Filmmaker Eliza McNitt’s second VR film, SPHERES: Songs of Spacetime, has made history as the first VR film to sell at Sundance. CityLights, a VR financing and distribution company, acquired the project as a three-part series for a significant seven-figure deal. Narrated by Jessica Chastain, SPHERES is inspired by the recent discovery that gravitational waves make their own music, and it visualizes the collision of two black holes that produce these movements. With the Oculus Rift headset and hand controllers, the viewer uses their voice and body to interact with the cosmic landscape, drawing stardust circles while being pulled into […]
The Rider, Chloé Zhao’s miraculous second feature, possesses a narrative that feels both as old as time and riveting in its newness: A young rodeo star has a tragic accident and must battle adversity on his way to recovery. You know this story. Except, through Zhao’s eyes, “redemption” looks different from what we’ve been conditioned to expect in a culture built on stories of success and celebrity. Every character on screen in The Rider is a real person, playing a version of themselves. But this is not a documentary. The performances in The Rider are exhilarating and deep and true. […]
The Young Karl Marx is the latest film from Raoul Peck, a filmmaker who still believes in the intelligence of the audience. It’s his first film since his incredible success with the Oscar-nominated I Am Not Your Negro, about James Baldwin. Like so many radical filmmakers he has found acclaim when he has been able to marry his own political beliefs and curiosity with society’s infatuation with celebrity. The film on Baldwin came at the right time and struck a chord at a moment when #BlackLivesMatter entered the public consciousness and the realisation that the election of an African-American president […]
With the release of Coco last year Pixar created yet another film that won over critics and audiences with rich visuals and a compelling story; it’s earned over $200 million so far and just took home the Best Animated Feature Oscar. Pixar wanted to use the property to push forward into new territory, though, and thus used Coco as the vehicle for its first virtual reality experience. To do so they tapped Magnopus, a Los Angeles-based VR/AR company that had previously produced Moana‘s virtual reality product for Disney. The result is Coco VR, a visually arresting gaming experience that also constitutes Oculus’s largest foray into social VR thus far. […]
Ben Stillerman — director of Taking Stock, a new film about his father’s South African family business — talks with two other documentary filmmakers about the particular joys and challenges of making films about family. Leah Warshawski is the director of Big Sonia, about her inspiring Holocaust survivor grandmother; Kate Dandel’s Gold Balls is about professional senior tennis and features her father-in-law. Stillerman: I came up with the idea for doing a film about my father and our family business partly because I knew I would have unfettered access to a very interesting person and story. I also knew that […]
Lucrecia Martel’s Zama was one of the few titles to escape the sweeping critical scorn heaped upon the cinematic year 2017. After getting passed on by Cannes (potentially because one of its producers, Pedro Almodóvar, was president of the jury – though that would only have disqualified it from the main competition) and inexplicably landing an out of competition slot in Venice, the long-anticipated fourth feature by one of today’s most distinguished auteurs was received with Twin Peaks: The Return-levels of enthusiasm in certain quarters. The comparison to Twin Peaks isn’t merely incidental: both are works of staggering confidence and […]
Developed with the support of a 2013 Guggenheim Creative Arts Fellowship, The Manhattan Front is experimental filmmaker Cathy Lee Crane’s first feature-length narrative film in a career spanning over two decades. True to Crane’s hybrid art film roots, though, The Manhattan Front melds melodramatic acting on silent-film-styled sets with newly digitized archival footage of daily life in New York City and on the front lines during World War 1. Via this unconventional approach Crane presents the true story of how a German saboteur’s plans to prevent American munitions from reaching Britain during a period of official U.S. neutrality became entangled […]
Director Mark Pellington has long been one of the American cinema’s foremost chroniclers of the connection between mortality, memory, and identity; questions related to how we define ourselves in life and how those lives define our legacies have been key in films as diverse as The Mothman Prophecies (a thriller in which Richard Gere becomes obsessed with the supernatural ramifications of his wife’s death), Father’s Daze (a documentary about Pellington’s father’s struggle with Alzheimer’s Disease) and Of Time and Memory (an unconventional adaptation of Don Snyder’s novel about Snyder’s attempts to know his deceased mother). In Pellington’s last several features, […]
For over 15 years, Jesse V. Johnson has been a reliable craftsman of action movies for the wildly unreliable DTV market. Born in England, he moved to Hollywood to work as a stunt performer in the 1990s, working on everything from Total Recall (1990) to The Thin Red Line (1999). He has bounced back and forth between stunt work and DTV directing ever since — whatever it took to pay the bills in an unpredictable career. One predictable thing over the last year has been the presence of Scott Adkins as his leading man. Adkins may not have the name […]
Over nearly 20 years, film journalist Neville Pierce has collected bylines at most of the U.K.’s top film publications, including Empire (where he’s a contributing editor), Total Film (where he was the editor) and The Guardian. And while he worked as a reviewer early in his career, he’s best known for his long-form profiles of actors and directors, pieces that are deep dives into the art and craft of subjects like Michael Fassbender, Mark Romanek and, most consistently, David Fincher, whose sets he has visited and written about no less than seven times. But since 2011 Pierce has been building […]