occupation with the contemporary reality of policed borders in economies dependent on exploited migrant labor."

All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh) [LB] by Stephanie Monohan - "Andrew Haigh’s latest is a return to his early-career focus on gay romantic dramas, but trades in the naturalism of his previous work for metaphysical melodrama. Adapting Yamada Taichi’s 1987 novel, Strangers, Haigh queers the Japanese ghost story and moves it to London, creating a sad and sensual portrait of love and grief whose magical realism doesn’t always work to its advantage."

In Water [LB] + In Our Day [LB] (Hong Sang-soo) by Elissa Suh - "It’s never difficult to trace a thread between the movies of Hong Sang-soo, which have for years come in twos, delicately perambulating the same thematic grounds (immensely fertile, it turns out), but the twinningly titled In Water and In Our Day (both 2023) evince an especially close kinship. One film encapsulates the dawning of a young man's artistic vocation, while the other poignantly parses an older man’s winding-down career."

Youth (Spring) (Wang Bing) [LB] by Jeva Lange - "It can be heartbreaking to see youth wasted on pointless, dangerous, robotic hours of hard labor; Wang’s documentaries (including West of the Tracks, 2003; 'Til Madness Do Us Part, 2013; and Bitter Money, 2016) often have such a streak of desperation and despair. But that’s the thing about youth, too: they snub our pity. The whole world is still just beginning for them; behind every serger machine, dreams await."

The Human Surge 3 (Eduardo Williams) [LB] Interview by Minh Nguyen - "Some artworks spin webs of affinity, binding us to peer enthusiasts with their silken threads. This is true of Williams’s films, whose “stickiness” has an additional, visceral . They emit wetness and flows––the glittering stream of urine that showers a trail of ants in The Human Surge, or the liquid speed of Saigon traffic through a rain-smeared GoPro in his short I Forgot! (2014). For The Human Surge 3, the long-awaited sequel that opens the Currents section of this year’s New York Film Festival, Williams takes the original formula and spins it on its head. New characters––who this time move between Taiwan, Sri Lanka, and Peru––are warped through a 360-degree VR camera, glitched and datamoshed, in weather more dramatic and volatile."

Strange Way of Life (Pedro Almodovar) [LB] by Grace Byron - "When it comes to two straight men playing gay, it doesn’t hurt to have a bit of nudity to sell their affair, especially when they never consummate their love on screen."

LISTEN // Filmmaker Kelly Reichardt s the pod over Zoom to discuss her new film Showing Up. We talk about how the art school setting bred on-set creativity, shooting in familiar Portland haunts, artist-landlords, turning Outkast's Andre Benjamin into a certified ceramics guru, and the film's discrete shoutout to Light Industry co-founder Ed Halter. And much more!

For more on Showing Up, see our earlier pod with cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt.

LISTEN // Our friends Daniel Goldhaber, Ariela Barer, Daniel Garber, and Jordan Sjol visit Screen Slate HQ to talk about their new film How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which adapts Andreas Malm's nonfiction book of the same name into a heist-style eco-thriller. We get into the research and adaptation process, stealing locations, balancing Barer’s screenwriting and actor roles, and the art of editing as edging. Plus: what does Andreas Malm think of CAM?

Related links:
Trailer/showtimes/Q&As
How to Blow Up a Pipeline book

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The Screen Slate Podcast is ed by its Patreon . Sign up and get access to bonus episodes, our lockdown-era streaming series archives, discounts from partners like Criterion and Posteritati, event invitations, and more.

LISTEN // Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin s the pod to discuss his new film Enys Men, now playing in cinemas nationwide. We talk about the legacy of big, scary stones in British horror, working with a skeleton crew, hand-processing 16mm film, eco-friendly filmmaking, and creating soundtracks entirely in post. We also discuss his remarkable BAFTA-winning previous feature Bait, which returns to select theaters this weekend.

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The Screen Slate Podcast is ed by its Patreon . Sign up and get access to bonus episodes, our lockdown-era streaming series archives, discounts from partners like Criterion and Posteritati, event invitations, and more.

LISTEN // Projectionist Genevieve Havemeyer-King s us to talk about recent articles on theatrical film exhibition in The New York Times, Vulture, and n+1. Along with co-host John Klacsmann of Anthology Film Archives, we get into how pre-digital trends toward multiplex automation, corporate union busting, and studios stacking the deck in their favor with the D specification have shaped the current state of theatrical film presentation. We also talk about 35mm projection, 70mm blow-ups, the projectionist as showman vs. mechanic, and how the repertory experience is changing.

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New on Screen Slate: Stephanie Monohan on the Working Girl(s) series at Anthology Film Archives:

This week at Anthology Film Archives, four films with nearly identical titles explore sex, labor, and class in incisive yet accessible ways. Spanning nearly six decades of cinema and featuring the work of several pioneering female filmmakers, the series shows that, whether it's in a brothel or in a boardroom, being a working girl is not easy.

Read the full piece on Screen Slate, which includes the films Working Girls (Dorothy Arzner, 1931), The Working Girls (Stephanie Rothman, 1974), Working Girls (Lizzie Borden, 1986), and Working Girl (Mike Nichols, 1988).

Sara Driver interviewed by filmmaker Sierra Pettengill on Screen Slate

In You Are Not I (1981), a wide-eyed, wandering Suzanne Fletcher places rocks in the mouths of the dead bodies she finds lying along the side of a blank exurban road. In Sleepwalk (1986), a slightly less wide-eyed Fletcher moves through an uncanny version of New York at night, living through a Chinese folk tale she’s been hired (by a man missing some fingers, leaving bloody prints on the dollar bills he offers) to transcribe. And When Pigs Fly (1993), shot by the great Robby Müller, uses entirely in-camera effects to populate Alfred Molina’s waking life with a piano-playing woman murdered by her abusive husband.

Sara Driver’s cinematic universe is a living, breathing place, depicting the places we inhabit as they are—haunted by the past, by centuries of myths, and our own personal histories. As Lucy Sante says in Driver’s “videotape,” The Bowery: Spring, 1994 (1994), “the Bowery lives on as a domain of ghosts.”

I talked with Sara in New York on February 1, just before she left for Roxy Cinema to see Claire Denis’s Keep it For Yourself (1991), in which she acted (“last time I saw this was on VHS”) and George Franju’s Judex (1963), which she selected for her retrospective series.

Read on Screen Slate

Interview with Gaspar Noé by Chris Shields on Screen Slate - There is almost something Duchampian about reversing the order of one’s own film, like hanging a painting upside down. Though in this case the flip, rather than creating strangeness, is a righting of sorts. Gaspar Noé’s sophomore feature, Irreversible (2002), was shot with a three-page outline of 12 scenes that were improvised in chronological order and then reversed in the film’s editing. Ironically, the radical formal choice of Irreversible: Straight Cut (2019) is to place the events back in chronological order. It’s graceful and clever, even literary in its boldness, and yet ultimately generous to viewers who struggled with the original’s “invasive conceptual” aspect. With this seemingly simple idea enacted, what was once a brutal, fatalistic vision of intractable violence and the immutability of time becomes a drama in which the characters' psychologies and relationships, expertly rendered by the cast, take center stage, allowing for a more direct descent into abject barbarity.

Gaspar Noé took the time to speak with me about Irreversible: Straight Cut, how it came about, what it means now, and to point out that seeking revenge while on cocaine is a bad idea.

Read on Screen Slate

In February 2022 (2-22-22, to be exact), Corey Feldman released the first single from his album Love Left 2: Arm Me With Love. It was called “Comeback King,” and he directed the video himself. It starts out with a young boy getting beat up at some type of backyard volleyball game. The scrawny kid is knocked over, leaves and dirt kicked in his face. It cuts to a fogged-out soundstage, where we see Corey, in a deep v-neck tee and an unbuttoned ruched satin shirt, sunglasses at the tip of his nose, a lock of hair in his face. He does his best Michael Jackson inspired routine and sing-raps, “You know what time it is? It’s a comeback! I’m the comeback king!” Upon its release, he wasn’t exactly in the middle of a comeback. Rather, he was manifesting one.
Last month it was announced that director Jordan Peele would be curating a series at Film at Lincoln Center featuring a selection of films that inspired, or could help contextualize, his most recent blockbuster, Nope (2022). He called it “The Lost Rider: A Chronicle of Hollywood Sacrifice.” No one expected the inclusion of four films featuring Corey Feldman: Stand By Me (1986), Dream a Little Dream (1989), Friday the 13: The Final Chapter (1984), and the U.S. premiere of an obscure movie from 2004, The Birthday.

Feldman’s career needs no introduction. He was in countless ’80s hits like The Goonies (1985) and Gremlins (1984). He went on to star in a multitude of features with his best friend, Corey Haim, and they became known as “The Two Coreys.” Haim ed away in 2010, and Feldman made a documentary about his story and the darker side of Hollywood called My Truth: The Rape of 2 Coreys (2020). In a life of extreme highs and lows, Feldman has never stopped grinding out movies, TV shows, music videos, and countless viral moments. He even wrote an autobiography, Coreyography, and just dropped a box set of new and remastered tracks. 
Lead image courtesy Film at Lincoln Center/Arin Sang-Urai.

Full interview here.

LISTEN // Five years ago Kyle Edward Ball started making short horror videos inspired by people’s nightmares and posting them on YouTube. His debut feature Skinamarink—shot for just $15,000 in his childhood home in Edmonton, Canada—was the breakout hit of last year’s Fantasia Film Festival, and came from seemingly out of nowhere to become one of the most anticipated horror films.

Ahead of Skinamarink’s nationwide theatrical opening this Friday, Ball ed the Screen Slate pod over Zoom to talk about getting started as a filmmaker, developing his aesthetic, the YouTube analog horror movement, and how strongly the film has managed to resonate with audiences even before its release.

LISTEN HERE

LISTEN // Aftersun director Charlotte Wells and editor Blair McClendon visit Screen Slate HQ to talk about the remarkable new film. We get into the genesis of the father-daughter story, casting the fantastic young actress Frankie Corio, how for a certain generation MiniDV is the look of childhood memories, and constructing a turn-of-the-millennium period piece without overplaying it. Plus Wells and McClendon discuss the needle drops that did and didn’t make it into the film, and Blair ignites beef with Liam Gallagher.

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Screen Slate's Maxwell Paprella on the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. Includes Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica, Joana Pimenta and Adirley Quéiros’s Dry Ground Burning, Daniel Goldhaber's How to Blow Up a Pipeline, and Steven Spielberg’s The Fablemans.

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"Since the last time I visited Toronto, in 2019, the view from my friends’ Parkdale apartment has changed completely. The city is in the midst of a massive development wave, coinciding with a massive housing crisis. Brand-new luxury towers loom over tent encampments whose inhabitants must soon brace for winter. “A change is proposed for this site” signage abounds, denoting planned demolitions. Even the Scotiabank Theatre, where I spent much of my time while in town, is on the chopping block, never mind the architectural significance of its turn-of-the-century Rubik’s cube cornice. Appropriately or otherwise, the brand identity for the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival is all colorful skyscrapers, the distinctive shadow of the CN Tower falling atop one of them.

"As I sat down for the first film I would see, I received news of Queen Elizabeth II’s death. I usually have no reason to think or feel anything about the House of Windsor, but I had just seen its matriarch on the crisp polymer $20 bills coming out of the ATM as I changed currency. I had forgotten I was in the Commonwealth. Within days, her face was everywhere: on TTC subway screens, on 24’s delightfully bizarre split-screen news broadcasts, even on a t-shirt for sale at a discount store on Spadina Avenue, the main artery of Toronto’s Chinatown. When Jean-Luc Godard ended his life five days later, I and many others experienced some approximation of that grief evinced by those for whom the Queen’s work had meant so much."

Full piece

In the second of our three weekly dispatches, Screen Slate editor Jon Dieringer, managing editor Maxwell Paparella, and contributors K.F. Watanabe write to each other about their New York Film Festival experiences.

In the piece, they discuss The French Dispatch, The Velvet Underground, Introduction, Drive My Car, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, The Tale of King Crab, and a Cinema Workers .

Read here

In the first of our three weekly dispatches, Screen Slate editor Jon Dieringer, managing editor Maxwell Paparella, and contributors Jeva Lange, Chloe Lizotte, and K.F. Watanabe write to each other about their festival experiences.

In the piece, they discuss the return of the in-person festival, press screenings, opening night, FLC Union, Amos Vogel, the state of NYC film culture, and films including Benedetta, The Worst Person in the World, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, The First 54 Years: An Abbreviated Manual for Military Occupation, Ahed's Knee, Flee, Futura, Vortex, Bergman Island, Il Buco, Titane, The Tsugua Diaries, Outside Noise, Drive My Car, and El Gran Movimiento.

Read here