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 […]

Two women, each fleeing unspecified trauma, holed up in an aluminum-sided mobile home in the middle of a desolate patch of New Mexico flatlands is an apt set-up for a microbudget horror film, but the pleasures and originality of Pete Ohs SXSW-premiering Jethica are in the ways in which it avoids all the more obvious narrative pathways it might have taken. (Indeed, it’s an exemplar of George Saunders’s dictum of “ritual banality avoidance” — rejecting the “crappo version” of a story.) There are no screams or shaky-cam chases, no woman-in-jeopardy jump scares. Instead, Ohs has worked with his actors to […]

As I’m editing my print-edition interview with Gaspar Noe about his new feature, Vortex (to my mind, at this moment, his best film), this new trailer from Utopia is a nice refresher. From the Francoise Hardy soundtrack to the Edgar Allen Poe-quoting tagline to the consoling gesture rendered uncanny by Noe’s split screen, this trailer captures the film’s melancholy heartbreak and unsentimental philosophy. The film is an astringent yet not uncompassionate look at the final days of two aging leftists, a married couple played by director Dario Argento (portraying a film critic, which Argento once was) and actress Francoise Lebrun […]

With the 2022 edition of Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look festival beginning on Wednesday, the series has just dropped a trailer — a brisk 1-minute+ showing the range of this year’s selections. The First Look schedule now includes a number of recently announced additions, including a screening of Jenny Perlin’s documentary Bunker followed by a discussion with the film’s producer, the well-known critic A.S. Hamrah; Deniz Tortum and Kathryn Hamilton’s single-channel video installation Our Ark (now viewable in the gallery); and Charlie Shackleton’s single-viewer VR experience As Mine Exactly. Also, there are a number of films in the program from […]

After a week in which there was some social media sniping over NEON’s seemingly stalled “never-ending tour” of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, my personal #1 movie of 2022, the distributor has announced that distribution is not stalled at all. The previously announced tour, in which the film will travel from city to city, formally begins with New York’s IFC Center on April 1 and L.A.’s NuArt on April 8. Multiple cities now open each week, and the website includes dates stretching through October. From the press release: Director, Apichatpong Weerasethakul remarked on the plan, “For Memoria, cinema experience is crucial or maybe the […]

NEON announced today that they will produce the documentary Seeking Mavis Beacon by director Jazmin Jones, one of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of 2021. The eponymous Beacon, initially personified by a Haitian woman, Renée L’Espérance, was the face of the popular Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing software game. L’Espérance subsequently vanished, and the film, according to the press release, “will investigate the disappearance and reimagine the legacy of a missing Black woman who helped define the digital age.” Comments Jones, “NEON has been a perfect home for this project. They understood our positionality as Black femmes and share our interest in disrupting traditional documentary […]

Jamie Stuart’s cat SK, who accompanied him through a chunk of adulthood spanning New York to LA, passed away recently. Stuart’s new short, The Love Battery is an account of that passing, a tribute as well as introduction to his next pet chapter. From Stuart’s program notes: Cats. Love and loss. I made this as a crew of one over the past two months. Initially, I’d planned it as a tribute to my recently deceased cat SK — but then the story took a turn… This is NOT a documentary. It is a dramatic reenactment — that includes real live […]