One of the most formally and politically groundbreaking movies of the early 1970s, Melvin Van Peebles’ 1971 trailblazer Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, is now available on Blu-ray from specialty label Vinegar Syndrome, a company doing more to preserve the heritage of America’s outlaw independent films than any other. Sweetback is one of the more historically significant titles in the company’s catalogue, a picture so influential that its innovations are probably less readily apparent to contemporary audiences than they should be — though the propulsive energy and stylistic audacity that drive the movie still set it apart from its many imitators. […]

Filmmaker Christen Clifford is at work on her 10-part autobiographical doc series, Cancer: A Love Story, and recently participated in the 2018 IFP Screen Forward Labs, which is devoted to serialized content. Below is her first-person report of her week spent with mentors, fellow filmmakers and advisors. Day 1: Screening and General Overview The day starts with a meet-and-greet breakfast. I’m late. My first day and I’m late. I resist the temptation to hate myself and get a cup of tea. I want a latte, but all they have is brew and that can make me jittery. Proud of myself […]

I’d seen 2001: A Space Odyssey on 70mm twice over the years before going to see the “unrestored” print out now in limited release. Christopher Nolan premiered this new print at Cannes, and his interview from there with Eric Hynes is helpful to understanding some of the thinking behind this reissue. Still, I haven’t read anyone really breaking down what Nolan’s birthed, which is incredibly specific. Nolan’s explanation is that he’s gone back to the original camera negative to come up with a print that looks like what the very first public audience to view 2001 would have seen. This isn’t entirely accurate, […]

Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane, which was released theatrically earlier this year and is now available on Blu-ray and multiple streaming platforms, is yet another of the director’s fascinating experiments with narrative structure and genre, and another instance of Soderbergh responding to cultural shifts with astonishing speed. In this case, as opposed to the 2003 HBO series K Street or Soderbergh’s 2009 film The Girlfriend Experience, some of the relevance seems to be a bit accidental, as Unsane was in the works long before the downfall of Harvey Weinstein and the rise of the #MeToo movement. Yet there’s no denying that screenwriters […]

Hollywood has been transformed. The six major studios — Disney, Warner Bros., Universal, Fox, Sony, and Paramount — have all changed significantly. Few filmmakers understand how profound these changes have been and how they have altered their opportunities.

  

 What follows is my review of a recently published book, The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies, that opened my eyes to the new configuration of studio filmmaking. It was written by Ben Fritz, who has been covering the entertainment industry since 2004 for Variety, the Los Angeles Times and currently the Wall Street Journal.
  
The goal of […]

For nearly as long as Hollywood has been making movies they’ve been making sequels, and for most of that time journalists and critics have grumbled about the studios’ lack of originality; yet there’s an honorable tradition of filmmakers using the perceived economic insurance of sequels to create some of the riskiest and most personal films ever to come out of Hollywood. Francis Coppola’s The Godfather Part II, John Boorman’s The Exorcist II: The Heretic, Peter Bogdanovich’s Texasville, Joe Dante’s Gremlins 2 and Jack Nicholson’s commercially disastrous but artistically triumphant Chinatown sequel The Two Jakes are all films that either greatly […]

Longtime Filmmaker contributor Jamie Stuart premieres his debut feature film, A Motion Selfie, direct to Vimeo tomorrow. To mark the occasion, he’s written this guest blog post about five of the short films he made for us over the years, using them to trace his progression as a filmmaker. 1) White Plastic Flower (2007) This short was really significant for me developmentally. Web video was still a relative novelty (YouTube had launched only a year before), so prior to this, most of my work maintained an offbeat comical vibe. For whatever reason, I went into this one without caring what […]

As a film programmer who recently made the painful but necessary decision to quit the organization at which I’d worked for 11 years, you might expect me to have a dim view of contemporary film culture. I don’t. Quite the contrary: I feel strongly that this is one of the great watershed moments in the history of cinema. Some of the reasons for my optimism are personal, but most can be generalized.  Working more than a decade for a regional film festival that gradually entered the national discussion around independent film, I became increasingly aware of an alarming divide. On […]

One of the great joys of directing a film is to work with actors, and when you make an ensemble film, you get to work with a lot of actors! But working with any big group of people — especially actors! — can come with a host of unique challenges. So, whether you’re making a blockbuster like the Russo Brother’s recent uber-ensemble Avengers: Infinity Wars or you’re making a web series in your back yard with all your high school drama class friends, many of the lessons are the same. My current film, Bernard and Huey may sound like a […]

By 1957, television was competing with movies in a way that had driven studio films toward the epic widescreen aesthetic of Bridge on the River Kwai and The Ten Commandments, yet the relationship between TV and mainstream cinema was more complex than that of straightforward opposition in terms of style and scale. Although spectacles like those of David Lean and Cecil B. DeMille were designed to draw audiences to theaters for experiences they couldn’t get at home, the fact that older films from the ’30s and ’40s were suddenly accessible on the small screen gave some viewers a thirst for […]