SFFILM, in partnership with the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, announced today the 20 projects that will receive SFILM Rainin Grants totaling $490,000. The grants will support the makers’ screenwriting and development activities, with these grants remaining among the very few that fund narrative filmmakers in the development stage. Additionally, two projects have been awarded SFFILM Rainin Filmmakers with Disabilities Grants — a new initiative supporting applicants whose films specifically address stories from the disability community. According to the press release, “SFFILM Rainin Grants are awarded annually to filmmakers whose narrative feature films meaningfully explore pressing social issues and/or have significant economic […]

The cinema of scopophilia is given a generational, technological and gender-reversing twist in Michael Mohan’s The Voyeurs, opening today on Amazon Prime. Pippa (Sydney Sweeney, of Euphoria and The White Lotus) and Thomas (Generation‘s Justice Smith) are a young couple who move into a gorgeous Montreal loft apartment sporting one ethically dubious perk: clear sightlines into an even more gorgeous pad occupied by an oversexed fashion photographer, Seb (Ben Hardy), and his striking girlfriend Julia (Natasha Liu Bordizzo). For the new couple, the action across the road is initially an aphrodisiac, a kickstart to libidos on the early wane. Soon, […]

Each week I write a free Filmmaker newsletter that’s normally not published on this site. Letters range from links and recommendations to longer-form pieces and article first passes. Here’s a newsletter that was sent out June 18 that received a lot of response. With Caveh Zahedi finishing his Kickstarter campaign with a 24-hour telethon, and Jaime Grijalba’s Ruiz Diaries continuing, I thought I’d post it here. You can subscribe to the Filmmaker newsletter at the link. — SM I’ve recently been spending time each day with Raúl Ruiz and Caveh Zahedi. Not literally, of course — Raúl died in 2011, […]

The Toronto International Film Festival kicks off today, a hybrid event that combines last year’s digital platform with in-person screenings for vaccinated viewers. (Just two days ago Canada’s Border Agency announced that fully vaxxed international visitors do not need to quarantine upon arrival.) The festival boasts about 100 films, roughly double last year’s selection but still much less than a normal year. That said, film historians will look at this ’21 edition to see what imprint the pandemic has made upon the films themselves. As our list of picks below indicates, a large number of films traveling to the festival […]

U.S. and Canada in Progress, the event taking place during Wroclaw’s American Film Festival each November, has extended its submission deadline for American and Canadian independent filmmakers with works-in-progress seeking post-production support to September 17. The program offers selected American and Canadian projects in final production stages European sales agents, distributors, and festival programmers) and partnering Polish top post-production companies (including Fixafilm, Orka Studio, Soundflower, XANF). In-kind services valued at $40,000 will be awarded, and the Polish Film Institute additionally offers a prize of $10,000 in Polish post-production services. There’s no fee to apply, and submission details can be found […]

After winning an Oscar for portraying a sociopathic villain, Joaquin Phoenix now essays a (seemingly gentle) radio journalist in the new picture from Mike Mills, his follow-up to 2016’s 20th Century Women. Gabby Hoffman co-stars in the road trip film, which finds Phoenix’s character traveling cross country to interview children and teens about the state of the world. Wrote Rodrigo Perez in his Playlist review, “Vaguely reminiscent of Wim Wenders’ Alice In The Cities—a journalist is saddled with a young girl and lets her tag along on his road trip—the filmmaker’s dynamic work shares little else with the film and […]

Writing out of Cannes, Blake Williams reviewed Mia Hansen-Løve’s latest, Bergman Island, a meta-fictional drama about a female filmmaker’s marriage to a fellow director and the ways in which she mines her life, creative anxieties and influences for narrative material. About the film, which jumps between the filmmaker’s (played by Phantom Thread‘s Vicki Krieps) exploration of the Baltic island where Ingmar Bergman lived and shot several of his films, her conversations with her partner (Tim Roth) about her efforts to crack her third act, and imagined scenes from the film to be, which feature Mia Wasikowska and Joachim Trier-regular Anders […]

When I recently interviewed Cam Archer about his latest short, His Image, the director told me that he has been revisiting old projects, creating new high-definition scans and working on new edits. The first of those projects to see the light of day is out October 26, and a trailer has just dropped. Via video label Altered Innocence comes a 15th anniversary edition of Archer’s debut feature, Wild Tigers I Have Known, in what’s billed as a “2021 Edit and Mix.” Bonus features on the disk include: -Pull-out Poster by Michael Gillette -Deleted Scenes -A 2021 Interview with Lou Stumpf (who […]

“The artist is not with society, he’s different,” says Mary Woronov in the just-dropped trailer for Todd Haynes’s fantastic documentary, The Velvet Underground. It’s an apt pull-quote for a film that’s more about the band and the culture they arose from, reacted to and fermented than any rise/fall/redemption-styled rock narrative. Set against a few of Velvet hits (“Sweet Jane,” initially in a drone-y, slowed-down live version; “Here She Goes Again”; “Venus in Furs”) the trailer gives a glimpse of the film’s elegant graphics, masterful use of archival (not just VU concerts but experimental films of the day) and smart musicology. […]

The recently announced results of the 2021 U.S. census produced a number of headline takeaways: for example, the nation’s white population declined for the first time, Hispanics have become California’s largest ethnic group, and metropolitan areas were the beneficiary of declining population in over half of America’s smaller counties. And among those growing metropolitan areas, one, in Florida, stood out as the most quickly expanding: The Villages. Over the last decade, the over-55 retirement community saw its population increase by nearly 40%; it now encompasses 60,000 homes, with more on the way. Seeing The Villages show up in an official […]