April Wolfe

What’s constant in Katherine Dieckmann’s films – Motherhood (2009), Diggers (2006) and A Good Baby (2000) – is an attention to characters and place. Many of us in the world of film reside in the big coastal cities, but a good number come from somewhere else, smaller towns with subtle......

Our critic April Wolfe is filing updates all week from the Toronto International Film Festival. When a quiet film is set outside of the big cities — New York, L.A., Chicago — it’s often called a “slice of life.” But that’s ultimately a condescending designation; to the millions of people......

Our critic April Wolfe is filing updates all week from the Toronto International Film Festival. Writer/director Ivan I. Tverdovsky may be a twentysomething male, but in his sophomore feature, he exhibits a direct pipeline into the psyche of a lonely, middle-aged woman. In Zoology, a lowly zoo worker suddenly sprouts......

What happens when a director takes his own life before he’s able to see his work open in theaters? In the case of Marcin Wrona and Demon, his mesmerizing Polish art-horror film, Olga Szymanska, Wrona’s producing partner and wife, has pressed on. She has traveled with the film, watching the......

The techniques of verbatim theater go back decades, to at least the 1950s, when young German theater troupes would re-enact complicated court cases word for word onstage. Even earlier, in the United States, the WPA paid for a form of this performance with its Living Newspapers, in which theater artists......

Tension and release is the driving principle of a tearjerker, where every good fortune is countered by something worse. And as dismissive as critics often are of the genre, it’s actually quite difficult for a director to make people cry en masse and genuinely feel things. Derek Cianfrance’s foreboding melodrama......

Nepotism is occasionally a positive, and not just for the direct beneficiary. Ridley Scott gave us Alien, with heroine Ripley and a memorable cast of ne’er-do-wells and villains with defined personalities. And now Scott’s son, Luke, who’s been shadowing his dad on his last few big-budget films, has delivered unto......

Just as there’s a bizarro internet where Donald Trump is celebrated as a warm, loving, generous, successful businessman who really wants to earn a Purple Heart, I wonder if there's also a bizarro, ravenous audience awaiting a feature-film re-enactment of Donald and Melania’s epic first date. (He literally tricked his......

Don’t let the uptick in big-cast movies fool you: Ensemble films are difficult to make. When a script gets a projected budget in creative development, “ensemble” adds dollar signs and story challenges. Each actor needs to get a moment in the star circle, and each is competing for top billing......