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Saturday
May182019

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Saturday
May182019

Xavier Dolan

by Samantha Craggs

It's been 10 years since Xavier Dolan, age 20, burst out of the gate at the Cannes Film Festival with his first ever movie, I Killed My Mother. It was a raw, imperfect effort. The deeply autobiographical narrative rambled at times. A plethora of shots framed the subject in the middle lower third of the screen, leaving space for blank white walls and reams of extraneous information. But it was a first-hand look at being a queer teenager fighting with his parents in the new millennium. For taste-makers at Cannes, it was more than enough. His movie showed in the Director's Fortnight, and Dolan, a former Québecois child actor who'd never even directed a short film, became the arthouse's youngest rock star. 

We've watched him learn the craft in two-hour intervals ever since. He works at a frantic clip, so he's made eight movies in 10 years. The now 30 year old filmmaker will premiere that eighth feature Matthias et Maxime at Cannes on May 22nd. Love or hate his offerings so far, one thing is guaranteed – this one will look nothing like I Killed My Mother. Let's do a ranking of his movies so far, after the jump... 

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Saturday
May182019

25th Anniversary: Danny Boyle's "Shallow Grave"

by Anna

Twenty-five years, a new British filmmaker made a dark splash at Cannes. Danny Boyle’s directorial debut Shallow Grave, which would become a significant sleeper success in 1995, opens with flatmates David (Christopher Eccleston), Juliet (Kerry Fox) and Alex (Ewan McGregor) looking for a new boarder (and subsequently trolling the prospective candidates). They settle on Hugo (Keith Allen) but he dies from a drug overdose within hours of moving in. Then the trio  find a suitcase full of money under Hugo’s bed, and that’s where the plot (and the meaning behind the film’s title) really kicks off.

Roughly a decade of award-winning films from the likes of Stephen Frears and David Attenborough, Boyle came and turned British cinema as a whole on its ear...

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Friday
May172019

Posterized: Keanu Reeves

by Nathaniel R

Whoa. Keanu Reeves turns 55 later this year and he's made roughly that many movies, too. Time sure does fly since he's still implanted in our consciousness as that stoner-like raven-haired looker of convenience store, surfing, and bus adventures. Figuring him out has always been an impossible trip. Keanu means "cool breeze over the mountains" in Hawaiian but, that geographically specific well-known trivia aside, he's always been hard to visually or sonically place anywhere on the map OR within the pantheon of contemporary stars; Born in Lebanon and raised in Canada, though he's of Hawaiian/British/Chinese/Portuguese descent, and with a voice that conjures the early 80s and California. Who/what/where is he even other than on his own planet and his own unique star? 

Though it seems hard to imagine now, when he first came to fame he was a very unlikely candidate for longevity...

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Friday
May172019

Interview: Ritesh Batra on 'Photograph' and why he makes movies about longing

by Murtada Elfadl

By his own admission Ritesh Batra makes movies about longing. Movies about people trying to connect. That was evident in The Lunchbox (2013), where two strangers meet and bond through a case of mistaken lunch deliveries. In Our Souls at Night (2017) two older neighbors - played by Jane Fonda and Robert Redford - try to fill their lonely nights by sleeping in the same bed, for companionship not sex.

In his latest film, Photograph, two strangers from different backgrounds also try to connect. He’s Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), a struggling street photographer. She’s Sanya (Sanya Malhotra) a shy Accounting student. They meet when he takes her photo at the Gateway of India, the famous arch monument in Mumbai. Rafi is being pressured to marry by his grandmother so he convinces Sanya to pose as his fiancée during a family visit. The film tells more with the silences between the strangers than any words, Batra is able to let emotions rise quietly but clearly to the audience. We recently interviewed him in New York about why these themes keep attracting him. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity...

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