From What Is Before

Nov 20, 2017 — “Charles Manson, the hippie cult leader who became the hypnotic-eyed face of evil across America after orchestrating the gruesome murders of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and six others in Los Angeles during the summer of 1969, died Sunday after nearly...

Nov 18, 2017 — Don Hertzfeldt “has created a singular universe of stick figures in crisis,” writes David Ehrlich, introducing his interview for IndieWire. “One of life’s few perfect things, World of Tomorrow [2015] is as mordantly funny and existentially fraught as anything Hertzfeldt...

Nov 13, 2017 — Angela Watercutter’s interview with Steven Soderbergh is actually a sidebar to her piece for Wired on the making of Mosaic—not the browser that put the World Wide Web in the global spotlight back in 1993, but the iOS app that...

Nov 8, 2017 — Dave Kehr’s long reviews for the Chicago Reader, published between 1974 and 1986, comprise “a body of work that, together with Kehr’s columns for Chicago magazine in the 1980s, strikes me as being the most remarkable extended stretch of auteurist...

Oct 5, 2017 — “The French writer and actress Anne Wiazemsky, who famously wrote a best-selling account of her short marriage to New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, died of cancer in Paris on Thursday,” reports the AFP. Wiazemsky, who was seventy, “made her screen...

Oct 3, 2017 — “American Gods star Pablo Schreiber will play astronaut Jim Lovell in Damien Chazelle’s moon-mission movie First Man,” reports Deadline’s Anthony D’Alessandro. In March, D’Alessandro noted that the story, based on James R. Hansen’s 2005 book, “follows NASA’s mission to land...

Sep 21, 2017 — The big “in the works” news today is the release of the trailer for Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, embedded below. According to the official synopsis from Fox Searchlight, Anderson’s second stop-motion animated feature after Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) “tells...

Sep 17, 2017 — There’s no getting around the loaded real-world context on this one. For the Daily Beast, Richard Porton begins with the “various accusations about [Louis C.K.’s] supposed sexual misconduct, which have been floating around for years since a 2012 Gawker story...

Aug 14, 2017 — A “collection of new image-making practices, technologies, and conditions of viewing embody a new era of the cinematic,” writes Holly Willis for the Los Angeles Review of Books. “And right along with these changes, a spate of recent books arrives...

Aug 8, 2017 — This underappreciated highlight of Michael Curtiz’s filmography grapples with postwar disillusionment and marital strife through the prism of a daylight noir.