By now you must have heard about Peter Jackson’s “controversial” restoration of 100-year-old 35mm newsreel footage from WWI, taken from the archive of London’s Imperial War Museum. A splendid profile by Mekado Murphy occupied #1 in the New York Times Trending section for several days after it appeared Dec. 16, joined by coverage by Chris O’Falt in IndieWire and David Sims in The Atlantic. Unfortunately, in a highly unusual release pattern, distributor Warner Bros. Pictures is screening this groundbreaking film on two dates only: Dec. 17 and Dec. 27 at select theaters across the U.S. (check local listings if you […]

A $1300 4K RAW camera that comes with DaVinci Resolve and produces stunning, detailed images as those featured in the above camera test seems like a no-brainer. But as Blackmagic begins shipping their latest Pocket Cinema Camera, reports are rolling in of faulty battery life and other hang-ups. More than one reviewer noted that the battery has a tendency to jump from 70% to 0% in a second flat. Another suggests remedying the issue by purchasing a handful of Canon LP-E6Ns for back-up, effectively tacking an extra couple hundred dollars onto the baseline price tag. He also warns that the audio jacks can […]

Alice (Madeline Brewer), the star of Cam, sustains herself as a full-time webcam model at the top of the “FreeGirls.Live” leaderboards. She aspires to break Top 50, but to do so she’ll have to descend deeper into her on-screen persona and farther from her off-screen principles. The system of rewards in this cyber cranny conditions her to betray her standards; the more Alice caters to her audience’s desires the more her fan base grows and the bigger her tips get. When she’s pushed to go beyond her comfort zone, a digital doppelganger of Alice, named Lola, manifests and assumes control […]

In his book Making Movies, Sidney Lumet wrote that he once asked fellow director Akira Kurosawa why he’d framed a shot in his period epic Ran in a particular way. Kurosawa replied that if he’d panned the camera an inch to the left he would’ve seen a Sony factory. Panning an inch to the right would’ve revealed an airport. I don’t know if Halloween cinematographer Michael Simmonds has read Lumet’s book, but after chatting with him I’m confident he would appreciate that anecdote. Simmonds, whose diverse credits range from the horror sequel Paranormal Activity 2 to the acclaimed documentary Project […]

Robert Redford’s final day on David Lowery’s The Old Man and the Gun — perhaps his final day as an actor on any movie set — found him in Texas. Though the amiable based-in-fact caper was shot largely in Ohio on 16mm, Redford’s dapper bank robber actually did most of his pillaging in Texas and its neighboring states. Thus a few pick-ups were needed — the last of which featured Redford’s Forrest Tucker phoning a widowed rancher he’s romancing. “There was a little bit of electricity in the air for that scene,” said cinematographer Joe Anderson. “The shot worked really […]

This is my fourth time rounding up the previous year’s US theatrical releases shot, either partly or in full, on 35mm, and it increasingly feels like I’m asking the wrong question. If the number of films originating on 35 has remained more or less consistent the last three years, they fall into an increasingly limited number of categories: auteur films by directors too old or stubborn to change and with the clout to follow through on that; period pieces; and enormous blockbusters. (To these we can now add the return of 70mm-originated and released films with Dunkirk and Murder on the […]