independent film

There are a lot of ways to screw up movies about women. So warped is the film market, directors have few examples to draw from: most films, mainstream and independent, are about men. We can even test for it. Like a ballerina en pointe, Black Swan maintains an athletic sense of balance: between a woman’s [...]

Thanks to Racialicious for reposting! Here in the US, it’s pretty safe to say, most if not all of the Hong Kong films we see are big budget, triad-themed or auteur-centered. We see Johnnie To, Wong Kar-Wai, films from stars like Tony Leung, Andy Lau, and Jackie Chan. While film production in Hong Kong has [...]

Woody Allen’s Interiors (1978) Woody Allen, it seems, does not care if women hate him. He’s now making headlines doing what many people in Hollywood have done: defend Roman Polanski. As the ever-sharp Chelsea Handler exclaimed on her show, Woody Allen’s last person Polanski wants defending him: “he should be in jail!” Handler said of [...]

The New York Times has a great little article out on the debate  over Precious, over whether or not it’s a responsible representation of black people. Felicia Lee asked for my opinion, based on an essay written for this blog: Aymar Jean Christian, a doctoral student in communications at the University of Pennsylvania said he found [...]

Originally published at Splice Today. My first post about Precious here. Precious has arrived! For anyone following the film world, the push for Precious, at first titled Push, began months ago, in the beginning of the year. It has been a long haul. Some of us are tired. Now it is here and is bound for [...]

Filmmaker Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter, Adoration) has, over the course of three decades of movie-making, probed such disparate characters as strippers and comedians in provocative and artful ways. Egoyan further demonstrated his artistic curiosity at The Philadelphia Museum of Art on Sunday during a public conversation with curator Michael Taylor commemorating the recently opened [...]

UPDATE: Mo’Nique has won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, praising the Academy for putting “the performance” over “politics”! Go ahead, girl! UPDATE: Mo’Nique has addressed the controversy, saying: “Baby, people gonna talk. It comes with the territory. But didn’t they talk about Jesus? Then they killed him. So, what makes me think I’m so [...]

I had high hopes for New York, I Love You. My friends know what kinds of movies I fall for easily, and this is it: pretty people, New York City, romance, set in autumn, bourgeouis pretension. I eat it up: You’ve Got Mail, As Good as it Gets, Auntie Mame, All About Eve, the list [...]

ORIGINAL at SpliceToday. Please excuse the following nerdy statement: I care about how artists represent online video. This is something you need to know to understand why Afterschool, an independent film out in limited release on Oct. 2, is one I respect but do not love. Afterschool, the debut feature of Antonio Campos that premiered [...]

Original at Ronebreak. Let’s just say this: if Bloomingdale’s offered me money to make a short film, I’d say, “sign me up!” Rising indie filmmaker Barry Jenkins, whose first feature Medicine for Melancholy (my thoughts on it here, and here) made a small critical splash last year in the indie film community, not to mention [...]