New York-based animator Alexa Lim Haas made Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2017 while her lovely short Agua Viva was still in post. With the film appearing on Vimeo this week, where it received a Staff Pick, now both we and all of you can experience it in its fully-inked glory. Agua Viva, which depicts the inner life of an immigrant Chinese nail salon worker in Miami, premiered at Sundance and Rotterdam this year and won jury prizes at SXSW and Dallas. It received quite a bit of support, including the Borscht Corp’s #NoBroZone Grant, the Time Warner 1st […]

Indiewire Senior Film Critic David Ehrlich’s “best movies of the year” supercut is always an amazing watch, a video in which individual cuts, sequences, and music intros generate dopamine hits as you silently, or while singing along, endorse and possibly decry some of the individual selections. This year’s edition, at 13 minutes-plus, is no exception. I was happy to see here a number of personal favorites here alongside Ehrlich recommendations that I haven’t seen yet (Paddington 2!) as well an opening section that draws from the trippy ending of Alex Garland’s underrated Annihilation.

On the heels of Nicolas Roeg and Ricky Jay, the movies lost another major figure today with the passing of the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci. Bertolucci leaves behind something of complicated legacy, especially given Hollywood’s current sociopolitical climate. His treatment of Maria Schneider on the set of The Last Tango in Paris has led some to decry his standing, while others lament that such indiscretions are “in danger of [overshadowing]” his work. Whichever side of the aisle you may fall on, it’s hard to deny his eye for staging a scene. Above is one of the most memorable sequences from one of […]

The critic Adam Nayman has a new book out, with the self-explanatory title The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together. It’s one of those large Abrams doorstops, like Matt Zoller Seitz’s books on Wes Anderson and Oliver Stone — filled with glossy, well-chosen pictures as well as thoughtful, eloquent analysis that more than justifies their literal heavy-osity. Nayman has now taken part in a new video for TIFF, where he focuses in on one of the themes running throughout his film-by-film essays: the notion of circularity in the films of Joel and Ethan Coen. Nayman starts with […]

Olivier Assayas speaks eloquently about his own work, able to talk about them both abstractly and practically. No surprise, then, that he’s as sharp when talking about other filmmakers’ films. A new video from TIFF finds the acclaimed French filmmaker — most recently of Non Fiction, Personal Shopper and Clouds of Sils Maria, and whose 1994 classic Cold Water was reissued earlier this year — talking Ingmar Bergman. Specifically he discusses Persona, the Swedish legend’s game-changing 1966 whatzit, about a caretaker (Bibi Andersson) tending to a damaged actress (Liv Ullmann). Bergman, according to Assayas, showed “that you could be both […]

We are something of David Lynch completists here at Filmmaker, hence this posting of Ant Head, a music video (of sorts) combining two tracks — “Frank 2000” and “Woodcutters From Fiery Ships” — from Thought Gang, the just-released collaboration between Lynch and his longtime composer, Angelo Badalamenti. Lynch describes the work as “…a short video featuring my friends the ants along with cheese, etc.” As the press release notes, the material from this album hails from the early ’90s but has made its way into almost all of Lynch’s subsequent productions, including Twin Peaks: The Return. From the press release: […]