Featured
Emily Ann Hoffman on the Power of “Human-Crafted” Animation
OK, Call Me Back (2017)
A multidisciplinary artist at heart, the animator Emily Ann Hoffman makes films spanning many mediums at once. Stop-motion animation remains at the core, though she finds her inspiration in disparate places. “It’s so piecemeal,” she says. While an undergraduate at the Rhode Island School of Design, Hoffman took an animation course on a whim, pivoting from an interest in painting and searching for an art form that worked for her. “Through that experience, it all really clicked for me,” she says. “I realized animation—and stop-motion, in particular—was this amazing Venn diagram of all my interests: handcrafting, sculpting things, painting backgrounds, making sets.” Hoffman leapt into making shorts after meeting collaborator and producer Sean Weiner, and her filmography reflects this interest… Read more
Weaving The Odyssey
The Odyssey (2026)
When Christopher Nolan hired Jennifer Lame to edit Tenet, his 2020 sci-fi action thriller, she’d never worked on a project quite like it before. Her background was in far smaller films, including Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (2012), Mistress America (2015), and Marriage Story (2019), as well as Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea (2016) and Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018). Jumping into a project featuring big fight scenes and car chases filmed backward, Lame had a lot to get her head around, and has admitted it was intimidating at first. “I started having to just imagine the cars in these big action sequences as people, giving each car a personality, and have them talk to each other,” Lame said in 2020, “basically, treating them like dialogue scenes because I think dialogue scenes are that… Read more
Spa Eclectics: At Karlovy Vary
Everytime (2026)
The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival has walked an improbable path of occupation, compromise, and survival. Its first edition was held in 1946, the year after Czechoslovakia was restored from Nazi rule and weeks before the first Cannes Film Festival. By 1958, after a coup and ten years of state communism, it was designated a category-A film festival by the International Federation of Film Producers Associations—the tier denoting the highest level of international impact. The next year, the Soviet Union dictated that Karlovy Vary take place on alternating years with the Moscow International Film Festival until 1994, two years after its host country had become the independent Czech Republic. This year’s “Vary Special” festival celebrates sixty editions in the course… Read more
Keep Sex Weird: An Intimacy Coordinator Roundtable
In Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex (2026), a wallflower Gen Z gallery assistant, Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), enters into a dom-sub relationship with his much older boss, art-world provocateur Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde). For Elliot, intimacy is a gateway to self-exploration, and through messy experience, he grows more attuned to his own curiosities, likes, and dislikes. He also discovers that good sex is a dialogue—and that Erika, whose persona as a sexual explorer directly feeds her art, is maybe not the best role model for healthy consent practices.These themes of communication are central to the art and craft of intimacy coordination. Cultural debates around screen intimacy tend to question whether sex scenes move the plot forward on a very utilitarian level,… Read more
Remembering Sam Neill
In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
I never got to meet Sam Neill, but I thought of him as a neighbor for a very specific reason: like me, he had sat in the front row to watch a movie at the Eglinton Theatre. There he is as cynical insurance investigator turned wild-eyed paranoiac John Trent at the end of In the Mouth of Madness (1994), cheerfully chowing down on some popcorn as he enjoys a 35mm print of what will seemingly be the last movie ever screened, in Toronto or anywhere else. Screenshots from that John Carpenter sequence kept popping up on my timeline in the hours following Neill’s death last week at the age of 78, and my melancholy at losing one of the great modern movie actors was tempered… Read more
La Clef Revival Occupies the Cinema
Photograph by Chiara Marinai
I first heard about the reopening of the community-run cinema La Clef shortly after arriving in Paris this January. A friend, an American lecturer at the Sorbonne, took me there and proudly pointed at the two-story building with a signature key (clef) on its facade. “Do you know they used to illegally squat in the cinema for more than two years?” she asked. Founded in 1973 in Paris’s Latin Quarter, La Clef became known for championing independent and political films underrepresented in the commercial mainstream. After its owners announced plans to sell the building and closed the venue in 2018, a collective of cinephiles, filmmakers, and activists occupied the cinema for more than two years, organizing daily pay-what-you-can screenings while fighting to… Read more
