In the new Netflix film Mixtape, 12-year-old Beverly (Gemma Brooke Allen) tries to learn about her late parents by tracking down the songs they loved, a task made difficult by the pre-iTunes and Spotify era in which the movie takes place. The quest to find the songs—a necessity for Beverly given the unwillingness and inability of her grandmother (Julie Bowen) to answer questions about her mom and dad—yields one of the sweetest, smartest, funniest, and most touching coming of age dramedies since Stand By Me, a film with which Mixtape both invites and earns comparison thanks to its skillfully calibrated […]

At the age of 64 Dolph Lundgren remains as busy as ever, alternating between Hollywood mega-productions like Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom and small-scale action movies like Castle Falls, which he produced, directed, and co-starred in (alongside Scott Adkins). Castle Falls, which opens December 3rd in theaters, on demand and digital, is a compact crime film in which millions of dollars are hidden in a derelict hospital slated for demolition. A prison guard (Lundgren), an ex-MMA fighter (Adkins) and a desperately violent gang converge on the crumbling edifice hoping to strike it rich before everything explodes. I spoke with Lundgren […]

With Maria Maggenti’s 1995 picture The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love now in rerelease from Strand Releasing, we’re reprinting our 1995 print issue interview with Maggenti, who has gone on to write and direct Puccini for Beginners, write Before I Fall, and write and write and produce for series such as Motherland: Fort Salem and Supergirl. The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love is currently screening at New York’s Metrograph, where Filmmaker‘s Scott Macaulay will be moderating a conversation with Maggenti and Hall on November 24. The below interview has been lightly reedited to add […]

The Emerald Triangle—three counties in Northern California— represents the largest region to produce cannabis in the United States. Even so, it hasn’t been a free-for-all for growers and sellers. As pot farming has become legalized in select parts of the west coast, the push for governmentally regulated weed distribution has become an expensive business to invest in, with required permits and enforced rules pushing out more experienced old-timers who made a habit of keeping things affordable and independent. As their businesses are crippled by state legalization, these farmers are forced to take desperate measures or risk losing their livelihood.  Mario […]

At the root of the word “procession” is “process” — really a fitting description for any Robert Greene film. But the title of  the nonfiction veteran’s latest foray into character-collaborative doc-making has other meanings. It nods specifically to the Holy Spirit’s procession and also to the dictionary definition of people moving forward, a march that includes the risk-taking filmmaker himself. Procession (which premiered at Telluride and just hit Netflix November 19) is perhaps Greene’s boldest cinematic move yet. Once again the director (and “filmmaker-in-chief” at the University of Missouri’s Murray Center for Documentary Journalism) blurs the lines between narrative and nonfiction, […]

As perhaps one of the few people on the planet who managed to nightclub through the ’90s without any awareness of shooting star Alanis Morissette (her music just didn’t penetrate my punk/goth/new wave bubble) I came to Alison Klayman’s latest doc Jagged, part of HBO’s new Music Box series, with a positively clean slate. The film is an in-depth look at the Canadian-American musician-singer-songwriter-actress through an exhaustive amount of archival material, juxtaposed with straightforward interviews with the mercurial Morissette herself. (For those also in a Morissette-defying bubble, this would be a good time to state that the musician is not […]