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17 Films We’re Looking Forward to at Cannes 2025
Sirat
With the Cannes Film Festival underway until May 24, here are 17 films our editors and writers are keenly anticipating. As always, look throughout the festival for reviews from Vadim Rizov and Blake Williams as well as interviews and festival reports. The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt) For her return to Cannes following 2022’s Showing Up, Kelly Reichardt latches onto Josh O’Connor’s rising star; after his profile-elevating turns in La chimera and Challengers, he’s in two competition titles this year (the other is Oliver Hermanus’s The History of Sound). Here he’s opposite Alana Haim, who also has a lot to promote with her band’s fourth album out this summer and her role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another; as a result of… Read more
“Drama Appeals to Us is Because It Touches Something Different than the Contemporary”: David Mamet on TV, Theater, Gene Hackman and His New Film, Henry Johnson
Henry Johnson
I assumed David Mamet would probably have more opinions about Aristotle than A24 and, indeed, in discussing the 76-year-old playwright-turned-filmmaker’s new movie, Henry Johnson, the former came up while the latter didn’t. Henry Johnson marks Mamet’s return to the director’s chair after a decade-long absence from cinema, and it’s easily his most austere work since 1994’s Oleanna, which like this film was adapted from his own play. Premiering on stage in 2023 at the Electric Lodge in Venice, California, and later staged at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater in 2025, the play follows the unraveling of its titular character, a well-meaning but naive middle-aged man (played by Mamet’s son in law, Evan Jonigkeit), whose attempts at misplaced or perhaps undeserved compassion… Read more
UFO Announces Spring, 2025 Short Film Lab Cohort
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UFO (Untitled Filmmaker Org) announced today the three new filmmakers comprising its 2025 Short Film Lab cohort. Selected filmmakers Daisy Friedman, Carin Leong (a Filmmaker 2025 25 New Face), and Emilio Subía will begin the Lab experience this month as they develop new scripted (Friedman and Subía) and nonfiction (Leong) projects. Filmmakers Emily May Jampel, Arielle Knight, and Samuel Wright Smith from the second Short Film Lab cohort announced last spring will continue in the program through December to develop their second projects engaging scripted narrative, hybrid nonfiction, and animation, in keeping with the Lab’s staggered enrollment model. The UFO Short Film Lab is an 18-month program designed to help early-career directors advance and refine their voice and craft, while receiving project… Read more
Read Interviews With the Fifth Annual Student Short Film Showcase Winners, Awarded By The Gotham, JetBlue and Focus Features
James Ross, Sisa Quispe, Xinying Lao, Kevin Haefelin and Mel Sangyi Zhao.
A creepy humanoid inches closer with every blink. A young woman returns to Peru to fulfill her grandmother's dying wish. A nine-year-old boy attempts to hide the beloved cows his grandfather must separate. A despondent man attempts to end his life to no avail. An older woman navigates ageism and desire in China. These are the varied premises of the five winners of the fifth annual Student Short Film Showcase, co-presented by JetBlue, Focus Features and The Gotham, Filmmaker's publisher. The five winning filmmakers are, respectively, James Ross (Don't Blink, Florida State University), Sisa Quispe (Urpi: Her Last Wish, City College of New York), Xinjing Lao (Xiaohui and His Cows, New York University), Kevin Haefelin (Fuse, Columbia University) and Mel Sangyi… Read more
Six Derelict Movie Theaters That Inspired Joshua Erkman’s Horror Thriller, A Desert
A Desert
With Joshua Erkman's eerie horror/thriller, A Desert, which centers around a photographer lost in a Southwestern desert while on an expedition to photograph its abandoned movie theaters, in theaters now, the director presents here six inspirational photographs he shot on his own early research trip to the film's locations. — Editor The original seed of A Desert was the photographer character, Alex Clark. I’ve long been obsessed with photography, and before movies took ahold and bent my brain, I had aspirations of being a photographer. Before I even had an idea of what A Desert was going to be about, I knew that I wanted to examine a very specific type of contemporary art photographer. One that dealt with the cumbersome… Read more
“Slow Cinema Meets Heavy Metal is Kind of Like My Goal in Life”: Joel Potrykus, Back To One, Episode 340
We rarely get to hear Joel Potrykus talk about himself as an actor. The independent filmmaker of such beloved low-budget treasures as Ape, Buzzard, and Relaxer says he has, in fact, never talked about it. In his latest, Vulcanizadora, he once again co-stars with the man he loves to point his camera at, Joshua Burge. The two reprise their roles of Derek and Marty exactly ten years after they birthed those characters in Buzzard. On this episode, Potrykus explains the decision to take on the role in both films, why he loves working with the “machine” that is Burge, the part of directing actors he likes the least, how the end of Field of Dreams helped his acting process, and… Read more
