Todd Haynes’s May December, which premiered this year at the Cannes Film Festival and was snatched up by Netflix almost immediately, marks a return to the kind of expressive women’s drama for which the director is arguably most beloved. Think… Read more
Before The Holdovers, director Alexander Payne and actor Paul Giamatti hadn’t worked together in nearly two decades. After premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2004, their Oscar-winning comedy Sideways went on to garner countless awards and generate profitable… Read more
With credits on high-profile TV series like Suits, Star Trek: Discovery and Billions, writer-director Chloe Domont had experiences in the entertainment industry where she felt like she had to adapt to the boys club. Those experiences, as well as the… Read more
In the late 1980s, Gregg Araki began making movies. He made films on a shoestring budget with a do-it-yourself mindset–not due to any kind of loyalty to the auteur theory, but the constraints of what he had at his disposal.… Read more
My DOX:AWARD top pick for the Ekko jury grid I participated in at this year’s CPH:DOX, Margreth Olin’s Songs of Earth, was also number one in my critic’s notebook for the doc most needing to be experienced on the big screen. In this palpably loving portrait of the veteran filmmaker’s elderly parents and the country that shaped them (and her), “Olin juxtaposes jaw-dropping, drone-captured images of the awe-inspiring Norwegian landscape with closeups of her dad’s bald pate, his tender hand on her mother’s back, as the environment and humankind become one” (per that notebook, and my coverage). Thus, it comes as little surprise […]
“I wonder if we can find ourselves fully in a world we invented,” the French-Palestinian-Algerian filmmaker and actor Lina Soualem eloquently ponders in the role of ever-questioning narrator of Bye Bye Tiberias, her extraordinary, multigenerational, female-focused family portrait. Seen through contemporary footage and 90s home movies — expertly interwoven with material from historical archives — the women include not only Soualem’s conservative, customs-observing grandmother and great-grandmother, who never left the Palestinian village their entire community had been forcibly displaced to, but also her mother, Hiam Abbass, a rebellious dreamer set on becoming an international actress. And now, 30 years on […]
For over 20 years, the Australian video artists Soda Jerk have been making work that samples film, music and other various forms of pop culture. Their films are kaleidoscopic and psychedelic, irreverent and constantly surprising. Their newest film, Hello Dankness, is no different. Set in a fictional suburbia populated by Tom Hanks, Annette Bening, Bruce Dern, and Wayne and Garth from Wayne’s World, Dankness is a response to–and a film about–the 2016 election and its aftermath. After all, an era of American history and politics that so ferociously shred away societal norms and imbued daily life with a lasting weirdness […]
“I literally finished the film at three in the morning last night,” director Matthew Heineman says on a video call with Filmmaker on Tuesday, just past the airport security on his way to the 50th Telluride Film Festival. “I’m barely alive right now.” Thankfully, Heineman is alive and well, and at the height of his powers as a documentarian with sharp instincts and artistic finesse with American Symphony, which marks the second time a feature of his world premieres at the annual Colorado gathering. The first was last year’s stunning Oscar-shortlisted Retrograde, on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. In a […]
In December of 1964, principal photography finished on the pilot of Star Trek, featuring captain Christopher Pike (played by The Searchers’ Jeffrey Hunter) as the commander of the Enterprise. When the show’s first episode finally aired almost two years later, Pike was nowhere to be found. The initial pilot had been scrapped and re-shot, with William Shatner’s James T. Kirk taking the helm and a different crew boldly going where no man had gone before. However, that wasn’t the end of Christopher Pike. The character returned as a Kirk mentor in the J.J. Abrams-directed reboot films. Now, with the Paramount […]
Onur Tukel is a boldly independent writer-director-actor who, for more than a decade, has been making cutting edge comedies in New York City that sometimes land in the horror category, sometimes social satire, are often absurd, mostly hilarious and always thoughtful—Catfight, Applesauce, Summer of Blood, The Misogynists, Scenes From An Empty Church, to name just a few. His latest, Poundcake, about a serial killer who only targets straight white men, is maybe his boldest yet, which says a lot. In this hour, he talks about his reluctant approach toward acting in his own films, the ways he has navigated low […]