I recently watched Frances Ford Coppola’s Godfather Part II and Apocalypse Now on the big screen. Like many other directors of his era, he charted his path through auteur runs: multiple movies in a row with wide distribution and a personal artistic vision. No extended detours into TV. No five plus year gaps between films. No anonymous paycheck gigs. Coppola’s output from 1972 to 1979 – The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now – was arguably the greatest auteur run ever. Such directorial stretches used to be commonplace but are rare today, especially for younger directors. It’s a trend that, left unchecked, can threaten film’s cultural relevance.
But before getting too pessimistic about the situation, I did some research. I looked at Sight and Sound’s 2022 critics poll alongside the most popular movies on Letterboxd for a more populist take. From these sources, I hand picked at least forty directors who each had at least one reasonable auteur run: three or no movies in wide release (e.g., available across your average American cineplex or widely popular for rental or streaming) with no gaps greater than five years and no obvious mercenary gigs.
Every decade, many influential directors have had auteur runs at their critical and financial peak. In the 50s and 60s, there was Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Kubrick, Wilder, Fellini, and Goddard. The 70s brought New Hollywood in with Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, Friedkin, and Lucas. The 80s were defined by filmmakers as varied as Spielberg, De Palma, Stone, Carpenter, Cameron, Zemeckis, and Lynch. For the 90s we had Tarantino, Soderbergh, Lee, Linklater, Fincher, the Coen brothers, and Paul Thomas Anderson. I’d argue the 2000s saw a meaningful dip, but we still saw talent like Bigelow, Anderson, Wan, McDonaugh, and Iñárritu break out.
Of the many films I’ve seen this year, nothing has shaken me the way Killers of the Flower Moon has. Director Martin Scorsese subverts film archetypes and genre conventions to deliver a bleak, indelible story on evil and capitalism rooted in America’s past.
(Spoilers ahead for Killers, which you should watch.)
Most of Killers centers on WWI vet Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), his uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro), and other white settlers as they scheme against the Osage in 1920s Oklahoma. The Indigenous tribe became wealthy from oil rights. Hale and his crew lie, steal, and murder Osage to secure their wealth.
Most of the screen time is from the white characters’ perspective, which I found occasionally frustrating. With his gullibility and unquestioning criminal mindset, DiCaprio as Burkhart is a less compelling character to watch than the supporting players around him. Lily Gladstone, who plays Ernest’s wife, Mollie, delivers a quietly devastating, pitch-perfect performance but disappears from large stretches of the film. One could point to Scorsese’s long history with gangster crime stories and playing into his comfort zone.
Midway through Nicolas Winding Refn’s new Netflix series Copenhagen Cowboy, I was thoroughly bored. The repetition was annoying: another neon-drenched set with stilted dialogue and glacial plot development. Then, in a shot that probably lasted no more than a minute, the series’ protagonist moved upwards in an elevator as a synth score kicked into overdrive. The brief scene’s immaculate construction ended up burrowing in my brain for days.
That small example underlines how Refn and fellow art house helmer Gaspar Noé are some of the most stylistically dazzling directors working today, to the point I regularly seek out their work. Yet I struggle to recommend almost any of their films. They provide memorable moments of stylish brilliance that clash against sophomoric writing, turgid dialogue, and nihilistic, sadistic violence. It’s frustrating because both could produce fantastic work with the right writers and collaborators.
Admittedly it can take a lot of work to group these two directors. Noé’s and Refn’s most famous films derive from different genres, if not at times, entirely different worlds. Noe’s 2002 Irréversible is messy and heavily improvised, a French extreme horror revenge tale whose reverse narrative structure feels in conversation with Christopher Nolan’s Memento. Refn’s 2011 Drive is a slick, minimalist crime thriller that meshes late 70s Walter Hill with 80s synths and a stoic turn from star Ryan Gosling.
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Portrait of a Lady on Fire was the last movie I saw in theaters before COVID-19 landed stateside. While I’m sad that watching movies on the big screen won’t be an option for a while, at least it ended on a high note. Portrait is an astounding film with unimpeachable craftsmanship, from acting to script and cinematography. And now, with the film’s availability on Hulu, it’s also a great film to enjoy at home. For this post, we’ll look at how the camera — its distance from subjects, characters in the frame, where, and for how long — can convey growing intimacy between characters.
What follows is light on spoilers. We’re only covering content from the first thirty or so minutes of the film, glossing over dialogue and plot developments. That said, some setup is in order: Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is commissioned to paint a portrait of a young woman Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) on an island in Brittany during the late 1700s.
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A great opening scene grabs the audience’s attention while establishing setting, tone, and key characters in the story. Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive does all of this while memorably defying our expectations of the action genre. When I reflect on my favorite films from the 2010s, Drive ranks high, and its opener is a significant reason why.
However, eight years removed from Drive’s debut, subverting action conventions isn’t the film’s legacy. What lingers for many is Cliff Martinez’s electronic score and Refn’s 80s visual pastiche punctuated by bursts of graphic violence. So while the general critical consensus on Drive is positive, many critics write the film off (if not Refn’s whole filmography) as self-suffocating style over substance. It’s an unfair rap because beyond the synth-heavy music and neon-drenched L.A. setting, Drive has superb craftsmanship that makes it unique and compelling today.
All stills are property of their respective owners and are used here strictly for educational purposes only. Most shots are combined into a grid format – click or tap to enlarge.
Bright is a flat out bad movie. Its screenplay has too much sophomoric dialogue and tonal whiplash. Unresolved plot threads abound. Any charisma from leads Will Smith and Joel Edgerton rarely registers above the film’s mediocrity.
Bright is also an action film with a ninety million plus budget, yet the shootouts are barely comprehensible. Fights lack a clear sense of continuity, editing, and direction. To examine how and why that is we’ll break down a single action scene midway through the film (watch the scene on Netflix; it starts at 1:01:36.)
Ken Adam is a legendary, British production design designer, most famous for his innovative work on early James Bond films (e.g. Dr. No, Goldfinger, Thunderball). Later in his career, Adam was the production designer for The Spy Who Loved Me. To quote the Youtube video:
One of the sets included the villain’s secret lair that was located inside of an enormous tanker ship. Adam struggled with lighting the massive set, and called in a favor from his old boss…Stanley Kubrick. Under an
agreement of total secrecy, Kubrick was snuck onto the empty set, where he spent 4 hours setting lighting and advising Ken Adam.
Wonderful, exhaustive look at David O. Russell’s career by Steven Hyden of Grantland. One smart observation:
Russell makes movies about families — some bound by birth (The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook), others by circumstance (Three Kings, I Heart Huckabees, and American Hustle). But they’re always loud, frayed, self-destructive, and yet somehow functional units.
A deep dive over at BFI on Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic. There’s coverage of the film’s origin story, treatment of sex and race, direction, and its prophecies of the future.
I thought I’d move past linking to more Gone Girl articles, but here we are; it’s that strong of a film. DP Jeff Cronenweth talks about Fincher’s preferred visual style:
I think that, for the most part, the camera is never in a position that would be a typical shot. There are no shots that are ever taken for granted. There’s a purpose behind everything — without getting crazy; obviously certain situations allow you a lot more freedom than other situations, but it always intrigues me that it’s slightly not normal, or not traditional, rather. The camera tends to stay lower; we’re always looking at people in an observational way that allows you, really, to study them and give them an opportunity to express whatever turmoil’s going on in their heads that then reflects in their performances. The camera has movement but nothing is ever moving for the sake of movement, you know? There’s purpose for everything, as opposed to filling in a void in content or our energy by deciding to make some interesting camera moves. The camera moves have a reason.
