With the “golden age” of documentary filmmaking still upon us, there’s no shortage of doc fests to attend throughout the year (especially around November, when it often feels like a nonfiction pileup). The Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, however, knows how to set itself apart from the pack. Besides now taking place in March (and thus not needing to fight with IDFA over eyeballs and premieres), CPH:DOX strives to be “the best festival in and for the world.” What this means in concrete terms is that, though CPH:DOX showcases everything from cinematic art pieces to true-crime thrillers, it’s forever rooted […]

Saturday night at the 16th annual Oxford Film Festival was prom—not an actual prom, but a sweet sixteen-themed awards ceremony complete with fried chicken and sangria, hosts in ballgowns and an electricity in the air where you felt the nostalgia of your own teenage dance. If you grew up in the south, like I did, your prom may not have felt anywhere as progressive as this one, and it wasn’t until I was standing in the packed auditorium of the awards that I realized I had mostly seen LGBTQ, minority-focused and movies with a female gaze at the festival, which […]

With SXSW already underway, here’s my quick list of films of interest at this year’s edition of Austin’s annual tech, music and film festival. The Beach Bum. Harmony Korine’s latest, The Beach Bum, which time travels the stoner comedy ethos of ’70s Cheech and Chong to the upscale mansions and beer-soaked boardwalk of contemporary Miami Beach, is sure to be a SXSW standout this year. Matthew McConaughey plays Moondog, a cheerfully debauched would-be poet whose writer’s block is more a product of his 420 lifestyle than existential exploration. “The idea of getting wasted is a virtue to Moondog, living in […]

Where Brett Story’s previous feature, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, interrogated the US’s carceral system in twelve formally and thematically distinct segments, her new film The Hottest August approaches climate change, in its broadest sense, through a freeflowing diaristic chronicle of a summer month. Over August of 2017, Story and her crew traveled to all five boroughs of NYC, capturing a broad polyphony of voices that, pleasingly, refuses to stay strictly on-thematic-task. The film just premiered at True/False before proceeding to SXSW; the first screening there is today. Over FaceTime Audio, I spoke to Story about working with a small crew, redefining […]

The Tribeca Film Festival has announced the feature lineup for this year’s edition, which runs this year from April 24 to May 5. The slate breaks down to 103 features: 52 are narrative, 51 documentaries. New to the festival are the Critics’ Week slate, a selection of five films chosen by NY-based film critics including K. Austin Collins, Bilge Ebiri, Eric Kohn and Alison Willmore, as well as the “This Used to Be New York” section (highlighting films about NYC’s past). Potential highlight among the US narrative slate include Gully, the feature debut by 2017 New Face of Film Nabil Elderkin and; Initials […]

You’re making another short? Why not just make your first feature? You’re already making your feature? Maybe you should make some shorts first. Oh, you’re making a feature? Good luck funding it; good luck casting it; you should be sure it’s genius before embarking on that next three years of your life…. If you suffer from these neuroses-inducing comments, as well as doubts around stamina, sustainability and creativity, you might be a first-time feature filmmaker. Anyone who’s making movies, or trying to, knows there are mountains worth of judgements, opinions and advice that come with the craft. I’ve found a […]

Whether you’re still defrosting your nether-regions from waiting in line for a Park City shuttle, or sitting in your Bushwick studio apartment eating ramen and surviving the polar vortex, you could probably use a little time on a tropical rum-soaked beach right about now. With all the indie-film attention focused on Sundance/Slamdance (not to mention the chilly, angst-ridden fests in Rotterdam and Berlin), it’s worth remembering that there is an entire circuit of film festivals ringed around the Caribbean Sea. From internationally revered fests like Havana that focus on the biggest Latin American cinema premieres to new local upstarts in […]

“My life is not what one would term heroic.”  The narrator of Romina Paula’s second novel, August, returns to her home town in Patagonia to memorialize a childhood friend five years after his death. Emilia’s in her early 20s and has been living with her brother in Buenos Aires. She’s still in college; her boyfriend is in a band. Once back home, she reunites with the love of her youth, Julián, who is now a father, married, somewhat happily. Emilia’s a familiar character making familiar first steps into adulthood, but Paula heightens every sensation and plumbs every potential cliché for […]

On one level, The Plagiarists is a two-part comedy about a ceaselessly fighting couple, the first half of which takes place in winter. Anna (Lucy Kaminsky) is a novelist, at least aspirationally—completion of her first novel is a ways off, so she pays the bills as a copy writer. Tyler (Eamon Monaghan) is a filmmaker, but doesn’t think he can call himself that—he’s written a script, but that’s not the same thing as actually having directed a feature, and meanwhile all he’s doing is, as they say, “creating content.” His latest contract is with Evian, which makes it especially regrettable that, […]

With the epic nature of the #MeToo movement and the independent film community’s goals to program female voices (at Sundance 41% of features and episodic had a woman director, while 52% of shorts did) one would think there’d be progress within the larger film community. But Caryn Coleman, who runs the Future of Film is Female fund and MoMA screening series reminds us, there’s still a need for activism. The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s 4% Challenge shows that there hasn’t been any dramatic changes in the representation of women directors. From 2007-2018, just 4% of the directors of the 1,200 top […]