Columns
-
DP Michael Bauman on “One Battle After Another”
For the first time since 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love, Paul Thomas Anderson has made a movie with a contemporary setting. To do so, he used a film format dormant for the last half century. Anderson’s One Battle After Another continues a resurgence of VistaVision that now includes The Brutalist and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things and Bugonia. The format, which uses 8-perf 35mm traveling through the camera horizontally rather than vertically to create a larger negative, gained popularity as a non-anamorphic widescreen alternative in the mid-1950s. It was used for everything from Biblical epics (The Ten Commandments) to musicals (White Christmas) to […]
-
Cue the Sun: DP Steve Yedlin on “Wake Up Dead Man”
After spending the last Knives Out entry on a billionaire’s private Greek island, master sleuth Benoit Blanc’s latest mystery Wake Up Dead Man takes him to a remote parish in upstate New York to solve the murder of a priest (Josh Brolin). It’s a classic locked door mystery, with Brolin’s monsignor stabbed mid-mass in a closet a few feet from his pulpit. The suspects include a recently reassigned young priest (Josh O’Connor) and a tightly knit clique from the church’s flock (Jeremy Renner’s recently dumped doctor, Cailee Spaeny’s injured concert musician, Andrew Scott’s paranoid novelist and Kerry Washington’s lawyer). Like […]
-
“Everyone Should Be After Greatness”: Kimball Farley, Back To One, Episode 374
Kimball Farley is the future. His breakthrough role in Hippo, the critically acclaimed dark comedy that RogerEbert.com called “an unholy fusion of A Clockwork Orange and Napoleon Dynamite” established him as a talented, chameleon-like actor to watch, then his performance in The Righteous Gemstones, opposite Bradley Cooper, displayed his range. And now 2026 is shaping up to be a big year for him, with upcoming releases from filmmakers like Tim Sutton, Mark H. Rapaport, and Henry Chaisson showcasing more of what he can do. On this episode, he details his “outside-in” approach to character work, and why changing his appearance […]
-
Release the Beastgrip: DP Anthony Dod Mantle on “28 Years Later”
When 28 Days Later arrived on screens in 2002, it marked a leap forward for both zombie movies and digital cinema. Eschewing the shambling undead of George Romero, the film’s infected sprinted after prospective human snacks. Technologically, 28 Days Later represented one of the first wide theatrical releases to shoot on digital cameras. Director Danny Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle belatedly returned with 28 Years Later. With the British Isles quarantined from the rest of the world, the story follows a 12-year-old boy (Alfie Williams) who leaves behind the relative safety of his island community to search the infected-strewn […]
-
“There’s No Good Acting Without a Sense of Truth”: Michael Imperioli, Back To One, Episode 373
Michael Imperioli is best known for his Emmy-winning portrayal of Christopher Moltisanti onThe Sopranos, a role that made him one of the most recognizable faces of prestige television. Some of his other credits include Goodfellas, Jungle Fever, Summer of Sam (which he also co-wrote), The White Lotus, and his latest, Song Sung Blue, the real-life story behind Neil Diamond tribute performers, where he plays Mark Shrilla, opposite Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson. On this episode he talks about the technical mountain he had to climb before he allowed himself to take on that role. Then he takes us back to his early days and two giant, back-to-back acting […]
-
“Red is Always Surprisingly Challenging on Focus”: DP Caleb Heymann on “Stranger Things,” Season Five
The fifth and final season of Stranger Things required a full calendar year of production in Atlanta, a marathon of 240 shooting days that will bring the beloved Netflix series to a close with eight super-sized episodes. A job of that scale and duration is an arduous undertaking that could rightfully intimidate any crewmember. For Caleb Heymann, it’s kind of his thing. The cinematographer has spent much of the last five years shooting color contrast-laden Netflix feats of endurance in Georgia. That association began with the 100 days Heymann toiled on the trio of Fear Street films that the streamer […]
-
The 8th Annual Kevin Corrigan Episode, Back To One, Episode 372
Kevin Corrigan, the consummate actor, true student of the craft, friend of all actors, the best friend of Back To One, the very first guest of this podcast, returns for the 8th time in what might be his most vulnerable and relatable episode yet. He generously details a crisis he had acting on a series this past year, ponders what he would do with power, asks the question he thinks every actor should ask themselves, reads a moving instagram tribute to Diane Keaton by Jarrod Allan, shares his own wonderful memories of working with Keaton, delivers a couple wonderful impersonations, […]
-
The Screen in the Sky: Drone Shows as Cinema
After I put my kid to sleep, I found myself standing by the window, looking out over the valley of apartment buildings. The house went quiet; the city softened into an arrangement of distant lights. As I stared into the sky, a bright purple word snapped into view over the horizon. At first, I thought there was something wrong with my eyes. Then, the letters sharpened: “VERSACE,” spelled out by hundreds of synchronized drones floating above Istanbul. I had never seen an advertisement suspended in the sky before. Billboards, phone screens—the daily flood of images is, today, expected visual noise. […]
-
Scott Macaulay’s Final Editor’s Letter as Filmmaker Editor-in-Chief
The following is Filmmaker co-founder and editor-in-chief Scott Macaulay’s final Editor’s Letter, from the Winter 2026 print issue. Edit a magazine for 33 years and by the time you must write a final editor’s letter, you have plenty of examples to draw from. Knowing that some day I’d be writing this send-off, I’ve found myself taking note of all the departing missives that have come across my coffee table and screens—quite a few, given the tumult across the film, non-profit and journalism worlds these past decades. There’s the most common type of farewell: plucky, somewhat anodyne, with the promise not […]
-
CCR (Claustrophobic Control Rooms): DP Barry Ackroyd on “A House of Dynamite”
In Netflix’s A House of Dynamite, the United States’ government and military chain of commands scramble to respond as a ballistic missile of unknown origin speeds toward the Midwest. The non-linear narrative replays the final 20 minutes before impact from different perspectives, taking the viewer into the White House Situation Room, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, U.S. Strategic Command and an Alaskan missile defense battalion. It’s certainly not cinematographer Barry Ackroyd’s first time lensing a room full of analysts staring worriedly into a bank of monitors. “Someone actually said to me once, ‘Is that the only thing you do? You’re […]
