Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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NYFF 2025: Duse, Gavagai
When I caught up with Martin Eden during the pandemic, I liked it pretty well but didn’t understand “what, exactly, is the value of […] a eulogy for the Western European project’s dissolution at this late date.” Whoops! I don’t know why I couldn’t grasp why Pietro Marcello wanted to delve into fascism’s allure for charismatic upstarts in 2019; I certainly get it now, so perhaps my positive response to his tepidly-received Duse is, in part, a delayed apology for spacing the first time round. This film’s project is, pretty precisely, gender-flipped Martin Eden (more succinctly, per my colleague Mark […]
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New/Next Film Festival 2025: On Campus
Begun as a scrappy response to the Maryland Film Festival cancelling its edition in 2023, New/Next held its third run in Baltimore from October 2 to 5 and has already announced that the festival will be back next fall. “The word about the festival in the filmmaker community is really strong, especially about the quality of experience we offer them,” festival programmer and co-founder Eric Allen Hatch said during an edition which brought in over 300 filmmakers to The Charles Theater. “I find that most of the works I would want to show are being sent to me.” “You keep […]
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Busan International Film Festival 2025: Follow the Money
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 […]
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The 2025 San Sebastián Film Festival
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 […]
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20 Recommended Films at the 2025 New York Film Festival
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 […]
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TIFF 2025: The Christophers, I Saw the Face of God in the Jet Wash, Rose of Nevada
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 […]
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TIFF(ty) 2025: The Fence, To the Victory!
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 […]
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Ides of March: The 2025 Venice Film Festival
On the evening of August 8, 1939, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels led a fleet of gondolas down the Canal Grande. He’d been invited to attend the opening of the seventh Venice Film Festival, which began in a lugubrious atmosphere. The specter of a new world conflict was haunting Europe; critics dispatching from the Lido wrote of an “empty” Venice, “long-faced people,” “little dancing” and “lots of play to chase away negative thoughts.” Back then, the festival functioned as a sort of political summit; the Biennale invited delegations from different countries, which would submit the films themselves. Sixteen nations took […]
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TIFF 2025: Wake Up Dead Man, The Wizard of the Kremlin
The lights went down precisely at 6 pm, the designated starting hour for Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man, and people began murmuring in pleasant surprise: at premium TIFF screenings where a starry cast is the main attraction, kick-off time is understood to be more of a loose suggestion than an actuality you can make plans around. Director of Programming and Platform Lead Robyn Citizen briskly thanked the sponsors and brought out Johnson; he worked the room and had his intro done in 2.5 minutes. (Rian Johnson is a wise man.) The sponsor bumpers started at 6:05; “A TIFF miracle!” […]
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Patricia Aufderheide, Jax Deluca Named Fall 2025 Shorenstein Center Fellows
The Shorenstein Center announced today the Fall 2025 cohort of Documentary Film Fellows, who will be working closely with the Documentary Film in the Public Interest (DFPI) initiative. Through the Fellows’ projects, the Shorenstein Center will engage in examinations of public impact and media policy. Shorenstein Center Director Nancy Gibbs said in a press release, “We are eager to welcome these exceptional leaders into our research community. Prof. Aufderheide’s groundbreaking work on ethical practice, and Jax DeLuca’s on the civic power of documentary, could not be more timely at this critical moment for the field.” The Fall 2025 Fellows will […]
