Cayetana de los Heros, the eight-year-old protagonist of The Bad Intentions, is precociously preoccupied with death. She idolizes her nation’s independence heroes, imagining the many exotic ways in which they have been executed for their valor. “Massacre, massacre,” she whispers into the ears of her sleeping cousin. Beautifully shot in steely gray and blue hues that look cold to the touch, The Bad Intentions moves away from the conventional pastel-hued whimsy often used to depict childhood. Death — the fear and the fact of it — quietly pervades the entire film. Cayetana’s divorced parents mean well but have too many …

Amy Berg’s West of Memphis lays out an overwhelmingly strong case for the innocence of the men known as the West Memphis Three. Charged with the 1993 killings of three boys in Arkansas, Jason Baldwin, Damien Echols and Jessie Misskelley Jr. each spent 18 years in prison. Baldwin, Echols and Misskelley were released in August 2011, but they were forced, under an arcane statute, to accept responsibility for the murders. Now in their mid- and late 30s, Baldwin, Echols and Misskelley are technically still culpable, but Berg’s rigorous, science-based inquiry, should dispel any lingering notion that they were involved in …

We had just lost all of our locations in one fell swoop the day before, and I was walking along the train tracks that cut through the sun-baked adobe village of Chita, pretending to measure the light, but really just trying to re-convince myself that coming all the way to Bolivia to make a short film was a good idea. Since arriving, we had somehow eased our lenses through airport customs, protected our camera from torrential rain and endless sun, teamed up with a film school, and learned to love rice and potatoes with every meal. But that was before …

At Filmmaker we continuously cover the struggles of first-time directors to make their debut pictures. But the second film comes with its own set of unique challenges, issues that will be explored in this five-part series by Kishori Rajan. Below is the first installment, chronicling Filmmaker 25 New Face Tze Chun’s move from the microbudget character drama Children of Invention to a thriller with stars like Bryan Cranston. Look for further articles in the weeks ahead. — SM The late producer Laura Ziskin once remarked that movies “aren’t made, but forced into existence,” an expression never more apt than when …

The following Q&A is an excerpt from a conversation between filmmaker John Henry Summerour and John DeVore, a writer for The Pulse, Chattanooga’s weekly alternative. (DeVore’s Pulse feature on Summerour can be found here.) Summerour discusses the importance of his personal relationship with the South in making his newest film Sahkanaga (“Great Blue Hills of God” in Cherokee), which is inspired by the Tri-State Crematory scandal. In 2002, it was discovered that over 300 bodies that had been committed to the crematory in Georgia for proper disposal were never cremated and instead buried or left in a shed and the …

New York City’s taxi drivers are as ubiquitous as they are invisible. In his new documentary Drivers Wanted, Joshua Z Weinstein takes the passenger seat — often literally — and trains his camera on the men at the wheel, as well as the gristly mechanics and staff who work behind the scenes at a Queens-based taxi company. Though this may be a niche community, larger economic forces are clearly at play: many of the drivers are bankrupt, broke, or struggling to support their families. From the bustle of the garage, full of camaraderie and occasional conflict, emerge several key characters …

In California Solo, the latest film from writer/director Marshall Lewy (Blue State), Robert Carlyle plays Lachlan MacAldonich, a former Britpop star, now an alcoholic working as a farmhand in California. After he is caught driving drunk one night, MacAldonich’s legal right to remain in the country is challenged, and he is forced to revisit his former life. Carlyle delivers a wonderful performance, quiet, thoughtful and an altogether different alcoholic than Begbie, the Trainspotting role that shot him to stardom. After premiering at Sundance, California Solo played festivals worldwide (including its European premiere, at Edinburgh where one audience member, and Carlyle …

Early in Wagner & Me, a new documentary about the music and legacy of Richard Wagner, English actor and writer Stephen Fry says he’d like to time travel to the 19th century. Once there, Fry continues, he would start a letter-writing campaign, urging the composer to rethink his infamously anti-Semitic essay Jewishness in Music: “I say to him, ‘Listen, you’re on the brink of becoming the greatest artist of the 19th century, and future generations will forget that, simply because of this nasty little essay that you’re writing, and because of the effect it’ll have.” Wagner, of course, did not …

If you have a confession, then you have a conviction. At least that was the open-and-shut premise at the heart of the Central Park Jogger case, a crime story that inflamed racist paranoia in late ’80s New York City, stoking sensationalistic media coverage and frenzied outrage in the era of Bernard Goetz, Tawana Brawley, and the Bensonhurst murder, when the city was gripped with tensions that seemed ready to combust at any moment. After a white Wall Street banker from the Upper East Side was raped, beaten, and left for dead on April 19, 1989, while out for her nightly …

Nine years ago, I walked into Sound One on my first run at my first internship. This summer, I walked out of Sound One having completed post-production on my first feature, B-Side, less than six months after we began pre-production. It wasn’t just a feature debut for me as a director, but also for our producer, DP, editor, 1st AD, and leading lady. Now rest assured, I could tell you dozens of things we would do differently. Free sample: Don’t shoot anything that will go in a movie’s first five minutes on the first day of shooting. And we have …