Renowned Cinematographer Robby Muller Dead at 78

Robby Mller, the cinematographer known for his collaborations with Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch as well as his work on Repo Man, Honeysuckle Rose and To Live and Die in L.A., has died at the age of 78.

Dutch newspaper Het Parool (via The Guardian) reported that Mller, known as the master of light, died at his home in Amsterdam, the Netherlands following a lengthy battle with vascular dementia, a degenerative disease that left him unable to talk or move for several years prior to his death.

We have lost the remarkable, brilliant & irreplaceable Robby Mller, Jim Jarmusch tweeted. I love him so very much. He taught me so many things, & without him, I dont think I would know anything about filmmaking. R.I.P. my dear friend Robby. Mller served as Jarmuschs cinematographer on five films, including Down By Law, Mystery Train and Dead Man.

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The British Film Institute tweeted, Were very sad to hear about the passing of cinematographer Robby Mller, master of light, who collaborated with Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders, Sally Potter and William Friedkin to create some of the most striking images in all of cinema.

The Curacao-born cinematographer began his career as director of photography on Wim Wenders 1970 debut feature Summer in the City; Wenders and Mllers partnership would span 10 films, from the directors German-language movies to 1984s acclaimed Paris, Texas, featuring Mllers breathtaking images of the American Southwest.

Following Peter Bogdanovichs 1979 film Saint Jack Mllers first American film as cinematographer Mller would help compose the unforgettable images and era-defining lighting in Eighties classics like Repo Man, Honeysuckle Rose, To Live and Die in L.A. and Barfly.

The cinematographer also worked on Michelangelo Antonionis final film Beyond the Clouds, Michael Winterbottoms 24 Hour Party People and Lars Von Triers Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark. Mllers final feature film credit was for Jarmuschs 2003 anthology Cigarettes & Coffee.

In 2016, Amsterdams Eye film museum held a Master of Light Robby Mller retrospective. He taught me later a lot about color, as well, and how it relates to your emotions, or how the sky at magic hour changes every ten seconds and becomes a different shade, Jarmusch told the New York Times of Mller in 2016.

Robby would teach me things like, it says in the script that its a sunny day, but then on the day of the shoot it would be cloudy and about to rain. Most people would just say, O.K., lets not shoot today. Robby would always say, lets think, maybe the clouds and the rain is better, lets not be closed off, lets be open to what we might do.

Which Witch Is Which: In Praise of the Original Suspiria

Shes just a small town girl, livin in her lonely world, she took the midnight plane going well, to Munich. Her name is Suzy, and this doe-eyed American has just been accepted to a prestigious dance academy in Germany. No sooner has she stepped out of what is the single most red-tinted hallway in the history of movie airports and made her way to school than this young woman begins to feel that something is a little weird. Maybe its the former student who she meets on her way in, the one with the crazed look in her eye and the manic jibber-jabber about turning the blue iris, whatever that means. The fact that this same person will end up dying in a highly baroque manner hours later how else would you describe being grabbed by hairy arms through a window, then stabbed in the heart, and then tumbling through a stained glass ceiling with a noose around your neck? doesnt help ease her anxiety. Nor does the oddly stern dance instructor, or the ghoulish looking Romanian handyman with new teeth, or the young blond boy in the Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit who keeps staring at her. Maybe its the Euro-grotesques that her nerves all aflutter. Maybe its the ceiling dripping with maggots. Really, who can say?

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Or, and we could be reaching a bit here, it might be that Suzy is a little freaked out by the guild of witches that are using the academy as both a cover and a cozy home base. Technically, the correct term is a coven. But when you have to deal with a powerful supernatural creature that wants you dead and isnt afraid to throw a few walking corpses with needles in their eyes at you, semantics is the least of your worries.

Discerning consumers of the real-deal spooky cinema speak of Dario Argentos 1977 magnum opus as a sacred text of Italian horror, the sort of grandiloquent Grand Guignol gorefest that inspires both hushed whispers and earsplitting screams. The filmmaker had made canonworthy cult films before, giallo GOATS like The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970) and Deep Red (1975), but this one is different. Its the sort of stylish, surreal, gloriously perverse nightmare that borders on the transcendent Lewis Carroll meets Caligari, according to one critic. There may be pound-for-pound scarier movies, though this supernatural tale makes for a strong Top 10 contender. But it is, hands down, the single most sensual horror film ever made, all bright colors and palpable textures and heightened, panic-inducing mayhem. An editor once informed me that the phrase hell on earth was never, ever applicable because we have no idea what hell on earth would actually look like! Suspiria is as close to an Exhibit-A approximation as you could hope to ask for.

And so it makes sense that one of the few major seventh-art sensualists currently working, Luca Guadagnino, would want to take a crack at his own version (it goes into wide release this Friday). Its an impressive stab at a classic, even if the Call Me By Your Name director makes some questionable decisions while detailing Dakota Johnsons journey from lost naif to final-girl superstardom. Setting Suspiria 18 in 1977, the year of Argentos original? Sure, why not the wardrobe alone warrants the back-dating. Desaturating and draining the images of bright colors so that it looks like something that a Berlin-based filmmaker would have made in the late Seventies, then trying to fit the sound and fury into some big-picture, sins-of-a-nation social template? Was our man dipping into the drugged restricted diet dinners in the dance academy?

What the new version does get correct, however, is the casting Johnson, very good; Tilda Swinton as modern-dance majordomo Madame Blanc (her credited role), beyond genius and the sense of reality cracking in half. The latter is the Brothers Grimm currency and the calling card on which the originals spirit-of-77 fractured fairy tale runs. Once upon a time, a girl wanders through the Black Forest. She comes across a house. She discovers something she is not supposed to discover. And then: Chaos reigns.

It was a fairy tale, in fact, that Argento had in mind when he started mulling over this story of a young woman and the Mother of Sighs. Per Maitland McDonaghs invaluable book Broken Mirrors, Broken Minds, the director had been approached about doing an H.P Lovecraft movie for some American production company, but was having a hard time figuring out what they and he wanted out of the material. Instead, his thoughts drifted to witches, those wart-covered crones who dealt in the Dark Arts. He liked the idea of doing something involving the supernatural, and maybe along the lines of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The original idea, he was quoted as saying, was to set everything in a primary school, where the witches were teachers who tortured the children; the heroine, we can assume, would have been the same age as Suspirias Suzy, which suggests a parallel to a young princess taking care of small wards. People say, Oh, youre just like Snow White in that movie, Jessica Harper was recently quoted as saying. (This was probably not lost on Dario when he saw her in The Phantom of the Paradise and decided hed found his wide-eyed lead.) The look of the movie was designed, in part, to draw comparisons to Walt Disneys animated version.

Yes, those visuals colorful is too mild a word for them. For a film partially inspired by both a totemic feature-length toon and Thomas De Quinceys essay collection Suspiria de Profundis (translation: Sighs From the Depths), it makes perfect, perverse sense that the film would utilize retina-searing reds, blues and greens to create what cinematographer Luciano Tovoli would refer to as a total abstraction from what we call everyday reality.' Never mind that its also drawn from an apparently true story, told to the films cowriter/co-creator Daria Nicolodi by her grandmother, about escaping an actual coven (!), and a real-life visit that she and Argento took to a school in Switzerland with ties to the arts and the occult. This is a movie that feels like an expressionist hallucination, one marinating in primary hues to which Tovoli would add a complimentary color, mainly yellow, to contaminate them. The very first shot sets the tone with that conspicuously crimson airport lounge. Goodbye, real world; hello, cruel world. Its like Harper is stepping through a portal into a dream, one where the blues are icy, the greens range from emerald to pea-soup nauseating, the goldenrods gleam and the reds bring to mind gallons of spilled Type O.

And then there are the kills Jesus, Mary and Mario Bava, the murders in this film! Weve already mentioned the death by heart-stabbing, hangman-noose-tying, hairy-armed killer (those are Argentos hands grasping the first of the films numerous victims). There will also be death by a jagged glass plate through the skull, by a seeing-eye dog attacking a jugular vein and by stumbling into your run-of-the-mill room filled with barbed wire. The last one is punctuated by a black-gloved hand slicing the victim with a razor, the most common manner of homicide to be found in a giallo. In fact, its such a conventional way of dispatching a character that it sticks out in an Italian horror that borrows the vocabulary of that subgenre but leaves any sense of slasher-flick realism (the word is being used extremely loosely here) behind. Then that woman returns later as a maniacally grinning, laughing cadaver with steel needles stuck in her eyeballs, ready to kill, and you think, Ah, right: That is the Suspiria-logic ending we assumed shed get in the first place.

By the time weve arrived at the climax, having been primed by the band Goblins throbbing prog-Euro-funk-meets-kitchen-sink score (writer David Karat astutely noted that the opening melody resembles a childs nursery rhyme one more fairy tale-like motif), the movie delivers unto us the apocalyptic delirium its been promising for the previous 80 minutes. The head of the snake known as the Black Queen makes her appearance known, Harper has to deal with all sorts of nastiness and the coven gets their comeuppance. Things fall apart. And viewers leave feeling dazed, as if theyve just awoken from a particularly nasty Technicolor nightmare. Unlike other Seventies horror films that made you want to repeat Its only a movie only a movie, Suspiria 1.0 revels in its blatant make-believe at no point do you ever forget that its only a movie. But thats what makes Argentos masterpiece such a glorious through-the-looking-glass experience. Its an immersive bad dream you keep returning to, one that neither endless reviewings nor a remake can temper. It will still unnerve you in ways you cant even pinpoint.

Miss Bala Review: Gina Rodriguez Brings the American-Remake Heat

Gerardo Naranjos 2011 Mexican thriller Miss Bala followed the tragic story of an aspiring beauty queen who was kidnapped and coerced into service by a cartel; it was a brutal, relentless movie, one that had little time for psychological shading. In the new American remake, the ruthlessness of the original has been tempered quite a bit, replaced by a string of narrative clichs and pro forma character development. Without the unyielding forward charge of the original, however, the far-fetched story doesnt really work. And the movies attempts to explain its characters doesnt make them any deeper; quite the contrary, it renders them simplistic.

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Miss Bala 2.0 follows young Los Angeles make-up artist Gloria (Gina Rodriguez) as she travels south of the border to Tijuana in order to help her best friend Suzu (Cristina Rodlo) enter into the Miss Baja California beauty pageant. One night, the two of them go to a club, where Gloria witnesses a group of armed thugs enter through the womens bathroom. One massive, deadly melee later, Suzu has gone missing and Gloria has been whisked away by a local gang, led by Lino (Ismael Cruz Cordova), a fellow Mexican-American who spent his childhood in Bakersfield. He decides that she can be of some use to them, especially when it comes to transporting drug money back across the border.

The situation gets complicated, however, when the young woman is intercepted by a merciless DEA agent (Matt Lauria) and forced to help his team spy on the bad guys. Faced with no choice the feds refuse to believe that shes just an innocent bystander whos been kidnapped Gloria agrees to become a mole as well as a mule. But might she have feelings for the hunky Lino? Hes a brutal gang leader, but hes also got a sad backstory about being out of place in both the U.S. and Mexico too gringo to be a Mexican, too Mexican to be a gringo, as he describes it. That seems to echo Glorias own experiences of alienation in different worlds. It also echoes her specific journey in this film: When shes in Mexico, shes told she sounds like an American. Crossing back into the U.S., shes regarded with suspicion.

What we have here is something perched between soap opera and action movie yet doesnt quite commit itself to either genre. Director Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight) stages the gunfights clean and fast, but theyre also largely anonymous what happens is rarely interesting or intricate enough to hold our attention. And while the story builds some romantic tension between Gloria and Lino, things never go so far as to make us feel invested in their relationship. (Though they do share a plate of delicious-looking barbacoa together.) The filmmakers are probably wary understandably so of making the tormented heroine fall for the criminal who kidnapped her. But without any deeper emotional engagement, its hard to really care about what happens to anybody besides our morally conflicted.

Gloria, however, is Miss Balas key strength. Rodriguez proves herself quite adept at conveying this young womans terror even as she attempts to stay calm: We can see in her eyes that shes petrified by whats happening to her, and barely holding it together. With each new twist each new, dangerous alliance shes forced into Glorias situation feels increasingly hopeless. Thats also why some of the pictures later developments are so ludicrous and out-of-place. She seems too human to turn into a kick-ass action hero.

Naranjos original, though inspired by real-life events, was itself quite an unlikely tale. But the films relentless forward march, its refusal to slow down, sold the narrative you couldnt quite believe your eyes, but you also couldnt stop watching. This Hollywoodized remake is mostly generic and uninspired, but it also proves that Rodriguez has the makings of a true movie star. Itll be exciting to see what she does next so long as its not a sequel to this.

Candyman: Why This Racially Charged Horror Movie Is Scarier Than Ever

Racists of every stripe have been telling Americans that they should be afraid of black men for as long as theres been an America. It tooka 1992 horror movie, however, to the turn the embodiment of that fear-mongering into a literal bogeyman that appears out of nowhere to violently murder people.Candyman written and directed by Bernard Rose, adapted from Clive Barkers short story The Forbidden (and coming out in a new Blu-Ray edition on November 20th) sics an undead son of a former slave on a white woman, who finds herself fascinated by what shes supposed to be afraid of. And theirrelationship gives viewers a bizarre tour of the harsh reality that results whenstereotypes applied to black peopleare believed en masse.

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We hear the title characters voice long before we ever see him on screen, but the films real focus is on University of Illinois graduate student Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen). Helen and her best friend Bernadette (Kasi Lemmons) are conducting research into urban legends, which leads her to stories of a mythical serial killer named Candyman. Her pursuit of the phenomena takes her into Chicagos infamous crime-ridden Cabrini-Green housing projects, where shes met with hostility and distrust by the residents who tell her more stories about the hook-handed killer. Scoffing at first, she investigates the legend and the killings and she learns that Candyman is indeed real. Worse, he stalks her to the brink of madness and commits more murders that she gets arrested and institutionalized for.

Early on, the movie seeds the idea of deep, hidden connections between Americas ugly racist history and contemporary urban blight and crime. Candymans origin story begins when he was still alive, the son of a slave who got rich in industry. He was well-educated, came up in polite society and eventually became a talented artist who did portraits of fellow elites. But when he fell in love with the daughter of a well-off landowner who became pregnant, her father hired hooligans to cut off his hand. After smearing his body with honey so he was stung to death by bees, the hired brutes burned Candyman on a pyre and scattered his ashes all over Cabrini-Green. The fantastical gore differentiates it from the kind of extra-judicial killings that were used to hearing about. But its a lynching nonetheless.

Yet, despite his tragic death, the audience is not directed to be sympathetic towards this character. We never learn his real name in the movie. Hes only concerned with perpetuating his own undead existence through horrifying means. Hes more useful as a monster than as a human, a political calculus thats infected America from the start. This callousness is just one of many dissonant elements throbbing under Candymans exposed ribcage, spotlighting how folklore by black people and folklore about black people have often been at odds. White hegemony has made it so that the morbid whispers of the latter category can multiply in force until commonly accepted, ultimately becoming powerful enough to permanently imprint on a nations psyche.

Helens symbiotic relationship with the killer knowingly draws on the way that white women in peril have been used to demonize black men in America, a tradition stretching all the way back to D.W. Griffiths The Birth of a Nation. Candyman tells the tragic tale of the unjust death of an 19th-century black man and then presents that same black man as a supernatural monster. No one helped Candyman when he was being chased through Cabrini-Green after daring to impregnate a white woman. A century later, hes getting revenge for his own murder at the hands of the white ruling class, shaping this grad student in his own image and making it so no one will want to help her.

Roses screenplay acknowledges that, too, since Candymans sole motivation for killing is his continued existence as an immortal bogeyman. I am the writing on the wall, the whisper in the classroom, he says to Helen. Without these things, I am nothing. So now I must shed innocent blood. Come with me. Later, he drives the point home again: I am rumor. It is a blessed condition, believe me. To be whispered about at street corners. To live in other peoples dreams but not to have to be.

I first saw Candyman in the theater during college, with a group of friends. Id read some Stephen King in high school but I didnt identify as a big horror fan. And, though the group of friends I went with was almost entirely black, the reason we went to see movie wasnt because it was built around a black occult figure. As best as I can recall, the reason we wanted to see the movie was to see if it could summon superstitious dread en masse. We all remembered from hearing about Bloody Mary during our elementary school days and wanted to see if wed grown past it. Or, if we all got scared shitless in a movie theater along with a bunch of strangers, there had to be something to the primal conceit of this boogeyman story, right?

That was then. Its weird to watch Candyman in 2018, when Chicago gets trotted out as a charnel-house cautionary tale thats the exemplar of everything thats wrong about black inner cities in America. The racism that got this character killed in 1890 is the same one that powered chattel slavery, as well as the prejudices and stereotypes that led 20th-century political scholars to cook up the term superpredator. The most discomfiting thing about the film is how its title character relishes his role as a malevolent immortal. We dont know if he was a decent man in his past life and are left to wonder if it was the circumstances of his death that turned him evil.

At the beginning of the movie, Helens self-satisfied professor husband Trevor ends a lecture by saying that stories about giant albino sewer alligators are modern oral folklore the unselfconscious reflection of the fears of urban society. After she dies and comes back as a bogeywoman, Helen exists as manifestations of those fears: A white woman going where she shouldnt, haunted by a black man who died for doing the same thing. Helen and Candyman are the demonic answers to the unspoken question rumbling inside the movie: What happens when people only want to believe the worst about you? He tells Helen our names will be written on a thousand walls, our crimes told and retold by our faithful believers. In a political climate where fear and stereotypes are tearing Americas psyche to shreds, Candyman is scarier than ever because it reveals how deftly we can damn each other. Thats genuinely terrifying no matter how many times you say it into a mirror.

First Reformed: Paul Schrader on Faith, Hope and Returning to Form

Its a sunny afternoon in Los Angeles, and Paul Schrader is asking for forgiveness as an American flag flaps outside his window. If he appears distant, the 71-year-old filmmaker explains, he had a detached retina operation three weeks ago and his left eye is half-filled with blood. The screenwriter-turned-director who helped engrave Martin Scorseses reputation with his scripts for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull is wearing black pants and a nubbly black sweater over a white shirt. You could describe his style vibe as casual priest a perfect look for talking about First Reformed, his tense drama starring Ethan Hawke as an alcoholic minister named Toller whos politicized by questions of how an Old-Testament God can combat global warming.

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But even before a violent environmentalist (Philip Ettinger) and his pregnant wife named, naturally, Mary (Amanda Seyfried) insinuate their way into his thoughts and prayers,the pastors faith is already failing. Hes suffering from health issues and a crippling sense of futility. His rural 250-year-old house of worship has been emptied by a glossy megachurch; their local celebrity preacher (Cedric The Entertainer Kyles) glad-hands with donors like the polluters whove driven Tollers conflicted activist parishioner to suicidal despair. Soon, the holy man feels he has to do something, anything, to combat the tide of personal depression and eco-destruction. It does not end well.

Itsounds heavy and it often is. But its also a movie filled with moments lit up by Schraders cerebral sense of the absurd, as when he zooms in on the Reverend pouring Pepto-Bismol into his scotch as the bubbling pink blob looks like the formation of the universe.Or, after an hour of barren rooms and emotional austerity, Hawke suddenly flies through a hallucinatory vision quest that swoops from the creation of life to mans destruction of the planet. Trippy, severe and literally sublime, First Reformed is Schraders best film in a decade, maybe longer and throughout a conversation that swirls from faith to films, from an in-progress countdown to humanitys extinction to the time Homeland Security thought he might kill the president, the supposedly dour director laughs often. If this is how the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimpering plea for charity and empathy, Schraders saluting it with a sardonic farewell.

Your dad was very religious and didnt let you watch movies growing up he helped the campaign to block The Last Temptation of Christ from playing in your hometown. Do you think that out of all of your films, this might be the one that hed have liked the most?
I think he would be proud of the people he knows who likes it. I dont know whether he could make that opinion by himself. I went back to Calvin [College, founded by Christian reformers in 1876], which was my alma mater, and we showed the film to 600 people. I did a Q&A and gave a lecture, followed up by a panel with faculty members discussing spirituality of cinema. That was a kind of terrific deal. So in that context, of course, my father would be tickled.

The first film you saw was The Absent-Minded Professor and you didnt like it. Do you think if you had seen a better comedy, you would have fallen in love with that genre instead?
No, no, no, because I just didnt think films were very serious and I was a very serious kid. So it really wasnt until I was in college that I saw the European intellectual cinema of the Sixties and all of a sudden I saw that the kind of person I was, the kind of things I respected, were also happening in the film world.

Growing up,I was very entrepreneurial. I was always selling stuff, starting stores, selling flowers door-to-door. I started out wanting to be a minister, I wanted to get on a soapbox. I said, Im gonna be a lawyer, Im gonna be Clarence Darrow. And then I realized I really didnt like people that much. So then I realized theres no other thing I can be but an artist.

One of the refrains in the film is, Will God forgive us? It feels like were living in a moment where forgiveness isnt happening on even a mortal level.
God will forgive us. He doesnt have a choice thats why we made him. Thats his job description! We will make you, God, but you have to forgive us.

The young activists first monologue about how global warming has destroyed the world should we all be in that headspace right now?
Its kind of amazing to think that that conversation has currency. In the midst of affluence, to say we have so little faith in the future that maybe its not a good idea thats kind of shocking and certainly not a question I asked myself when I had children. But I know its something people are asking. It gives a kind of weight to an argument and a discussion that has been over the centuries hypothetical: Where are we going? What will happen after us? Its always been a hypothetical conversation, but now people are having it in not such a hypothetical context.

Do you know who Yuval Noah Harari is? He had a bestseller a couple years ago called Sapiens, a history of intelligence; he has another book called Homo Deus, which is the future of intelligence. Hes quite a brilliant guy, an Israeli out of Oxford, and its one of those gob-smackingly brilliant books. But I was recently watching an interview with him and he said long-range thinking isnt 2000 years. It isnt 200 years. Its 20 years.

The tone, even just with the political news were not shaking out of despair and exhaustion into action.
Were defeated, in a way. Occasionally on Facebook, the first of every month, I post something that says, Stay mad until November. Hopefully we can stay mad until November, because that will be maybe the last chance. The mechanism of democracy is under siege.

You also posted something on Facebook that brought the Department of Homeland Security to your door. Do they tell you theyre coming ahead of time or do they just show up?
No. I was in the editing room and the doorman called me and said they were here. It was because of Alex Jones.He put me up on this website as someone who had threatened the life of the president. Then, of course, thats an automatic thing. All his people, they call up. So now Homeland Securitys getting all these messages about me as a threat to the life of the president, and therefore they have to follow up because if they dont follow up, and I happen to actually be one, they look like fools.

How do you convince them youre not a threat?
It wasnt very hard. I just explained the five stages of grief. And that anger was one of them.

Do you get the sense that the loudest religious people right now arent promoting soul-searching as much as hypocrisy.
Yeah. Its kind of confusing for the general public, because the loudest voices in the room are the most hate-filled. But theyre not the majority. Because they are so loud, people think that these evangelicals represent Christianity. And they certainly dont. But thats what happens when you play that media game and obviously, intentionally, say things to get headlines.

Theres a rich businessman character in First Reformed that argues that he doesnt believe climate change exists, despite factual science. Somehow thats connected to faith?
I once asked Michael Wolff why intelligent people would deny climate change. And he said, thats because theyre exceptionalists. They simply dont believe the rules of life apply to them. That they will somehow escape. Thats in their in their DNA. But I do think that we have made our decision. Were all hoping that deus ex machina will somehow rescue us. Its getting less and less likely.

Back to the film: What did you like about the pairing of Ethan and Amanda?
Well, I liked the fact she was pregnant. She was pregnant when we shot.

God will forgive us. He doesnt have a choice thats why we made him. Thats his job description! We will make you, God, but you have to forgive us.

Really?
I got a list of 10 actresses who the financiers would be happy with. And I was asking about them and the casting person said, weve been trying to get Amanda to do something, but shes turning everything down. The reason she was turning things down was she was pregnant. So I met her and she says, heres my date. That actually came in handy because we were having cash flow problems, because financiers hate to actually start paying money. I explained to them that if you dont get cash flow on Monday, were gonna lose Amanda and I will give you her obstetricians name if you want to call him. I dont think hell negotiate.

You cited so many film influences for this: Diary of a Country Priest, Winter Light, Ordet, The Sacrifice. When you add it all up, does it still feel like yours, or do you mostly see your nods to what you love?
Oh, absolutely. The secret of theft is to steal around. You cant go back to the same 7-Eleven theyll catch you so you go to the floral shop, you go to the gas station, you go to that little hot dog stand that nobody goes to. If you steal enough stuff, it starts to feel like its yours.

Comparing Ethan Hawkes austere little chapel to the megachurch that Cedric the Entertainer hosts shiny, appealing, non-controversial almost feels like the difference between black-and-white Bergman films and modern faith-based cinema.
Faith-based cinema, like Hillsong, like those churches, theres a real buzz there but its the buzz that you get from being in a group. Its the same buzz you get in a football stadium, in a political rally, in a military rally. We are a group, wearing the same uniform, making the same gestures. Thats a real buzz, but I dont think its a spiritual buzz. Its a buzz of the comforts of conformity.

When the tone of the film is so severe, was making it and being on set fun?
Oh yeah! It was fun because it felt right. Of course, youre moving very fast because to make a film like this, you have to do it inexpensively. So the film took 20 days to shoot youre moving so fast that you dont have time to second-guess and you dont have a trailer, because by the time you get back there, somebodys saying, Were ready now!

A tribute to austerity in a film about austerity.
Part of the visual aesthetic was if it moves, take it out. These people dont have anything. No carpets, nothing, just take it out. The worst thing you can do for the eye is show a cluttered billboard. The eye doesnt want to see all that. That half wine bottle [pointing to an opened bottle of wine next to the television], thats enough. You dont need anything else. You empty out that house and you say to the production designer, Okay, we have room for one idiosyncratic element and I think it should be a lamp.

If its possible to make good-looking films for a $3.5 million budget like this, why arent studios doing it? Why cant they afford a small risk?
We dont really have studios anymore. The middle has gone out, so now we have this tsunami of independent films, of which eight to 10 get their head above the crowd at any given year. And then you have the event films and family films so the dramas have migrated to longform where they reside on TV. But TV is not as free as you might think. This film, First Reformed, was turned down by Netflix and Amazon at the script stage and at the completed stage. So youre free to have transgressive things, but youre not free to have quiet things.

Is there anybody making films today who excites you?
A lot of people. In fact, theres so many that its hard to keep up because so many people are enabled by technology. People who couldnt afford make films a decade ago are making them. Its almost a clich to pick up the paper, read a website and see: Brilliant film by first-time director! So many people are now getting to have a voice that didnt have a voice, so theres brilliant films. And of course, you have a whole generation of filmmakers who have been trained. If you dont know how to make a film by the age of 12, youre behind the curve.

Youve been going back and reevaluating the movies of the Sixties and Seventies. Was it the times that made the films great? Something else?
It was the audiences. Whenever audiences ask art for answers, art will rise to the challenge and there will be great art. And there was a period there where movies were the center of the culture, which isnt true anymore, and there were about six or seven questions going around that society was wrestling with. Womens rights, civil rights, homosexual rights, the drug revolution, the anti-military revolution, wife-swapping, whatever. Movies responded. They said, you want an answer? Well give you an answer. And on the other hand, when people dont want serious movies, its almost impossible to make one.

What your film does is talk about how destructive young men arent sure where to put their energies.
Of course, thats the same thing as Taxi Driver 45 years ago.

Do the angry young men of today get the wrong idea from Taxi Driver?
Yeah, I think thats true. Obviously, Taxi Driver hit the zeitgeist. Thats the oddest thing. How do you plan on it? You cant. It just sort of happens.

And then to watch it change underneath you as people just superficially think of the mirror and the gun and reinterpret it for their 21st century lives.
Yeah. Often men always men will come to me and say, Taxi Driver is the film that made me want to be a filmmaker, the film that changed my life. And I say, Let me guess, you saw it when you were 14. They say, How did you know? And I say, Because thats the spot where youve been watching action films, male violence films and somebody recommends Taxi Driver. You see it in that context and you realize, Oh, theres a different way these movies can work it isnt all about superheroes.'

This is the closest weve ever seen to our country losing its mindand having things to talk about. Is it, at least, a time where arts important again?
[Long pause]

You just shuddered.
You certainly want to believe so. You know, I used to believe the way we talk about freedom. We want to be America the free. I think its just the opposite. I think were terrified of freedom, and the only reason we talk about freedom is the only way we can justify our fear of it. We crave chains and those of us who are craving chains use the word freedom, but we dont want freedom. I remember years ago John Dean, who was part of the Watergate scandal in the later part of his life, he joined a think tank and they put out a study about human nature. They said that about 25-percent of people wish to be told what to do, and one-percent hate to be told what to do. So that if you are mounting a fascist operation, you already have a quarter of the people. All you have to do is convince another quarter to join.

So if you were president, what would you do?
Im afraid thats too much of a hypothetical, but [exhales, thinks]

Is God an easier question?
I mean on November 9th I more or less stopped watching the news and reading the newspaper. I know everything thats going on you can pick it up through secondary and third news sources but just to have to see those terrible people talking on the news is an agitation that is bad for your health. Its like walking into a room full of polluted air. Why do you want to breathe this air, these people? So I dont watch anymore. I know what theyre doing. Its pretty hard not to figure out what theyre doing, but at least I dont have to watch them.

White Boy Rick Review: True Story of 1980s Informant Talks Loud, Says Little

By 14, Rick Wershe Jr. (Richie Merritt) could tell a real Russian Kalashnikov assault rifle from an AK-47 knock-off, courtesy of his firearms-hustling dad, Richie Sr. (Matthew McConaughey). At that age, he also hung with the African-American gangs who ran the drug trade in Detroit in 1984, earning a reputation and a nickname. By 15, hed been recruited by two feds (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Rory Cochrane) and a local narcotics cop (Brian Tyree Henry, now officially costarring in every fourth movie being released this year) to do buys for them, so they could try to build a case and nab the big fish running things. So Rick seems legit, they teach him how to make crack. By 16, Rick would become a dad, get shot in the stomach, help send his former running partners to prison and go into the pushing-heavy-weight business along with his dad. And by 17, the kid with the fat roll and a license plate that read Snow-Man would inadvertently help put a number of corrupt cops away and, after being sold down the river by the FBI, be sentenced to life in prison himself.

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So what did you do in your teenage years?

Wershes journey from ambitious young American to convicted-felon cautionary tale is the sort of true story thats catnip to movie producers, so it was inevitable wed eventually get an adaptation of his memoir especially if its a book blessed with the pulp-perfect subtitle My Life as an Undercover Teenage Informant for the F.B.I. You could do a lot worse than getting a director like Yann Demange, whose British-soldier-in-Belfast thriller 71 (2014) is a textbook example of pure forward-momentum filmmaking, to call the shots. The same goes for casting the newcomer Merritt as Rick Jr., a young actor who somehow makes the most of a role that requires him to be a blank slate cursed with a caterpillar-peachfuzz mustache and a mushroom mop of hair. His constant expressionlessness is in character, of course; the kid has to be the coolest cat in the room or die tryin. Plus, given that McConaughey is in mulleted, maxi-sleazoid mode and often looks like hes licking his chops over some highly chewable scenery, the kid kind of needs to balance out the equation a tad.

You could also do better than just presenting a series of incidents, true or otherwise, and not really connecting them into a bigger-picture whole, however which is what White Boy Rick feels like for most of its running time. Its early scenes, in which the two Ricks battle it out with the boys junkie sister Dawn (Bel Powley) and their cantankerous grandfather (Bruce Dern), crackle with dynamic familial chaos, and when Demange is called on to give the period stuff a sense of either bombed-out, urban-blight desperation or a giddy, come-on-party-people excessiveness, he can deliver good isolated moments. (Theres a shot of a pimped-out bigwig Eddie Marsan, dancing the wop to the break from Take Me to the Mardi Gras by Bob James, that is unforgettable and priceless.)

And while it doesnt fall prey to grabbing the GoodFellas brass ring and turning into just another story of crime and irony, the film isnt saying much about the Reagan-era War on Drugs, the hypocrisy that characterized it or the notion that crack was really cocaine cut with pure capitalism that you have not heard before. Takeaways are minimal here, other than Rick Jr. got burned bad and 1980s Rock City got burned worse. If the father-son drama running parallel to the rise-and-fall-with-detours narrative fares better, its mostly because Merritt and McConaughey work well off each other. The latter in particular gets a few deep scenes with his screen daughter Powley as well.

But the potential to use Wershes story to tell a larger one about the environment that made him and locked him up is M.I.A. America is the only country where a man can hot-wire his brains to his balls and make shit happen, Rick Sr. tells his offspring at one point. White Boy Rick has both a mind and a pair of cojones on it occasionally it even wears its heart on its rayon sleeve. They rarely seem juiced up or in sync enough to make a lot of substantial shit happen.

Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway to Present Best Picture at 2018 Oscars

A year after one of the most infamous moments in Academy Awards history, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway will return to the Oscars to once again reveal the Best Picture winner.

TMZ first reported that the Bonnie & Clyde co-stars would appear together again at Sundays ceremony, with the Hollywood Reporter confirming that Beatty and Dunaway will present the evenings biggest prize, a redemption of sorts following last years Moonlight/La La Landmistake.

At the 2017 Academy Awards, Dunaway and Beatty announced La La Land as the Best Picture winner after an accountant from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the firm that oversees Oscar balloting, accidentally handed Beatty the envelope for Best Actress (which La La Lands Emma Stone won) instead of Best Picture; Moonlight was the rightful winner of the Best Picture category.

While La La Land producers gave their acceptance speeches, chaos broke out onstage as soon after the accountant, later revealed to be Brian Cullinan, realized his error. Moonlights cast and crew then took the stage to accept Best Picture.

Beatty and Dunaway were initially blamed for the mix-up host Jimmy Kimmel jokingly asked the actor, Warren, what did you do? before the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences clarified after the show that human error on behalf of the PricewaterhouseCoopers accountants, neither of whom will take part in the 2018 ceremony, was the reason for the unbelievable Oscar moment.

The Academy previously announced additional safeguards, including a third accountant and banned cellphone use backstage, to prevent another disaster.