Filmmaker Videos
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Trailer Watch: Jeff Baena’s Spin Me Round
With a cast featuring an array of director Jeff Baena’s frequent collaborators, Spin Me Round is likely to fit right in with the filmmaker’s established quirky canon. The trailer shows Alison Brie (who co-wrote Baena’s previous directorial effort, 2020’s Horse Girl) as a woman who wins a company retreat to a so-called “institute” on the outskirts of Florence, Italy—and eventually falls for the extremely Italian CEO. Of course, this idyllic Mediterranean romance quickly gives way to a web of secrets and illusions. Also starring are Aubrey Plaza (Baena’s wife and collaborator since 2014’s Life After Beth), Alessandro Nivola, Molly Shannon, […]
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Trailer Watch: A24’s Bodies, Bodies, Bodes
A new trailer has been released for A24’s forthcoming slasher comedy Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, which is set to hit theaters later this summer. Directed by Dutch actor/filmmaker Halina Reijn with a script by playwright Sarah DeLappe (and based off a story by “Cat Person” writer Kristen Roupenian), the film follows a “nihilistic” friend group that decides to play the titular murder-mystery game on a stormy night in one of their lavish mansions. What starts as a drug-fueled party game soon morphs into a real-life witch hunt when one of the friends is viciously murdered. Frantic to find the killer and […]
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Trailer Watch: David O. Russell’s Amsterdam
A ridiculously huge cast — Chris Rock, Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Anya Taylor-Joy, Robert DeNiro, Rami Malek, Taylor Swift, Alessandro Nivola, Andrea Riseborough, Matthias Schoenaerts, Michael Shannon, Mike Myers and Zoe Saldaña! — are (mostly) all highlighted in this first trailer from David O’Russell’s latest, the comedy/thriller Amsterdam. With cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki and production design from Judy Becker, the film is set in the 1930s and deals with three people who witness a murder and find themselves drawn into “one of the most outrageous plots in American history.” Previously, David O. Russell was interviewed for Filmmaker‘s […]
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Watch: Behind-the-Scenes Clip Showing Tribeca Premiere Life Rendered‘s Use of Unreal Engine
Premiering at Tribeca, Emma Needell’s short film Life Rendered tells the story of a closeted gay Colorado man who lives on a ranch, where he takes care of his aging cowboy father while seeking romance in the virtual world. Set in the near future, the short draws inspiration from the director’s own childhood. “I explored the depths of the internet long before I ever saw a major city,” Needell says. “When I turned seven, my parents built a solar-powered cattle ranch in Colorado. The county was as rural as it gets, where everyone participated in the rodeo on Saturday and […]
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Trailer Watch: Tzvi Friedman’s Man
In my print issue article (now online) on two ultra-low-budget filmmakers, I described Tzvi Friedman’s Man as an “an eerily austere New York-set serial killer drama with a (possible) science-fiction twist and impressive formal control.” As the film finishes post-production and begins submitting to festivals, Friedman, who is making his feature debut with Man, has sent Filmmaker an early teaser from the film that aptly showcases its depiction of dread-filled urban anomie and assured tone. As I write in my piece, “The film was inspired when Friedman was locked out of a Brooklyn apartment where he was sleeping and wound […]
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Watch: Jim Jarmusch’s Video for Cat Power, “A Pair of Brown Eyes”
Jim Jarmusch has directed a new video for Cat Power’s excellent new album, Covers, a clip for the Pogues-penned “A Pair of Brown Eyes.” “As someone who deeply loves Cat Power’s music, getting to collaborate with Chan on this video was like a dream come true,” said Jarmusch in a press release. “She’s so inspiring to me, of course as an artist, but she’s also just such an extraordinary person.” Check it out above.
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Trailer Watch: Gaspar Noe’s Vortex
As I’m editing my print-edition interview with Gaspar Noe about his new feature, Vortex (to my mind, at this moment, his best film), this new trailer from Utopia is a nice refresher. From the Francoise Hardy soundtrack to the Edgar Allen Poe-quoting tagline to the consoling gesture rendered uncanny by Noe’s split screen, this trailer captures the film’s melancholy heartbreak and unsentimental philosophy. The film is an astringent yet not uncompassionate look at the final days of two aging leftists, a married couple played by director Dario Argento (portraying a film critic, which Argento once was) and actress Francoise Lebrun […]
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Watch: MoMI’s Trailer for the 2022 First Look Festival
With the 2022 edition of Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look festival beginning on Wednesday, the series has just dropped a trailer — a brisk 1-minute+ showing the range of this year’s selections. The First Look schedule now includes a number of recently announced additions, including a screening of Jenny Perlin’s documentary Bunker followed by a discussion with the film’s producer, the well-known critic A.S. Hamrah; Deniz Tortum and Kathryn Hamilton’s single-channel video installation Our Ark (now viewable in the gallery); and Charlie Shackleton’s single-viewer VR experience As Mine Exactly. Also, there are a number of films in the program from […]
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Watch: Jamie Stuart’s Tale of Cat Love and Loss, The Love Battery
Jamie Stuart’s cat SK, who accompanied him through a chunk of adulthood spanning New York to LA, passed away recently. Stuart’s new short, The Love Battery is an account of that passing, a tribute as well as introduction to his next pet chapter. From Stuart’s program notes: Cats. Love and loss. I made this as a crew of one over the past two months. Initially, I’d planned it as a tribute to my recently deceased cat SK — but then the story took a turn… This is NOT a documentary. It is a dramatic reenactment — that includes real live […]
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Watch: DuArt: History of Independent Film
With the recent passing of DuArt Film Laboratories Chairman Irwin Young, we’re posting this video kindly flagged to us by David Leitner, whose one of those on-screen detailing the history of DuArt — everything from its role as a technical innovator to the support it gave to the New York independent community. A panel discussion hosted by the Post New York Alliance in December, 2021, the video features in addition to Leitner former DuArt employees Dominic Rom (Goldcrest), Tim Spitzer (Jigsaw Productions), Bob Mastronardi (Kodak) and Jane Tolmachyov (Goldcrest). A bonus is a short video at the end about Young […]
