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Considerations: The Gascón Press Tour

Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofía Gascón in Netflix's Emilia Pérez.Emilia Pérez (Netflix)

Every Tuesday Tyler Coates publishes his new Filmmaker newsletter, Considerations, devoted to the awards race. To receive it early and in your in-box, subscribe here. In October, I told (warned?) a publicist friend that it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw some old-fashioned, Weinstein- and Rudin-style opposition campaigning this Oscar season. Back then, the prominent narrative was that the field was wide open without a clear frontrunner, and most of the studios and marketing agencies were operating with smaller budgets. By this time last week, the only controversies were about the use of AI to perfect the Hungarian accents in The Brutalist (which raised flags for many who don’t like the use of AI in artmaking to begin with) or the…  Read more

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“Being Clean with the Words Gave Me More Freedom than Anything”: Margo Martindale, Back To One, Episode 329

A middle-aged white woman with brown hair and a red top -- the actress Margo Martindale, leaning forward with her chin on her hand.

In movies like Million Dollar Baby, August: Osage County, Blow The Man Down, and series like The Americans, Justified, and Sneaky Pete, “esteemed character actress Margo Martindale” loves to play people much different from herself. And she’s been so good at it for so long that she only started to get truly recognized for her work in her 60s. Three Emmys later, she’s able to pick and choose what she wants to do. Her latest, the Amazon series The Sticky, finds her number one on the call sheet and having a blast playing the bombastic maple syrup farmer Ruth Landry. On this episode she explains why the first step in her preparation process is knowing where a character was born…  Read more

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“…How To Put Myself in a Situation Where the Outside Pain Helps Me Reach the Inside Pain…”: Stefan Djordjevic on His IFFR-Premiering Wind, Talk to Me

Wind Talk to Me

German philosopher Ernst Bloch was noted for his introspection and study around what he termed the “utopian imagination.” He put forth the concept of simultaneous non-simultaneity: the possibility that people could live in different temporalities while inhabiting the same place at the same time. Moving image work, by its very nature, can illustrate this idea like no other art form can – even without special effects or CGI. From frame to frame, sequence to sequence, a collection of purpose-built images and sounds floats through their own unique space-time continuum, evoking an awakening, a recognition, creating a genre-defying ode to staying connected to things and people relegated to a past that still feels uncannily vivid in the present. In his feature film…  Read more

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Atropia, Seeds Win Top Prizes at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival

An older Black man wears a t-shirt and cowboy hat. He is holding a baby in his arms and kissing it on the head.Seeds, courtesy of Sundance Institute.

Hailey Gates's war-training satire Atropia won today the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Brittany Shyne's Seeds, about Black farmers in Georgia and their relationship to both the land and U.S. agricultural policy, won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary. In the international categories, the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic went to Rohan Parashuram Kanawade's UK/India/Canada production about a Western India urbanite grieving the loss of his father. Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears). Cutting Through Rocks (اوزاک یوللار), Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni's documentary about the feminist teachings of a councilwoman in a small Iranian village, won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary. The film is an Iran, Germany, U.S.A., Netherlands, Qatar, Chile, Canada…  Read more

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“Compassion Should Rule the Day, Not Punishment”: Director Cole Webley on His Sundance-Premiering Drama, Omaha

A white man, two white children, and a golden retriever are sitting in a car.Still from Omaha. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

A family of four—an unnamed Dad (John Magaro), his children Ella and Charlie (Molly Belle Wright and Wyatt Solis), and their Golden Retriever—hit the road at the start of Omaha, towards Nebraska. We don’t get to know too much about them at first—just that they have an old car that needs a little push, and they’ve been evicted from their home, forced to collect their most treasured possessions quickly, like they are saving memorabilia during a fire. We don’t even know why they are heading there. Cole Webley’s deeply compassionate gut-punch of a movie, which premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition section of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is one that should be experienced without spoilers. So with a major spoiler…  Read more

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“In a Way This Film Asks, What is Lost by the Virtual?” Ira Sachs on his Sundance-Premiering Peter Hujar’s Day

A white man in his 40s with dark hair and a blue plaid shirt leaning on a couch with cigarettePeter Hujar's Day

Among the features premiering this year at the Sundance Film Festival, there are none — on paper — simpler than Ira Sachs's Peter Hujar's Day. Arriving just two years after he premiered his Passages at the festival, Sachs reunites with actor Ben Whishaw for a picture that's one 76-minute dialogue between two friends in a New York apartment in 1974. What's more, that dialogue is not some dramatically sculptured theatrical two-hander building to third act epiphanies but, rather, a transcription of an actual conversation between art photographer Hujar and artist Linda Rosenkrantz, who was conducting interviews for a book in which New York artists would, Andy Warhol diary-style, narrate the details of one 24-hour period. (That book was abandoned but…  Read more

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