The first conversation I had in Busan was with a Malaysia-based genre film buyer who told me about the recent challenges of dealing with his adopted country’s famously rigid censor board while clearing promotional materials for a new Bollywood film, which he described as a less-violent John Wick. The poster showed the lead actor holding a bottle of beer and smoking a cigarette; unsurprisingly, the board nixed both elements and rejected the compromise of erasing them while leaving smoke still trailing out of the star’s mouth. In the end, the buyer was provided with an image of the hero on […] Source

In 2012, Mark Jenkin wrote his self-proclaimed manifesto “Silent Landscape Dancing Grain 13,” a series of vows of chastity à la Dogme 95; among other strictures, the Cornish director promised to shoot his films in black-and-white, keep them under 80 minutes and use only natural or available light, post-synched sound and diegetic music. Only a handful of projects Jenkin’s made since then would meet all those criteria. But even as his productions have steadily gotten bigger after his BAFTA-winning 2019 breakthrough Bait, his filmmaking approach hasn’t drastically changed. Jenkin wears many hats—aside from writing and directing, he routinely edits and […] Source

Catherine LeFrere plays Isabella Blow in the inventive Off-Broadway production House of McQueen at The Mansion At Hudson Yards in New York City. The play depicts the life of the brilliant fashion designer Alexander McQueen, who was discovered by Blow. On this episode, LeFrere takes us on a deep dive into the creation of her version of Isabella. She talks about starting with the voice, why she doesn’t want to be off-book in first rehearsals, the importance of playing off the audience, and much more. House of McQueen has been extending into November. Back To One can be found wherever […] Source

What does the sublime sound like? For Graham Reznick, serving as the sound designer for Bryn Chaney’s psychological thriller Rabbit Trap (available on digital Sept. 30, from Magnolia Pictures) was a sustained exercise in experimenting with aural narrative storytelling, searching for the same sorts of subliminally haunting sound effects that alternately entrance and unsettle the film’s musician protagonists. When Darcy (Dev Patel) and Daphne Davenport (Rosy McEwen) move to a remote house in rural Wales, they seek to draw sounds out of the local landscape, with Daphne interpolating and manipulating Darcy’s field recordings to create experimental compositions marrying electronic distortion […] Source

The 73rd San Sebastian International Film Festival marked the penultimate edition for its director José Luis Rebordinos, who has grown and expanded the event on Spain’s northern Basque coastline over his 15 years at the helm. One noticeable element of his programming down the years has been its satisfying cohesion, with themes frequently running across the festival’s different strands so that discussion of ideas is able to break out beyond a single movie into wider debate. Perhaps, as he begins to contemplate passing the baton onwards, it should come as little surprise then, that one of this year’s key subjects […] Source

Documentary essayist Lee Anne Schmitt’s latest feature Evidence is, artistically speaking, both a concerted continuation and marked departure. On the one hand, it furthers her career-long penchant for braiding political rhetoric, environmental portraits and American mythology; on the other, it filters these observations through a distinctly personal lens, even featuring a rare on-screen appearance for the director. The film opens with Schmitt showcasing an impressive collection of dolls, childhood gifts that her father brought back from frequent international business trips. Their national diversity and craftsmanship is impressive—most adorn traditional garb, some possess the ability to blink—yet they all translate the […] Source

While many (likely most) maverick artists have at least one unrealized moonshot project, few have a record of the high stakes drama of development behind the scenes of that lost dream. And even fewer have a record that’s as cinematically riveting as Howard Brookner’s Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars, a fascinating look at the titular theater legend as he goes about crafting — artistically, managerially, financially — the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down, his massive, multinational, 12-hour opera for the 1984 Summer Olympics. And far fewer documentarians have a nephew like Aaron Brookner, […] Source

In Bouchra, 3D animated anthropomorphic animals may populate the world, but the intricacies of their lives are unmistakably human. This approach is par for the course for the film’s co-directors, the Brooklyn-based visual artists Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki, whose bite-size episodic project 2 Lizards captivated viewers during the early stages of lockdown in 2020—and landed them on our 25 New Faces of Film list the same year. In the latter project, the eponymous 3D-rendered lizards (voiced by Bennani and Barki) shoot the shit about celebrities, news coverage, pandemic-era anxieties and the morbid relief of being able to shirk social […] Source

Though 1974’s Carrie marked Stephen King’s first published novel, The Long Walks holds the distinction of being the earliest opus penned by the horror author. The story of a contest in which 100 teenagers march until only one is left alive, King began The Long Walk as a college freshman at the University of Maine in the late 1960s amid the Vietnam War and the looming threat of its televised draft. He submitted the story to a Random House contest for new novelists, but received only a form letter in response and The Long Walk went into a drawer. Following […] Source

With the 63rd edition of the New York Film Festival kicking off tomorrow (Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt is the Opening Night Film), we at Filmmaker offer a list of 20 recommendations, the majority films we’ve seen and reviewed out of other festivals, a list augmented with a couple of strongly anticipated titles. Find below recommendations from Vadim Rizov, Blake Williams, Natalia Keogan, Leonardo Goi, Vikram Murthi, Nicolas Rapold and Sofia Bohdanowicz, with links to their coverage. For more information and tickets, visit the NYFF site. Gavagai There are two world premieres in NYFF’s Main Slate this year. The starry inclusion […] Source

“To tell you the truth, I was actually quite scared about making a documentary.” It’s a luminous morning in early September and Lucrecia Martel is chewing mate leaves in the restaurant room of a hotel a stone’s throw away from the Adriatic. Her latest, Landmarks, is her first nonfiction work, but to insist on the apparent break from the rest of her oeuvre feels misleading. A chronicle of the trial for the 2009 murder of Javier Chocobar—a member of the indigenous Chuschagasta community killed by a white landowner and two former cops in Tucumán, Argentina—the film still speaks to her […] Source

Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki made Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2020 off their improbably delightful pandemic-set 2 Lizards, a viral web series in which the filmmakers, week by week, transposed the time’s various masking and social distancing rituals into an animal-centric parallel NYC. In our profile, Bennani teased a new work, saying, “There’s something we spontaneously found together in terms of an animation technique and a certain tone that could be developed into another project.” So, in other words, don’t call the duo’s debut feature, Bouchra, any kind of specific follow-up, even though, again, there are animals (the […] Source

In 1971, Jean Eustache set a camera in front of his grandmother Odette and invited her to speak. The film that emerged, Numéro Zéro, is a vivid document of one woman’s life told without embellishment. The frame is almost fixed—broken only by a zoom or reframe—but Odette’s words animate it with a striking urgency as she chain-smokes, drinks whiskey, fields interruptions and insists on telling her story on her own terms. Domestic minutiae becomes monumental: Eustache reveals not only the power of a raconteur but also the radical act of listening and granting someone the time and space to summon […] Source

Hal Hartley’s Where to Land, his first feature in 11 years, presents a familiar, potent lattice of miscommunication within a small community. Joe Fulton (Bill Sage), a filmmaker referred to as “the quiet and unassuming elder statesman of American romantic comedies,” decides to prepare his last will and testament while also jockeying for a job as a cemetery groundskeeper. The timing of his estate planning combined with the drastic professional pivot concerns some of the people in Joe’s life, most of whom assume that he’s near death. His actress girlfriend Muriel (Kim Taff) and niece Veronica (Katelyn Sparks) panic about […] Source

Josh Pais returns to the podcast (first time was Ep. 77). Aside from being one of the most respected actors in the game, with over 150 credits in film and TV, Pais is the founder of Committed Impulse, a groundbreaking training born from his own acting process that has since become a “secret weapon” for thousands of top entrepreneurs, artists, doctors, lawyers, public speakers, and creators of all kinds. His work helps people break free from the tyranny of overthinking and drop into a state of embodied, spontaneous brilliance. And now—he has written a book! In Lose Your Mind: The […] Source

Megalopolis’s reputation preceded the film itself long before its première iat last year’s Cannes Film Festival. As Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating opus about the folly of men and the collapse of the fictional city of New Rome edged closer to completion, it became embroiled in a flurry of speculation and controversy, kickstarted by a striking exposé in The Hollywood Reporter about rising tensions on set between director, cast and crew. Self-funded by Coppola, who funneled over $100 million of his vineyard profits into the film, the Adam Driver-starring film ultimately represents two things at once: a historic landmark of independent […] Source

In Predators, three-time Emmy-winning filmmaker David Osit’s new documentary, the titular descriptor applies to multiple people: the pedophiles who found themselves the target of popular NBC sting series To Catch A Predator (2004-07), but also the makers of a show which packaged disturbing subject matter into mass entertainment while feigning moral superiority, the slapdash copycat series that have sprung up in its wake and the undiscerning audience for all of these. Osit divides Predators into three chapters. The first uses To Catch A Predator clips, chat logs and phone calls to build an introduction to the show, in which men […] Source

Steven Soderbergh’s films routinely fixate on money—who has it, who doesn’t, what (illegally) acquiring it says about personal status and national identity within global capitalism. So, it’s mildly surprising he hasn’t set a film in the contemporary art world prior to The Christophers, though previous works deployed visual art for character definition (Laura San Giacomo’s character in sex, lies, and videotape is a painter) or as a plot engine (the Imperial Coronation egg as Ocean’s Twelve’s MacGuffin). In his latest two-hander, artmaking serves as a dramatic foundation for extended badinage about creative expression as an imperfect vehicle for immortality. The […] Source

The carefree, meandering pace of summertime suddenly takes the form of a depressive stupor in Forastera, the feature debut from Los Angeles-based, Spanish-born writer-director Lucía Aleñar Iglesias. During an annual vacation to visit their maternal grandparents in Mallorca, Cata (Zoe Stein) and Eva (Martina García) engage in typical teenage shenanigans: they aimlessly ride bikes along the coast, go to beach bonfire parties and flirt with the boys they encounter there. Basically, all is as it should be—at least until the day that Cata discovers her grandmother’s unresponsive body. The girls’ mother Pepe (Núria Prims) arrives in order to help with […] Source

In November of 2023, always-busy cinematographer Matthew Libatique embarked on a particularly prolific period that saw the three-time Oscar nominee lens a trio of films nearly back-to back. That grueling feat was predicated on the fact that a triumvirate of Libatique’s most frequent collaborators came calling: Spike Lee with Highest 2 Lowest (briefly in theaters, now on Apple TV+), Darren Aronofsky with Caught Stealing (now in theaters) and Bradley Cooper with Is This Thing On? (scheduled for release at the end of the year, premiering shortly at NYFF). “It wasn’t lost on me how rare of an opportunity it was […] Source

On the sad occasion of Robert Redford’s passing, filmmaker Eva Vives pens this guest post on her interactions with the legendary actor, director, environmentalist, activist and Sundance Institute founder. — Editor I first met Redford by chance. Pete Sollett and I had gone to meet Sundance Institute’s Michelle Satter, Founding Senior Director of Sundance Institute’s Artist Programs, at the Sundance offices in New York after our short, Five Feet High and Rising, had won the festival. There was some kind of snafu, and I was asked to wait in an office while they sorted it out. I don’t remember where […] Source

The “making of,” in which process is made visible through behind-the-scenes chronicles—documentaries, YouTube tutorials and explainers of all sorts—is its own journalistic genre. These pieces invariably fixate on the facts. When it comes to feature films, for example, this camera, this number of shooting days and this set of references are the currency exchanged between artist and reader. Offering transparency through specificity, these exchanges are a hallmark of this magazine, so, in his dialogue below with fellow filmmaker Azazel Jacobs, director Ira Sachs (Passages, Keep the Lights On, Forty Shades of Blue) comes prepared to share. Their conversation about the […] Source

Sometime last year, Matt Quinn took an excerpt from a script he’d written and put it into an AI image generator to create a character. The associate professor of screenwriting, who also serves as associate dean for student affairs and director of L.A. programs at DePaul University’s School of Cinematic Arts, feels that it is his job to stay current with new technologies. He had previously experimented with various tools and had mixed feelings about generative AI and its connection to the filmmaking process. However, this experience was different. “It took a second, but it almost took my breath away,” […] Source

Watching Ruby Cruz’s remarkable and seemingly effortless performance in her latest film, The Threesome, I got a hunch that she was engaging with the work on some kind of intuitive level where connection was paramount. I also sensed that this might not be easy to talk about. In one sense I was right, the gifted young actor, who’s credits include Bottoms, Willow, Mare of Easttown and The Sex Lives of College Girls, approaches the work in an elusive way, but, lucky for us, she still manages to speak about the intangible and slippery aspects with an eloquence that is inspiring. […] Source

In the 1999 mini-series Storm of the Century, a malevolent stranger (played by noted Canadian Colm Feore) shows up outside Stephen King’s longtime fictional community of Castle Rock and repeatedly says “Give me what I want and I’ll go away”—but he doesn’t tell anyone what he actually wants, instead telepathically manipulating people into suicide and other grisly events until finally unveiling his ask. Obviously this made a big impression on me when I was 13, but I’m told the series was in fact terrible, which isn’t hard to believe, and it’s definitely not what should have been coming to mind […] Source