Shuttered last year by the pandemic, the Tribeca Film Festival returns this year with a large program (many of last year’s selections are included) and hybrid format full of large outdoor events and stay-at-home screenings. The festival opens with the premiere of Jon M. Chu’s exuberant In The Heights, and there’s new work by Steven Soderbergh, a film about and live performance by Blondie, and talks with Amy Schumer, M. Night Shamalayan and others. But as usual, though, we’ll point you here to films by emerging makers that might have flown beneath your radar. Here are 12 picks from Vadim Rizov […]

Kino Lorber and Dedza Films announced today their first collaborative release, Who Will Start Another Fire, an international short film omnibus featuring the works of nine emerging filmmakers from underrepresented communities around the world. Beginning June 11, the films will be released digitally on KinoMarquee.com, the distributor’s virtual theatrical platform in partnership with arthouse cinemas around the country. The anthology will also be released day and date on VOD on KinoNow.com, and forthcoming will be a limited edition DVD with an introduction by Charles Burnett. In-person screenings will occur across the country at independent cinemas that are open. From the […]

A Brooklyn teen and her Guyanaese cousin, who has traveled to New York for an uncle’s funeral, spend a day together before the wake, an afternoon that arcs from a gentle hang to a more complex articulation of vulnerability and friendship. Mandy Marcus’s incredibly assured and beautifully directed short, Cousins, is confident in its clear-eyed realism. It allows its story to unfold as we observe the girls’ subtly redefine their relationship, with moods and textures shifting as the day moves from afternoon to night and the excellent soundtrack pulses with cues from Sudan Archives and Carlton and the Shoes, among […]

Love, lust, heartbreak and solitude — Edward Hancox’s clever relationship drama, Things That Happen in the Bathroom mines a home’s most private space for the full spectrum of feelings that can occur there. For Jak, a lonely young queer man, the bathroom is his place for contemplation and introspection, and Hancox’s short explores the charged interactions that occur when Jak invites a new hookup into the space. True to its title, the short stays within the bathroom’s four walls, but the space itself transforms continually as the shifting sun throws different shadows through the windows and, later, when Jak outfits […]

The sensations of summer — the heat, the mild ennui, but also the complicated feelings when teenage friendship and romance blur during those carefree months — are beautifully captured in Temple graduate Molly Sorensen’s short film, Mud and Honey. Maeve, a bit of a loner, seems sure of her sexuality but unsure if the object of her affection, Delilah, is sincere in her reciprocation. The popular Delilah, on the other hand, enjoys her languid afternoons with Maeve but could also easily spend them with a group of local boys. The tension between the two simmers in a film in which […]

A larger-than-usual Competition — 24 films — for its 2021 edition was announced today by the Cannes Film Festival, along with the Out of Competition, Un Certain Regard and other titles that comprise (for now) its official selection. Delayed from its usual dates in mid-May to July 6-17, the festival opens with the long-awaited Leos Carax Sparks-scored musical Annette and contains new features by Asghar Farhadi, Mia Hansen-Løve, Jacques Audiard and Nanni Moretti. Cannes also adds this year a new section, Cannes Premieres, containing films by festival veterans such as Oliver Stone, Kornél Mundruczo and Andrea Arnold. Among the American […]

Poignant and with astonishing visual style, No Law, No Heaven is a decades-spanning drama about love and regret set within Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City by University of California, Los Angeles graduate film student Kristi Hoi. It’s one of five winners of the 2020-21 Student Short Film Showcase, a collaborative program from The Gotham, Focus Features, Jet Blue and the Westridge Foundation, currently available for viewing via Focus Features’s YouTube channel as well as in the air, on Jet Blue’s in-flight entertainment system. Consisting of three sequences, No Law, No Heaven features the same character as he ages from being […]

Four winners of the 2020-21 Student Short Film Showcase award, a collaboration between The Gotham, Focus Features, Jet Blue and the Westridge Foundation, are now streaming on Focus Features’s digital platforms as well as in the air on JetBlue’s inflight entertainment systems. The films were chosen from the submissions of 16 film schools and represent a real diversity of subject matter and storytelling styles. In Edward Hancox’s (University of Texas, Austin) cleverly conceived and sharply acted Things That Happen in the Bathroom, a bathroom, typically a place of privacy and solitude, becomes the site of complicated relationship dynamics between a […]

The following piece contains mild spoilers for Derek DelGaudio’s In and Of Itself, the film version of which, directed by Frank Oz, opens today at IFC Center and is currently also streaming on Hulu.  For the live viewer of Derek DelGaudio’s In and Of Itself — a theater production which ran in Los Angeles and New York from 2016 to 2018  —  the piece began not when the suited, dark-haired performer took the stage but 20 minutes before, in the lobby. As ticket-holders lined up before entering the theater, they were asked to pick a card — not a playing card, but, […]

Filmmaker Leah Shore — a 25 New Face who contributed an illustration to Joanne McNeil’s Speculations column last issue — has directed a music video for the band The Malpractice. With pink curtains, green shag wallpaper and cardboard broccoli, the video features Sarah Ellen Stephens, who stars in Shore’s recent short film, Puss, and film critic and programmer Aaron Hillis in a playfully menacing infantilism scenario that Shore shot entirely in her own apartment. Check it out above.