In what looks like a bit of a spiritual sequel to Somewhere — if you add a couple or more  decades to each of the characters — Bill Murray plays a womanizing dad concerned about the possibly adulterous activities of his daughter’s husband (Marlon Wayans) in Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks. Rashida Jones plays the disbelieving daughter in a picture sure to bring the feels for the beauty of a pre-pandemic New York City. The film is forthcoming as the first venture between Apple TV+ and A24 and will be in theaters and online in October.

Brooklyn-based designer Lydia Cambron — whose commercial work focuses on retail environments and who is fascinated, according to her website, “in the narrative ability of products and objects” — has used her quarantine days to make a witty and poignant one-woman/one-apartment homage to the final sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. From Cambron: 2020: an isolation odyssey is a reenactment of the iconic finale of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). Restaged in the context of home quarantine, the journey through time adapts to the mundane dramas of self-isolation–poking fun at the navel-gazing saga of life alone and indoors. This […]

Kirby Ferguson, who landed on Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2011 following this Everything is a Remix web series, is back with a new work that explains the QAnon phenomenon and places it in larger political context. For anyone who found themselves Googling “Marjorie Taylor Greene” this morning (Or was perhaps mystified by a colleague’s late-night email screed), the video offers a bit of a primer on the internet phenomenon as well as analysis. As Jason Kottke summarizes at Kottke.org, Ferguson sees QAnon as a form of magical thinking, breaking down six specific characteristics: 1. Obsession with symbols and […]

Director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and brother Olivier, who previously worked together on music videos like the Chemical Brothers’s “Star Guitar,” have just released a new quarantine-made clip for the Bristol band IDLES. Using a blend of lo-fi animation (Michel’s cardboard cutouts shot by a suspended-overhead iPhone) and CGI (Olivier’s desktop wizardry), the clip, which suggests a Richard Scarry adaptation of Animal Farm, moves from a racist village to the moon. From an article on the video at WePresent: The song is really about the dangerous small-mindedness born out of villages which can sometimes act as […]

A long, progressively disorienting drive across a snow-battered landscape leads to a relationship milestone — meeting the parents — in the latest from writer/director Charlie Kaufman. For Jessie Buckley’s unnamed girlfriend character, Jake (Jesse Plemmons) is someone promising even as the film’s serenely despondent title functions as her mantra-like internal dialogue. Awaiting in a house that seems unmoored by time are Jake’s mom and dad, played by Toni Collette and David Thewlis. Said Kaufman to Entertainment Weekly, “The house represents the imagined interaction between someone you bring home to your parents — that panic that is twoheaded at that point. […]

In a project led by series producer and editor Ben Fee, 19 filmmakers have turned the old Surrealist “exquisite corpse” creation method into a “collaborative filmmaking game,” Exquisite Shorts, that you can watch above. Previously used throughout the 20th century to create poetry and artwork, the method lends itself beautifully to collaborative filmmaking, particularly when the creators are as inventive as the ones in this group. (Names involved who are familiar to Filmmaker readers include Travis Stevens as well as Courtney and Hillary Andujar, who appeared on last year’s 25 New Faces list.) In the 12-minute piece they mix short visual […]

With Lynn Chen’s I Will Make You Mine now in release on digital platforms as well as DVD and Blu-ray, Chen and filmmaker Dave Boyle, whose films Surrogate Valentine and Daylight Savings form the first two parts of a loose trilogy in which Chen’s film is the finale, have released a trailer for the complete three-film story. All three films, which premiered, or were set to premiere, at SXSW, feature musician Goh Nakamura, playing himself as he navigates relationships with a trio of  women. Chen plays “Rachel,” who appears in all three films, and in her conclusion to the trilogy, […]

Mark Jackson’s This Teacher — a Slamdance Closing Night film as well as the final U.S. Fiction winner at the now-shuttered Los Angeles Film Festival — is being released on DVD and digital formats June 9 by Breaking Glass, and the trailer has just dropped. Jackson (Without, War Story) is a 2011 Filmmaker 25 New Face who won the 2012 Audi Independent Spirit Award. Starring Cesar-winner Hafsia Herzi, the film’s a kind of existential cabin-in-the-woods thriller dealing with Islamophobia and American madness. The synopsis: This Teacher follows a French Muslim woman (Hafsia Herzi) as she travels to New York City […]

We’ve highlighted the work of nonfiction filmmaker Anthony Banua-Simon before, notably 2018’s compilation documentary short Pure Flix and Chill: The David A.R. White Story. Banua-Simon’s debut feature, Cane Fire, was set to make its world premiere at this year’s Hot Docs, and still will in its online edition. A mixture of personal and archival material, refracted through both personal and national history, informs Cane Fire. From the press kit: The Hawaiian island of Kauai is seen as a paradise of leisure and pristine natural beauty, but these escapist fantasies obscure the colonial displacement, hyper-exploitation of workers, and destructive environmental extraction that have […]

Filmmaker Michael Reich has a thing for both household pets (and vermin) as well as bleeding VHS-damaged color schemes. The former dog groomer’s debut feature She’s Allergic to Cats, which premiered in ’16 at Fantasia Fest but is only now seeing a digital release via Gigantic Pictures, is about, natch, a socially awkward dog groomer (Michael Pinkney) attempting to deal with a rat infestation in his apartment while making an all-cats remake of Carrie. Sonja Kinski is the love interest whose cat may be the answer to the rodent issue. As the trailer above attests, Reich is fond of distressed […]