In her latest film Laggies, which premiered last week at Sundance, Lynn Shelton switches gears, working from another person’s script for the first time—without most of her standard improvisation—on a much higher budget (“I broke the million-dollar mark, by quite a lot!”), and with a bigger cast of characters, many of them A-list. The result […]
Among the glitz and overloaded chaos of Sundance, breakout stars emerge, fueling the reputation of the festival’s force as a discovery engine. This year, one of the most talked-about young actors is 15-year-old Josh Wiggins, who stars alongside Aaron Paul in director Kat Candler’s third feature Hellion. […It’s] a heartbreaking film, filled with alternating moments of […]
Note: This essay first appeared on Seed & Spark and The Huffington Post. Director Sarah Polley in Lionsgate Home Entertainment’s STORIES WE TELL Call it cheating, but I separated out documentaries from narratives for my year-end list. This was just too fantastic a year for these films to compete with movie stars and spectacular CG. Though […]
Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi‘s work has been quietly stunning audiences for almost a decade. His last three films—Fireworks Wednesday, About Elly and A Separation—racked up festival accolades from Berlin to Tribeca to Sydney, with the latter film going on to win both the Golden Globe and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2012. In […]
Since his award-winning debut feature In the Company of Men in 1997, Neil LaBute has developed a diverse career that spans writing and directing for both the stage and screen. Depicting unsettling and often cruel relationships between men and women, his work can be difficult to stomach, but there is no denying his unique voice. His latest film, Some […]
Born in Delft in 1632, Johannes Vermeer was not a prolific painter; scholars can only definitively attribute roughly 35 paintings to him. (A few more are in dispute.) Modestly successful in his lifetime, then relatively forgotten, Vermeer was rediscovered in the 19th Century. He has since become regarded as a grand master, best known for his impeccable […]
Nicole Holofcener‘s much-anticipated new film, Enough Said, stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the late James Gandolfini in one of his final film roles. The two play a pair of divorced parents who begin dating after meeting at a party, bonding over the fact that each is sending a daughter off to college soon. Both Louis-Dreyfus and Gandolfini […]
With Hunger, his feature debut in 2008, Turner Prize-winning artist-turned-director Steve McQueen made a bold statement right out of the gate: he was a filmmaker to watch. Three years later, Shame solidified his reputation as an audacious director with an unflinching eye. And now, with 12 Years a Slave, which screened this week at the Toronto International Film Festival after […]
In Kelly Reichardt‘s latest film, Night Moves, a ragtag triumvirate of determined activists-cum-eco-terrorists, played by Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, and Peter Sarsgaard, decide to make a grand statement about over-consumption and the destruction of natural resources by blowing up a hydroelectric dam on the Oregon river near where they live. Afterwards, the trio is forced to confront the depth […]
In Richard Ayoade’s The Double, which premiered this week at the Toronto International Film Festival, Mia Wasikowska plays Hannah, an enigmatic and artistic young woman caught in a bizarre love triangle of sorts with two men who are outwardly identical, but polar opposites in how they interact with their dystopian world (both roles are played by Wasikowska’s […]
Kristin also presents social media workshops, moderates panels about all aspects of the film industry, and offers one-on-one training sessions about building a digital community.
She occasionally contributes filmmaker interviews to select outlets, and provides editorial content across platforms.