The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker‘s parent organization, announced today the nominees for the 29th Annual IFP Gotham Awards. Ten competitive awards will be presented to independent features and series. In addition to the competitive awards, Gotham Tributes will be given to actors Laura Dern and Sam Rockwell, director Ava DuVernay, and the Gotham Industry Tribute to Glen Basner. “We congratulate the 2019 IFP Gotham Award nominees and are excited to recognize these artists on December 2nd here in New York, a city known for its great tradition of independent storytelling. This year has been filled with brilliant performances and dynamic […]

This is the second year for NYC’s CineCina Film Festival, which is flying relatively under-the-radar relative to its titles. Per its press releases, CineCina is “the only New York-based film festival dedicated to promoting excellent Chinese films,” and it’s true that the lineup features a smattering of new Chinese films. But it also has one Cannes premiere, Elia Suleiman’s It Must Be Heaven, that wasn’t at NYFF; the overdue first NY screening of Yuri Bykov’s Russian class-conscious Die Hard riff The Factory; a reprise screening of NYFF selection The Wild Goose Lake (at $20 a pop, $10 cheaper than tickets for main slate NYFF […]

Two teen girls lust for each other in post-Dust Bowl Oklahoma. A pregnant writer visits her parents in China and confronts her father’s closeted homosexuality. A Filipina punk-rocker is sent from Manila to the countryside and falls in love while attending an all-girls Catholic school. A meek farmhand and a police officer become lovers despite the oppressive anti-gay legislation in rural Siberia. A trans TSA agent grapples with the prospect of de-transitioning in the face of ostracization.  These varied narratives account for a mere fraction of the films that will screen at the 31st annual NewFest, also known as New […]

After Hurricane Katrina turned New Orleans into a wasteland, visiting film and television productions looked further north for their Louisiana gothic vibes. Over the years, the riverfront city of Shreveport, with a population of some 260,000 (including the adjacent Bossier City), has been a popular location, the backdrop for supernatural thrillers (The Mist, the series Salem), multiple actioners (Shark Night 3D, The Mechanic), comedies (Super, I Love You Phillip Morris) and everything Nic Cage (Drive Angry, Trespass, Season of the Witch). There’s been a lot less such activity in recent years, as the Crescent City got back on its feet […]

A number of cinematic styles, narrative modes, and political agendas collide in Bacurau, one of two South American films on NYFF’s Main Slate this year. Urgent, yet vague enough to feel timeless, the film depicts a form of unhinged white supremacy in the outback of northern Brazil. We’re told up top, quite ominously, that Bacurau takes place “a few years from now,” as if to suggest that the wholly irrational racism herein is just around the corner. An angry movie, at once frightening and funny, it’s bound to rattle viewers aesthetically, politically, or both. Bacurau, a fictional town, is already […]

It’s tempting to sum up this weekend’s pop culture focus as rooted in chronic coulrophobia. As Todd Phillips’s Joker, the latest big screen incarnation of the DC Comics ubervillan, opens across 4,000 theaters, a fear of clowns (coupled with a pathetic lack of common sense gun laws) has collectively stricken the country. Temporary bans have been put in place that discourage moviegoers from adorning clown makeup, security amped up for extensive bag checks, and theater chains encouraged to emphasize Joker’s well-earned, hard R-rating. Has the mere thought of clowning (that is, the obscuring of identity under facepaint) brought about an […]

For 20 years running, the films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have confronted a single fundamental facet of modern life: class. From their breakout La Promesse (1996) to The Unknown Girl (2016), the messy tangle of money, employment, and morality has defined their work. The brothers take a hard turn, in subject if not style, with Young Ahmed. The film debuted at Cannes, like their previous seven features, where it won the Best Director prize earlier this year. Despite that honor–which they won over Almodóvar, Tarantino, and Malick among other heavyweights–the film has earned the harshest reviews of the Dardennes’ career. […]

The fourth, and final, of this year’s Wavelengths shorts programs returned to the curatorial logic of the opening night, bringing together half a dozen disparate sensibilities based on formal, rather than thematic, common ground—in this case, their shared interest in performance. With one exception, the coherence here was more immediate than in the first slate’s buried interest in image production, though the styles of performance deployed across these works bear little resemblance to one another.  The program began with Zachary Epcar’s Billy, a quick, cool sip of Michael Robinson-aid recounting the domestic unease experienced by its eponymous male lead (Peter […]

Arnaud Desplechin’s returned to his hometown onscreen many times: “I still have to go back in my tracks, as a malediction—not as a dream, but as a curse,” he’s said of Roubaix, where My Sex Life and My Golden Years‘ protagonist stand-in Paul Dédalus hails from and where A Christmas Tale unfolds. Desplechin’s also shot digitally before, but this is the first time he’s ever aggressively leaned into it: like Tale, Oh Mercy! also starts during the holiday season, but—opening strings of Christmas lights over city streets aside—the dominant colors aren’t red and green but the familiar digital color-correction staples of orange and blue. […]

The first time I saw Angela Schanelec speak, there was nothing for her to smile about: at a cartoonishly hostile Q&A for 2016’s The Dreamed Path, she fielded questions like “Was this supposed to take place in an alternate universe where emotions don’t exist?” and admirably didn’t yield an inch. Returning to TIFF, Schanelec was onhand not just for Q&As for her latest, I Was at Home, But… but to introduce a 35mm rep screening of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket—one of the foundational works from a director whose influence on, and importance for, Schanelec’s work is immediately apparent. Both when I interviewed her […]