Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist took seven years to realize, a process he understandably seems to have found traumatic—both the film and interviews he’s given about it are about how financiers are monsters. Per Corbet, The Brutalist “was made for under $10 million. But I still need millions of dollars. That’s very complicated because it means I often have to interface with people with whom I don’t share the same ethics and morals.” Process is text: Anyone who’s ever worked for an equally oblivious and imperious rich person, one whose underlings can only work out how their near-impossible plan of action […]

There’s nothing quite like happening into a film committed to not playing by the rules; that real-time realization, in the darkness of a movie theater, that the story you’re watching isn’t concerned with sticking to well-worn formulas so much as challenging your expectations around what cinema can do and be. Pepe is that kind of film. The first, per its subtitle, in a series of “studies of the imagination,” Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias’s fourth feature is a cinematic UFO perched somewhere between hard facts and dreams. It is a work that celebrates imagination as the ultimate means to […]

On the eve of the opening of the 62nd New York Film Festival, dozens of filmmakers have published an open letter calling on the festival to end its partnership with Contributing Partner Bloomberg Philanthropies, which they write is “directly implicated in facilitating settlement infrastructure in the West Bank and denying Palestinians their basic rights.” Among the signers are over three dozen filmmakers with films in the current 2024 edition, including Mike Leigh (Hard Truths), Julia Loktev (My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow), Neo Sora (Happyend), Basel Adra, Hamdam Ballal and Yuval Abraham (No Other Land), Truong […]

“Ah man, I could talk about it forever.” It is the day after Happyend’s Venice premiere and director Neo Sora is holding court for a parade of journos in the ballroom of an Art Nouveau hotel on the Lido. I’m the last in line, and we’ve been chatting for almost half an hour when his face suddenly lights up. The topic Sora could talk about forever and to which we devote the last few minutes of our allotted time is music, a connection that long predates his first feature-length foray into fiction. An eclectic audiovisual artist, Sora’s a member of […]

The largest genre film festival in North America, Montréal’s ever-growing Fantasia International Film Festival celebrated its 28th edition this summer. This was my seventh year covering for Filmmaker, my ninth in attendance and I arrived with a severe case of FOMO: at an industry party last year, I met a man dressed head-to-toe in a gigantic beaver costume, allegedly to promote a feature he had at the festival. He was charming, so I told him I’d make an effort to see Hundreds of Beavers, but a part of me, taken aback by the man’s zany attire and commitment to self-promotion, knew […]

I was trying to make sense of my notes on Happyend when I noticed him. Arms akimbo, left hand drumming his gun holster, the cop was patrolling the press room looking equal parts annoyed, bored, and baleful. I glanced away; when I looked up again, another colleague had joined him in inspecting the crowd of journalists typing at their laptops like exam invigilators. For a festival as militarized as Venice, the sight might not be front-page news: Ever since my first trip in 2014, the security corps deployed across the Lido have grown almost exponentially, reaching near-Orwellian levels in 2020, […]