Pedro Costa has made the latest in a long line of festival trailers commissioned by the Viennale from leading auteurs. This one stars Elizabeth Pinard, star of his newest short, The Daughters of Fire, singing a Brecht song. This year’s Viennale runs from October 19 to 30.

Introducing his third feature, Nowhere Near, Miko Revereza said that his first, the train travelogue No Data Plan, was shot in three days and edited in about a month, fooling him into thinking every movie would be as easy. Instead, Nowhere Near took seven years and five or six entirely different cuts to compose itself. Similarly contemplating a mountain of longitudinally acquired footage, Chris Wilcha’s Flipside is assembled from work shot over nearly three decades. Their approaches and intentions are entirely different, but the two films work well together. Wilcha is the maker of 2000’s The Target Shoots First, an immaculate workplace comedy about his mid-’90s […]

Nothing I heard or saw at the 80th Venice Film Festival felt more momentous than the news that came from Berlin after four days of screenings. On September 2, Berlinale artistic director Carlo Chatrian announced he’d step down after next year’s edition, citing issues with the new management structure proposed by Germany’s minister for culture and media Claudia Roth. His premature departure will mark the end of a five-year journey that turned the festival into an event miles away from the tacky extravaganza of its Dieter Kosslick era. Shepherded by Chatrian and executive director Mariëtte Rissenbeek, the Berlinale had found […]

In terms of acquisitions, the most financially significant screening of last year’s TIFF was an industry-only one of The Holdovers, a Miramax-developed title whose worldwide rights promptly sold for $30 million to Focus Features; this year, it returned for press and public inspection following its Telluride premiere. It is, as previously announced, a crowdpleaser directed by Alexander Payne, designed for career rejuvenation after the ambitious, unwieldy and expensive commercial failure of 2017’s Downsizing, and effectively written under his instruction by sitcom writer-producer David Hemingson. He cannibalized what was initially written as a prep school-set pilot by, among other things, following Payne’s directive to […]

Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s Evil Does Not Exist begins by removing every element that might be reasonably expected from his work by now. Instead of long group dialogue sessions and theatrical/ therapeutic role-play, Evil starts with a generously prolonged, people-free dolly shot through a forest, the camera pointed straight up at the sky as it’s broken up by branches passing overhead. With a higher-resolution camera and some fancy post work, the forest could be a formalist spectacle—tree limbs overlapping and dissolving, the lattices created in the process, etc. But visual high definition has never been one of Hamaguchi’s priorities, as his movies remain oddly […]

The Toronto International Film Festival is fully underway beginning today, and while the vibe will certainly be different without as many Hollywood stars on the red carpet — a number of films have qualified for SAG-AFTRA interim agreements while probably at least as many either were not able to or decided not to try — there’s as always a strong lineup of films to look forward to. Below, Filmmaker‘s editors have compiled a list of 20 films to watch out for, many of which ones that have premiered at other festivals along with several world premieres we are hearing particularly […]