Michel Franco’s Sundown is unsettling tale of existential drift, one that upends the way in which the concept of family is often thematized in narrative films. It’s now given a suitably eerie trailer by its distributor, Bleecker Street. The story involves a brother (Tim Roth) and sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg) vacationing at a Mexican resort when sad news arrives from abroad. The sister leaves, the brother stays, and the film’s mysteries concern the brother’s inscrutable motivations. Spasms of violence are expected in any film by the New Order director; those are hinted at by the trailer’s concluding sequence of flash cuts […]

Each Friday I write an original Filmmaker newsletter, which is free to all. Always original and not archived on the site, they consist of various musings, thoughts, link recommendations and sometimes even early versions of pieces that appear later here. And while yesterday’s “Top Ten New Posts of 2021” was determined using Google Analytics, I’ve chosen today’s “Top Newsletter of 2021” purely empirically. Forget Mailchimp open rates, this newsletter about George Saunders’s book on writing and Russian literature, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life, is […]

If you’re not a daily visitor to Filmmaker, reading this piece, our annual “top ten,” will be a process of discovery as you can scan through the articles that received our highest traffic in 2021. But, increasingly, compiling this article is a discovery process for us as many of its entries are simply not ones we would have guessed. There are articles that kick up conversation across Twitter, or that I receive emails and calls about, and then there are quiet traffic-getters that only surface when the Google Analytics button is hit. The top post here is no surprise, as […]

An ambitious series of 11 music videos accompanied the new Parquet Courts album, Sympathy for Life, and as the band’s Sean Yeaton writes here in an email, the band has opened up the viewing possibilities behind the original live distribution: In the spirit of miracles, I thought I’d bring up a recent one in PC history, where we somehow incredibly (with the help of so many of our talented friends and colleagues) produced 11 new music videos–one for every song on Sympathy For Life. Until now the only way to see them was a live stream event that I successfully managed […]

The spectacular first trailer for the anticipated third feature of Robert Eggers, The Northman, just dropped. About a Viking prince avenging his father’s murder, the film reunites the director with Anya Taylor-Joy, the star of his debut, The Witch, and Willem Dafoe, the star of his sophomore film, The Lighthouse. (And that’s in addition to Alexander Skarsgard, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Ethan Hawke and Bjork). In a Filmmaker interview on the film’s production, DP Jarin Blaschke promised that the film will be “accurate as hell”: Well, at least as accurate as 1,000 years ago can be. I don’t want to […]

The Sundance Institute announced today the 59 shorts that will comprise the Short Film Program for the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. In addition, this year there’s a new “From the Archive” section — 40 films that are online exclusives playing for all pass holders during the festival, January 20 – 30. Kim Yutani, the Festival’s Director of Programming, said in a press release, “Short films are such a vital part of the independent storytelling culture that Sundance Institute has consistently put its full support behind. We’re all happy for the opportunity this year’s hybrid in-person and online Festival model is […]

The Sundance Institute announced today the full Feature Film, Indie Episodic, and New Frontier categories for the upcoming 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Returning from last year’s purely virtual festival, this year’s Sundance will be a hybrid edition, with in-person events at Park City, Salt Lake City and the Sundance Mountain Resort in Utah as well as on an enhanced online platform for remote attendees. Additionally there will be The Spaceship, a “bespoke immersive platform.” Continuing from last year’s experimentation, in-person screenings at seven Satellite Screens venues will occur across the country during the Festival’s second weekend. Films this year — […]

The Slamdance Film Festival — this year a hybrid festival — announced today its full lineup of features and shorts that will comprise its 2022 edition. The festival will run live in Park City Utah, January 20 -23 and virtually January 20 – 30. The selection contains 13 world premieres, six North American and four U.S. reviews. All competition films are feature-length with budgets under $1 million and without U.S. distribution. “We are anti-algorithm,” said Slamdance President and co-founder Peter Baxter in a press release. “That’s always been true, but it’s more urgent than ever as we continue to celebrate […]

The Southern Documentary Fund has just announced ten projects that will receive $10,000 production grants, unrestricted funds supporting projects in varying stages of productions. Half the grants go with aspiring and emerging makers, while non-first-time filmmakers include Julie Dash, whose highly influential Daughters of the Dust was the first feature directed by an African American woman to receive general theatrical release in the U.S. Says  Southern Documentary Fund Executive Director Kristy Garcia Breneman in a press release, “This year’s applicant pool was rich with Southern talent, telling a vast range of powerful stories from across our region – we were […]

Just in time for the holidays, during which the question of what makes a Christmas movie appears across film social media feeds, arrives Camille Griffin’s Silent Night. From its title down to its Christmas setting, in which family and friends congregate for the kind of boozy reunion that segues from holiday cheer to emotional warfare, Griffin’s directorial debut sits squarely within the sub-genre and, due to one cross-genre addition, feels particularly of the moment. In Griffin’s film, the Yuletide gathering is to be a final one as a poisonous gas cloud is poised to envelope the earth, killing all living […]