Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: Christopher Arcella’s Bitcoin-Inspired Short, The Satoshi Sculpture Garden
With bitcoin values soaring and “blockchain” the soon-to-be-new film industry buzzword, Christopher Arcella is out with a well-timed short, The Satoshi Sculpture Garden. With a cool, meditative calm, he follows a young woman as she surveys an outdoor sculpture garden consisting of pieces that play upon ideas tied to the cryptocurrency. Data visualization indeed! From Arcella’s director’s statement: In order to fully appreciate Bitcoin one needs to have a basic understanding of Bitcoin’s technology and the systems that the technology is disrupting. Otherwise, trying to understand Bitcoin is a bit like trying to derive meaning from abstract sculpture. The Satoshi […]
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Trailer Watch: Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here
The U.S. trailer for Lynne Ramsay’s contemporary neo-noir, You Were Never Really Here, which won the Best Screenplay and Best Actor (for Ramsay and Joaquin Phoenix, respectively) at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, has just dropped. An adaptation of a Jonathan Ames story, it stars Phoenix as a modern-day gumshoe tracking down a kidnapped kid. Amazon releases in early ’18.
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Watch: Walter Murch Talks Music, The Conversation and “Nodal Editing”
Starting off with a discussion of classic Hollywood vs. Soviet editing styles (continuity editing vs. Soviet montage’s dialectic approach), famous editor and sound designer Walter Murch goes on to discuss a third way that he dubs “nodal editing.” Drawing examples from The Conversation, the first film he sound edited, to The Godfather to his work in documentary, Murch offers an incisive, history-laden master class in editing theory at this year’s Sheffield Doc Fest.
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Watch: David Ehrlich’s 25 Best Films of 2017 Supercut
Critic David Ehrlich’s 25 Best Films of 2017 supercut, dropped today, is an expected pleasure. Through the luxuriousness of its 12-and-a-half minutes, it produces, as it always does, the affect of, “Hey, this was a decent year for movies!” There a quite a few personal favorites on his list — Personal Shopper, Phantom Shopper, Good Time, A Ghost Story, to name a few — as well as a spirited soundtrack flecked with a number of ’70s and ’80s pop hits and disco anthems. Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” is the bold opener, and particularly amazing needle drops include Chaka Kahn’s “I’m […]
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Watch: Nicole Kidman at the 2017 Gotham Awards
“Sit down! I don’t deserve that!” After being introduced by her friend Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman took to the stage at Monday night’s Gotham Awards to accept a Tribute award for her distinguished career.
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Watch: Timothée Chalamet Thanks Cardi B and Martin Scorsese at the Gotham Awards
Taking the stage to accept the Gotham Award for Best Actor for his turn in Call Me By Your Name at last night’s Gotham Awards, Timothée Chalamet — a graduate of NYC’s LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, as he noted — closed out an exuberant speech by rattling off a roll call of the New Yorkers who’ve inspired him. It’s a diverse cluster that included Edie Falco, John Leguizamo, Al Pacino, Martin Scorsese, Kid Cudi, Cardi B and Martin Scorsese.
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Watch: Jordan Peele’s Gothams Get Out Best Screenplay Gothams Acceptance Speech
“When I started to write this film, I set out to make a movie that would be my favorite movie that I’d never seen,” said Jordan Peele when accepting his Best Screenplay Gotham Award for Get Out from the legendary Lois Smith (nominated for Best Actress for Marjorie Prime) and The Florida Project‘s Brooklynn Prince. “I didn’t know that it would ever actually get made.” Peele returned to the stage later in the night when the breakout horror film also picked up the Bingham Ray Breakthrough Director Award and Audience Award. “It’s so important that we support these voices from the outside, […]
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Watch Live: Gotham Independent Film Awards 2017
Tonight marks the 27th annual edition of the Gotham Independent Film Awards, presented by Filmmaker‘s parent organization, IFP. Starting at 6 pm EST tonight you’ll be able to watch the ceremony, beginning with the red carpet arrivals, with the ceremony proper staring at 8. A Facebook live stream of the ceremony has begun; click on the Facebook icon here to watch. For more information, including a complete list of the nominees and tributees, click here, and check back tomorrow for a write-up of the ceremony.
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Trailer Watch: Jason Kohl’s New Money, Starring Louisa Krause
I’m a fan of Jason Kohl’s SXSW-premiering short film, The Slaughter, which he wrote about here for Filmmaker. And I also took note of his thoughtful filmmaking how-to, Film School: A Practical Guide to an Impractical Decision. Today, Kohl’s debut feature, New Money, is having its world premiere at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Starring the great Louisa Krause (King Kelly, The Girlfriend Experience, The Flick), it’s described as a “sharp-witted true crime drama” inspired by a story Kohl heard about two stepchildren, worried about their inheritance, who kidnapped their stepdad to insure that they’d get their cut of […]
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Exclusive Clip: Chanelle Aponte Pearson and Rae Leone Allen’s 195 Lewis
195 Lewis, a web series directed by Chanelle Aponte Pearson and created by Rae Leone Allen, premieres tomorrow night at 8:00 PM at the show’s website. Last year, when the series was in production, we interviewed Pearson, and she discussed her own motivation for joining the project: At the time of joining the project as director, I used to watch The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl and The Couple, so I largely understood the format to work best for comedies with episodes ranging from two to five minutes. Despite knowing this, I still entered the writing process not focusing on […]
