Screening tomorrow night at New York’s BAM Rose Cinema is one of the real and under-screened discoveries of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, The Mountains Are a Dream That Call to Me, the transfixing debut feature from Cedric Cheung-Lau, who has worked for a decade in the New York independent film scene gaffing such features as Patti Cake$, Christine and Monsters and Men. Embracing slow cinema and tacking away from the dialogue-driven penchant of much U.S. independent film, The Mountains Are a Dream That Call to Me is as much about landscape as story, about the possible meanings delivered through the pauses […]

Filmmaker is happy to partner with the Filmfort Film Festival, part of the Treefort Music Fest, by exclusively hosting selections from their online showcase. These films will stream exclusively here on the site through Saturday. This year five films travel from the caves of Italy to interior mindscapes to places in between. You can watch all the films embedded below, and check out the rest of the lineup at Filmfort. Cyllinder Day dir. Milly Cohen 2021, USA, 3 mins As the whole town rejoices around a maypole to celebrate the arrival of spring, this tradition holds a dark underlying secret. […]

One of the most chilling moments in Beth de Araújo’s masterful and outraged Soft & Quiet occurs early on, before the film’s sickeningly violent chain of events formally begins. After shooting side eye at her school’s immigrant female custodian, blonde thirtysomething elementary school teacher Emily (Stefanie Estes) coaches a young boy to go back inside the lunchroom and tell the woman off — to tell her that she must wait to do her job until the school is totally empty. Emily is not just using the child to disrespect the custodian, she’s instilling in the boy the sort of racial […]

Full Frame announced today the films comprising its virtual 25th Annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, which takes place April 7–10, 2022.  Among the 37 films are two world premieres, one North American premiere and three U.S. films.  “It is an honor to present these 37 films at our 25th annual festival,” said interim festival director and artistic director Sadie Tillery in a press release. “I am humbled by the range of experiences revealed on screen—the palpable tenderness, violence, pain, strength, vulnerability, and resolve witnessed in these works. And I am equally moved by the commitment and artistry displayed by the filmmakers, […]

When Toby Amies emails me the Vimeo press link to his SXSW-premiering documentary on the band King Crimson, In the Court of the Crimson King, he appends a list of influences. There’s a documentarian (Ross McElwee), a pseudo-documentarian (Christopher Guest), a narrative filmmaker who is a real King Crimson fan (Vincent Gallo) and then a couple of directors whose impact remained a bit puzzling both before and after seeing the film: Ernst Lubitsch and Sam Peckinpah. But perhaps the cinephile (and King Crimson fan) in me was looking too closely, because after watching In the Court of the Crimson King […]

From the plains of the Dakotas to the Mexican-American border, landscape — seen through rain-streaked windshields at night, from overhead drone shots, and from the point-of-view of a single woman moving across a country that’s both reassuring and suddenly alien — is both subject and setting in The Unknown Country, the debut dramatic feature from artist and documentary filmmaker Morrisa Maltz (Ingrid). Lily Gladstone (Certain Women) plays Tana, grieving the loss of her grandmother while driving to the wedding of cousin Lainey (Lainey Bearkille Shangreauxr) in South Dakota’s Oglala Dakota’s community. Shangreauxr is one of the several non-actors featured in […]

After 2016’s Western, In the Valley of Violence, and several years directing episodic TV, Ti West (The House of the Devil, The Inkeepers, The Sacrament) makes a very welcome return to the world of feature horror with X, a ’70s-set picture in which the sort of ambition that has characterized West’s impressive filmography is both evident on screen as well as the subtext driving the film’s characters. The set-up: a ragtag group of filmmakers ensconce themselves in a rented barn outside a foreboding farmhouse straight out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to make a porno feature, The Farmer’s Daughter. Mia […]

As more and more human activity — personal, social, economic, political — happens online, a challenge is posed to practitioners of that legacy art form, the feature film. To wit: how to tell an 80-minute-plus story whose symbolic meanings were created in part by interactions and juxtapositions occurring in virtual spaces, a story that’s possibly inseparable from a rich visual culture that is most accurately parsed in portrait mode and not in a theater or on a flat screen? Providing one answer are filmmakers Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari, whose latest feature documentary, the SXSW-premiering Diamond Hands: The Legend of […]

When Casey Neistat, along with his brother Van, made Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2006, he had already made over 300 shorts that had played at film festivals, museums and online. Three years later he launched an HBO series. But Google Neistat now and the information panel for the 40-year filmmaker offers a single blunt ID: “American YouTuber.” It was only in 2010 that Neistat began posting his work on YouTube and in 2015 that these postings became daily, a profusion of content (and subscribers — 12 million) that have made him a progenitor of a newer generation of […]

Filmmaker‘s once-a-year subscription sale launches today, with 40% discounts on our print and digital subscriptions. Filmmaker will be raising its cover price next issue, so this will be the last chance to lock in our old (and very reasonable!) pricing. All subscribers during this sale will receive Filmmaker‘s upcoming Spring issue and will be eligible for a selection of bonus gifts — Blu-rays, box sets and swag from a number of top distributors. In addition, all new and returning subscribers will receive a free three-month subscription to Metrograph, which includes discounts to its New York theater as well as access […]