SFFILM, in partnership with the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, announced today eight new recipients of its SFFILM Rainin grants along with two recipients of its new SFFILM Rainin Filmmakers with Disabilities Grant. The grants provide early stage screenwriting and development support, with the latter grant a new pilot program “to provide additional support to Rainin applicants whose films specifically address stories from the disability community.” Among the grant winners are two projects from filmmakers appearing on Filmmaker‘s 2019 25 New Faces: Sephora Woldu and Alison O’Daniel. O’Daniel also interviewed Sound of Metal‘s Darius Marder in our current issue. The SFFILM Rainin […]

For my final home video column of the year, I’ve decided to round up the best 4K and Blu-ray titles of 2020 that I wasn’t able to cover in previous columns. Maybe “best” is the wrong word, given that it’s impossible for any human being to keep up with even a fraction of all the new physical media releases; let’s just say these are personal favorites that have yielded many hours of diversion in this challenging year.  Blade  Ten years before Iron Man kicked off the current tsunami of Marvel movies, New Line released this gloriously idiosyncratic adaptation of Marv […]

The last time I wrote about film color for this magazine was on the ways 35mm shooting and digital color combined in Uncut Gems and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker to create contemporary looks strongly engaged with the past, resulting in what we might call a look “more filmic than film.” David Fincher’s Mank, along with a second season of the Star Wars TV series The Mandalorian, gives us an opportunity to consider how digital and celluloid tendencies combine from the opposite direction—both were shot digitally, then graded to explicitly evoke celluloid. Once again, color grading and capture format […]

A repeat David Fincher collaborator after The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) and Gone Girl (2014), multi-award winning costume designer Trish Summerville has been signing her name onto numerous challenging film and TV projects throughout her storied, genre-spanning career, including the likes of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Red Sparrow. But Mank—Fincher’s meticulous creation of the Golden Age of Hollywood through the story of Herman J. Mankiewicz’s writing of Citizen Kane—and working in black-and-white presented a new challenge for the artisan, who had only done small projects in monochrome previously. “We were lucky; we were able to do […]

From Apocalypse Now Redux to The Cotton Club Encore, Francis Coppola has never been reticent about reworking past directorial efforts, so it was probably inevitable that he would get around to revisiting The Godfather Part III. Although by any normal standard Godfather III was a respectable success – conceptually bold, rich in visual and emotional textures and literary depth, and a financial hit with seven Oscar nominations – the fact that it wasn’t a flat-out masterpiece like its predecessors left the film with a lingering reputation as a disappointment, and Coppola was always unhappy with the manner in which it […]

The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP, and Filmmaker‘s publisher) announced today that Chadwick Boseman will receive a posthumous Actor Tribute and Viola Davis an Actress Tribute at the upcoming 30th Anniversary Edition of the Gotham Awards. “Chadwick Boseman was an incredibly talented actor whose significance and impact onscreen and kindness offscreen will never be forgotten. We at IFP are forever indebted to him for all of his contributions to our organization, his legacy in providing mentorship and we are proud to honor him and all of his historical and groundbreaking contributions with this tribute,” said Jeffrey Sharp, Executive Director of IFP […]

One of the more interesting periods in the history of Italian cinema is the era of international co-productions that followed neorealism; kicked off by the massive success of MGM’s 1951 extravaganza Quo Vadis, the Italian film industry entered a boom age in which the location shooting, social consciousness, and limited resources of neorealism gave way to spectacular sets, glamorous Hollywood stars, and lavish budgets thanks to the country’s abundance of breathtaking scenery and attractive production incentives. One of the most expensive and entertaining of the 1950s historical epics was Ulysses (1954), a gorgeously photographed and cleverly written adaptation of Homer’s […]

Criterion adds another excellent title to its collection of Jim Jarmusch films this week with the Blu-ray and DVD releases of Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, a 1999 feature that stands alongside Dead Man as one of Jarmusch’s richest and most fascinating movies. Like Dead Man, Ghost Dog follows a stripped-down narrative that’s made extraordinarily complex by the sophisticated network of cinematic, literary, and historical allusions Jarmusch weaves through it; in another director’s hands the same story could be a routine genre programmer, but the force and depth of Jarmusch’s philosophical vision elevates the film to a level […]

There was a meme floating around the interwebs in early April. It consisted of two photos of Donald Glover. On one from, I think, Community, where he is clean cut, smiling and drinking coffee, the caption reads: “New Year’s Day, Looking Forward to 2020!” Next to it was the “Three Months Later” photo; it’s a shot from a Childish Gambino video where he’s shirtless and holding a shotgun.   My January 2020 pretty much mirrored Donald Glover’s sunny optimism. I had just received a contract to direct a long-gestating film of mine, which had been optioned by a French company […]

The 10th edition of U.S. in Progress,  the American Film Festival in Wroclaw’s post-production forum that brings together American independent projects with the Polish and international film industries, concluded on Friday with the announcement of the winning films. Among the awardees are Homebody, by Joseph Sackett, who was selected for this year’s Filmmaker 25 New Faces list, as well as a prior 25 selection, Geoff Marslett, who brought his The Boardinghouse Reach to the event. As the American Film Festival’s Artistic Director explained earlier to Filmmaker, this year’s event was held online, with projects being presented to European sales agents, […]