Melvin Van Peebles, revolutionary independent filmmaker whose credits include Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Watermelon Man and La Permission, died Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 89. On this sad occasion we’re reprinting Brandon Harris’s profile of Van Peebles from Filmmaker‘s Fall, 2008 issue. It isn’t the first thing you notice when you walk into Melvin Van Peebles’s Columbus Circle South digs, but very few items within his intimate, eclectically appointed apartment — one that sports the back end of a VW bus jutting out of one parlor wall and a giant sculpture of a hot dog near the window — speak […]

In the infant years of this publication, Ted Hope wrote a piece musing on the death of 1990s off-Hollywood production models, and controversy arose! I was only 12 at the time, but I glean now that there was a sense then — at least in this tiny community of cultural producers and aspirants — that the debate within Hope’s “Indie Film is Dead,” (and then-partner James Schamus’s response “Long Live Indie Film”) mattered. But here we are, making magic together still. This 25-year-old magazine, and the tiny corner of the entertainment industry it covers with a level of detail and […]

I normally go to the Seattle International Film Festival towards the end, when the festival hosts its largest contingent of industry types and you get to go to the top of the Space Needle, where the annual awards brunch is held, for free. As an out-of-towner, it’s necessary to focus on a weekend or two; Seattle’s is the country’s largest festival by sheer volume of films, screening exactly 400 this year, so it’s clearly impossible to see a significant chunk of the program — even if you decided to stay for the fest’s entire entire three-and-a-half week duration. Of the […]

Just now released on Showtime, Laura Poitras’s Risk, which found its way to theaters in May via upstart distributor Neon, is in a vastly different form than when it premiered last year in Cannes. The documentary traces a thread running counter to the moral certitude heard from our politicians, mostly on the right, about the role of leaks in degrading democracy. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, the film’s primary subject, has been confined to the Ecuadorian embassy in London for nearly five years following allegations — and, later, charges — of sexual assault against two Swedish women. (The rape investigation was recently […]

As Brad, a grief-stricken closeted gay man in upstate New York who becomes increasingly obsessed with a younger Jamaica man (Jimmy Brooks) he meets in an online meat market, Anthony Rapp (Star Trek: Discovery, Rent) is fantastic in writer-director John G. Young’s Bwoy. With a title based on the pronunciation of “boy” in Jamaican patois, the film at first seems like a story of online obfuscation, but it soon grows into a tense meditation on mourning and loss as we discover Brad bears some responsibility for the death of his son and remains in a marriage with Marcia (De’Adre Aziza) […]

#Tribeca2017 came to a close last night, after a final day of screenings dominated by the many winners from both Thursday evening’s award ceremony, held at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, and Saturday evening’s audience award announcement. Among the dozens of awards the festival gives out, Rachel Israel’s New York-set romantic comedy Keep the Change, which centers on an autistic couple, took home the Founder’s Award for Best Narrative Feature, while Elina Psykou’s Son of Sofia took home the Best International Narrative Feature prize. Elvira Lind’s Bobbi Jene, already a favorite in these parts, swept the documentary prizes for Feature, […]

Ever searching for an identity, the Tribeca Film Festival returned — for a 16th time last week — to Midtown, the Upper West Side, Chelsea and, yes, the neighborhood for which it’s named. These days the festival never opens with a genuinely great (and thematically appropriate) film like Paul Greengrass’s United 93 or a goofy overstuffed blockbuster like J.J. Abrams’s Mission Impossible III, but usually with a low-key doc centered on iconic New York stuff: comedy (Bao Nguyen’s 2015 SNL doc opener Live from New York!), fashion (Andrew Rossi’s The First Monday in May, which opened last year’s edition) and music — the Nas doc which […]

Around the time Miami’s Borscht Diez went down in late February, Black Cinema seemed to take over the world for a second. That was cool; Get Out was all anyone wanted to talk about. The doldrums of the country’s greater ills lifted somewhat during that thriller of a week, in which the Oscar Best Picture winner and the number one movie in America were suddenly, and for the first time ever, directed by African-Americans. That the former had been incubated by the country’s most outlandish short filmmaking outfit, Borscht Corp.— which goes out of its way to produce work by people of […]

In Mike O’Shea’s insidiously unsettling and remarkably assured debut film The Transfiguration — the most unlikely official selection at last year’s Cannes Film Festival — Milo (Eric Ruffin), a black teenager in a far flung outer borough ghetto, is first seen hunched over a dead white man in a public bathroom stall, his mouth wrapped around the cadaver’s jugular. Although he might be the super predator of Hillary Clinton’s nightmares, this kid is no regular old vampire; he can walk around during daylight hours and eats actual food. Perhaps he’s just a killer? The movie gives you little certainty on […]

In retrospect, it seems like it was the last glimmer of something. We were all in Eastern Oregon again, the loose circuit of folks who gather annually for the tiny two-and-a-half day, two-venue film festival that takes cinephilia to the reddest corner of a blue state. The election was just a few weeks off. No one seemed particularly bothered about it, seeing as the weekend before all the talk had been about the #BillyBushTapes and how could an admitted sexual assailant become the President anyway, puhleeze? It wasn’t hard to encounter a Trump/Pence sign in La Grande, though. It’s a largely […]