If the 25 films highlighted in David Ehrlich’s annual supercut review of the year in film aren’t enough for you, try this mash-up from Sam Barnett, featuring 304 titles from last year. For a full list of all the titles included, click here.

If you don’t have access to all the work, and if you’re not plugged into the industry development community, the annual Black List — a “most-liked” list of unproduced screenplays floating around in Hollywood — is always a bit of head-scratcher list. Do the loglines — Daddio‘s “A passenger and her cab driver reminisce about their relationships on the way from the airport to her apartment in New York,” or The Mother‘s “A female assassin comes out of hiding to protect the pre-teen daughter she gave up years before” — herald exciting new voices or simply clever takes on durable […]

From 2004 to 2016, Steve Bannon directed nine feature-length documentaries. Bannon, who professes open admiration for the aesthetics of Leni Riefenstahl, believed for a time that his films, which bear dire titles like Battle for America, Fire From the Heartland and District of Corruption, would catapult him to prominence as the right-wing’s cinematic answer to Michael Moore. Diving into his oeuvre is not unlike experiencing the last decade’s-worth of popular political documentaries but through a conservative looking-glass. Bannon’s films illustrate both his dangerously apocalyptic worldview, and provide an object lesson for probing the thin line between documentary and propaganda. They’re also near-unwatchable. But, they are texts worth encountering in order to get […]

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 […]

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.

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.

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 […]

“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.

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.

“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, […]