Independent films
fromThe New Yorker
1 day agoNew Directors, New Films
The New Directors/New Films series showcases diverse films with innovative narratives, including 'Variations on a Theme' and 'Next Life'.
If a consortium of Italian grandmothers were to put down The Ten Commandments of making pasta, then 'Thou Shalt Not Break The Spaghetti Before Boiling It' is likely to be right up there alongside 'Thou Shalt Serve The Pasta Al Dente' and 'Thou Shalt Only Add Salt To Boiling Water, Never Oil'.
The invention of the Cinématographe was ready right away. The process of the invention was longer, and there were a lot of inventors before Lumière.
Set on the blossom tree-lined fringes of Hyde Park in London, Herbert Wilcox's black-and-white rom-com blows in like a fresh spring breeze. The film charts the will-they-won't-they romance between Richard (Michael Wilding), a wealthy lord masquerading as a butler, and Judy (Anna Neagle), the niece of the family who employs him.
The inquiry was like thousands of others. Somebody had potentially cool films they thought might interest the Library of Congress. But it was brand new for Jason Evans Groth... In September, he stepped outside the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, to meet Bill and Mary McFarland, who had driven from Michigan with about 40 strips of celluloid that had once belonged to Bill's great-grandfather.
During a junket interview with OutNow, Gyllenhaal explained that the punctuation mark was included to represent the "whole lot of energy" that comes out when the historically muted Bride of Frankenstein is finally allowed to speak. That's all well and good, but to viewers the titular exclamation point is less of a metaphor and more of a golden arrow saying, "This movie is going to be crazy."
George Lucas should have died. It was 1962; the 17-year-old had just crashed his yellow Autobianchi convertible into a walnut tree, in Modesto, California. The car rolled, bounced and came to rest - it was "beyond mangled, flipped upside down and twisted like a crushed Coke can against the tree". When the teenager woke in hospital two weeks later, his heart having nearly stopped, he had a new philosophy: "Maybe there's a reason I survived this accident that nobody should have survived."
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
10 Cloverfield Lane Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman and John Gallagher Jr are locked in an underground bunker for the majority of this left-field sequel to Cloverfield, with thrilling results. In the film's final throes, Winstead's character exits the bunker, and finds that her captor was telling the truth about an alien invasion above - a twist that completely and ruinously dissipates the hard-earned tension that came before.
A quarter-century later, it's safe to say that those days have come to an end. Not only does the streaming-only Netflix of the twenty-twenties no longer transmit movies on DVD through the mail (a service its younger users have trouble even imagining), it ranks approximately nowhere as a preferred cinephile destination. That has to do with a selection much diminished since the DVD days
The esteemed film-maker was licking his wounds: his most recent picture, Far from the Madding Crowd, which imbued its 19th-century rural characters with an anachronistic King's Road style and panache, had flopped stateside. Childers approached the date with mixed feelings. He adored Schlesinger's previous movie, the jazzy Darling, starring Julie Christie as a model on the make, and had seen it three times.