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Don DeLillo’s tome “White Noise” has frequently been a title thrown into the “unfilmable novel” sweepstakes due to its massively descriptive, interior, dreamy prose, but adaptor/director Noah Baumbach and cinematographer Lol Crawley not only found a palatable visual modus to reintroduce DeLillo’s 1985 characters into the 2020s, but put the most bliss-out cherry-on-top imaginable, a nearly 10-minute, expressive dance number featuring the film’s entire cast traversing the aisles of the production designer Jess Gonchor’s impressively-mounted A&p supermarket set, set to an infectious new tune by LCD Soundsystem.

“I think we probably did that dance sequence in a day, but had three different scenes [in that supermarket] so I can’t remember where we landed,” says Crawley, collaborating with the usually more demure Baumbach for their first-ever project. “We followed them around to the pace of somebody pushing a shopping trolley, so it’s fairly controlled. By the end of it,...

It’s always fun and games until someone bites another person’s finger off.

To be fair, Maren — the young hero of Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All, one half of its red-hot killer couple, our tour guide of ’80s Rust-Belt America and the role that officially confirms actor Taylor Russell as a best-of-generation contender — has sampled human flesh before. Her tastes first manifested themselves when she was three years old, we’re told, and her father (Andre Holland) has been shepherding Maren around from city to city, state to state ever since.

First things first: Yes, Luca Guadagnino still wants to make a sequel to “Call Me By Your Name” with Timothée Chalamet as the soul-searching Elio, but he wouldn’t put it in those terms. “A sequel is an American concept,” the filmmaker said during an interview at the Telluride Film Festival. “It’s more like the chronicles of Elio, the chronicles of this young boy becoming a man. It is something I want to do.”

For now, though, Guadagnino has already satiated his desire to collaborate with the actor who became a star as a result of that 2017 romance. With “Bones and All,” Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich have transformed Camille DeAngelis’ 2015 cannibal into a gothic plunge into the ’80s-era midwest. Equal parts “Badlands” and “Bonnie and Clyde,” the movie is a sensitive look at the kind of marginalized characters who populate all of Guadagnino’s films.

A scrawny Chalamet plays Lee,...

Michelle Obama graces one of seven covers for T magazine's October 2016 "The Greats Issue," and to say she's deserving of that title is definitely an understatement. The first lady looks beautiful on the black-and-white cover, showing some skin in a spaghetti-strap tank top, earrings, and natural makeup. The covers, which celebrate people who "redefine our culture," also feature singer Lady Gaga, painter Kerry James Marshall, novelist Zadie Smith, chef Massimo Bottura, photographer William Eggleston, and fashion designer Junya Watanabe. Michelle is described as "the first lady who forever changed the role," and has four thank-you notes written to her by people including actress Rashida Jones and author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. "She had the air of a woman who could balance a checkbook, and who knew a good deal when she saw it, and who would tell off whomever needed telling off," Chimamanda wrote. "She was tall and sure and stylish.

FX’s “Fargo” got a lot more bizarre in its sophomore season, going back in time to 1979 to explore more ordinary people gone bad. Noah Hawley’s semi-prequel even borrowed elements from “Miller’s Crossing” and “The Man Who Wasn’t There” to appropriate more of the Coen brothers universe. There’s an escalation of violence that spirals out of control from the micro to the macro, which underscores the turbulent period.

Season 2 revolves around a winter gang war between a local crime family (the Gerhardts) and a Kansas City syndicate, all sparked by an inciting diner incident known as “The Sioux Falls Massacre” that resulted in three murders. The chain reaction is what state trooper Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson) and sheriff Hank Larsson (Ted Danson) must resolve.

The new challenges for the prequel included getting the period look just right and editorially dealing with a sprawling ensemble cast of characters.

Where his second feature Weekend was deep in the midst of two men at once falling for one another and trying to come to terms with who they were and who they wanted to be, Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years takes an approach where the couple we watch (Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling) have already mostly finished becoming who they are, both as individuals as well as with respect to one another. But it’s one thing from the past that makes them confront the meaning and authenticity of their relationship and their identities.

Keen on using subtlety the quotidian as emotional explosive, Haigh delicately films his lead paying acute attention to every movement, word, and look, how they relate to how these characters see themselves and each other, and how that impacts their relationship with the past, the present, and the future.

45 Years is a stunning piece of work, as...

Aferim!This year, Tribeca moved back home, swapping out the East Village’s AMC Loew’s 7 for the venue they once used, the nearly invisible Regal Battery Park Stadium 11 as one of the festival’s main theater locations. Whether it is coincidence or just one of the festival’s grand themes, the finest films I saw were about movement. Characters search high and low for someone or something. While carrying strange cargo, they journey to the West, to the East, wherever, going from point A to point B. If not travelling, then characters are stuck, stranded, or even trapped in a spot, but desiring to move, move, move. There’s a whole lotta riding and talking going on in Radu Jude’s Aferim! Shot on black-and-white film (Kodak Double-x), the film is set in 1855 Wallachia, a time in which the Romani people had subhuman status, being slaves to landowning Boyars,...

Telluride — Actor Ethan Hawke is in the middle of a career high right now. In the space of a year he has been a part of two landmark films from director Richard Linklater, "Before Midnight" and "Boyhood," each of them the result of years and years of work exploring characters as they change across a wide spectrum of time. He has two films set to play the Venice Film Festival next week in Andrew Niccol's "Good Kill" and Michael Almereyda's "Cymbeline" and he's here in Telluride with his own directorial effort, an emotional documentary that is ostensibly a portrait of pianist Seymour Bernstein, but on a deeper level is an exploration by Hawke of finding satisfaction in one's art. It's a delicate piece of work that played like gangbusters to a Telluride premiere audience Saturday, rapt as the so wonderfully well-spoken Bernstein rattled off philosophical nuggets throughout a lively Q&A.

Utopia’s director, Marc Munden, chatted to Den Of Geek readers about Utopia's distinctive style, its superb series 2 opener, and more…

Interview

In the swish screening room underneath Channel 4’s London headquarters, Utopia director Marc Munden chatted to a group of Den Of Geek readers after a preview screening of the first two surprising, stunning episodes of series two.

Catch up on what was said, from big yellow bags to moral quandaries, rhino dung and more…

That first episode is quite a bold one insofar as it has none of the characters as we know in it, how hard was that to get past the channel? Was there much debate about doing it that way?

I think people were sceptical and then when Dennis started to write it people just got behind it. Once Dennis had written it, everyone just came on board and it just got better and better.

When Sundance announced the films in competition for the 2014 festival yesterday, its organizers noted that they were impressed by the caliber of cinematic artistry — mostly due to technology — that freed up filmmakers to experiment with different genres. No category of the festival is more rooted in genre than Park City at Midnight, the late-night section that specializes in horror and the supernatural, and this year’s slate has several potential breakouts. “The Midnight lineup came together in a way that is about the strongest group we’ve ever had, top to bottom,” says Trevor Groth, Sundance’s director of programming.

Sundance Institute executives announced on December 5 that the festival will feature new work from artist Doug Aitken as well as Klip Collective’s external projections on the Egyptian Theatre.

An expanded New Frontier will showcase installations, performance, transmedia and panel discussion section. Most of the installations will be housed at a new, 5,000-square-foot location at the Gateway in Park City adjacent to Main Street.

Doug Aitken’s The Source (Evolving) will occur at a nearby location along Main Street.

“As human and machine, biological and media experiences blur and hybridise, the distinctions between them are also becoming irrelevant,” said curator of the exhibition and Sundance Film Festival senior programmer Shari Frilot.

“The digital and the organic integrally constitute a new primordial pool. What does creativity and storytelling look like if we revel in this new way of being?”

“This year’s expanded New Frontier allows artists to continue pushing the boundaries in telling their stories,” said Sundance...

The American Midwest's spare, glum beauty is conjured in Alexander Payne's lugubrious road comedy

At the start of Nebraska, Woody Grant (Bruce Dern), confused and old, is seen slouching doggedly along a highway on the outskirts of his town. "Hey, bud, where ya headed?" asks a solicitous cop. But where can Woody possibly be headed? It takes just one look at the nondescript urban expanse; at the chimney belching out fumes in the background; at the sign reading "Billings City Limits" (that's Billings, Montana) to know he can't be going anywhere special. This is the back of beyond, right? And Woody's surely on the proverbial Road to Nowhere.

In fact, Woody is determined to get to Lincoln, Nebraska, where he's convinced that a million dollars are his for the claiming. It's usual in American cinema to assume that areas such as the stretch between Billings and Lincoln, some 800 miles away,...

Musician, robber, cancer patient and all-round badass, Jerry McGill is the bizarre subject of this ambiguous documentary

Irish documentarist Paul Duane has chanced upon a properly bizarre subject: one Jerry McGill, musician, robber, cancer patient and all-round badass. In his 70s, McGill was not what he was – the gun-toting, Jaggeresque charmer who featured in William Eggleston's experimental feature Stranded in Canton, but he's still fearsome. Duane, as fascinated as a rabbit in headlights, follows McGill as he attempts to revive his music career, fend off medical treatment and negotiate fraught relationships. First seen clocking his partner Joyce in a car, McGill, it's safe to say, does not come out of this well; Duane's voice, off camera, cracks with genuine terror on more than one occasion. McGill died earlier this year ; this film will stand as his somewhat ambiguous memorial.

Rating: 2/5

DocumentaryAndrew Pulver

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It struck me the other day that two new posters that have recently caught my eye have something unusual in common: they both play on the idea of neon signage in very different ways. Since one of the best new posters of the year is the devilish blast of neon luminescence that is the Only God Forgives poster (which can be seen again further down) I thought that maybe we had the makings of a trend.

The poster for the music documentary Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me reuses the neon band sign that graced the cover of Big Star’s debut 1972 album #1 Record, only now the sign looks unused, if not abandoned. The photo has the feeling of a William Eggleston photo, which is not surprising since Eggleston was a good friend of Big Star’s Alex Chilton and a photo of his was used as the cover for...

Scarecrow and The King of Marvin Gardens – quirky, unstylised films made in the 60s and 70s that refused to smooth their rough edges. This bravery, Adam Mars-Jones argues, is what film-makers are missing today

The label "independent film" doesn't mean what it once did, and the Sundance festival is part of the reason. The moment aspiring film-makers realised there was a potential shortcut to distribution and acclaim, they started smoothing off their rough edges – consciously or without even noticing – or at least they began to stylise themselves. Either way, the overall effect of the festival has not been to promote individuality but to erode it. So it's a mild beneficial shock to watch two American films of the early 1970s on re-release – not because they're masterpieces, exactly, but because they give the flavour of a different set of assumptions.

Scarecrow, directed by Jerry Schatzberg, won a prize at Cannes in...

Even as late as the seventies, a lot of serious photographers looked askance at color pictures. Black-and-white was pure, documentary, the medium of Arbus and Adams and Avedon. Color was for ads and blockbusters. That attitude is mostly gone now—William Eggleston, Saul Leiter, Helen Levitt, and many others helped bury it for good—but spend some time with Katherine A. Bussard and Lisa Hostetler’s Color Rush: American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman (Aperture, $60), and you’ll begin to realize that it was bunk all along. For one thing, the marriage of art and technology that these images required is, itself, compelling: You cannot help staring at, say, a color photo of Parisian life in 1907, as much for its achievement as for its content. Even more eye-opening are those very approaches that highfalutin artists eschewed: the oversaturated Kodachrome jewel tones that make a Hollywood tableau simultaneously over-the-top and exactly right,...

Harvard film grad Andrew Bujalski wrote and directed "Funny Ha Ha," "Mutual Appreciation" and "Beeswax," all of which have appeared on the New York Times’s “Best of the Year” lists. He's in Sundance this year with his Next entry, "Computer Chess." What It's About: "A convention of computer chess programmers, long before Deep Blue defeated Kasparov, losing their minds while they build an artificial one." What It's Really About: "The dawn of the digital age--a time when nerds were nerds, and the rest of us had no idea what was coming." My Biggest Challenge: "Middle age!" Inspirations: "William Eggleston's 'Stranded in Canton' mashed up with all the science fiction and fact I absorbed as a kid." Indiewire invited Sundance Film Festival directors to tell us about their films, including what inspired them, the challenges they faced...

At the Telegraph, Anne Billson explores the work of Canadian artist and fashion photographer Kourtney Roy, who draws from Guy Bourdin, Cindy Sherman, William Eggleston but also various film directors in her ravishing, psychologically mysterious, yet bordering on kitsch portraits. From Billson: Where does [Roy] get her ideas? “I’m always struck by images in films. I love Douglas Sirk.” Sirk is the Hollywood film director best known for sumptuous 1950s melodramas such as Written on the Wind and Imitation of Life. “I love the colours and the décor. I really like Hitchcock, too, but he’s been referenced so many times …...

Named one of Filmmaker magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2007, New York–based co-conspirators Melanie Shatzky and Brian M. Cassidy gravitated toward moving-image storytelling after earning master’s degrees in photography at the School of Visual Arts. Exploring the porous borders between narrative and nonfiction, while importing many of the techniques they’d learned as Mfa students in another visual discipline, Shatzky and Cassidy debuted two equally memorable, conspicuously stylized shorts that year, The Delaware Project (fiction) and God Provides (a nine-minute doc), which premiered at the Rotterdam and Sundance Film Festivals, respectively. In 2011, The Patron Saints, a six-years-in-the-making “hyperrealistic” feature documentary that peeks at life in a nursing home with curiosity, discomfiting candor, and eccentric flashes of dark humor, unspooled at Toronto and further aligned the husband-and-wife team with a heightened cinematic style that borrows something from portraitists-of-the-everyday Walker Evans and William Eggleston.

Continuing their exploration in...

Note: Don't read on unless you've seen the premiere episode of AMC's "Breaking Bad's" fifth and final season, entitled "Live Free or Die."

What should we make of the opening scene of the new season of "Breaking Bad'" (Sundays at 10 p.m. Et on AMC)? Will there be a structural conceit similar to the one we saw in Season 2, which opened with images of items that we learned, much later, came from a plane that crashed?

This is just a guess, but I'm thinking creator Vince Gilligan will not try to recreate exactly what he did in Season 2, given that he's said in interviews that the need to steer the story to the plane-crash ending tied the writers' hands a little bit. This is a show that likes to change course as needed: One reason Season 3 was so good was because Gilligan and company ended the Mexican brothers' run...

'I placed an ad: "Seeking striking older woman to pose as glamorous movie star." I got around 150 responses'

There is an old Hollywood that still exists in Los Angeles, and I was interested in tracking down what remains of it. I wondered if there were women who had wanted to reach a level of stardom, but never did. So I placed an ad on Craigslist saying: "Seeking striking older woman to pose as a glamorous movie star for photo series." There were up to 150 responses, and I ended up shooting about 25 women.

I wanted the photographs to be a collaboration with the models, so I needed people who really connected with the idea of glamour. And they had to have a look: I didn't want to photograph someone who needed me to come up with ideas: it was about facilitating their fantasies.

Mara, the woman in this picture, told me...

The star of Alice in Wonderland on her new role as Jane Eyre, why she turned her back on ballet and how her love of photography allows her to focus the lens away from her

I arrive for my interview with Mia Wasikowska 45 minutes early, barrelling into the hotel corridor as she leaps gawkily, girlishly through a door. We lock eyes, I recognise her, she smiles shyly, as if trying to remember who I am, then realises she has no idea. This 21-year-old, the highest-grossing female film star of 2010, one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world, is clearly entirely unused to being recognised. Her expression shifts to friendly confusion, and she bounds off through another door.

Even when she's completely silent, stories whisper over Wasikowska's face, which explains her latest casting as Jane Eyre, a woman whose inner monologue bubbles with wit and defiance. The film opens...