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If, as Tolstoy put it, happy families are all alike, that’s probably because they’re opaque to the rest of us, for whom friction and rifts are as much a part of the kindred experience as love. Jesse, the hyper-observant only child at the center of Ricky D’Ambrose’s The Cathedral, takes in all the specifics of his unhappy family — not just his parents’ divorce when he’s 10, not just his father’s ongoing struggles, financial and otherwise, but the awkward silences and generational baggage, the rite-of-passage celebrations straining toward grace. The writer-director-editor’s microbudgeted sophomore film, now streaming on Mubi, juxtaposes remembered interactions and still-life shots with a deliberate, elliptical precision, the minor-key notes building to a chord that resounds with the ache of lost time and unexpressed emotions.

Through the eyes of the filmmaker’s alter ego, an artist in...

Ricky D’Ambrose’s second feature, The Cathedral, begins in the mid-’80s, with a narrator outlining the history of the Damrosch family: father Richard (Brian d’Arcy James), mother Lydia (Monica Barbaro) and son Jesse. The film begins shortly before the latter’s birth and continues into the mid-aughts, outlining an often difficult Long Island upbringing. Richard casts a dark shadow over Jesse’s upbringing. The years’ passing is concretized datewise by a plethora of broadcast news footage—a new element for D’Ambrose’s work in a feature full of them. I […]

The post “Originally I Had a 200-Page Script”: Ricky D’Ambrose on The Cathedral first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Ricky D’Ambrose’s second feature, The Cathedral, begins in the mid-’80s, with a narrator outlining the history of the Damrosch family: father Richard (Brian d’Arcy James), mother Lydia (Monica Barbaro) and son Jesse. The film begins shortly before the latter’s birth and continues into the mid-aughts, outlining an often difficult Long Island upbringing. Richard casts a dark shadow over Jesse’s upbringing. The years’ passing is concretized datewise by a plethora of broadcast news footage—a new element for D’Ambrose’s work in a feature full of them. I […]

The post “Originally I Had a 200-Page Script”: Ricky D’Ambrose on The Cathedral first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Rarely has a filmmaker kept his central character at such a distance as writer-director Ricky D’Ambrose does in The Cathedral. This is clearly an autobiographical work in some very important ways, and no doubt a purging of some demons as well. And yet the kid here, whose life the film follows from birth to his acceptance at college, has very few lines of dialogue and for the most part remains a cipher. All the same, this is a penetrating look at childhood that, distinctively, focuses more than anything on the foibles and shortcomings of the child’s parents, particularly his father.

Workshopped at the Biennale College Cinema program in 2020-2021 and world premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival, this fastidiously crafted work creates a sharply selective portrait of clueless parenting that one can only imagine will require years of intensive therapy from which to recover—or, if D’Ambrose is lucky,...