Welcome to 2024! This, our first column of the new year, follows Oppenheimer, and Lots of Late Gift Ideas”>our December 2023 piece by offering more 2023 releases that deserve your time and attention.
Spielberg: The First Ten Years by Laurent Bouzereau (Insight Editions) and Steven Spielberg: All the Films by Olivier Bousquet, Arnaud Devillard, and Nicolas Schaller (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers)
I am not sure what Steven Spielberg obsessives like myself did to earn two lengthy, photo-backed, hardcover career appreciations, but I’m not complaining. Steven Spielberg: All the Films runs for nearly 500 pages and covers literally everything, from the director’s contributions to Rod Serling’s Night Gallery to The Fabelmans. Along the way are some unique insights, surprising facts (Leonardo DiCaprio was approached to play Tintin?), and the inclusion of some of his 1980s television work. And Spielberg: The First Ten Years is just as engaging, and even more in-depth.
Spielberg: The First Ten Years by Laurent Bouzereau (Insight Editions) and Steven Spielberg: All the Films by Olivier Bousquet, Arnaud Devillard, and Nicolas Schaller (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers)
I am not sure what Steven Spielberg obsessives like myself did to earn two lengthy, photo-backed, hardcover career appreciations, but I’m not complaining. Steven Spielberg: All the Films runs for nearly 500 pages and covers literally everything, from the director’s contributions to Rod Serling’s Night Gallery to The Fabelmans. Along the way are some unique insights, surprising facts (Leonardo DiCaprio was approached to play Tintin?), and the inclusion of some of his 1980s television work. And Spielberg: The First Ten Years is just as engaging, and even more in-depth.
- 1/2/2024
- by Christopher Schobert
- The Film Stage
Following The Film Stage’s collective top 50 films of 2023, as part of our year-end coverage, our contributors are sharing their personal top 10 lists.
I love going to the movies every year, but I really loved going to the movies this year. I saw Knock at the Cabin in Providence, I saw May December in Tallinn. I saw Enys Men in a small theater at Village East where it felt like everyone in the audience turned against the film but me. Somehow I liked Equalizer 3 despite loathing the other two. The worst movie I saw in theaters was Fast X, which I watched on an edible that put me to sleep during a set piece. I missed out on seeing Magic Mike’s Last Dance with some friends who wound up running into Christopher Nolan going to see Skinamarink. I loved breaking Yom Kippur fast during The Beast (out next year—I...
I love going to the movies every year, but I really loved going to the movies this year. I saw Knock at the Cabin in Providence, I saw May December in Tallinn. I saw Enys Men in a small theater at Village East where it felt like everyone in the audience turned against the film but me. Somehow I liked Equalizer 3 despite loathing the other two. The worst movie I saw in theaters was Fast X, which I watched on an edible that put me to sleep during a set piece. I missed out on seeing Magic Mike’s Last Dance with some friends who wound up running into Christopher Nolan going to see Skinamarink. I loved breaking Yom Kippur fast during The Beast (out next year—I...
- 12/28/2023
- by Fran Hoepfner
- The Film Stage
Todd Haynes season is in full swing. As May December‘s (too-short) theatrical run winds into a perpetual Netflix future this Friday, New York’s Museum of the Moving Image will begin a massive retrospective––his films, of course, but also the exhibit “Reflected Forms” surveying his corpus, the career-spanning book Todd Haynes: Rapturous Process on sale, and Julianne Moore presenting Haynes their Moving Image Award for Career Achievement on December 4.
Once you’ve collected all that information we’ll point you to an exclusive trailer for MoMI’s retro, which begins on Friday, December 1 with two short-film programs: one is a super-rare presentation of his thesis Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud, while the other features Dottie Gets Spanked and something else that runs 43 minutes, and surely nothing that’s legally prohibited from being advertised. Haynes will be appearing on December 1 and 2; the series runs to December 30.
Watch the preview...
Once you’ve collected all that information we’ll point you to an exclusive trailer for MoMI’s retro, which begins on Friday, December 1 with two short-film programs: one is a super-rare presentation of his thesis Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud, while the other features Dottie Gets Spanked and something else that runs 43 minutes, and surely nothing that’s legally prohibited from being advertised. Haynes will be appearing on December 1 and 2; the series runs to December 30.
Watch the preview...
- 11/27/2023
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
It’s no small testament to Todd Haynes that this is the second interview this website’s conducted with him since August. Although the opening of his newest film, Wonderstruck, is a proper excuse, that’s only ostensibly the occasion; the truth is that we’d gladly go over his decades- and genre-spanning filmography any day of the week and still have plenty of ground to cover.
So it’s doubly to our fortune that Wonderstruck befits multiple rounds of discussion. A children’s adventure movie wrapped in a two-pronged period piece that can hardly conceal the tragedies this kind of work so often doesn’t want you to think about, it finds Haynes and the usual band of collaborators — Dp Ed Lachman, composer Carter Burwell, and costume designer Sandy Powell among them — working on their biggest canvas yet. For recalling the director’s artistic history as much as anything else,...
So it’s doubly to our fortune that Wonderstruck befits multiple rounds of discussion. A children’s adventure movie wrapped in a two-pronged period piece that can hardly conceal the tragedies this kind of work so often doesn’t want you to think about, it finds Haynes and the usual band of collaborators — Dp Ed Lachman, composer Carter Burwell, and costume designer Sandy Powell among them — working on their biggest canvas yet. For recalling the director’s artistic history as much as anything else,...
- 10/17/2017
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
For as beloved as his features may be, Todd Haynes boasts a repertoire of short films no less deserving of attention — attention they might receive if they were more readily accessible. One has long been able to find Superstar and Dottie Gets Spanked with little effort, but some pieces were only recently discovered — e.g. The Suicide, found on Criterion’s Safe release; in terms of emotional effect, it makes Carol feel like an episode of Night Court — or have yet to be given a proper restoration.
Which brings us to (drum roll) a Kickstarter campaign to extensively restore and properly release eight shorts from Apparatus, a now-defunct creative house founded by Haynes and longtime creative partner Christine Vachon. Although the former’s work is not immediately on display therein, part of the $30,000 effort is to locate his 1985 Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud, “in which he depicts the poet as...
Which brings us to (drum roll) a Kickstarter campaign to extensively restore and properly release eight shorts from Apparatus, a now-defunct creative house founded by Haynes and longtime creative partner Christine Vachon. Although the former’s work is not immediately on display therein, part of the $30,000 effort is to locate his 1985 Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud, “in which he depicts the poet as...
- 6/23/2016
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
For the longest time, it seemed like the last thing you should expect from Todd Haynes was a simple story. Coming out of the fertile 1990s Sundance scene, he was a provocateur and a delirious mash-up artist: his films were fractured narratives, or anti-narratives, or meta-narratives. His best work either smashed together wildly different styles and stories (as in his debut Poison [1991]), or presented unsettling, contradictory ideas but refused climax or closure (as in his masterpiece Safe [1995]). Even in a zeitgeist defined by Quentin Tarantino, the jukebox musicals Velvet Goldmine (1998) and I'm Not There (2007) looked like pastiche and homage taken to the farthest limit. But far more than Tarantino, Haynes, the former Ivy League semiotics student, insists on not simply getting swept away in the styles, but maintaining a critical viewpoint of how and why the styles function. In retrospect, everything about his method was already in place in his...
- 1/28/2016
- by Duncan Gray
- MUBI
Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.
Film Society of Lincoln Center
The release of Carol (our coverage can be found here) brings “Todd Haynes: The Other Side of Dreams,” which will pair the director’s work with his personal favorites. Safe and Imitation of Life show on Friday; on Saturday, see “Todd Haynes: Rarities” — which brings Dottie Gets Spanked,...
Film Society of Lincoln Center
The release of Carol (our coverage can be found here) brings “Todd Haynes: The Other Side of Dreams,” which will pair the director’s work with his personal favorites. Safe and Imitation of Life show on Friday; on Saturday, see “Todd Haynes: Rarities” — which brings Dottie Gets Spanked,...
- 11/20/2015
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
The release of this week's "Carol" has spurred many to take a look back at the films of director Todd Haynes (as we did with a recent retrospective of his work). The Film Society of Lincoln Center is taking it another step further, kicking off tomorrow with"Todd Haynes: The Other Side Of Dreams," a screening series not just dedicated to Haynes' films, but the pictures that inspired them. And for those of you in New York, we've got a special treat. On Saturday, November 21st Haynes' short film "Dottie Gets Spanked" will be screened in conjunction with a Q&A with the director, plus they're showing a secret, surprise film. And we want to get to you in the door with a pair of tickets to the event. If you haven't seen 'Dottie,' it's a short that was made for PBS about a suburban 6-year-old boy marked...
- 11/17/2015
- by Edward Davis
- The Playlist
Carol! Carol! The people, they cannot get enough of Carol, which makes the eve of its release a perfect time to share some Todd Haynes-related material. (Not that there’s ever really a bad time, nor do we need much of an excuse.) It helps that he’s been “on tour” as of late, stopping by festivals to discuss things in his characteristically honest manner, and the latest example comes from the BFI London Film Festival. A Carol screening was accompanied by a Clare Stewart-led interview, but not one that follows the standard chronological format — not even one that’s indebted to focusing on any single title. What matters is the discussion, and even those who’d claim to know a ton about Haynes should find something enlightening.
We’ve paired that with two of his earlier works, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (a work long “banned” but nevertheless long-available) and Dottie Gets Spanked.
We’ve paired that with two of his earlier works, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (a work long “banned” but nevertheless long-available) and Dottie Gets Spanked.
- 10/20/2015
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
Read More: 13 Things We Learned at Todd Haynes' Masterclass On the heels of lauded screenings for festival and critical favorite "Carol," the Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced that it will celebrate the oeuvre of director Todd Haynes with "Todd: Haynes: The Other Side of Dreams." The special series will screen each of Haynes' features alongside a film that influenced it, with Haynes selecting the accompanying films himself. "Carol" will serve as the opening film, matched with "A Place in the Sun" and "Lovers and Lollipops." Other pairings include "Dottie Gets Spanked" with "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, "Far from Heaven" with "The Reckless Moment" and "Mildred Pierce" with "Klute."The event will also feature a 20th anniversary celebration of Killer Films, the legendary production company co-founded by Haynes' frequent producer Christine Vachon....
- 10/9/2015
- by Karen Brill
- Indiewire
The Lights. Camera. Help. annual nonprofit film festival is now in its fourth year, and runs Wednesday, September 12 through Friday, September 14 at the Texas Spirit Theater and the Scottish Rite Theater. This three-day event focuses on short and feature-length films, including PSAs, that convey messages for charitable organizations and important causes. The keynote speaker is local filmmaker Turk Pipkin, who will also premiere his new short film, Let There Be Sight, which tells "the incredibly hopeful story of The Nobelity Project's partnership with The Seva Foundation, an eyesight surgical camp in Nepal."
The school year is well underway, but kids and parents can still enjoy an entertaining and family-friendly time on a school night courtesy of Austin Public Library on Tuesday, September 11, at 6:30 pm with a free screening of The Lorax at the Twin Oaks location. Folks interested in more adult and "queer poetics and politics" content can attend...
The school year is well underway, but kids and parents can still enjoy an entertaining and family-friendly time on a school night courtesy of Austin Public Library on Tuesday, September 11, at 6:30 pm with a free screening of The Lorax at the Twin Oaks location. Folks interested in more adult and "queer poetics and politics" content can attend...
- 9/7/2012
- by Debbie Cerda
- Slackerwood
Composer James Bennett, who brought musical wit and a lyrical touch to his work in film and theater, died in New York this week of a heart attack.
He was classically trained on piano and later was a member of the Bmi Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop, an innovative New York City program known for training composers, lyricists and librettists. His work in theater includes collaborations with Charles Horne on the scores for the Off-Broadway shows Eva Braun and Dogs.
Though Jim composed music for only two feature films — Todd Haynes’ Poison and my film Swoon — he brought a remarkable musical sophistication and depth of emotion to his work. He worked as both composer and conductor and somehow managed to record lush, heartbreaking scores with a handful of musicians and the very few dollars we gave him. His music for my short Geoffrey Beene 30 and for Haynes’ Dottie Gets Spanked...
He was classically trained on piano and later was a member of the Bmi Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop, an innovative New York City program known for training composers, lyricists and librettists. His work in theater includes collaborations with Charles Horne on the scores for the Off-Broadway shows Eva Braun and Dogs.
Though Jim composed music for only two feature films — Todd Haynes’ Poison and my film Swoon — he brought a remarkable musical sophistication and depth of emotion to his work. He worked as both composer and conductor and somehow managed to record lush, heartbreaking scores with a handful of musicians and the very few dollars we gave him. His music for my short Geoffrey Beene 30 and for Haynes’ Dottie Gets Spanked...
- 6/8/2012
- by Tom Kalin
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
When feature producer-writer-director Todd Haynes began work on the 5-part HBO miniseries adaptation Mildred Pierce, it was his first television project aside from a 1993 short film for PBS entitled Dottie Gets Spanked. It reeled in a chart-topping 21 Primetime Emmy nominations, including 3 for him alone. It was quite an Emmy initiation for the Oscar-nominated writer-director of Far From Heaven (2002) and I’m Not There (2007). Haynes spoke to Deadline TV Contributor Ray Richmond: Deadline: What was it like to wake up the morning of the Emmy nominations and find 21 nominations? Todd Haynes: It was very unexpected to say the least. I didn’t even know that Mildred Pierce was eligible in that many categories. This is a slightly new world for me. But it was obviously an incredibly prideful moment. So many people worked extremely hard on it, and we tried to bring the best to the project that we could.
- 8/26/2011
- by THE DEADLINE TEAM
- Deadline TV
It's not intentional but today will be something of a TV day here at The Film Experience -- and to think how we were just bitching about all the false arguments in its favor -- and let's start with this trailer for the HBO Miniseries Mildred Pierce. [thanks to Sebastián for alerting me]
Like Angels in America seven years back, the director, cast and production values allow us to easily pretend that it's really just a feature film in disguise. It's just another part of The Great Convergence because what are today's franchises like Harry Potter and Twilight other than three season'ish long television series with bigger budgets?
Yes I'll see anything -- and have seen everything -- that Todd Haynes directs. From subversive queer shorts like Dottie Gets Spanked to the inventive Superstar (the legally troubled Karen Carpenter bio with Barbie dolls) through to Oscar contending films like Far From Heaven and I'm Not There....
Like Angels in America seven years back, the director, cast and production values allow us to easily pretend that it's really just a feature film in disguise. It's just another part of The Great Convergence because what are today's franchises like Harry Potter and Twilight other than three season'ish long television series with bigger budgets?
Yes I'll see anything -- and have seen everything -- that Todd Haynes directs. From subversive queer shorts like Dottie Gets Spanked to the inventive Superstar (the legally troubled Karen Carpenter bio with Barbie dolls) through to Oscar contending films like Far From Heaven and I'm Not There....
- 9/13/2010
- by NATHANIEL R
- FilmExperience
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