It’s been a very good month for two different women filmmakers whose work has been covered in these pages over the last year. One is Amy Morrison Williams, a transplanted New Yorker who cares for her family when she’s not making films, and the other is Tess Ernst, a Chapel Hill native and college filmmaker […]
David Fellerath
Bio: David Fellerath is INDY Week's culture and sports editor.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/dfellerath
Posted inFilm & Television
Baby love
After 14 films, John Sayles is our great American populist director, but he’s never made a great movie. Eschewing familiar plot conventions, he prefers to situate a large, socially stratified cast of characters into a distinct community with a particular set of issues. His most successful films tend to hew close to genre conventions, such […]
Posted inNews
Demon world
So Emily and I are stuck in traffic on Hillsborough Street., one lousy mile from the State Fair. She’s along for the kicks and I’m here on business, scouring this 150th annual extravaganza for its residue of cinematic possibility. On the ride over from Durham, I’ve been blathering about carnivals and the way that they […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Thrill kills
Well, folks, it’s a new millennium and Quentin Tarantino’s got a new movie for us. After changing the popular film landscape in the 1990s with Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and, to a much lesser extent, Jackie Brown, Tarantino spent half a decade in hibernation, accompanied by little more than a television set, a movie projector […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Trouble at home
Thirteen Raleigh native Evan Rachel Wood stars in Thirteen, a film that has been garnering predictable publicity for its allegedly shocking content. However, I found myself squirming and frequently groaning throughout this heavy-handed, melodramatic, and utterly humorless film. The increasingly busy Wood, who was seen last year in SImOne, plays Tracy, a lonely girl who […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Neal Hutcheson
Neal Hutcheson spends half of his waking life in a tiny, airless office deep inside N.C. State’s Tompkins Hall. There are no windows in his office and he has no contact with other humans. He wears headphones and keeps the door closed. The light in the room comes from the twin computer monitors in front […]
Posted inFilm & Television
No success like failure
American Splendor, by turns pugnacious, droll, self-pitying and sentimental, concerns Harvey Pekar, the celebrated underground comic book writer who, thanks to this film, is much more famous now than he was a year ago. Pekar, who’s best known for the American Splendor comic book series that he began in 1975, has built a career on […]
Posted inNews
Patriot flack
I’m deathly afraid of cops, so the last place I’d ordinarily want to be is in a roomful of uniformed, burly men with guns, all listening to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft defend the Patriot Act. But it’s Saturday and I’m here at the Sheraton Imperial, a hotel located between an expressway and an airport, […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Freedom films
The well-made but curiously enervating Safe Conduct, the 20th film from the veteran French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier, is a re-enactment of life during wartime in the early 1940s, centering on the French film industry during its period of control by the Germans. Although the attention to historical detail is precise, the acting is top-notch, and […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Dreams so real
Last Friday, Aug. 8, Todd Lothery, chief film critic for the Raleigh TheNews & Observer announced that, after seven years, he would be leaving his post as the Triangle’s only full-time movie reviewer on Aug. 29. It was a strenuous job, but Lothery did it well, providing the paper with a thoughtful voice that was […]
