Back in 2002, Filmmaker covered Nigeria’s “Nollywood” film scene, which producer Jeremy Nathan wrote, could be compared to the American no-budget movement of the ’80s and ’90s with its inventive, low-cost non-industry production models. Nollywood would go on to receive much international press over the years, with articles describing the interplay between Hollywood hits and the Nigerian variants they would inspire. The latest noteworthy example is actually not a movie or TV show but a music video. Nigerian rapper Falz the Bad Guy, a former lawyer, has released a riff on Childish Gambino’s This is America, in which the song […]

I was talking with some French producers recently, and they were seriously looking forward to this year’s Cannes Film Festival. And they were miffed by some of the preview articles that have been posted, including Todd McCarthy’s piece questioning the firepower of this year’s line-up. For years people have been wanting the Festival to be more adventurous, they told me, and now, when they are, Cannes is being criticized for not having the new films of the familiar auteurs who have appeared in the main selection so many, many times. I heard similar comments from a Latin American producer, who […]

A slightly belated posting here to recognize 25 New Face filmmaker Kyle Henry’s latest feature, the Chicago-set relationship drama Rogers Park, which is extended at Cinema Village through this coming Thursday, May 10. After theatrical openings in New York and L.A., the film has cemented a rare 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with Glenn Kenny writing in the New York Times, “The superb actors, given opportunities to go for broke, make each one count, and make the movie worth watching.” Henry has been in the independent trenches for nearly two decades, with features including the superb psychological drama Room and […]

New York-based director and production designer Laura Moss landed on Filmmaker’s 25 New Face list this past year on the strength of Fry Day, her entirely exemplary short film about a teenage girl selling Polaroid photos on the eve of serial killer Ted Bundy’s execution. With this macabre event as a backdrop, Moss goes on to create, as I wrote in the profile, “a nail-bitingly tense, mournfully sad coming-of-age adventure.” I went on to write: That Fry Day uses the disquieting atmospherics and moral turbulence of the serial killer genre without indulging in gratuitous physical violence is a testament to […]

Errol Morris brings the full force of his filmmaking to a pair of PSAs he’s made as part of AT&T’s “It Can Wait” campaign, which raises awareness about distracted driving. Those who’ve seen his recent work, especially his Netflix six-part film, Wormwood, will recognize a number of stylistic devices here, including multi-angle talking heads material, unusual photo crops, and, of course, Morris’s pertinently shouted off-screen questions. But the films, particularly the devastating “Forrest’s Story,” go further than the usual PSA, exploring, in addition to Morris’s usual epistemological inquiry, the different forms of grief and the enduring mysteries of loss. The […]

Well, the curtain has already risen, but I’ve yet to see a film — I’m heading to my first screening in about 90 minutes. So, it’s not too late for my annual list of movies I’m looking forward to at the Tribeca Film Festival. This list is just what it sounds like — anticipated movies based on buzz, knowledge of the filmmakers, word of mouth, etc. And it’s heavily skewed towards premiere titles that haven’t been reviewed yet. A quick note that this list has been easier to put together this year simply due to the sheer number of films […]

Feminist film journal Another Gaze heads to New York this week for two events surrounding the issue launch of their debut print edition. On Saturday at the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation there will be a free day of discussions and panels, and, on Thursday at Union Docs a screening of shorts in which women filmmakers reframe onscreen sexual violence. From our own print issue, here’s our interview with editor Daniella Shreir about her decision to add an analog component to her already impressive web publication. “I didn’t want it to look too essentialist or zine-y,” says London-born writer, editor […]

In his previous two features, Restless City and Mother of George, Nigeria-born photographer-turned-filmmaker Andrew Dosunmu has placed vivid human dramas within ultra-specific pockets of New York City. His films have examined how immigrant characters find their lives shaped by the often very subtle clashes that come from their retaining their own identities within the larger melting pot of the city. Working continually with the great cinematographer Bradford Young, Dosunmu also makes extraordinarily beautiful films, full of arresting images that convey the rhythms, exuberances but also pathos of these city streets. With his new picture, Where is Kyra?, opening today from […]

Offering a blend of psychological seduction and physical threat, cults have provided charged settings for a number of recent movies, both fiction and doc. But The Endless, the latest feature from innovative independent genre filmmakers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, puts a new spin on the cult-film genre; they writers, directors and stars make their “UFO death cult” one in which the very ambiguity of its danger is just one of their film’s existential menaces. Benson and Moorhead play Justin and Aaron Smith, brothers who escaped the California cult years ago. Aaron has fond memories of growing up in the […]

His fifth feature, and the first following his co-directed (with Martha Stephens) breakthough comedy Land Ho!, Gemini returns writer/director Aaron Katz to the character-based neo-noir of his earlier Cold Weather but with the cloudy Portland grays of that film replaced here with a sunlit sensuality befitting the picture’s L.A. setting. Indeed, shooting in his new hometown for the first time, Katz looks for inspiration to the kind of ’80s thrillers — American Gigolo and Bad Influence in particular — that found their treacheries and ambiguities within the city’s sunlit highways, dark nightclubs and oversized mansions. And while city geography is […]