Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Tribeca 2017: Alon Benari on the VR Thriller, Broken Night
Currently running at the Tribeca Film Festival’s Virtual Arcade, Broken Night is a psychological thriller featuring a quarrelling couple (Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola), an intruder and a handgun. Distilling these elements into 11 taut minutes, the piece throws viewers not just into the action but into the unsteady point-of-view of the short’s protagonist, the wife played by Mortimer, who is trying to reconstruct the events of one violent evening for an investigating police detective. Using a VR headset and browser-based player, Broken Night allows viewers to slip in and out of the wife’s POV, making for her character the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 24, 2017 -
IFP Announces 10 Projects Selected for 2017 Screen Forward Labs
The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker‘s publisher, announced today the ten projects taking part in its third annual Screen Forward Lab for story-driven, serialized projects. Among the projects, which span web series, VR and cross-platform storytelling, are works set in the world of extreme sports, gentrified Brooklyn, and a youth rehab center. Characters include young scouts and their scoutmasters, a gay-curious heterosexual woman, and angry black women — the latter in the series, Angry Black Women. Screen Forward Lab creators begin their program today with five days of workshops and seminars at the Made in New York Media Center, where […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 24, 2017 -
Tribeca 2017: Exclusive Clip, Mark Grieco’s A River Below
“We need action!” That’s Richard Rasmussen, one of the two main subjects of Mark Grieco’s Tribeca documentary premiere, A River Below, in this exclusive clip provided to Filmmaker. The film, Grieco’s follow-up to the Sundance-premiering Marmato, has its first screening on April 22. Here, from the press materials, is a further description: A River Below is a gripping journey into the Amazon that follows a Brazilian wildlife TV star and a renowned marine biologist as they each attempt to save the endangered pink river dolphin from being hunted to extinction. As we burrow further into the Amazon, the film takes […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 20, 2017 -
28 Films, TV and VR Pieces We’re Excited About at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival
Kicking off tonight with an all-star Radio City concert following the premiere of the Clive Davis doc, The Soundtrack of Our Lives, the Tribeca Film Festival once more offers a near-overwhelming array of new work spread across not just film but TV, VR, gaming and music. The program has been slimmed down this year, say the programmers, but the below list of works we’re excited about could still stretch many times fold. Nonetheless, from myself and our various Tribeca contributors this year, here are 28 works we have reason to excitedly anticipate. The Departure. Lana Wilson follows up her abortion […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 19, 2017 -
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
