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How to Ace a Film School Admissions Interview

USC MOTION CAPTURE STUDIO PHOTO COURTESY OF USC SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS.

I turned in this column way late this quarter. My excuse? Admissions. Like film faculty across the country, my colleagues and I in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California are reading dozens of applications for a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate filmmaking, screenwriting and media arts programs, and sorting through personal statements, work samples, grades, letters of recommendation and more, trying to sense who might be best for our program and how our program might best suit potential applicants. There are more applications than ever, even though recent analyses suggest that students consider the humanities to be a joke, while enrollment in statistics classes skyrockets (I’m thinking specifically of Nathan Heller’s New Yorker piece…  Read more

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Solutions Based: Who Should Save Independent Film?

Two white men, one wearing a red hoodie and one wearing a blue zip-up, gaze upward.A Real Pain, courtesy of Sundance Institute.

The Sundance Film Festival is a time for movie watching, deal making, talent scouting and, often, much soul searching about the state and future of the independent film industry. This year in particular there was no shortage of media coverage and conversations about distribution and the sustainability of the independent business. As Sundance CEO Joana Vicente told The Ringer’s “The Town” podcast, “Everyone is thinking about solutions… How can we help and figure out how all these films find a home, and what’s our role in the distribution exhibition piece?” For Sundance’s more commercial films—of which there were several this year, including the dramatic comedy with recognizable actors (A Real Pain), the crowd-pleasing documentary (Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story) and the…  Read more

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A Blurring of the Real: Damon Packard, Documentary Archival Footage and Generative AI

An AI-generated version of the filmmaker John Carpenter sits in a living room on fire.A Day in the Life of John Carpenter

A crowd of people, animals and AI-generated beings sleeps in a movie theater. Faces are lit by the explosions of an atom bomb on screen. All we hear is the loud snoring of hundreds of people and the sounds of their bodies moving; a nondescript rodent crawls on the floor. We cut to the 70mm IMAX projection room, where the projectionist is also sleeping. The camera moves very slowly, but each shot morphs within itself at a faster pace. These two visual rhythms are layered on top of each other. The explosions on screen intensify; a panic sets in. We cut outside, and bombs start exploding in the city, submerging the theater and the audience. A YouTube comment below the…  Read more

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Notes from Inside the Ecosystem: Joanne McNeil on Apple Vision Pro

The Apple Vision Pro headset with battery

From the late aughts until pre-pandemic times, Apple’s presence in my life seemed concise and easy to recognize. It manufactured the phone in my pocket and the laptop I worked on. I picked an iPhone and a MacBook over the alternatives for the usual reasons: because Apple products were reliable and well-designed with intuitive user interfaces. The company, as a product manufacturer, appeared to have a vastly different purpose than the neighboring Silicon Valley empires extracting and monetizing data like Google and Facebook.  Something changed in recent years. Now, when I think of Apple, I think of the AirTags I use to track my luggage or of contactless payments with Apple Pay on my iPhone—a service that struck me as redundant…  Read more

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“We Were a Bit Like a Circus That Came to Town”: Sara Summa on Arthur&Diana

Sara Summa, Lupo Summa and Robin Summa in Arthur&Diana

Filmed during a genuine road trip between Germany, France and Italy, Arthur&Diana, the sophomore film from writer-director Sara Summa is fueled by experimentation. Summa and her real-life brother Robin play the titular sibling duo as they embark on a trip from Berlin to Paris in order to renew documentation for the car which carries them, itself a cherished familial relic. In tow is Diana’s two-year-old son, Lupo, also embodied by Summa’s own child. As they drive through Europe and encounter faces old and new—a magnetic young hitchhiker, the pair’s zany Parisian mother, Diana’s partner and co-parent—it becomes clear that their beat-up yellow station wagon (or, more aptly, the era of their lives that it recalls) might be abetting the duo’s…  Read more

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“I Didn’t Want It to Get Too ’80s”: Rose Glass on Love Lies Bleeding

A female bodybuilder flexes on stage before a table of judges.Katy O'Brian in Love Lies Bleeding

Equal parts romantic horror movie, revenge thriller and twisted, small town family drama, Rose Glass's second feature after Saint Maud, is a midnight movie for the arthouse crowd, complete with Hollywood stars (Kristen Stewart, Ed Harris, Dave Franco, Jena Malone) doing wild and crazy things all in the name of intense body horror. Set in the late 1980s, the film stars Katy O'Brian as Jackie, a woman making her way through the American Southwest en route to a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas. In New Mexico, Jackie picks up a job as a waitress at a tacky shooting range run by an intimidating gun nut and his idiot son-in-law (sporting hairstyles equally hilarious and mortifying, the roles are played by Ed…  Read more

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“When I Started Putting the Talking Head [Interviews] In, It Didn’t Feel as Beautiful”: Director Antony Crook on His SXSW-Premiering Mogwai Doc, If the Stars Had a Sound

If the Stars Had a Sound

On X recently, a poster asked for song titles named after movie directors. One of the few that came to mind was from the Glasgow-based band, Mogwai — "Stanley Kubrick," from their 1999 EP. It's a vintage Mogwai track, bass and drums in mid tempo as a reflective melody rises and falls over seesawing organ chords. The song's connection to the great director is left up to the listener, the way of virtually all of Mogwai's imaginatively titled, mostly instrumental songs, which over a 25-year-career have captured fans with their mixture of gentle beauty and then, in bursts, beautiful noise. Few bands have sustained such a consistent emotional chord across such a long career, an ability to to activate memory or…  Read more

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Masterclasses at Qumra 2024 by Leos Carax, Claire Denis and More

Two men sit on a stage separated by a small wooden table at a Q&A.Richard Peña and Leos Carax on stage at Qumra 2024

Launched ten years ago by the Doha Film Institute, Qumra is an industry convention held annually in Qatar’s capital city of Doha. Through panels, workshops, screenings and masterclasses, Qumra brings together a cross-section of producers, festival programmers and journalists in an effort, according to organizers, to “provide mentorship, nurturing, and hands-on development for filmmakers from Qatar and around the world.” This year’s edition, which ran from March 1 to 6, arrived at a particularly fraught moment for the Middle East with Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza. After cancelling last November’s Ajyal Film Festival in solidarity with Palestine, the DFI, which oversees both events, soldiered on with Qumra. Speaking at a press briefing, Fatma Hassan Alremaihi, the Chief Executive Officer of…  Read more

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