‘Otis’ and the new American cinema

Filming Otis was like completing a giant puzzle, Stein says. Each character had a handful of “fiddle points,” or moments that were pivotal to the story and unmovable. For instance, one of the film’s most powerful scenes involves the babysitter smashing her own face with a soap dish — Stein and his team shot that moment, edited it down and timed it with a stopwatch. Then, they knew how long the