Starring the “bastard son of a hundred maniacs” (the horrifically burned, blade-adorned fictional sweater-wearing slasher, Freddy Krueger), A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge was itself a kind of bastard son, birthed by good intentions but several less maniacs. Released on November 1st, 1985, the sequel was rushed into theaters on the goodwill and unexpected success of its Wes Craven-directed predecessor. Reviews were less than stellar, and it would take the return of Craven in a creative role to right the ship with the third entry in 1987. Nightmare 2 was forgotten and ignored, deemed an outlier in the franchise […]

Vitalina Varela is a luxuriantly claustrophobic staging of a story Pedro Costa’s title subject, playing herself, first orally recounted in 2014’s Horse Money. The world Costa constructs around her is, initially, an endless night—daylight is, at best, the barest suggestive sliver peeking in from outside. As the narrative unfolds, more sunlight penetrates interiors, but a full radiant glare seems, at best, a hypothetical perk for people with more money, and in the very final-stretch shots in exterior day, colors have been graded down enough where the effect isn’t overwhelming but mutedly in keeping. There isn’t a pixel Costa hasn’t accounted for in his […]

The opening shot of The Irishman* is a signature Steadicam glide through a nursing home soundtracked by doo-wop (The Five Satins’ 1956 “In The Heat of the Night”), slowly making its reverential way to an close-up of Robert De Niro—a suitably majestic re-introduction of both the actor as persona and his character, hitman Frank Sheeran. Sheeran lived until 2003, and (minus one brief WWII combat service flashback) the film picks him up sometime in the early ’50s. If the opening shot is as close to the present day as possible (2003, I hate to remind you, was already 16 years […]

San Sebastian has always been a place where the past meets the present with some finesse, its Art Nouveau buildings nestling happily next to the angular lines of the film festival’s main Kursaal auditorium, opened in 1999 and intended to mimic “two beached rocks.” This mix of energy is reflected in the audiences who attend, often seen snacking on a glass of wine and one of the city’s traditional pintxo canapes as they patiently queue for the cinema, and who generally break out into a round of spontaneous hand-clapping as the festival’s jazzy introduction plays before each film. History seemed […]

The 2019 New York Film Festival kicks off tonight with Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman — and do you really need us to recommend it to you? With our editorial staff seeing the film tonight, we’ve been avoiding Film Twitter, where extremely positive reactions have been leaking out from this morning’s press screening. But Scorsese’s long-anticipated, epic, effects-driven film is just one of many highlights we’re certain of as New York brings together some of the best out of Cannes, Venice, Telluride and Toronto along with some fantastic short-film premieres, talks (Lynne Ramsay!, DP Denis Lenoir!, Olivier Assayas!), and new VR […]

Every year, the Camden International Film Festival manages a nifty magic trick. Its ambition swells within the concise duration of what amounts to a holiday weekend (if the second Friday of September was deemed, say, National Non-Fiction Day), with the same handful of venues, including two opera houses and a gorgeous vintage bijou, in three adjacent towns in northern seaside Maine. Marking its 15th year this September, CIFF–produced under the umbrella of the Points North Institute – consistently ups the stakes for filmmakers and audiences, without suffering from the dreaded festivalitis: the condition that arises when film festivals become all […]

The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker‘s parent organization, announced today that Laura Dern will receive the Actress Tribute and Glen Basner, founder and CEO of FilmNation Entertainment, will receive the Industry Tribute at the 2019 IFP Gotham Awards. The ceremony will be held on Monday, December 2, 2019, at Cipriani Wall Street, New York City. “We are thrilled to be honoring the extraordinary talents of one of our most beloved actors, Laura Dern, with this year’s Actress Tribute. From her early roles in Blue Velvet and Jurassic Park to her more recent performances in Big Little Lies, Little Women and Marriage Story, Laura […]

With Toronto wrapped, New York upcoming and Sundance on the horizon, the film festival season is here, and distributors — particularly the traditional arthouse distributors — are facing tougher competition than ever. While critics and audiences struggle to keep up with the sheer volume of buzz-worthy films, industry executives must contend with tectonic shifts in the marketplace, ensuring in the process that their release slates are kept full of strong pictures.  In this new environment, when a pay TV outlet likes HBO scoops the competition by paying near $20 million for Toronto’s hot title, Bad Education, traditional distributors are often […]

If there’s one basic, all-encompassing piece of advice to take away from the IFP Week 2019 panel “Where Do We Go From Here?” concerning those crippling migraines known as tax incentives it’s this: Talk to someone. Even if you’re that rare filmmaker with a head for business, tax incentives (and grants, and rebates) can be mind-foggingly complicated. “Talk to someone” and variations on it are uttered again and again by the three panelists and their moderator, John Hadity, an industry veteran who knows as much about the subject as they do. “All the programs, they sound familiar,” Hadity said. “But […]

Ira Sachs will get a lot of the credit for his latest film, Frankie, an ensemble drama with an all-star cast anchored by top-billed Isabelle Huppert, playing an international movie star whos been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Many will call it “Ira Sach’s Frankie” and single him out as its main creator. But just as the film isn’t only about Huppert’s character (Brendan Gleeson, Marisa Tomei, Greg Kinnear play her blended family), Frankie is not just about Sachs. Only one of his features, his 1996 debut The Delta, has been written solo. And four of the rest, Frankie included, have […]