America, The Damned Thing

by Jason Adams

Nocturnal Animals is a strange little beast. I find myself tempted to call it the "Gay Straw Dogs" (gay in spirit if not in character) but that's not quite right - it is very much its own fascinating thing; it is very much the work of one man, one artist, grappling with his own art and the idea of himself as an Artist. And our idea in turn of him as an Artist. So much so that there's a discussion of Art and the Artist both framed by the film's structure - that of a "reality" where Amy Adams is reading a book and then a "fiction" inside the book itself - and by the film itself; that is to say that two characters actually sit down and have a conversation about what it means to be an Artist, to be critiqued, and to put one's self out into the world for that sort of judgement, bare-assed and vulnerable.

I think the most telling bits in the film comes early...

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Doc Corner: From the Chiffon Jungle to the Great Outdoors at DOC NYC

Last week we looked at a group of films among the mammoth collection of titles playing Doc NYC. The festival continues and so we're looking at a few more films, taking a sort of cinematic road trip from the big city, down the highway to the Rocky Mountains and then back again.

The “chiffon jungle” is what the subject of Otis Mass’ debut film, The Incomparable Rose Hartman, a fashion and pop culture photographer whose images are as iconic as they are striking, labels her home of New York City. A place where fashion is as integral to daily life as breath is to life. Feel to free disagree, but as the first person to understand the appeal of the decadent backstage of celebrity life and master it into something truly artful, Hartman soon built a reputation that put her subjects at ease and made her none synonymous with New York’s cultural scene in a more extravagant way than the likes of Bill Cunningham. Whether she was photographing the models backstage and on the runways of  Donna Karen, Caroline Herrera or Halston, or capturing the more candid, celebratory side of celebrities like Jerry Hall, Andy Warhol, Grace Jones, Liza Minnelli and Cher at Studio 54, her work is justifiably as iconic as it is extraordinary...

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Doc Corner: Slenderman, David Lynch and More at Doc NYC

By Glenn Dunks

Doc NYC begins this week in (where else?) New York City. This year's festival, running from November 10th to November 17th, features 110 feature titles (now on sale), 44% of which are from women directors proving that #52FilmsByWomen is perfectly achievable if you're a fan of non-fiction.

After the jump notes on four new titles including a horror movie ready documentary and a look at David Lynch's creativity offscreen...

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Review: Doctor Strange

A slightly abridged version of this review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

For a franchise sprung from the fantastic realm of comic books, Marvel movies have not been particularly exciting on a broad visual level.

Sure, they’ve consistently managed iconic little visual beats within setpieces and that's no small thing. But they’re never suffused their films with eye-popping aesthetics as a matter of atmosphere. (The two exceptions to this rule are Guardians of the Galaxy‘s garish cosmic cartooonishness and Thor‘s brassy mythological kitsch). The Marvel film is more likely to stage its action setpieces and earnest conversations in vast empty spaces like sterile corporate buildings, parking garages, airport tarmacs, or mountain ranges. Given this predilection, the second half of Doctor Strange is absolutely jarring in a welcome way, never failing to give you plenty to gawk at...

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Review: "Hacksaw Ridge"

by Chris Feil

Caught between championing pacifism and luxuriating in brutality, Hacksaw Ridge struggles to have it both ways. Telling the story of WWII medic Desmond T. Doss (Andrew Garfield), America’s first conscientious objector (a soldier refusing to bear arms) who rescued over seventy soldiers in a single night. What plays out is part old-fashioned star vehicle for Garfield and part survival epic.

The film is as bloodthirsty as Mel Gibson’s other directorial efforts despite Doss’s message at the center. There is more fascination in the multitude of ways military bodies can be destroyed than Doss’s moral stance against that very violence - Gibson’s gaze is never more invigorated than when someone is brutalized. While the third act could simply be presented as the grim reality of war, it is instead an aimless fetishizing of bloodshed. This won’t come as a surprise to the dissenters of Gibson’s filmography, but the habit is perhaps more glaring given it is directly at odds with the material. The taste level is questionable and the subject gets lost.

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