Authors — Scott Macaulay
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14 Films (and Other Recommendations) at the 60th New York Film Festival
With the opening night of the 60th New York Film Festival upon us, Filmmaker would like to recommend 14 titles to catch during the 17-day engagement, which runs from September 30 through October 16 in-person at Film at Lincoln Center. Over the course of our previous festival coverage from this year—including Sundance, Cannes, Venice and TIFF—many of these films have been featured on our site in critical dispatches and reviews. Below, we share links and excerpts from these director interviews and festival dispatches, highlighting Jerzy Skolimowski’s Eo, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica, Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 30, 2022 -
Filmmaker Hosts Conversations During Gotham Week Conference
Filmmaker is hosting four conversations next week at The Gotham’s Gotham Week Conference, all with filmmakers who have recent films we love and have covered extensively at Filmmaker. And, these talks are free to public. Three are in person at Brooklyn Navy Yards, and the fourth is on Zoom. RSVP by clicking on the links below. On Monday at 10:30 AM, I’ll be speaking with DEDZA founder Kate Gondwe, one of our 25 New Faces last year, about the distribution of Saul Williams’s and Anisia Uzeyman’s Neptune Frost, and particularly about the specialized techniques used to broaden the reach of this […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 16, 2022 -
“In Movies, Comedy and Tragedy Are All the Same”: Jean-Luc Godard Interviewed by Hal Hartley
In Spring of 1994, as Filmmaker began its third year of publication, we received a call: would we be interested in interviewing Jean-Luc Godard? Yes, we excitedly said, and when Hal Hartley agreed to be the interviewer, and the interview was a go, we made the film our cover. (In Filmmaker’s history, it’s sandwiched between Rose Troche’s Go Fish and Rick Linklater’s Before Sunrise.) Rereading the interview today, I’m struck — although I shouldn’t be! — by the prescience of Godard’s musings on the future histories of cinema, the ways that it will be mediated by technology and its changing […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 13, 2022 -
Filmmaker Moves To Exact Editions for Digital Editions and Archive
Filmmaker is proud to announce that we have moved our quarterly digital edition and archive going back to 2005 to Exact Editions, a London-based company that specializes in digitizing content, selling subscriptions and providing streaming solutions across web, iOS and Android platforms. Our digital edition, which replicates our print edition, is now available to read via Exact Editions across browsers and mobile devices, the latter through a browser or the company’s Exactly app, found in the App and Google Play stores. As a long-time reader of other publications using Exact Editions, I’ve admired the company’s elegant, easy-to-use platform. Issues download quickly, can […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 12, 2022 -
14 Films We’re Recommending You See at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival
The Toronto Film Festival is underway, the first purely in-person edition since before the COVID-19 pandemic. There are high profile premieres, including Ryan Johnson’s Knives Out sequel, Glass Onion, a number of films traveling on their awards march from Telluride and/or Venice (Florian Zeller’s The Son, Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed), as well as smaller acquisition titles that are always in danger of being overlooked amidst the galas. Below are a number of films, most but not all TIFF premieres, that we’re recommending you check out, whether that recommendation is based on pre-screening or just our knowledge […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 9, 2022 -
“We Wanted the Film to Feel Like a Memory, a Dream of Childhood…”: Director James Ponsoldt on His Coming-of-Age Neo-Noir, Summering
In Summering, James Ponsoldt‘s return to cinema following several years of episodic television work, four young girls, best friends about to enter different junior high schools, find their final moments of group bonding upended by a shocking discovery: a dead body. Encountered near a secret spot they dub Terabithia (after the YA novel and film Bridge to Terabithia), the gruesome find turns into a challenge. What if rather than calling the police or telling their parents these friends could actually solve the mystery of this deceased middle-aged man’s identity and cause of death? It’d be both a kind of end-of-summer […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 12, 2022 -
“The ‘Broken Heroine Narrative’ — That’s Something I’m Very Interested in Subverting”: Lily Baldwin on Her Audible Podcast, Stories of the Stalked
Director, choreographer and dancer Lily Baldwin has appeared in these pages several times over the last decade in interviews about her work across both short film and virtual reality. But throughout this time, one project — alternately creatively compelling and deeply distressing — has been a persistent focus. In a story she details in our interview below, it began as Glass, an autobiographically-inspired thriller about a woman being stalked, that placed in the IFP (now Gotham) Emerging Storytellers program in 2014. It then morphed into a multi-part documentary TV series before finally now hitting download queues as a six-part Audible […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 4, 2022 -
Remembering Director of Photography Tom Richmond, 1950-2022
This piece has been updated after publication with comments from Keith Gordon. — Editor Director of photography Tom Richmond, who shot numerous seminal features that launched many directorial careers, died yesterday in New York City. He was 72. Tom’s career began in the early ’80s. After graduating Harvard with an undergraduate photography degree and then going on to study at AFI, he worked second camera on Alex Cox’s Repo Man and was camera operator on Oliver Stone’s Salvador, among other credits. After several low-budget comedy and horror films, Tom was director of photography on two higher-profile films: Cox’s Straight to Hell […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 30, 2022 -
“I Want to Be the Rod Serling of Cinematography”: An Interview with Little Odessa DP Tom Richmond
The following interview with director of photography Tom Richmond appeared in Filmmaker‘s Winter, 1995 issue. Richmond died yesterday in New York at the age of 72, and this interview is now published online for the first time. — Editor “I want to be the Rod Serling of cinematography,” says Tom Richmond, whose distinctive and varied lensing has graced three recent films: the “Tex Avery meets Bonnie and Clyde” Love and a.45; the hyper-realist heist noir Killing Zoe; and Little Odessa, James Gray’s intimate epic about Brighton Beach’s Russian mafia. “The way Serling could get into you…”Richmond continues. “I want [my […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 30, 2022 -
“We Can Shoot the Sun and the Characters Dramatically, but the World is Humble”: Writer/Director Max Walker-Silverman on A Love Song
The sun is harsh in Max Walker-Silverman’s A Love Song. Intense in the mid-day, it beats down on Faye (Dale Dickey) — ruddy, her face lined by hard living, her blonde hair lightened further by all the incandescent days. Ensconced in her small trailer sitting in a lakeside patch of dirt somewhere in Colorado, the widow waits for a man, also familiar with loss, she knew decades ago. She wrote to him — will he show up? It’s not a spoiler to reveal that he does, in the form of Wes Studi, and theirs is a bittersweet, gently melancholic connection […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 29, 2022
