“It’s about energy — how do we preserve the energy around the work and the artist?” That’s Sundance Film Festival director Tabitha Jackson speaking this morning at Sundance’s opening press conference about the thinking that went in to this year’s necessarily altered pandemic edition. With a slimmed-down schedule and screenings happening through the Sundance platform as well as at various “satellite screens,” Sundance has fully embraced the challenges and potentials of translating the Sundance experience to the ways in which we are living our (viewing) lives now. But several principles guided the Sundance team, said Jackson. One was the concept […]

Some actors go through a transformation to the point where the word “performance” feels inadequate. “Embodiment” is more apt. Nicole Beharie transforms into Turquoise Jones in Channing Godfrey People’s film Miss Juneteenth. It’s a wonder to behold. On this episode, she talks about the immersive preparation work that went into her Gotham Award-winning performance, how the opportunity to take her time and “own the space” affected her work in a deep way, and the substitutions necessary to create the motherly bond so central to the film. Plus we discuss the benefits and drawbacks of unanswered questions in a performance, and […]

During last night’s Gotham Awards, Gotham Film & Media Institute Executive Director Jeffrey Sharp announced the creation of The Joel Schumacher Mentorship Award in partnership and endowed by MTV Entertainment Group. Honoring the legacy and social consciousness of the director of such films as Tigerland, Falling Down, Car Wash and St. Elmo’s Fire will be a scholarship enabling four undergraduate students to attend the The Gotham EDU summer program, according to the press release, “an eight-week curriculum which will offer workshops to hone career development and technical skills, master classes hosted by industry decision makers, and insight from mentors through one-on-one […]

The Gotham Awards — the long-running event by IFP, which used tonight’s ceremony to formally unveil the organization’s name change to The Gotham Film & Media Institute — has long occupied pole position in the year’s film awards ceremonies, followed by, among others, the SAG Awards, the Spirit Awards and, of course, the Oscars. So too this very different year, when live events are precluded because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tonight’s event was streamed live from The Gothams’ usual location — Cipriani Wall Street — with The Gotham Executive Director Jeff Sharp presiding over ceremonies that saw some presenters walk […]

Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP, Filmmaker‘s publisher), announced today that it is renaming itself The Gotham Film & Media Institute, or, simply, “The Gotham.” From the IFP’s email to members: For over forty years, IFP has worked to advance the groundbreaking, enduring, challenging culture of independent film. In that time, we’ve grown from a grassroots marketplace into a year-round organization with an annual conference, awards, labs, a membership community and a mandate to support storytellers across a wider range of media. Along the way, we’ve also outgrown our brand. So to better support our mission—and an expanding role in the film […]

The following interview with David Cronenberg about his film Crash originally appeared as the cover story of Filmmaker‘s Winter, 1997 edition. With Crash having just been rereleased in a new restoration by Criterion, it is being republished online for the first time. Also regarding Crash: Joanne McNeil’s essay on the relation of the work to the source material, J.G. Ballard’s novel. Blood, semen and gasoline are the liquids that course through David Cronenberg’s compelling study of sexual fetishism, Crash. But far from being a, well, messy affair, Crash is startling for its cool precision and astute manner of intellectual provocation. […]

Now streaming on STARZ and with a Gotham Awards nomination for its lead, Jasmine Batchelor, The Surrogate, Jeremy Hersh’s powerful and probing drama, begins with what might seem a familiar sort of indie film setup: a young, twentysomething Columbia grad, Jess (Batchelor) agrees to be the surrogate mother to the baby of her best friend Josh (Chris Perfetti) and his husband Aaron (Sullivan Jones). But very quickly writer/director Hersh establishes that The Surrogate will not be a bantery relationship comedy: a prenatal test reveals that the child will be born with Down syndrome, a development that destabilizes the progressive male […]

We’re still waiting here in the States to see Gaspar Noe’s previous collaboration with Saint Laurent, Lux Æterna, which premiered in Cannes in 2019, but the fashion house has just dropped a new short by the French director that’s well worth a late-night watch. Starring Charlotte Rampling and a group of models — Anok Yai, Antonia Przedpelski, Assa Baradji, Aylah Mae Peterson, Clara Deshayes, Grace Hartzel, Kim Schell, Mica Arganaraz, Miriam Sanchez, Sora Choi, and Stefania Cristian — the film begins a model’s frenzied run through crimson-lit woods at night (a not to Suspiria, perhaps, as well as Last House on […]

Releasing tomorrow, January 1, 2021, on digital platforms is Thomas Balmès’s Sing Me a Song, which finds the French documentarian returning to the town of Laya in Bhutan, the scene of his excellent 2014 documentary Happiness, to learn how one of its subjects, an eight-year-old monk named Peyangki who’s now a teenager, is dealing with the late arrival to his monastery of the internet and social media. Needless to say, the combination of adolescence and technology has created profound changes in Peyangki’s life — changes that provide insight into the ways in which these forms of communication have changed all […]

To rhyme with the year, I’ve expanded this year’s roundup of our most popular posts, as determined by Google Analytics, from 10 to 20. It’s full of both expected entries — our 25 New Faces scores highly every year — as well as a few surprises. It also shows the dominance of TV and streaming, or perhaps the ’20 decline in theatrical exhibition. So many of the articles on this list — which aren’t “a best of the year,” although many are indeed that — are the ones that intersected best with search analytics, caught viral waves, or rode along […]