The Furniture: The Salesman Crafts His Own Stage

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

Asghar Farhadi's Oscar winning The Salesman begins with a set. The opening credits appear over the quiet stage of a small Tehran theater, nearly ready to debut a new production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. We see the bed before the actors who will lie in it, neon lights illuminated for an empty house. It is a quite literal setting of the stage before the drama begins.

It’s not a play adaptation, but it often feels like one. There are few locations and the cast is small. And, as in many play adaptations, the production design does a lot of heavy lifting...

Click to read more ...

Tribeca 2017: Nobody's Watching

We've still got some Tribeca reviews to catch up on, so here's Jason Adams again.

I know you're going to be shocked to hear this about someone who writes on the internet for a living, but I'm a bit of the solitary type. 'A loner, a rebel,' in Pee-wee parlance. I was an only child, a gay only child, and never learned how to make friends all that well, so I spent a majority of my teenage years wandering. I grew up in a small town but one big enough to wander, and when I moved to New York City after college I carried the habit with me. And New York rewards the hell out of such instincts; there's nowhere more comfortable for solitary wandering than in the middle of a great big oblivious crowd...

Click to read more ...

Box Office For Those Who Can Read...

by Nathaniel R

Since this weekend's box office results are just too dull to report on (April has been seriously lacking in new mainstream movies of worth) let's swerve over to the arthouse for this weekend's box office chart. And this gives us an excuse to talk about the the underdiscussed auteur François Ozon, too. D'accord? Which foreign language films have been most popular with US moviegoers in the first third of the year?

TOP FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILMS RELEASED IN 2017
(numbers as of April 30th, some of these are still in theaters)

01 Baahubali 2: The Conclusion (India) $10.1
A sequel to the 2015 epic about ancient India. 

02 Your Name (Japan) $4.2
Many people thought this should have been nominated for the animation feature Oscar last year -- from my understanding it's being shown in both English dub and in subtitled versions though I'm not 100% confident about this understanding.

⇱ 03 Raees (India) $3.2
Shah Rukh Khan continues to be a very reliable Bollywood draw. His latest is about a bootlegger in Guajarat...

Click to read more ...

Tribeca 2017: November

Jason Adams reporting from the Tribeca Film Festival 

You can practically feel the mud caking beneath your fingertips while watching the Estonian fog folk nightmare that is November, which for once to this city boy felt like a good thing – that grounding sense of atmosphere helps situate us, keeping which way is up, in a topsy-turvy unknown world. If you’ve ever wandered in a country where you don’t speak the language then you’ll know the vibe director Rainer Sarnet dredges up here...

Click to read more ...

A Lovely Trailer for "Menashe"

Chris here. It's worth remembering as we head toward the clanging of the summer movie season that we will have some quieter cinematic treasures ahead to cleanse our palettes. One of my most anticipated is Sundance favorite Menashe, which Nathaniel recently reviewed. 

Menashe stars Menashe Lustig (loosely portraying himself) as a newly widowered father trying to regain custody of his son in their very conservative Hasidic Jewish community. If that sounds a little maudlin, the film promises to be balanced by humor and authenticity, as it stars actual residents of the Brooklyn neighborhood it depicts. The film will be the first non-English language film for distributor A24 - good to see their Oscar triumph with Moonlight isn't making them shy away from the tough sell, not to mention their commitment to new American voices like Menashe director Joshua Z. Weinstein.

The film's first trailer just dropped, and it is delicate and charming in the best way - a familiar story told in unfamiliar voices.