Back in 2011, Canon approached director Ron Howard about creating a short film inspired by a framework of eight photographs, which were culled from over 100,000 submissions through an online contest. Howard declined on account of his busy schedule, but offered to mentor a filmmaker through the process. His pupil in Project Imagin8ion was none other than his daughter, actress Bryce Dallas Howard. Through the exercise, Bryce crafted the 29-minute when you find me, a short film written by Dane Carbeneau about two sisters grappling with the death of their mother through space and time. A photograph of a dilapidated …

In Martha Stephens’ lovely, evocative and deceptively simple Pilgrim Song, Timothy Morton (Team Picture) plays James, a newly unemployed elementary school music teacher from Louisville, Kentucky. A gangly fellow with a large red beard, some mean fiddle skills and an unreliable sense of direction, James finds his future hanging in the balance in more ways than one after he’s laid off from his teaching gig. Seeking some sort solace following his dismissal and an unspoken trauma that has pushed him apart from his girlfriend Joan (Karrie Crouse, also the film’s co-writer), he sets out on a trek across Kentucky’s Sheltowee Trace …

Ben Wheatley first gained attention with a nine-second video clip that went viral in the pre-YouTube era. In “Cunning Stunt,” a man successfully jumps over a moving car, celebrates, and is instantly wiped out by an unseen oncoming vehicle. It’s a funny, jolting gag restaged in Wheatley’s 2009 feature debut Down Terrace (a sick-funny look at a homicidal low-tier-criminal family bumping off everyone in their immediate circle). Death by vehicular homicide again makes for the first death in his latest film Sightseers. Chris (Steve Oram) just wants to take his girlfriend Tina (Alice Lowe) on a relaxing rural trip through …

“The independent screenwriter” — is the term a tautology or oxymoron? While the word “independent” is often applied to directors and sometimes producers, it’s rarely seen appended to the job title of screenwriter. Is that because so many independent directors write their own scripts? Because screenwriters-for-hire are inevitably drawn to the world of Hollywood? Or, perhaps, because the term means little when applied to the craft of screenwriting? After all, while a director is reliant on others to provide financing and labor, a writer can always sit down with pen, paper or word processor. In this new, occasional column, we …

Sumptuous and evocative, Jared Moshe’s Dead Man’s Burden is the rarest of species in specialty film, a Western. More importantly, it is a fine addition to the genre, a complex meditation on the wages of sin and the burdens of family, a chamber drama with more than a hint of noir. Set during the years after the Civil War in and around a rural New Mexican ranch, the film initially focuses on a young couple, Martha (Clare Bowen) and Heck (David Call). They plan to sell the ranch after the death of her father, a struggling farmer, and use the money …

Could John Cassavetes’ children, all of whom have grabbed his passed torch, be any more different? Son Nick has dabbled in gritty crime fare (Alpha Dog) and mainstream melodrama (The Notebook), daughter Zoe helmed Broken English and has ties to the fashion biz, and now eldest daughter Alexandra — or “Xan,” for short — has carried on the tradition, making her own distinct narrative directorial debut with the vampire romance Kiss of the Damned after previously making the cinephilic doc Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession. Adamantly stylized, worldly, and nostalgic, Kiss of the Damned, which Xan also wrote, joins Neil …