Last year, Lashana Lynch made history as 007 in No Time To Die, this year she uses history to energize her powerful performance in The Woman King. In this episode she talks about how filming that movie “barefoot, on that soil,” surrounded by a truly supportive sisterhood, was so significant to her performance. She explains why she doesn’t have (or even want) a go-to preparation process, what choosing the hard road of avoiding stereotypical roles has done for her career, why she cherishes outstanding assistant directors, and much more. Plus she gives us a peek at her role as Miss […]

Documentary innovator Brett Morgen once again pushes the boundaries of creative non-fiction filmmaking with his latest doc, Moonage Daydream. Morgen was given access by the artist’s estate to over five million works in the archive — music, film clips, artwork, musings, interviews, photographs and recordings, some of which have never before been seen or heard. The resulting two hour and 20 minute-long film is a kinetic, sometimes euphoric tribute to Bowie and his multitude of stage personalities, career offshoots, and personal reflections. As with his other archive-based work (Jane, Cobain: Montage of Heck), Morgen’s approach is unconventional. Utilizing some of the alternative forms […]

I read Confess, Fletch for the first time in high school and, ever since, it’s remained a personal favorite. That often surprises people when I tell them that, not least because the name “Fletch” is less associated with Gregory Mcdonald’s genuinely funny novels than Chevy Chase’s considerably goofier incarnation of the journalist-sleuth in 1985’s Fletch and 1988’s Fletch Lives. The original Fletch adaptation essentially retains the structure and basics of Mcdonald’s original but changes the tone to better suit Chase. For better and worse, Mcdonald’s books string together often hilarious dialogue exchanges with aspirationally Hemingway-esque connective prose; they work better when the emphasis is on […]

Daniel Goldhaber’s second feature, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, takes its title and broader inspiration from Andreas Malm’s non-fiction manifesto, published by Verso. Malm’s book is heavy on the language of comrades and cadres, an exhortation to ecoterrorism to the already sympathetically inclined—and, as a friend pointed out, it’d be more accurately titled Why to Blow Up a Pipeline, as instructions aren’t provided. While Goldhaber’s version of How to Blow Up a Pipeline isn’t a manual as such, its commitment to depicting the means by which one might achieve its title goes much further than most. Eight protagonists from all over the country […]

As someone who never understood (okay, downright loathed) the conformist culture of so-called Greek-letter organizations, I didn’t bother to catch Byron Hurt’s (Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, Soul Food Junkies) latest doc Hazing when it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival back in the spring. But fortunately, the film—which takes a deep historical, as well as personal, dive into what Wikipedia defines as “any activity expected of someone in joining or participating in a group that humiliates, degrades, abuses, or endangers them regardless of a person’s willingness to participate”—will now be launching the new season of PBS’s Independent Lens, which […]

Veteran production designer Sophie Jarvis’s assured feature debut Until Branches Bend is one smartly executed, unexpected gem. Premiering in the Discovery section of this year’s TIFF, the psychological drama (really a contemporary horror film) follows a cannery worker named Robin (2016 TIFF Rising Star Grace Glowicki) whose life is upended after discovering a creepy bug in a peach while (conveniently) alone at break time. Unable to get her boss to take the very real threat of a catastrophic invasion seriously — and perhaps risk a factory shutdown — she decides to go public with her unappetizing finding, which entails sounding […]