Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut Lost River was torn limb from limb by critics at Cannes, followed by the news that it would be a straight to VOD release. The latter appears to have been an overreaction, as Warner Brothers quickly confirmed it’s set to receive a day and date limited spring run, but in any event, it’s a significant demotion for someone of Gosling’s pedigree at the hands of a major studio. The first trailer is now out, and I’m getting definite shades of Malick, Lynch and Tarkovsky, with Benoît Debie’s colorful lensing recalling his work on Irreversible, Enter the Void and Spring Breakers, in particular. There’s […]
The back half of the second season of our favorite web comedy series about weed delivery, High Maintenance, drops on Thursday, and the trailer is above. If you’re a regular Filmmaker reader you’ll know creators Katja Blichfeld and Ben Sinclair from their inclusion on our 25 New Faces list in 2013. They landed on the list based on the first episodes of High Maintenance, which has since taken off (check out the list of plaudits at the head of this trailer). For the second season, Blichfeld and Sinclair have added production polish by virtue of a deal with Vimeo, and […]
“Why should we use all this equipment and all this stuff when we can make it better?” In this excerpt from a recent Sundance panel on “The Power of Story,” George Lucas once again attempts to explain how his loathing for the Hollywood apparatus led to the creation of a special effects empire that enabled a whole new super-strain of Hollywood blockbusters. In his narrative, Lucas had to create a special effects house because none existed, and he had to get into the toy licensing business to prolong the life of his movies inn the market place, and he had to create […]
The term ‘hybrid’ has become increasingly debatable when discussing the divide between fiction and nonfiction, though it’s a rather apt description of the French artist Pierre Bismuth’s cinematic inquiry, Where is Rocky II? Perhaps best known for his Oscar winning collaboration with Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry on the script for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Bismuth became obsessed with a fake rock, called Rocky II, that Ed Ruscha placed amongst its geological counterparts in the Mojave Desert around the release of the eponymous Stallone film in 1979. The pitch of Where is Rocky II?, Bismuth explained in an email, “is that a […]
This quick Tony Zhou video starts by breaking down a shot from Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive in which Carey Milligan and Ryan Gosling walk to their respective doors in a hallway, pointing out how the left and right sides give us two separate stories in one composition. Then Zhou moves on, repeatedly slicing the film’s frames in half vertically and horizontally. A model of textbook visual analysis, Zhou gets to the essence of what thoughtful shot composition looks like. Heed Zhou’s wise parting words: “You don’t need Steadicams or cranes or drones, or the latest 4K whatever. You need top, […]
Just a few months before she won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for her documentary, The Wolf Pack, Crystal Moselle gained attention for this hypnotic video for the band Color War. Three teenage dancers (Cassiel Eatock, Isabel Ball and Elizabeth Van Genderen) turn the parks, streets and underground parking garages of New York into their own ballet stage while Moselle’s camera lurks behind. Check it out above.
Filmmaker and Borscht co-honcho Jillian Mayer literalizes herself into a piece of internet clickbait in Hot Beach Babe Aims to Please, a witty short that screened in December as part of Miami’s Borscht Film Festival. Check it out above, and read more about Mayer in our 25 New Faces profile of her and partner Lucas Leyva.
We’re big :: kogonada fans here at Filmmaker Magazine and are still catching up with his past work. This video focuses on Wes Anderson’s penchant for symmetrical compositions, dropping a line down the middle of the screen to better see on what is and isn’t exactly symmetrically balanced in his frames.
In his latest “Every Frame a Painting” series, Tony Zhou takes generic, ensemble coverage to task. Pitting rigid Hollywood biopic fare against the geometric blocking of Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well, Zhou considers why dynamism comes through movement and not necessarily edits. As the characters shift about the room, tracing lines of triangles and squares, Kurosawa uses full-bodied actors — not close-ups — to draw your attention to a given object.
Released this past Friday, Michael Mann’s Blackhat has already proven a colossal flop, which is a shame: following up on Collateral, Miami Vice and Public Enemies, it’s another never-less-than-visually-intriguing investigation of the kinds of truly new images digital cameras can produce in the guise of a cyber-hacking thriller. Go check it out while you still can. Beforehand, you may want to prep with this above-average supercut credited to one “balistik94,” which ties together Mann’s filmography in a number of different ways: dialogue that persists from one film to another (“Time is luck” as recited by both Gong Li in Miami […]