Authors — Scott Macaulay
-
Watch the Sundance Awards Live
Jessica Williams, star of the Sundance film The Incredible Jessica James, is hosting tonight’s award ceremony, which you can watch live here at Filmmaker. Check back after the show for the complete list of awards.
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 28, 2017 -
Working Through Fear: An Interview with Blumhouse’s Jason Blum
Driving down Beverly, you head opposite Hollywood, away from Studio City, toward the nondescript, single-level, brown-bricked building that’s the literal Blumhouse — the offices of horror movie maestro Jason Blum. Since founding the company, Blum has produced dozens of films that have made varying degrees of impact on the zeitgeist: the found-footage scares of the Paranormal Activity films, the reinvented haunted house of the Insidious pictures, the social violence of The Purge series. And then, of course, there’s megahit Get Out, Jordan Peele’s ferociously intelligent satire on racism that, despite its share of lobotomies and knifings and violently applied white […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 25, 2017 -
Parting Shot: Tim Sutton
Over the course of three features, Brooklyn-based writer/director Tim Sutton has excelled in creating visually gorgeous, tonally mysterious works that find intriguing new atmospheric territories by drifting away from conventional narrative structures and character arcs. His debut feature, Pavilion, is a diptych about a teenage son shuttled cross-country between divorced parents. Follow-up Memphis exploded the “artist battling creative block” storyline into a tale of spiritual crisis set in that city’s streets, recording studios and forest parks. His latest film, Dark Night, released this February by Cinelicious, is his strongest and certainly most challenging work. In a world where the value […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 18, 2017 -
Editor’s Letter
A year ago in this space I introduced my story on the STARZ show The Girlfriend Experience. It was our first-ever TV cover, and it kicked off a year in which the cultural conversation flowed from Moonlight to Atlanta, from Cameraperson to OJ: Made in America. I guess the Winter is our future issue, then, because, a year later, illustrated by artist Kim Dong-kyu’s witty update of Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting, “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” here is our first virtual reality, or VR, cover. This time the writer is Google’s principal filmmaker for VR, Jessica Brillhart, and her […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 18, 2017 -
The Terror of the Text: Olivier Assayas and Kristen Stewart on Personal Shopper
Personal Shopper, Olivier Assayas’s latest feature, begins with a classic horror movie trope: an evening spent in a haunted house. Kristen Stewart plays expat Maureen — not a paranormalist or twentysomething thrill-seeker but a personal clothes buyer and stylist to Kyra, a celebrity socialite and member of the Davos set. Something of a savant, Maureen does this job with an instinctual certainty but little evident pleasure. Whether that’s due to her preternatural cool or an overlay of mourning is unclear. But several months earlier, her brother, with whom she shares a congenital heart condition, died in a drafty mansion somewhere […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 18, 2017 -
Watch: An New Clip from Celia Rowlson-Hall’s MA
A woman, a man, a car and the desert. Widescreen. That’s the gist of this clip for Celia Rowlson-Hall’s highly-recommended MA, which opens tomorrow at the IFC Center via Factory 25. Check out the clip, read the synopsis below and see the movie! In this modern-day vision of Mother Mary’s pilgrimage, a woman crosses the scorched landscape of the American Southwest. Reinvented and told entirely through movement, the film playfully deconstructs the role of this woman, who encounters a world full of bold characters that are alternately terrifying and sublime. MA is a journey into the visceral and the surreal, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 12, 2017 -
Listen: Brian McOmber’s Haunting Score for Celia Rowlson-Hall’s MA
Celia Rowlson-Hall made our 25 New Faces list in 2015 on the basis of her entirely original, stunningly assured and nearly indescribable feature debut, MA. A year later, we picked for the list her film’s composer, former Dirty Projectors drummer Brian McComber, who not only composed her amazing score but did similarly outre work for Trey Shults’s Krisha. As he relates in our profile, the experimentalism of Rowlson-Hall’s film let him go slightly wild with the score; hence, the evocative gongs and cymbals. Now, over at the Soundcloud page of the film’s production company, MEMORY (yet another 25 New Face […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 12, 2017 -
Cameraperson and O.J.: Made in America Top the 2017 Cinema Eye Honors
The Cinema Eye Honors, which has been celebrating exceptional documentary filmmaking since 2007, wrapped its first decade tonight with its annual awards ceremony, hosted by documentary director Steve James, at the Museum of the Moving Image. Kirsten Johnson’s memoiristic meditation on documentary image-making, Cameraperson was the big winner, taking home three awards, including Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Filmmaking, Outstanding Achievement in Editing and Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography, while Ezra Edelman’s sprawling O.J.: Made in America won two: Outstanding Achievement in Directing and Outstanding Achievement in Production. Other winners included Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos’s Netflix series Making a Murderer (Outstanding […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 11, 2017 -
Sundance Trailer Watch: The Female-Directed Horror Anthology XX
Four female directors helm the various short works comprising XX, a new horror anthology from Magnet Releasing. Directors include musician Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent) and Karyn Kusama, whose Girlfight graced our Summer 2000 issue and whose The Invitation is one of the best films — horror or otherwise — of ’16. From the press release: XX is a new all-female helmed horror anthology featuring four dark tales written and directed by fiercely talented women: Annie Clark (St. Vincent) rocks her directorial debut with The Birthday Party; Karyn Kusama (The Invitation, Girlfight) exorcises Her Only Living Son; Roxanne Benjamin (Southbound) […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 11, 2017 -
Rotterdam Announces its 2017 Hivos Tiger Competition Films
The International Film Festival Rotterdam announced today the eight films that will comprise its 2017 Hivos Tiger Competition. Among the titles are films from the Chile, India, Bulgaria and the United States, the latter represented by the first narrative feature of kogonada, one of Filmmaker‘s 2014 25 New Faces. Commented Festival Director Bero Beyer, “This years line-up of the Hivos Tiger Competition features bold and daring filmmakers that don’t shun the use of other media, alternative narrative structures and provocative and relevant themes. The nominees and their works deserve international recognition for their artistry. We are proud to present each […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 3, 2017
