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DIY Baltimore: New/Next Film Festival 2024
Softshell
“Another year, another New/Next” looks to become a certainty in Baltimore. After last year’s inaugural festival, it wasn’t known if New/Next Film Festival was a one-off event or if the Maryland Film Festival would return from hiatus. In 2024, both happened a couple months and a block apart in Station North, and both announced on their closing nights that they will be back for 2025. For the foreseeable future, Baltimore has two tentpole, unjuried independent film festivals; what is not certain is how they are going to interplay with each other as establishments, rather than events with question marks attached. MdFF bookended itself with speeches from Maryland’s governor and Baltimore’s mayor, while New/Next kept it less formal, opening and closing… Read more
Register Now for Free Hundreds of Beavers Distribution Case Study
Next Thursday, October 17, over Zoom at 2:00 PM Eastern, Jon Reiss — a longtime Filmmaker contributor and author of the new and highly recommended (and distribution-focused) 8 Above Substack — and I will be hosting a distribution case study on DIY hit Hundreds of Beavers with producer Kurt Ravenwood. We’re going to investigate how the Hundreds of Beavers became a breakout success that grossed over $500K at the theatrical box office — more than tripling their production budget of $150K. Kurt will reveal how their team identified, mobilized and grew their audience, how they eventized their theatrical release and created a content strategy to drive more audiences to repeated sold out screenings, how and why they signed a VOD deal… Read more
“There Is a Bombardment of Violent Images in Our Lives”: Director Pascal Plante on His High-Tech Serial Killer Drama Red Rooms
Red Rooms
Real world inspirations and dark web folklore converge in Red Rooms, the third feature from Quebecois filmmaker Pascal Plante that has conjured much buzz since its U.S. theatrical release last month. Named after the fabled sinister backdrop of covertly circulated online snuff videos, the film dissects our culture’s obsession with gorey details. As the first day of a shocking murder trial unfolds in a Montreal courthouse, the devilishly striking Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) is first in line to snag one of a handful of seats available to the public. The man on trial, bald and lanky Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), is accused of broadcasting the separate murders of three schoolgirls on the anonymous Tor network. While two of the videos are slated… Read more
“You Really Have To Let Go and Trust That Something Funny Will Happen”: Michael Urie, Back To One, Episode 312
Photo: Chelsea Gehr
Michael Urie is one of those mega-talented actors who seems to jump effortlessly from theater (like Torch Song, Spamalot, and, currently, the revival of Once Upon A Mattress) to television (like Ugly Betty, Younger, and, currently, Shrinking), with a genuine love for both. On this episode, he talks in-depth about his acting process with a humility and a humor that is infectious. He explains why he decided to always be off-book on day one, how he came to believe in himself as an actor after starting out wanting to be a director, tells an interesting story about the temptation to mold a joke based on the audience’s response, lays out what makes Shrinking such a special show, reminisces on the… Read more
TIFF 2024: Wavelengths
The Diary of a Sky
As someone who finds the feature film a more or less moribund form at the moment, the only real draw for returning to TIFF after five years away was the Wavelengths program. It’s ridiculous, of course, to think that three group shows of shorts could summarize the activity of any corner of the film world, but programmers Andréa Picard and Jesse Cumming have managed—year after year and despite all manner of institutional obstacles—to present clear enough visions of the state of post-avant garde small gauge and video work that I’ll always be curious to see what they think is going on. To get it out of the way: their report on the state of things seemed to me both accurate and… Read more
“Day Car Work on Stage is Really Tough”: DP Larkin Seiple on Wolfs
On the set of Wolfs
It seems strange to call a $100-plus million dollar Brad Pitt and George Clooney movie a return to a director’s roots, but in a way that’s exactly what Wolfs is for Jon Watts. Like his breakthrough feature Cop Car—a spartan and sinewy 2015 neo-noir made for $800,000 that impressed Marvel enough to land Watts a trio of entertaining Spider-Man movies—Wolfs is a lean, propulsive story that unfolds in a single day with no use for superfluous exposition. Clooney and Pitt star as lone wolf fixers who reluctantly team up when a tough-on-crime district attorney (Amy Ryan) ends up with a half-naked, drug-addled one night stand (Austin Abrams) bleeding all over the floor of her New York City hotel suite. To borrow… Read more
Illness and Empathy: San Sebastian Film Festival 2024
Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton in The Room Next Door
If San Sebastian Film Festival director José Luis Rebordinos ever wanted to choose a poster child for how the new voices of today can become the established veterans of tomorrow, he could do a lot worse than Pedro Almodóvar, whose debut Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom played at the festival back in 1980. At this year’s 72nd edition, during which Almodóvar turned 75, he was back in the northern Spanish coastal city to receive a lifetime Donostia Award and show his latest film, The Room Next Door. At the award ceremony, Almodóvar was given the prize by Tilda Swinton, who stars in his latest, and indicated he has no intention of slowing down: “At my age, a… Read more
“North Dakota is Trump Country Today”: John Hanson and Rob Nilsson on the 4K Restoration of Northern Lights
Northern Lights
It would be easy to call 1979 a red letter Cannes for New Hollywood: Apocalypse Now got Francis Ford Coppola his second Palme d’Or (split with Volker Schlöndorff for The Tin Drum), Terrence Malick received Best Director for Days of Heaven. Outside of the spotlight of official competition, another American film playing in the International Critics’ Week walked away with the second ever Camera d’Or for best first feature. Directed by John Hanson and Rob Nilsson, Northern Lights returned the pair to their North Dakota roots by documenting 94 year-old Henry Martinson, a socialist organizer instrumental in the victory of the left-wing Nonpartisan League, set up by and for farmers, which won control of the governorship of North Dakota in… Read more
