Sally El Hosaini’s directorial debut, My Brother the Devil, is a touching and sensitive story of two Arab brothers in Hackney, London. During her sojourn in San Francisco as the San Francisco Film Society’s Artist-in-Residence, I sat down with El Hosaini to discuss her writing process, working with non-actors, her shoot, and her approach to the film’s aesthetic. […]
Don’t be fooled by the title, Fifty Shades of Grey is Anastasia’s film
Fifty Shades of Grey is far more interested in Anastasia’s thoughts and conscious decisions than in giving Christian even a semblance of a personality.
Sundance Review: Take Me to the River is creepy, unsettling, and a tad thin
Perhaps the most polarizing film at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, writer-director Matt Sobel’s Take Me To The River has left some critics grossed out and others fascinated with this evocative, probing mood piece that winds up a bit thin.
Best of Sundance NEXT 2015: Poekel’s bittersweet and quiet Christmas Again
Christmas, Again is a quiet, subtle film from writer-director Charles Poekel, about a lonely man, aptly named Noel (Kentucker Audley), who spends the week before Christmas selling and delivering Christmas trees.
‘Cinema is the only art ever where you share somebody’s loneliness’ and other insights from Céline Sciamma
Céline Sciamma discusses her third film Girlhood: the genesis of the film, how cinema is the only art form in which you can share someone else’s loneliness, and how she created the remarkable Rihanna scene.
Review: John Crowley’s moving, romantic Brooklyn
Colm Toíbin’s novel Brooklyn was in many ways a perfect book, a taut and heartwrenching story of a young Irish woman, Eilis, and her traumatic experience immigrating to America in the 1950s: the way it left her in limbo, no longer comfortable in Ireland and always an outsider in her new home. John Crowley’s screen adaptation, written by the incomparable Nick Hornby, is even more emotionally resonant — if not as poetically constructed as Toíbin’s prose — in part because it’s a more modern, feminist take on the story.