Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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The Golden Globes Gave Three Serious Films a Big Oscar Boost
If awards season is useful for anything, it’s to provide a distraction. Bombarded as we are by bleak headlines, there’s something soothing about watching a lot of very famous people collect trophies and crack jokes for a few hours. At the 83rd Annual Golden Globes, host Nikki Glaser set the tone for a fun celebration. But there was substance too. Those of us looking for clues to Oscar outcomes (I don’t mean Polymarket bettors, but, hey, they’re welcome too) were left with plenty to chew on.Warner Bros.’ One Battle After Another continued its hot streak, taking best picture (musical or […]
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Notable Tech Trends in 2025
Telluride is not on my annual festival calendar—too distant, too costly—and rarely I’m at Toronto, only with a film. So as a New Yorker, my personal fall awards season kicks off with the New York Film Festival. Like Telluride, it’s a non-competitive festival that showcases and celebrates the best of each year’s new crop, and it has the advantage of relying less on premieres and more on outstanding films gleaned from earlier festivals like Berlin, Cannes, and Sundance. As such, it’s a pretty good sampler of the latest trends coursing through the art and practice of cinematic expression. This year […]
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U.S. in Progress 2025: Poland to Park City
The 15th edition of U.S. in Progress—an industry market cum post-production prize competition held during the Polish-based Tauron American Film Festival—began on a particularly unorthodox foot this year. Though the festival’s based in the Southwestern, thousand-year-old metropolis of Wrocław, the program’s international cohort landed at Warsaw Chopin Airport, nearly 200 miles away from AFF’s home base, in the days preceding the event itself. Inconveniently, the Wrocław airport underwent extensive renovations from October 26 through December 4 of this year. As the AFF and its U.S. in Progress showcase unfold between November 6-11, the timing couldn’t be more headache-inducing. Yet for […]
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Sundance Film Festival Announces 2026 Feature Slate, Including Competition Titles
The Sundance Institute announced today 90 feature films, including the competition titles, and seven episodic projects that will screen at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, the final edition to be held in Park City, UT. (Eight other projects were previously announced as part of the Park City Legacy program.) Among them are new films from John Wilson, Josephine Decker, Kogonada, Gregg Araki, Alex Gibney and Antoine Fuqua; three films featuring Charli xcx (Araki’s I Want Your Sex, Aidan Zamiri’s A24 release, The Moment, and Cathy Yan’s The Gallerist), and, as always, a number of first-time features, including films from Ramzi […]
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FILM FEST KNOX 2025: 96 Hours in Knoxville
The last time I visited Tennessee, I was 15, traveling around Memphis with my parents, and spent most of the time listening to In Rainbows on cheap headphones; we ate barbecue, visited my grand-uncle and toured Graceland. 17 years later, I returned to Tennessee for the third annual FILM FEST KNOX, co-founded by filmmaker Paul Harrill and Filmmaker contributor Darren Hughes, and quickly realized my half-remembered teenaged experiences bore almost no relevance to this trip. For all intents and purposes, Knoxville might as well be in a separate state called East Tennessee, or so I’m told given the so-called Grand […]
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“One Battle After Another,” “My Father’s Shadow,” Jafar Panahi Win at 2025 Gotham Awards
International titles dominated at last night’s Gotham Awards, with films from Iran, France, the UK and Ireland, including one that was entirely Lagos-shot, winning seven of ten competitive categories. It Was Just an Accident‘s Jafar Panahi, who, it was revealed by his lawyer shortly before the event, has been sentenced in absentia to one year in prison and a two-year travel ban for engaging in “propaganda activities” against the state, was on hand to accept awards for Best Director, Best International Feature and Best Original Screenplay. Akinola Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow, a 2025 Cannes selection and MUBI release that […]
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Maryland Film Festival 2025: Cinema Saturation in Baltimore
If last year’s Maryland Film Festival felt like a trial run for a new era of Baltimore’s cornerstone film event, the 26th Maryland Film Festival solidified its direction. Bouncing back from the low point of 2023, when the event was postponed for a year due to financial constraints, MdFF looks to continue growing its reach—a herculean effort in 2025 as arts institutions across the country are under attack by crackdowns in free speech and having their federal funding gutted. “We were awarded [an NEA] grant, then it was taken away,” Nancy Proctor, the new executive director of the Parkway tells […]
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Metrograph To Screen Filmmaker 25 New Faces Shorts on December 6
Filmmaker is very happy to be partnering on December 6, 2025 with New York’s Metrograph for an evening of shorts drawn from the magazine’s 2025 25 New Faces list. I wrote for the Metrograph’s calendar: Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces list has annually curated a cross-section of emerging and impressive new independent film talent. Directors, writers, actors, below-the-line—these are filmmakers who have made indelible work in the past year and will go on to shape tomorrow’s film culture. With the magazine’s 29th edition of the list in its current edition, the editors have curated from their work an excitingly diverse selection […]
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Tokyo 2025: Mario Patrocínio on “Maria Vitória”
Mario Patrocínio’s Maria Vitória is the writer-director’s first narrative feature, but it brings the chops of his documentary background to ground the story of the titular young woman (Mariana Cardoso). Under the relentless eye of her controlling father Nacho (Miguel Borges), Maria is subjected to a rigorous soccer training regimen that makes having a social life nearly impossible. When her estranged brother Bruno (Miguel Nunes) unexpectedly returns to their small Portuguese village, the film expands from a father-daughter duo to a fraught triangle. Bruno’s queerness challenges his father’s stereotypical machismo; her brother’s former absence and her father’s constant presence are […]
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Sundance Redford Founder Tribute to Honor Ed Harris, Gyula Gazdag at 2026 Festival
The nonprofit Sundance Institute today announced in a press release details for the 2026 Sundance Film Festival’s annual fundraiser, Celebrating Sundance Institute: A Tribute to Founder Robert Redford, taking place on Friday, January 23, 2026, at the Grand Hyatt Deer Valley in Utah. From the press release: The evening will honor Sundance Institute’s Founder, Robert Redford — his legacy, vision, and enduring mission to support independent storytellers. In paying tribute this year, the inaugural Robert Redford Luminary Award will be established and presented to Ed Harris and Gyula Gazdag, two artists deeply dedicated to the Sundance Institute labs and committed […]
