MURTADA ELFADL

“Horror without catharsis” is how Chris (Vicky Krieps) describes the films of Ingmar Bergman in “Bergman Island.” By contrast, the films of Mia Hansen-Løve always include some form of release, for both her characters and the audience. Hansen-Løve describes that as the heart of why she makes cinema at all. “Bergman, [whom] I love very much, explores the brutality of human relationships. But I couldn’t make my own films this way, because I need catharsis,” she says.
Instead, Hansen-Løve’s movie...

There’s a scene well into 2021’s The Eyes of Tammy Faye that presents the main character as a staunch queer ally. The film, written by Abe Sylvia and directed by Michael Showalter, is a portrait of the Christian evangelist and television personality Tammy Faye Bakker¹. The scene takes place in the 1980s just as Tammy Faye (played by Jessica Chastain) and her husband Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield) were starting to make a name for themselves as TV preachers. It shows her taking on Jerry Falwell (...

When writer/director Justin Simien’s debut indie movie, “Dear White People,” first arrived at the beginning of 2014, it was a sharp, insightful and prescient breath of fresh air— woke— a good three years before the word was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017, several months before “stay woke” became a BLM call to action following the shooting of Michael Brown in the summer of 2014. When the movie evolved into a Netflix series three years later, it still had much to say, still deli...

This week many people will head to the Arthur Ashe Stadium in Flushing, New York, to attend matches of the U.S. Open tennis tournament. But how many of those fans will know about the legacy of Ashe beyond once being a famous tennis player? Rex Miller and Sam Pollard’s documentary “Citizen Ashe” should help rectify that. The film, which just premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, tackles Ashe’s story and his contributions as a Black man in the predominantly white sport of tennis during a vo...

About the hundredth time characters in Mike Mills’ C’mon C’mon expressed themselves clearly and verbosely and said exactly how they were feeling at that moment, I almost lost it. Who has this clarity? Who can articulate their feelings so eloquently at every waking moment of their lives? Who are these people? They must be aliens from an alternate universe of never ending therapy sessions. These people have done the work and figured themselves out. Even the 10 year old kid. Movies are not real,...

“I Carry You With Me,” the tender queer romance out in limited release this week, tells the love story between two undocumented Mexican immigrants as they cross the border and build a life in New York. The story is based on real people, Iván and Gerardo, who appear in the film to complete telling their story while actors play their younger selves. A wonderful mix of narrative and documentary filmmaking, the film feels particularly resonant to immigrants because it dramatizes the way they alwa...

Maybe it was the 10th time director Janicza Bravo used a freeze frame to reframe the wild weekend tale she’s telling in Zola, when I knew I loved her movie. The freeze frames until then were used to stop the narrative for a pithy or funny observation by our narrator Zola (Taylour Paige), twitter reply style. But this time we were getting a whole new perspective from another character. It was delectable, hilarious and ghastly. I’d say the same for Zola.

You all remember the infamous 2015 Twitt...

6 minute read
With her work to shift the current culture of hostility towards transgender people in United States, Emmy- and Peabody-winning journalist Imara Jones called for a “reimagination and an expansion of Blackness” in a recent Time magazine issue featuring voices of “The New American Revolution.”“Trans people, just through our existence, show the power and the resilience of change, and possibility of how we can do things differently,” wrote Jones. “We are creating a future less define...

Darius Marder loves actors. He thinks that while acting is hard, it’s also magical and mysterious. “I have studied Meisner, Uta Hagen, and Stanislavski and I have been in those trenches,” he recalls, revealing his history as an actor before turning to filmmaking. “It gives me a tremendous empathy and love for actors. I respect the process.”

The main reason to watch Malcolm & Marie at all is to watch Zendaya. She owns the duet and blows Washington off the screen. Her visceral delivery of the dialogue has a rhythm that cuts to the bone. Every insult lacerates like barbed wire, every truth lands like a punch to the stomach.

One of 2020’s Sundance debuts that is making a mark at this time of year is Miss Juneteenth. The film, written and directed by Channing Godfrey Peoples, is rooted in a specific community in Fort Worth Texas and the world of pageants.
Nicole Beharie (Shame, 42, and TV’s Sleepy Hollow) stars as Turquoise Joines, a performance that has earned her a Gotham Awards nomination for Best Actress. She was once Miss Juneteenth, a title commemorating the day slaves in Texas were freed, two years after th...

A few minutes into Passing, Ruth Negga appears. She’s Clare Kendry, who is in New York accompanying her husband (Alexander Skaarsgaard) on a business trip when she spots an old friend Irene Redfield (Tessa Thompson) in the lobby of the Drayton Hotel. Resplendent in 1920s garments, blond hair and a mischievous smile on her face, Negga’s the cat that ate the canary personified on screen. Over the next few minutes she flirts with, cajoles and charms Irene into visiting her suite, staying and hav...

You love to see a star being born in a festival screening. Specially when that star is over 40, wrote and directed their own star vehicle after years of being ignored. It’s the ultimate artistic dream, to find inspiration from something very personal to you, yet have others respond to it. Remember the name Radha Blank because The 40 Year Old Version is only the beginning for her.
Blank plays a version of herself, a New York playwright nearing her 40th birthday and still struggling to find a p...

Video interview with playwright Jordan E Cooper about his play AIN'T NO MO' at The Public Theater.

To celebrate this year’s Oscar nominations which were announced this week we have a special episode about one of the nominees for best actress; Carey Mulligan. We discuss her filmography, her screen persona and dig deeper into three films; Shame (2011), Wildlife (2018) and her latest Promising Young Woman for which she recieved her second Oscar nomination. For this conversation podcast host Murtada Elfadl welcomes producer and writer, Jordan Crucchiola host of Disaster Girls and Aughtsterio‪n...