Authors — Scott Macaulay
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The Cannes Film Festival Announces its 2017 Official Selection
New films by American independents Benny and Josh Safdie, Todd Haynes, Sofia Coppola and Noah Baumbach will all premiere in Competition at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. The official selection’s full slate includes the Safdie brothers’s Robert Pattinson-starring Good Time, Haynes’s Amazon-financed childrens picture Wonderstruck, and the latest from Baumbach, the Netflix-acquired, Adam Sander-starring The Meyerowitz Stories. International auteurs include Lynne Ramsay’s collaboration with Joaquin Phoenix, You Were Never Really Here; Michael Haneke’s Happy End, dealing with the European refugee crisis; and Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, one of four festival films featuring Nicole Kidman. Also noteworthy […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 13, 2017 -
Critical Review: Iyabo Boyd on Feedback Loop, a New Advisory Service for Filmmakers
“If filmmakers actually knew what industry people thought of their projects and were able to receive constructive criticism and what I call ‘productive honesty,’” says Iyabo Boyd, “they’d be able to improve at a much faster pace than just with that filmmaker peer-to-peer thing.” Boyd is speaking here of the realization that led to the creation of Feedback Loop, her new advisory service for filmmakers. Boyd — an independent film producer (the ’17 Berlin-premiere and Tribeca selection, For Ahkeem), writer/director and veteran of filmmaker support organizations (most recently Chicken & Egg, but also Tribeca Film Institute and IFP) — has […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 13, 2017 -
Parting Shot: Tracy Letts
Contemporary, middle-aged masculinity, in all its shadings, has become the métier of Tracy Letts, the Chicago-based playwright (Killer Joe, Bug, August: Osage County) whose commanding presence and nuanced performances have sparked television drama and independent film alike. He won a Tony Award for playing one of modern theater’s iconic husbands, George, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, adding what The New York Times’ Charles Isherwood called “a coiled ferocity” to the character’s often beaten-down stylings. On Homeland, he created unexpected empathy for the Cheney-esque bureaucrat Andrew Lockhart. And, of course, his balance of aggression and concern as Dean Cauldwell made […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 13, 2017 -
Editor’s Letter
If you’re an obsessive and long-term subscriber to Filmmaker, you’ll note that you’re receiving this spring issue a week or so before you’d normally receive it. And you’ll certainly note when the next issue, our summer, lands in your mailbox almost a month before it’s arrived in recent years. The fall issue will be similarly early, hitting you just after Labor Day as opposed to mid-October. Finally, our winter issue, which customarily debuts in late January, will now reach you in early December. Why the change? Well, first of all, it’s always been a little weird that our seasonal issues […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 13, 2017 -
Watch: John Wilson’s Escape from Park City
Filmmaker John Wilson — profiled this past year in our 25 New Faces series — covers the Sundance Film Festival for Vimeo with his inimitable lo-fi insight. Here, the glitz and pageantry of the ’17 festival are captured in sludgy grey tones and with a commentary that underscores Park City’s economic divide. The six-minute short, watchable above, is the latest — or, at least, latest publicly available — work of what Wilson calls “documentary memoir.”
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 12, 2017 -
Trailer Watch: Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit
From Annapurna comes this first trailer for Kathryn Bigelow’s feature follow-up to Zero Dark 30, Detroit. Shot by her The Hurt Locker DP Barry Ackroyd, it’s got an amazing look and Bigelow’s customary immersive, thrilling vibe as it recreates the summer of 1967 when riots rocked the Michigan city. It’s due out in August.
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 12, 2017 -
Trailer Watch: Laura Poitras’s Risk
“This is not the film I thought I was making. I thought I could ignore the contradictions…. I was wrong. They are becoming the story,” That’s Oscar-winning documentary director Laura Poitras at the head of this new trailer for her latest feature, Risk, with a voiceover that functions as a new statement of artistic intent. Poitras has been working on this film about Wikileaks and Julian Assange since before CITZENFOUR, but as those words testify, there was more to document since the film’s screening last May at the Cannes Film Festival. That earlier version necessarily ended before the ’16 election, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 10, 2017 -
Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker on Their Noir-ish Stasi Doc, Karl Marx City
Now playing in New York at Film Forum, Karl Marx City, Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker’s follow-up to 2013’s The Flag. An entirely different meditation on national identity, in Karl Marx City Epperlein — who emigrated to the States following the collapse of the Berlin Wall — travels back to her East German homeland, and the film follows her as she attempts to discover the reason for her father’s suicide in 1999. Evidence that he may have been a Stasi informant deepens the urgency of her journey, with a visit to the Stasi archives revealing thousands of hours of footage, somewhere in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 31, 2017 -
SXSW: Five Questions for Mr. Roosevelt Writer/Director/Star Noël Wells
Texas-born actress and comedian Noël Wells (Master of None, SNL, The Incredible Jessica James) steps into the director’s chair with her SXSW-debuting feature Mr. Roosevelt, which mixes a sort of low-key melancholic humor of self-discovery with a series of broader comedic set pieces also exploring issues of social anxiety, identity and relationships. For Emily, the offbeat comedian character played by Wells, comedy is both the source of identity and existential crisis. In a prologue, we see a young Emily perform at a school play to a laughing audience. She’s in tears afterwards until her mother explains to her that people […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 12, 2017 -
SXSW: Five Questions for Spettacolo Directors Jeffrey Malmberg and Chris Shellen
In Jeff Malmberg’s 2010 Spirit Award-winning documentary Marwencol, an artist constructs a one-sixth scale imaginary town, populated with miniatures, that is both his creative project and therapeutic enterprise; it’s through this work that he processes a violent attack that left him near-dead and brain-damaged. For the new Spettacolo, Malmberg, this time directing with filmmaker Chris Shellen, has focused on another individual for whom the world is a stage. Here, however, the scope is larger as theater director Andrea Cresti gathers each year the citizens of his small town in Tuscany to make a play based on their lives and histories. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 11, 2017
