The first trailer for The Card Counter, Paul Schrader’s keenly anticipated follow-up to First Reformed, has arrived. The premise is straightforward: sentenced to ten years in prison, fall guy Oscar Isaac learns how to count cards. The tone here is intriguingly all over the place, including Isaac’ flirtatious casino floor meeting with dealer Tiffany Haddish, promises of cold-blooded revenge and at least one shot directly quoting, per Schrader’s usual reference point, Pickpocket. (It’s the hands reaching towards each other through a prison visiting room’s glass pane.) The Card Counter premieres at this year’s Venice Film Festival before entering release on September 10 from […]

Filmmaker Leah Shore — a 25 New Face who contributed an illustration to Joanne McNeil’s Speculations column last issue — has directed a music video for the band The Malpractice. With pink curtains, green shag wallpaper and cardboard broccoli, the video features Sarah Ellen Stephens, who stars in Shore’s recent short film, Puss, and film critic and programmer Aaron Hillis in a playfully menacing infantilism scenario that Shore shot entirely in her own apartment. Check it out above.

Producer, screenwriter and director James Schamus has created a six-episode series, Somos., for Netflix that will premiere June 30. The first trailer has dropped along with a statement by Schamus on the Netflix site. Based on a ProPublica oral history of a cartel massacre in Allende, Mexico, crimes that journalist Ginger Thompson writes were triggered by actions by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the series has two goals, says Schamus: In telling the story, we have two core objectives: to make visible the people our culture often works to erase from our perceptions and memories, and to affirm our co-existence […]

All Light, Everywhere—Theo Anthony’s follow up to his feature debut Ratfilm—premiered during this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Now scheduled for theatrical release on June 4, All Light is a sweeping essay-film look at modes of surveillance and the ways they feed racism. Drone surveillance and police bodycams manufactured by Axon (formerly TASER) are just some of the subjects under consideration by Anthony (a 25 New Face of Film in 2015). (And click here to read Anthony’s interview with Sky Hopinka, the cover feature from our most recent issue.)

David Lynch directs as well as plays on a new video from Scottish songwriter and performer Donovan. The director is credited with “unique Modal Guitar Textures and effects” on the track, which, in a statement posted to Facebook by Donovan, came together quickly: It was all impromptu. I visited the studio and David said … “Sit at the mics with your guitar Don.” David in same room behind control desk with my Linda. He had asked me to only bring in a song just emerging, not anywhere near finished. We would see what happens. It happened! I composed extempore … […]

The first trailer just dropped for Nicole Riegel’s Holler, a flinty, tremendously assured debut drama with a powerful lead performance by Jessica Barden. When I interviewed Riegel last fall when her film played in Toronto’s market, she spoke of its development and financing process, during which some financiers asked her if she could make the lead male. “I wanted to tell my story, and I only knew to tell that if it was about a young woman in a very harsh, muscular environment,” Riegel told me. “And then I wanted to tell about how hard it is for young women […]

One of the highlights of this year’s edition of New Directors/New Films, Jonas Bak’s strong feature film debut Wood and Water stars his own mother, Anke. Shot on 16mm in both the director’s native Germany and Hong Kong, where Bak is currently based, Wood and Water follows Anke in the immediate days following her retirement. When she leaves her small town to visit her long-gone son in Hong Kong, Anke finds herself adjacent to the protests unfolding there. With a keen compositional eye, palpable warmth towards all the strangers she meets and the occasional musical assist from Brian Eno’s New Space Music, Wood and […]

Premiering online timed to Earth Day from Field of Vision is a stunning and poetic Arctic-shot short, UTUQAQ, directed by Iva Radivojević. Acting as her own cinematographer, Radivojević counterpoints elegant and abstract patterns across sweeping planes of ice with more human-scale documentation of the work of four researchers drilling ice cores in the region’s freezing temperatures. The narration — in Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic) by Aviaja Lyberth — is from the point of the view of the ice itself, evoking the earth’s geological memory as it confronts efforts of the researchers working in the moment to learn about what is being lost […]

The long-awaited trailer for Leos Carax’s musical Annette — his follow-up to Holy Motors, one of best films of the last decade — has just been posted online. Concurrent with a communique from French President Emmanuel Macron that seems designed to assure anxious international industry about the viability of the upcoming ’21 edition of the Cannes Film Festival, where Annette will be opening night, it’s a particularly impressive publicity drop. The film’s synopsis, from the press release: Los Angeles, today. Henry (Adam Driver) is a stand-up comedian with a fierce sense of humor who falls in love with Ann (Marion […]

In the wake of Radu Jude’s Golden Bear victory at this year’s Berlinale for his latest, the pandemic production Bad Luck Banging, or Looney Porn, streaming platform DAFilms is hosting a five-film retrospective of his work. In the above video, recorded as an introduction to the series, Jude looks up a Romanian right-wing website which condemns him at last in verse. “You, cinephile, if you care who finances films, wish him to rest in peace and forget what he’s done,” reads part of the poem he recites without a blink. Click here to learn more about the series.