Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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What to See from the Tribeca Film Festival Online
Screenings have just kicked off in Manhattan for the Tribeca Film Festival, but as always not all the films are showing in theaters–and there’s more available online this year than ever before. Here’s a quick guide to what you can see and how to see it. Streaming select titles: Four feature films and four shorts will be online after their initial theatrical screenings this week and next; they’ll also be eligible for an audience choice award with prize money totaling $15,000. All of Tribeca’s online material discussed below, including these eight films, is available at http://tribecafilm.com/online. The short films include: * Love in […]
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2014 Cannes Lineup Announced
There were few surprises to be had at this morning’s announcement of the Competition, Un Certain Regard and Special Screenings sections for the 2014 Cannes Film Festival — perhaps barring Fremaux’s proud, misleading assurance that a whopping 15 female directors were included in the lineup, which is evidently French for eight. Familiar faces returning to the Croisette include Assayas, Cronenberg, Zvyaginstev, Bilge Ceylan, Hazanavicius, Egoyan, Loach, Leigh and the Dardennes, whose Two Days, One Night may prove to be Marion Cotillard’s successful shot at the Best Actress title, after snubs for Rust and Bone and The Immigrant. The two American titles in Competition […]
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25 Picks for the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival
The Tribeca Film Festival opens today, and, as usual, it’s a multi-headed hydra with splashy events, panels, talks but also, of course, films by new and emerging filmmakers. And while Tribeca has garnered a reputation in recent years as a solid platform for international directors with either world or U.S. premieres, this year the American independent section seems particularly strong. Indeed, it was easy to whip out this list of 25 picks I’m especially interested in seeing and that tie closely with the American indie focus of this magazine. Docs look especially sharp, with a number of them dealing with […]
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2014 Sarasota Film Festival Award Winners
I made the un-journalistic decision to forgo last night’s closing awards ceremony at the Sarasota Film Festival for a screening, but judging by the recipients alone, the event was a successful one. Sarasota’s programming, while eclectic and strong, can prove an interesting match for its respective audience. I witnessed about 10 walkouts during the astonishing Stray Dogs, and when the credits arrived after a languid 138 minutes, someone shot up in the back of the theater to wonder, “did anyone like that film?” I chuckled but did not raise my hand. Other hybrid, art house films faired better. Nearly every local I […]
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Digital Motion Picture Cameras in 2014: The Next Chapter
Welcome to Filmmaker Magazine’s fourth annual digital cinema camera round-up. Each year for reasons of publishing schedule, this overview is written on the brink of the big NAB show in Las Vegas. By the time some of you read this, journalists and bloggers will have breathlessly uploaded each and every scrap of breaking news from the frenzied show floor, saving you the airfare, sore feet, and those Vegas cab fares calibrated to expense accounts. But what do these splashy product introductions mean? Do we need to trade up our cameras? How soon? Are more resolution, bit depth, frame rates, color […]
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If You Build It, Will They Come? On the Treefort Film Fest
Idaho’s only city of 100,000+ residents sits in a valley north of the Snake river. Boise is a boomtown these days, with over 150,000 new residents since George W. Bush took office and new west corporate bravado written all over it. The flat city’s pert, immensely walkable and surprisingly bumpin’ downtown extends into residential areas north and east. Looming hills ringing much of the town can be glimpsed from almost anywhere in the city proper as long as the light is just so; it’s an oddly marvelous place to roam around. A gold rush town after the French and Native […]
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A Taste of Cannes in the Yucatán: The Riviera Maya Film Festival
For a beach bum cinephile it doesn’t get much better than the Riviera Maya Film Festival. Only in its third year, Riviera Maya mixes the accessibility of AFI Fest – surprisingly, it’s free and open to all – with a bit of the sensational cachet of Cannes. (Right down to a brazenly coordinated, multi-store jewelry heist in Cancun that resulted in the car carrying Peter Sarsgaard and Maggie Gyllenhaal getting stopped en route to the opening night screening of Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves. Now that’s entertainment!) I didn’t catch Reichardt’s edge-of-your-seat eco-thriller until the last day of the fest, but […]
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Vice City: The 31st Miami International Film Festival
Like many so-called “regional” film festivals, the Miami International Film Festival might not be on the tip of every rising filmmaker’s tongue when figuring out where they ought to submit. Struggles to get attention from the film world at large aren’t new for festivals taking place in non-media hub cities that happen to be events where movies aren’t bought and sold, just shown. Regardless of whether they’re “regional” or not, such festivals often get stuck with that half derogatory term. Such is the case with Miami even though it’s in a major city, is over 30 years old and has improved […]
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Club Med: New Directors/New Films (II)
Coincidence or zeitgeist? Three of the four outstanding films in the second, slightly shorter segment of ND/NF feature swarthy, sensuously handsome male protagonists who live and act out their dramas in sweltering countries with edges that kiss the cool yet uncomforting Mediterranean. And no, this is neither a projection nor an implication of selectors. Violence, be it palpable or discreetly off-screen, is a powerful element in all four. New Directors ends March 30; Part I of this review appeared last week. Four of 10 viewed (I missed centerpiece Obvious Child and closing nighter 20,000 Days on Earth)? A respectable proportion, […]
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Sundance Institute Launches TV-Based Lab Program
It was only a matter of time. With quality, funds and star power funneling into television, the Sundance Institute is the latest name to hop on board the medium, in announcing their first ever Episodics Story Lab to be held in the Fall of 2014. Designed for TV and online serial writers, the six day lab will pair the chosen few with accomplished mentors who will aid in script development as they also impart wisdom on the production and distribution landscape. Cary Fukunaga, Louis CK and Lena Dunham are among Sundance’s Screenwriters Lab alumni who enjoyed breakouts through their television […]
