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Considerations: The Best Picture Shortlist
Brían F. O’Byrne and Ralph Fiennes in Conclave
Every Tuesday Tyler Coates publishes his new Filmmaker newsletter, Considerations, devoted to the awards race. To receive it early and in your in-box, subscribe here. It’s my last dispatch of the year—I’ll be back with another newsletter the first full… Read more
“I Keep My Local 600 Card So I Can Operate”: Rachel Morrison on The Fire Inside
Ryan Destiny on the set of The Fire Inside (Sabrina Lantos © 2024 Amazon Content Services LLC.)
When she competed in the 2012 Summer Olympics, Claressa Shields became the first American woman to win a gold medal in boxing. It was the culmination of a lifelong struggle to make her way as a fighter. Growing up on… Read more
The Best Films of 2024 As Chosen by Some of Its Key Filmmakers
Félix Kysyl and Jacques Develay in Misericordia
As the year draws to a close, the urge to compile “best of the year” lists feels both inevitable and deeply complicated. In a world grappling with profound crises—most notably the genocide in Palestine and ever-deepening fractures in democratic institutions… Read more
The Ten Best Undistributed Films of 2024
Riders
This year was a peak travel year for me, mostly festival-enabled, and I was pleased by the number of good films I was privileged to see along the way that I wouldn’t have otherwise. While the globalization of film via… Read more
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Cinema is Not a Sport: My End of the Year List, 2024
At the end of each year comes the excitement of listing my favorite released films. This is a moment where I like to reflect on the status of modern cinema. When great films populate my list, ones that make my heart pound, I become alit with hope. Great is the desire to believe in the work being made today, especially as the gems of today’s moviemaking are often found on the deeper pages of Letterboxd.com’s most popular movies. In the 1950s, for example, the most critically lauded films are ranked at the top of page #1, sorted by the most popular […]
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“Apple Changed the Whole Landscape of How You Market a Product”: Sebastian Pardo on Crafting Graphic Design for The Brutalist
In late October, A24 dropped a teaser for their highly anticipated The Brutalist, where glimpses of Brady Corbet’s epic flash by as credits and review pullquotes horizontally crawl across the screen like the VistaVision-format celluloid that ran through the camera to capture the picture. It’s a sharp piece of trailer design that formally evokes the experience of the film as much as it serves as a piece of marketing. The design of the scroll also summons the Bauhaus stylings that inspire the architecture of The Brutalist’s subject, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), highlighting the words on screen around evocations of the […]
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The Animals Around Us: Amalia Ulman Visits Isabella Rossellini
In the first of a series on filmmakers and their relationship to the animal world, artist, director, writer and actress Amalia Ulman visits with actress, director (of the short film series Green Porno, among others), model and animal behaviorist Isabella Rossellini at her regenerative farm, Mama Farm. Rossellini can currently be seen on screen in Edward Berger’s Conclave playing Vatican nun Sister Agnes, while El Planeta director Ulman’s newest film is Magic Farm, premiering at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Photographs by Amalia Ulman. On October 2, I visited Isabella Rossellini’s farm with Gabriella. We took the train from Penn […]
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Sentient Images: RaMell Ross on Nickel Boys
RaMell Ross’s 2018 feature debut, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, is a non-narrative portrait of its Alabama locale, shot entirely by the filmmaker over years of immersion, his instinctually captured material assembled into intricate juxtapositions. Few scale-ups for a second film have been more dramatic: Nickel Boys is a narrative feature adapted from a pre-existing text (Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys), proceeding in more-or-less linear order through an incident-filled narrative, with an on-record budget of around $23 million and production handled by Plan B Entertainment and Louverture Films. The latter’s Joslyn Barnes was also a producer and […]
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Hits & Misses 2024: Case Studies of Six Sundance 2024 Premieres
In September, Variety declared, “Indie Films Are Staging a Box Office Comeback,” touting the success of the films Longlegs, Thelma and Late Night with the Devil as signs of life for a segment of the industry “crushed by COVID, strikes and streaming,” as reporter Brent Lang wrote. “And while it’s a long way from the arthouse heyday of the 1990s and early aughts, the turnaround is impressive.” Maybe not that impressive. Citing the more than $100 million global gross of Longlegs, a NEON-produced wide-release serial-killer movie, as some kind of indie darling misses the point. Thelma and Late Night are […]
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“Don’t Expect to Like ‘Em:” The Making of Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky
Entering to a standing ovation at a Friday-night screening of Mikey and Nicky at New York’s Metrograph on December 6, Elaine May looked out at the full house. “I was told this entire audience is made up of editors,” she said. And then, mock-anticipating their first question, she declared “Steenbeck,” name-checking the flatbed editing table on which her 1976 film was cut. The event was organized by the American Cinema Editors as part of their ongoing Filmcraft series at the Lower East Side Theater, and May was accompanied onstage by two editors; series moderator Phillip Schopper, and Jeffrey Wolf, who […]
