It goes without saying that 2020 was a year like none other in recent history. Significantly, by virtue of living through such times, it’s also a year that retuned minds to see history being made in the present. There are certainly more critical sociocultural…
Almereyda’s Experimenter-style mode is not as organic of a fit for the often compelling but ultimately overburdened Tesla. Having risen to renewed prominence on the indie circuit with 2015’s fourth wall-defying biopic Experimenter and 2017’s sci-fi drama of memory and quasi-dystopia Marjorie Prime, Michael Almereyda…
The finest films of 2017 simultaneously offered us a respite from, and a deeper reflection on, our fraught and fractured social and political realities. In sharp contrast to our unfortunate tendency to segregate ourselves with social media-fueled enclaves and ecosystems that do little more than…
Sometime in the near future, Tess (Geena Davis) and her husband Jon (Tim Robbins) gift octogenarian widow Marjorie (Lois Smith) an A.I. hologram version of her dead husband, to keep her talking and to fortify her faltering, faulty memory. Marjorie went with the age…
Most documentaries live and die by how much they can ‘get out of’ their subjects, which makes Escapes seem relatively low-stakes at first. In chronicling the life of Hampton Fancher—a D-list western actor turned screenwriter, who happened to write the Blade Runner script—director Michael Almereyda molds a seemingly mundane…
The 2017 BAMcinemafest ends this Sunday, and this dispatch concludes our coverage. Among the takes below, you’ll find several more holdovers from Sundance—including hit comedy The Big Sick and Alex Ross Perry’s unfairly panned Golden Exits—and two films (a narrative and a documentary) from American indie film director Michael Almereyda. Be sure to also…
