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“A conceptually exciting, intellectually searching portrait of the social psychologist Stanley Milgram….Mr. Almereyda bridges the past and present with a movie that looks back at the Holocaust and toward Abu Ghraib. Peter Sarsgaard, occasionally addressing the camera and sometimes accompanied by an elephant that materializes in the room, delivers a forceful yet intimate performance that expresses his character’s sincerity and the sinister undertow of his methods. Sundance could use more movies, like “Experimenter,” that are adventurous in form and thought, not just in subject.
Manohla Dargis, New York Times, October 16, 2015
Experimenter
1:38
Premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, 2015
“…Unfolds like a tragedy, gradually shedding all its armor until it winds up, naked and a little crazy, as something of a comedy. You don't have to love Shakespeare's Cymbeline to get swept up in the spirit of Almereyda's: With its shootouts, its subcurrents of tenderness and eroticism, its trick-or-treat mischief-making, this adaptation is brash and inventive and more than a little wild. But all this madness has a purpose: As with Hamlet, Almereyda is most interested in testing and proving the resilience of Shakespeare, challenging us to see how it holds up in the modern universe.
Steaphanie Zacharek, Village Voice, September 4, 2014
Cymbeline
1:38
Premiered at the Venice Film Festival, Italy, 2014
The Man Who Came Out Only At Night
15 min.
Premiered at the New York Film Festival, 2013
Skinningrove
15 min.
Best Non-Fiction Short at the Sundance Film Festival, 2013
Best Short at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2013
The Great Gatsby in Five Minutes
11 min.
Premiered at the New York Film Festival, 2011
“I am enthralled by Paradise, a film whose documentary eye wanders while seeming to have great fixity of purpose just below the level of conscious apprehension.”
Jonathan Lethem, Film Comment, 2003
Paradise
1:22
Premiered at Film Comment Selects, New York, 2009
Gotham Award Nomination for Best Documentary
“Fascinating… William Eggleston in the Real World speaks for itself in roughly the same mysterious way an Eggleston photograph does: it casts more light than you expect, and deeper shadows.”
Terrence Rafferty, New York Times, August 28, 2005
William Eggleston in the Real World
1:27
Premiered at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2005
Gotham Award Nomination for Best Documentary
Deadwood: E.B. Was Left Out
2005 (TV Series,1 episode) 55 min.
“Sam Shepard invited Almereyda to film his own rehearsals for the San Francisco stage production of his autobiographical play The Late Henry Moss, featuring Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, James Gammon, and Cheech Marin…
Almereyda's judicious observation and careful editing keep Shepard's serious work with actors and honest wrestling with personal demons fascinating and instructive throughout.”
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader, 2003
“An uncanny pulse-taking of our technology-saturated times, where identity has become not just a salable commodity but a mass-marketed one. This singular, raggedly beautiful film, which also manages to fit concerns about detective noir, Blaise Pascal’s Pensees and the blues music of the late Ernie K. Doe into its svelte 89-minute form, isn’t for everyone…But it will foster a core critical contingent that will find itself transfixed and, ultimately, deeply moved by the film’s ravishing power.”
Scott Foundas, Variety, June 12, 2002
“Mr. Almereyda has created a new standard for adaptations of Shakespeare, starting with an understanding of the emotional pull of the material that corresponds with its new period and setting… The director's rigorous trimming has a boldness and vivacity that makes this version exhilarating while leaving Shakespeare's language and intent intact.”
Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times, May 12, 2000
The Rocking Horse Winner
22 min.
Premiered at The New York Film Festival, 1997
Best Short at the Hamptons International Film Festival, 1997
At Sundance
1:11
Co-directed with Amy Hobby; Premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival, Switzerland, 1995
"The lushest film of the year thus far is Michael Almereyda's Nadja, a comic vampire tale, or portrait of the young as a lost tribe of bloodsuckers. Shot in shimmering, undulating black and white -- part Fisher-Price Pixelvision, part silvery 35mm -- Nadja follows the path of Dracula's moody daughter, who, discontented with the routine, intends somehow to start over, be born again."
- Georgia Brown, Village Voice, 1995
Rated #4 in the Voice's "20 Best Modern Vampire Movies, 1979 to the present" (2014)
"First-time director Michael Almeredya, who adapted the script from Mary Robison's 1981 novel OH!, has etched a disturbingly comic portrait of the nuclear family nuked....The film may be blissfully bonkers, but it also speaks tellingly of the dislocation in American life. Part fun house, part chamber of horrors, Twister emerges as outrageous, original entertainment."
Peter Travers, Rolling Stone, 1989
