Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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2016: Nonfiction Storytelling in a World of Fake News
“Truth is stranger than fiction,” as the maxim goes, and that was certainly the case in 2016. Following the election of Donald Trump, the fictional dystopian worlds of The Hunger Games, Westworld, and Black Mirror suddenly seemed pointedly realistic, and our new reality felt mighty strange. Some of the year’s most powerful nonfiction films, including Ava DuVernay’s 13th, Dawn Porter’s Trapped, and Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, took on new urgency as civil rights and reproductive rights increasingly came under fire. By intercutting scenes of Trump supporters physically assaulting African-Americans at his rallies with scenes of whites threatening black people during the civil rights movement […]
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The 20 Most Popular Posts of 2016
Again in 2016, when compiling this list of our 20 most popular posts on the site, I was gratified to see our customarily high substance-to-clickbait ratio holding steady. As always, our “top posts of the year” list is broken in two. There is a list of the top ten new pieces published in 2016, and then a list of the top ten previously published, or archival, posts. Befitting the magazine’s mission, there’s a strong current of practical filmmaking advice and DIY tutorials here, ranging from casting, finding a producer, developing a script and more. In terms of the newly published […]
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Animation in 2016: The Year in Review
When you think of indie film, animation may not be the first medium that comes to mind, and with so much else going on this year — both cinematically and in the world in general — it would be easy to miss that 2016 was a fantastic year for animation. The art form continues to present exciting opportunities for enterprising filmmakers, and this year it’s also given a plethora of great titles to those of us who simply want to watch quality animated cinema. So as the “Best of 2016” lists keep rolling in this December, here’s my take on […]
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The Best VR of 2016: Arnaud Colinart and Amaury La Burthe on Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness
This year’s DOK Neuland, DOK Leipzig’s interactive component (housed in what resembled an intergalactic pop-up tent in the beautiful, wide open Markt) allowed me a second chance to experience what will surely go down as the best work of virtual reality seen widely in 2016. Fortuitously, I’d been able to catch Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness — the accolade garnering (Storyscapes Award at the Tribeca Film Festival, the Alternate Realities VR Award at Sheffield Doc/Fest) VR companion piece to Peter Middleton and James Spinney’s much heralded documentary — at the charming Savannah Film Festival’s VR Showcase just the week before. […]
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Klown Forever, Porky’s 2/Porky’s Revenge and Moving Violations: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
December is proving to be a strong month for comedies on home video, with one of the funniest films in recent years getting a top-notch Blu-ray release alongside a couple of worthy catalog titles. First up is the latest treasure from the good folks at Drafthouse Films, who have released last year’s Klown Forever in both a stand-alone edition and a spectacular boxed set that contains both Klown films and a collectible flash drive containing all six seasons of the TV series that inspired the movies. For the uninitiated, the Danish Klown films and series follow comedians Frank Hvam and […]
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2016: The Year in 10 Double Features
The double feature has been a moviewatching mainstay since at least the 1930s. Their appeal is obvious: What better way to cap off a film than to delay real life for a few hours more with another one? Few of us catch double bills at a theater anymore, but their allure remains strong at home. As sites like Mashable and Uproxx reported this year, Netflix users can access double-feature-friendly micro-genres with ease. These days, the work of curating a dual bill of “critically-acclaimed gritty independent crime dramas” is practically done for you. You can even start the next film without […]
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The Best Short Films on Television in 2016
At the start of this year, I opened an account with Letterboxd, a social platform that allows you to keep track of the films you watch. I work as a critic and edit a criticism website, so readers and subscribers often write me asking about what I have seen, especially when I do not publish my sentiments about a major film on any outlet. As of mid-December, I have listed about 200 movies (and a few limited series, including Netflix’s Easy and the ESPN sensation OJ: Made in America) as “watched” since I saw Darius Clark Monroe’s brilliant short film, […]
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“If You Put Up a Video Village You’re Going to Get 10% Less Material Every Day”: DP Giles Nuttgens on Hell or High Water
In Hell or High Water two brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) embark on a spree of heists intended to fleece predatory Texas banks, with an about-to-retire Texas Ranger (Jeff Bridges) hot on their heels. The film is an elegy to a dying way of life – not only for family ranchers Pine and Foster, but also for lawman Bridges. Making the movie was an elegy of sorts as well for cinematographer Giles Nuttgens, a vocal celluloid proponent who ultimately opted to shoot with an Alexa Studio on the project. In the words of another great western requiem The Wild […]
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Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment and Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema Launch Women’s TV Pilot Contest
The Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) and Brooklyn College’s Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema have launched a contest that will award two New York City screenwriters the development and production of their scripts as pilots to be aired on NYC Media. One of the two winners will see their pilot be developed into four further episodes. The scripts — which must be “by, for and about women” — will be selected by a panel of industry leaders, says the press release, and will be produced by graduates of the Feirstein School “under the mentorship of Jonathan Wacks and […]
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The Poignant, Romantic and Bleak Snowden: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendation
One of the best films of 2016 begins streaming this week, as Oliver Stone’s Snowden drops on iTunes and Amazon. Stone has long been one of our most versatile directors, having made horror flicks (Seizure, The Hand), a Vietnam trilogy (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Heaven & Earth), a musical (The Doors), historical epics (Alexander, Nixon), a sports film (Any Given Sunday), a love story (World Trade Center), business movies (the two Wall Street movies), and three audacious and darkly funny crime pictures (Natural Born Killers, U-Turn, Savages). With Snowden, Stone synthesizes all of his strengths in one […]
