Now streaming on STARZ and with a Gotham Awards nomination for its lead, Jasmine Batchelor, The Surrogate, Jeremy Hersh’s powerful and probing drama, begins with what might seem a familiar sort of indie film setup: a young, twentysomething Columbia grad, Jess (Batchelor) agrees to be the surrogate mother to the baby of her best friend Josh (Chris Perfetti) and his husband Aaron (Sullivan Jones). But very quickly writer/director Hersh establishes that The Surrogate will not be a bantery relationship comedy: a prenatal test reveals that the child will be born with Down syndrome, a development that destabilizes the progressive male […]

Creating the soundtrack of your film is often a complex task for any filmmaker, and finding music that you can legally use without being subject to copyright claims is not that obvious. With the boom in online video creation, and more creators adding music to videos, music licensing platforms emerged to bridge the gap between the high price of licensing popular songs and the low quality of free music. This development also coincided with the increase in independent musicians looking to make money from their work.  Although royalty-free music platforms presented a way to simplify the process of acquiring music for […]

December 28, 2020 update: After delaying his signature by several days, President Trump signed the COVID-19 relief package containing the Save Our Stages act. The final specifics of the act, as released by Senator Chuck Schumer’s office, can be found at the conclusion of this article, which has also been updated. Small and mid-sized movie theaters will receive a portion of $15 billion in funds contained within the COVID-19 relief package being voted upon by Congress today. In addition to $600 stimulus payments, an extension of the $300/weekly enhanced federal unemployment benefit and further Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans, the package […]

A lot of the film industry has been sitting around waiting for things to return to “normal,” a normal that seems to be receding further away by the day. None of the films on my list I saw in a theater and access was both easier (some faraway fests I could attend from my bathtub for the price of a regular movie theater ticket) and harder (geo-blocking, ticket caps, outrageous virtual pass prices). Even in the face of all of this, the number of women working in the film industry continued a steady incline. Though many long for normal, remember: […]

In a normal year – one not defined by a global pandemic or its protracted, deeply politicized response – I would have seen Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden in a theater. Here in New York, options would have abounded: BAM, the Angelika, Lincoln Center. Instead I took the advice of critics like Bilge Ebiri to “see it any way you can,” which in my case meant an HDMI setup to my TV. As we limp toward the end of 2020, it seems every week brings another harbinger of doom for the theatrical experience. HBO Max announced that major 2021 titles will stream […]

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 […]