What Comes After

The Oscar nominations are out, Sundance is on, and SXSW has announced a lineup that includes Mimi Cave’s thriller Holland, starring Nicole Kidman and Matthew Macfadyen; Flying Lotus’s sci-fi adventure Ash, with Eiza González and Aaron Paul; and Alex Scharfman’s comedy The Death of a Unicorn, featuring Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega. This year’s edition will open on March 7 with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s half-hour comedy series The Studio and run through March 14.
- In a whopping dossier for 032c, Cassidy George takes a deep dive into the work of Harmony Korine, who wrote Larry Clark’s Kids (1995) when he was nineteen; directed his first feature, Gummo, two years later; actually had a commercial hit with Spring Breakers in 2013; and confounded audiences in Venice last year with Baby Invasion. “For decades, Korine compared making films to warfare,” writes George. “Now, he has placed himself on the front lines of an even bigger battle: shaping the future of entertainment. Korine is no longer concerned with disrupting or salvaging cinema. He’s interested only in what comes after it.”
- Eight years ago, Michael Schulman moved into a Greenwich Village apartment that he later discovered had been occupied by Charlotte Zwerin, a documentary filmmaker and editor best known for her work with Albert and David Maysles (Salesmen, Gimme Shelter). “I learned that she was a jazz buff, a chain-smoker, and a founding mother of the vérité movement, which replaced explanatory voice-over and talking heads with fly-on-the-wall naturalism,” writes Schulman in the New Yorker. “Zwerin’s status as the third Maysles was both her calling card and her curse.” But she did complete a film begun by Shirley Clarke, Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World (1963), which won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, and Clint Eastwood financed her “zenith as a solo director,” Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1988).
- Notebook is running excerpts from the latest issue of its smartly edited and spectacularly designed magazine. Durga Chew-Bose has notes on Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Lucrecia Martel’s La ciénaga (2001), and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Millennium Mambo (2001). Philippa Snow writes about what draws us—especially when we’re young—to graphic depictions of violence. And Christopher Holliday explores the economic and political factors driving a surge in the digital de-aging of stars getting on in years.
- In 1929, four years after Battleship Potemkin had become the talk of Hollywood, Joseph Stalin sent Sergei Eisenstein, assistant Grigori Aleksandrov, and cameraman Eduard Tisse on a trip through Europe and the States “to study sound technology in film,” writes Marlenée Heath for Little White Lies. “When the Soviet trio reached Hollywood in 1930, Paramount contracted Eisenstein for three thousand dollars a week. Now he just needed an idea.” He was researching an adaptation of Blaise Cendrars’s 1925 novel L’or (Sutter’s Gold) when the Red Scare led Eisenstein to leave the States before seeing the project through. “But his most outstanding work experimenting with sound, and even color, was yet to come,” writes Heath. “Even though he languished in Hollywood, the Western influence upon him remained, such as the costumes in Ivan the Terrible, inspired by Disney’s Snow White.”
- It’s been a while since we’ve mentioned any best-of-2024 lists. Two that are not to be missed are Reverse Shot’s and La Internacional Cinéfila, the poll of critics (Nicole Brenez, Adrian Martin), filmmakers (Radu Jude, Miguel Gomes), and programmers (Carlo Chatrian, Haden Guest) conducted each year by Roger Koza. This has come up because the new Senses of Cinema published today brings its massive World Poll (128 lists!) as well as interviews—with Matthew Rankin (Universal Language), Athina Rachel Tsangari (Harvest), Tatiana Huezo (Prayers for the Stolen), and Yeo Siew Hua (Stranger Eyes)—articles (Hirokazu Kore-eda, the state of horror), festival reports, and book reviews.