Filmmaker Videos
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Trailer Watch: Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers
Less than a year after Luca Guadagnino‘s cannibal love story Bones and All, the Italian director returns with Challengers. Written by playwright Justin Kuritzkes, the film stars Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist as participants in a ménage à trois that eventually develops into a monogamous marriage between two of them. Years later, the trio unexpectedly reunite, stirring feelings of jealousy, lust and betrayal anew. Per the film’s official synopsis: Challengers stars Zendaya as Tashi Duncan, a former tennis prodigy turned coach and a force of nature who makes no apologies for her game on and off the court. Married […]
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Trailer Watch: Noah Schamus’s Summer Solstice
World premiering tomorrow at the Provincetown Film Festival is Summer Solstice, the debut feature of writer/director Noah Schamus, which previously was included in the 2022 US in Progress work-in-progress coproduction forum. The filmmakers have just released a teaser trailer — watch it above. And here’s the description from the Provincetown program book. Leo, a trans man, and his cis and straight friend, Eleanor, go away for an impromptu weekend trip, during which they uncover old secrets, new challenges, and find the answer to the age-old question: can bad sex and good friends mix? Writer-director Noah Schamus’s funny, melancholic feature debut […]
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Trailer Watch: 4K Restoration of Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore
Janus Films has released a trailer for the 4K restoration of Jean Eustache’s 1973 opus The Mother and the Whore, which will open at New York’s Film at Lincoln Center on June 23. An official synopsis of the restoration reads: After the French New Wave, the sexual revolution, and May ’68 came The Mother and the Whore, the legendary, autobiographical magnum opus by Jean Eustache that captured a disillusioned generation navigating the post-idealism 1970s within the microcosm of a ménage à trois. The aimless, clueless, Parisian pseudo-intellectual Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) lives with his tempestuous older girlfriend, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), and begins a […]
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Trailer Watch: D. Smith’s Kokomo City
Winner of the NEXT Innovator Award and NEXT Audience Award out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival and the Audience Award in the Berlinale’s Panorama Documentary section, a new trailer for Kokomo City arrives ahead of its theatrical release later this summer. Directed by D. Smith (best known as a producer, singer and songwriter before pivoting to filmmaking), Kokomo City is her debut feature. The doc centers on four Black trans sex workers living in New York City and Atlanta—Daniella Carter, Koko Da Doll, Liyah Mitchell, and Dominique Silver—who detail the nature of their livelihood with humor and honesty. Tragically, […]
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Trailer Remix: The Science Fiction Behind the Apple Vision Pro
As the lone faculty member teaching Virtual Reality in UCLA’s film program, all week, people have been asking me what I think about Apple’s promotional video for the new Vision Pro system. I created this video in response, using clips from more than a dozen VR films dating back to 1983 and highlighting largely fictional but characteristically euphoric visions of the technological utopia purported to lie just over the horizon. Apple’s nine+ minute, superlative-filled video recycles dozens of tropes and cliches drawn from the last 40 years of cinematic and televisual imaginings of virtual reality, holographic projection, and gestural interface. […]
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“It is Like a Story From a Database That We Are All Implicated In”: Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Toshiaki Ozawa on Their DNA-Themed Short Film, T3511
Art and biology coexist in the work of artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg, who has created images — film, video, sculptural — as well as multimedia performance and process-oriented work that animate with emotional complexity increasingly urgent questions around identity and personal freedom. Much of her work uses DNA as both subject and artistic material, with the artist working herself with genome sequencing and DNA collection as well as exploring the implications of this same work being commodified at scale through consumer-facing companies like 23andMe. What’s particularly noteworthy are the emotional valences she brings to these questions. Neither a techno-thrillseeker or a […]
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Trailer Watch: Emma Seligman’s Bottoms
Emma Seligman appeared on our annual 25 New Faces of Film list back in 2020 ahead of the release of Shiva Baby, her feature debut starring Rachel Sennott as a young woman navigating anxiety-inducing encounters at a relative’s wake. She reunites with Sennott for her sophomore feature Bottoms, which she co-wrote with the actress who once again stars, this time alongside Ayo Edebiri as queer high schoolers who devise a hands-on scheme for hooking up with otherwise straight cheerleaders. Watch the first red band trailer above. The official synopsis reads: Bottoms, a refreshingly unique raunchy comedy, focuses on two girls, […]
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Exclusive Trailer: Film at Lincoln Center’s “Marco Ferreri: Beyond the Absurd” Retrospective Series
Filmmaker is pleased to host the exclusive trailer premiere of Film at Lincoln Center’s forthcoming retrospective series “Marco Ferreri: Beyond the Absurd,” which was co-produced by Cinecittà. The most comprehensive U.S. retrospective of the Italian director’s work will take place at FLC from June 9 through 22, with several films presented on 35mm. Per the press release: Highlights include Ferreri’s third feature The Little Coach, starring the famous comic actor José Isbert, which established young Ferreri as a European master of black humor; The Ape Woman, which underwent harsh censorship and is now presented with its three different endings: the […]
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Trailer Watch: 25th Anniversary 4K Restoration of Lars von Trier’s The Idiots
MUBI has released a new trailer for the 25th anniversary 4K restoration of Lars von Trier‘s dark comedy The Idiots. The only film that von Trier made under the Dogme 95 “Vow of Chastity” (and the second official Dogme film, or Dogme #2), The Idiots centers on a commune in the Danish suburbs where members aim to disrupt wider “bourgeoisie” society by pretending to have mental and physical ailments in public. It is the second film in von Trier’s Golden Heart Trilogy, preceded by Breaking the Waves and followed by Dancer in the Dark. The Idiots will open theatrically at […]
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Trailer Watch: Julio Torres’s Problemista
A24 has dropped the trailer for Problemista, the feature debut from writer-director-star Julio Torres, which first premiered at SXSW earlier this spring. Torres, who previously worked as a writer on SNL before co-creating and starring in the bilingual HBO comedy Los Espookys, plays an immigrant from El Salvador who takes on a taxing freelance gig as an esoteric artist’s (Tilda Swinton) assistant in the hopes of securing a visa so he can reside in the US long-term. The film also stars RZA, Greta Lee and is narrated by Isabella Rossellini. An official synopsis reads: Alejandro is an aspiring toy designer […]
