NYFF: BPM (Beats Per Minute)

by Jason Adams

The setting is a classroom; the conversations academic. Several cliques gather, piled high in the bleacher seating - they snap their approval and hiss their diss while sending flirty glances and fully enunciated lip smacks to the cute boys a row or two over. BPM (Beats Per Minute) is in its own way a High School Movie - everyone is young and they go to dances and they go on field trips (to actual schools, even) and harangue their teachers.

Of course everyone is young because they're all dying young and they go to dances to forget they're all dying and their field trips are to splash blood on the walls of the pharmaceutical companies keeping them sick, so it's a different kind of High School Movie. Mean Girls it ain't.

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Doc Corner: 'The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson'

by Glenn Dunks

It is sadly just a matter of fact that women of colour rarely get documentaries made about them without tragedy informing their very existence. “Death” is even right there at the start of the title for David France’s new film about one such pioneering person. And indeed, the mystery surrounding Marsha P. Johnson’s death is what acts as the central spine of his The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson as one activist, Victoria Cruz, sets about solving the mystery of the death of another activist 25 years ago.

But like the literal meaning behind the title of France’s last film, the Oscar-nominated masterwork How to Survive a Plague, this new film is also about “life” and surviving and ultimately acts as a testament to Johnson’s tenacity and pure force-of-nature attitude in the face of adversity – a tired cliché of a phrase that is nonetheless truly warranted here...

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"The Last Jedi" Trailer Arrives!

Chris here. A full trailer for The Last Jedi is finally here! Now before anyone complains about long waits or lack of plot details, allow me to remind that the limited information for the new Star Wars films has been refreshing compared to other franchises. Which is good, because now officially starts a likely three month period of Star Wars invading conversation and consciousness with relentless vigor. Luckily, it looks like director Rian Johnson has created a thrilling and singular entry into the beloved franchise that even the indifferent can get excited about.

But the thing you will all be lamenting is that we get no glimpse of Laura Dern's mauve-haired Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo. I'll give you a moment to let out that frustration before we dive in to the trailer. Inhale. Vent. Exhale. Very good. Shall we begin?

No need to give this one a Yes No Maybe So treatment, because we've already bought our tickets! Take a look at the trailer (if you haven't devoured it a dozen times already) and I'll give some ecstatic notes after the jump...

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The Furniture: The Gas Lighting of Gaslighting in Gaslight

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

This week I’d like to talk about gas lighting. That’s in addition to gaslighting, which is obviously related. Basically, I’d like to talk about the way that Gaslight (1944) uses gas lighting to distill the concept of gaslighting. It was so effective that “gaslighting” stuck, and has remained a popularly understood concept nearly 75 years after the film debuted.

Of course, these days the term has been almost completely divorced from memory of the original play or its various adaptations. The 1944 version is mostly remembered for winning Ingrid Bergman her first Oscar, and deservedly so. Her performance is astonishing, newly powerful with each successive viewing.

However, the film did win a second Oscar. Not for director George Cukor, who wasn’t even nominated. Nor for cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg, who lost to Joseph LaShelle’s work on Laura...

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