In a nice bit of cinematic serendipity, Paul Schrader’s singular 1985 film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters arrives on Blu-ray from Criterion at the same moment that his latest movie, First Reformed, is enjoying a deservedly successful art house run. Mishima remains perhaps Schrader’s most original and idiosyncratic film, which is really saying something; a meditation on the life and writings of Japanese author Yukio Mishima, it’s neither a conventional bio-pic nor a straightforward literary adaptation, though it combines elements of both forms. Schrader, writing in collaboration with his brother Leonard (Kiss of the Spider Woman) and sister-in-law Chieko, […]

I’m a director with one feature film to my name, and I also work as an editor and colorist. About a year ago, I was doing some editing consultation on an early draft of a documentary. Before I gave the director notes, I asked, “What festivals are you looking to have this play in?” He was taken aback. For him, a film—at least this sort, conceptualized as an art film—should be a pure object of creation, and industry concerns should be taken into account only after post-production is completed. I’ve come to disagree. Considering the potential audience and distribution channels […]

It’s a good week for cinematic iconoclasts, with extras-laden Blu-ray editions of Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive trilogy, Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy, and Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars all newly available. Cohen’s reputation has received a major and well deserved boost in the last couple years with the release of Steve Mitchell’s King Cohen documentary and reissues of many of his best films (Black Caesar, The Stuff, Special Effects) on Blu-ray. Shout Factory’s new boxed set containing It’s Alive (1974), It Lives Again (1978) and It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987) is likely to further fuel the […]

One of the most charming and intelligently written and directed teen films of recent years, Class Rank, premieres both in limited theatrical release and on multiple digital platforms today, and it’s well worth seeking out in whatever format one chooses to experience it. Olivia Holt and Skyler Gisondo (both terrific) play a pair of teenagers who take on their local school board over a bit of bureaucratic minutiae and in the process navigate both daunting struggles for power in the adult world and the complications of first love. The script by Benjamin August is a delicate treasure that’s hilarious but […]

Back in October 2015, I interviewed writer-director Ron Shelton for this site about the making of his immensely entertaining Play It to the Bone, a 1999 boxing picture that subverted sports movie clichés to its commercial detriment but artistic triumph. A deftly balanced work that is as smart and violent as it is sweet and funny, Bone is one of Shelton’s best films, and certainly his most underrated – something I’ve always found mysterious given how obvious and pleasurable its virtues are. It’s now available in a new Blu-ray edition along with Shelton’s Bull Durham follow-up Blaze (1989), which finds the director […]

The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker‘s parent organization, and SeriesFest are partnering to launch the “Forward Impact Project,” a year-round initiative designed to help finance, produce, release, scale, and build an audience for 15 select independent series deemed ready for development and production. These projects will be selected in collaboration by SeriesFest and IFP and will include long-form, digital and international projects. The Forward Impact Project will take place during IFP Week in NYC, beginning on September 20, 2018, and will give the selected creators the opportunity to pitch to and receive feedback from a curated group of key industry players, […]

Back in 2015, I wrote an article for Filmmaker on the best practices for delivering an exhibition copy of your film to festivals. In the ensuing two and a half, almost three years, I’ve received a lot of positive feedback, including a few panicked emails from filmmakers submitting their films to a festivals I worked at. Now in 2018, my editors have asked me to update it. Why the update now? Allow me the use of a clumsy and imperfect technical reference to Moore’s law that computing power doubles every eighteen months and the same has happened to available filmmaking […]

Tabitha Jackson, director of the Documentary Film Program at Sundance Institute, and Joaquin Alvarado, from Studiotube and former director of Centre for Investigative Reporting, were in discussion in March 2018 at CPH:DOX about the relationship between journalism and creative documentary filmmaking as part of Doc Society’s the Safe+Secure initiative. The following is a lightly edited transcript of their dialogue. Alvarado: When we say documentaries, it means a lot of different things today — they have evolved greatly in the last couple of decades. How you would you sort of level-set for folks the space of documentary and how we talk […]

From 1986, the year in which he made two flat-out masterpieces (Salvador and Platoon) to 1995, when he directed his boldest and richest film to that point (Nixon), Oliver Stone was on a streak like no other filmmaker has ever had before or since. Ten films in ten years, many of them (Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, The Doors) enormous epics and all of them ambitious attempts to assess where America had been, where it was, and where it was going. The scale and depth of Stone’s work during this period is equaled by the diversity of tone, […]

A few weeks ago my Twitter feed abruptly devolved into a long argument about The Canon: is it just an ossified collection of movies made by white men that should be junked? I don’t think The Canon is a fixed, immutable body of work, never to be added or subtracted to — it’s being constantly reshuffled, with films and filmmakers rising and falling in prominence. Repertory houses have a major part to play in that process, which I note while in the position of wanting to commend a smattering of series and screenings kicking off this weekend in NYC, none of […]