Bart Weiss is a longtime North Texas filmmaker, film programmer, teacher (at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he just recently retired), and all around source of wisdom about everything related to cinema. He just published his first book, titled Smartphone Cinema: Making Great Films with Your Mobile Phone. I got to know Bart … Read more
Across the two features she’s made to date, Payal Kapadia has emerged as a luminous new voice in Indian cinema, exploring the personal as political through her shimmering, empathetic portraits of working-class Mumbai. Her first feature, “A Night of Knowing Nothing,” opened with unsent love letters, from a film student to her estranged lover, discovered … Read more
In Jesse Eisenberg’s “A Real Pain,” now in theaters, two cousins reunite for a tour through Poland in honor of their recently deceased grandmother, who lived there before the Holocaust. Hoping that the experience will allow them to reconnect with their family’s past and grapple with their own sense of guilt and obligation toward the … Read more
Across the three features he’s made to date, Tyler Taormina has emerged as a true American independent, with an inquisitive eye and extraordinary depth of feeling for adolescent rites of passage that unfold — poignantly, mysteriously, with a sense of romantic possibility — amid the suburbs’ lonely, nocturnal stretches. His subliminally menacing feature debut, “Ham … Read more
JoBlo interviews with Yellowstone season 5, part 2 cast members Cole Hauser, Kelly Reilly, and Gil Birmingham On June 20, 2018, Paramount Network aired the first episode of a neo-Western drama television series called Yellowstone – and a megahit franchise was born. Lately, news regarding the franchise has been focused on what’s coming further down the line. We’ve been … Read more
Writer-director Hannah Peterson cut her filmmaking teeth on the sets of Sean Baker and Chloé Zhao, learning firsthand how to hone her cinematic voice and bring a fresh perspective to the screen. This can be seen in her radically empathetic debut feature film “The Graduates,” about the aftermath of a school shooting, which premiered at … Read more
If you notice any aesthetic blemishes on the miniatures in director Adam Elliot’s stop-motion film “Memoir of a Snail,” just know they were left in intentionally. Elliot’s film is all about the importance of embracing imperfections and understanding how life’s tragedies may shape us, but don’t have to define us. This thesis is extended to … Read more
Despite its expansive scale, Alessandra Lacorazza’s “In the Summers” thrives in the smaller moments, prioritizing the ways we wear complex emotions in our bodies far better than we can ever hope to articulate through words. The film, which won the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, focuses on sisters, Eva and Violeta, who every … Read more
Note: This piece was filed in conjunction with the Telluride Film Festival and run this week with the theatrical release of Netflix’s “The Piano Lesson.” I was one of the lucky ones to witness the original Broadway production of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, which was a pure revelation. Now, in 2024, in a version … Read more
A revelatory, vérité-style documentary that should go down as one of the year’s defining films, “No Other Land” exposes Israel’s relentless campaign of violence against the Palestinian community of Masafer Yatta in a southern area of the occupied West Bank. Having lived in their villages since the 19th century, the local population faces the threat of mass … Read more