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DC/DOX 2025: So Many Reality Checks
Amy Goodman in Steal This Story, Please!
"Well, we really needed that,” the woman in front of me said to her companion as we all left the opening night screening, Steal This Story, Please! at DC/DOX Film Festival. Co-founders Sky Sitney and Jamie Shor in fact seem to have offered up a timely slate, designed to inspire us in dark times and to provide examples of democratic action. And Washington, D.C. audiences embraced it. Their timing couldn’t have been better—the festival, in downtown D.C., occurred around the “No Kings” demonstrations accompanying Pres. Trump’s military parade. Steal This Story, Please!, by longtime Michael Moore collaborators Tia Lessen and Carl Deal, featured the lifelong struggle of Amy Goodman and her program Democracy Now! to tell the story of grassroots opposition… Read more
Uniting Home and the World: A Report From the 2025 Play-Doc International Film Festival
Vengeance is Mine
Each year, the Play-Doc International Film Festival brings a modest but well-curated selection of classic and contemporary films to Tui, Galicia, a historic border town that sits on the banks of the Miño River separating Spain and Portugal. As its name implies, Play-Doc is ostensibly dedicated to nonfiction cinema, though like other festivals with a similar remit (True/False, Visions du Réel, etc), it takes a liberal approach to what constitutes a documentary. The festival’s 21st edition, which ran from May 7 to 11, went further in this regard than ever before. Alongside two competitive programs, one for new and recent international films, and a second focused on Galician productions, there was a trio of retrospectives dedicated to Elaine May, Monte Hellman,… Read more
Watch: As IFC Center Turns 20, Joe Stankus’s Short Film, Marquee
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New York's IFC Center celebrates its 20th anniversary this week. Here, writer, director and projectionist Joe Stankus shares with Filmmaker a short film he made, shot by Ashley Connor, about the work that goes into the theater's essential old-school touch: its non-digital marquee. Back in 2013 I was working as a projectionist at the IFC Center and was grappling with what seemed at the time like a moment of great change. Most cinemas had just finished the transition from 35mm exhibition to DCP, and there was no longer any doubt that the increasingly cheaper and more accessible digital cameras would replace film at every level of the movie industry. More importantly, however, there were whispers that the cumbersome and time-consuming "analog"… Read more
“If I Get Specific About What I’m Doing, Why I’m Doing It, the Humor Will Be There”: Tim Bagley, Back To One, Episode 346
Tim Bagley has so much experience doing comedy on television that his credits read like a comprehensive list of every sit com over the past 30 years. But his depiction of Brad Schraeder on the HBO series Somebody Somewhere is on another level. It’s beautiful, truthful, restrained work, that is often hilarious and sometimes very moving. Few performances on television this year have impacted me more. On this episode, he talks about how the collaborative nature of that show helped so much with his work, the big part logic plays in his comedy, why it’s important to keep challenging himself, and much more. Plus he tells a couple wonderful stories about discovering that sometimes it’s not about you at all, and… Read more
“[You] Build a Movie Like You Build a Fire”: Lost Highway DP Peter Deming on Restorations, Lighting and Working with David Lynch
Lost Highway (courtesy of the Criterion Collection)
With all three seasons of Twin Peaks having arrived on MUBI today and two sold-out 35mm screenings of Lost Highway(1997), presented by cinematographer Peter Deming, having taken place at Film at Lincoln Center last night, it’s clear that David Lynch’s 1990s output remains firmly top of mind for cinephiles at home and in theaters. With Lynch’s death (the subject of countless memorials and personal tributes) and it now having been 35 years since Twin Peaks debuted on ABC and captivated America and beyond, 2025 has provided, month-by-month, reasons to commemorate the Lynchian touch (Attn: repertory theaters: Wild at Heart turns 35 this summer and The Elephant Man 45 this fall). Deming, who in addition to shooting Lost Highway, also shot Lynch’s… Read more
“But Then My Obsession Went to Darker Things: Joe Coleman and Whitney Ward on Being Subjects in the Tribeca-Premiering Doc, How Dark My Love
How Dark My Love
Joe Coleman and Whitney Ward are having a big summer. The reigning king and queen of the Coney Island Mermaid Parade also are known as two of the most original figures in a New York underground scene that flourished in the 1970s and ‘80s, and they continue to thrive as artists, performers and personalities. Coleman, a visionary painter, curated the sprawling “Carnival” group show at Deitch Projects, on view through June 28, which more than lives up to Coleman’s evocation of “a profane, holy place where the private desires, fantasies and fears of a society are given uninhibited free expression.” Weegee and Red Grooms rub shoulders with Freaks star Johnny Eck and legendary sideshow banner painter Johnny Meah in a… Read more
Back To One, Episode 345, Elsbeth Star Carrie Preston on Learning How to Deliver Just the Right Amount of “the Tascioni”
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Carrie Preston is back in her Emmy-winning role as 'Elsbeth Tascioni' in the second season of the CBS series Elsbeth from The Good Fight and The Good Wife, creators Michelle and Robert King. On this episode she gives us a deep dive into her work on that hit show, taking us way back to the “queen of quirk” as just a recurring role on the Goods, trying to figure out how to dip her toes into this new character, taking clues from the word “pause,” all the way till the second season of her own show, taking the job of number one on the call sheet seriously, learning what it means to give “more Tascioni,” working with her acting heroes when… Read more
“Shooting in the Fall, Premiering in June”: Travis Wood and Alex Mallis on Their Tribeca Debut The Travel Companion
The Travel Companion
Anxieties surrounding flight credits, male friendship and fraught filmmaking prospects fuel the bittersweet yet always amusing narrative of The Travel Companion, the feature debut from directors Travis Wood and Alex Mallis. Co-written by the duo alongside their Chicago-based buddy Weston Auburn, the rough gist of the story is mined from a situation that Wood personally found himself in. Long designated as his best friend’s “travel companion”—a perk granted to a friend or family member of an airline employee’s choosing—Wood realized that his coveted status was on track to be upset by his pal’s serious girlfriend. As Wood avows, however, his reaction was nowhere near as erratic or cringe-worthy as the film’s protagonist, 30-something aspiring filmmaker Simon (Tristan Turner), who is faced… Read more
