Issues
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Loving Cinema, Frame by Frame: The Art of Cathy Lomax
Every now and then—winter break, summer break—I purchase a new notebook at the local Blick intending to take up drawing, a practice far from my discipline of cinema studies. This notebook need is not driven by my usual academic hubris, which asks smugly, often with a shrug, “Really, how hard could it be?” but by something more feral and fervent. Like, if I could put pen or pastel to paper, something pure would pour forth, heart to hand to drawing. There would be color and expression and the ineffable, all in a scribble. And if you think I’m exaggerating: There […]
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Late in Life: Jonathan Lethem in Conversation with Between the Temples‘s Nathan Silver
Our Summer issue cover story, Between the Temples filmmaker Nathan Silver interviewed by novelist Jonathan Lethem, is being brought out from our paywall today as the film arrives in theaters from Sony Pictures Classics. — Editor In Between the Temples, Jason Schwartzman, looking suddenly on the verge of middle age, and with a disconcerting new depth to his eyes, plays a cantor unable to find his singing voice. “The cantor who can’t” might be the hook for any number of lively (or annoying) comedies set in a synagogue, but Nathan Silver has delivered not only the version I’d actually want, […]
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Can’t Look Away: How True Crime Series are Edited
I shouldn’t have been surprised by the number of cadavers I saw—the four-day cruise was, after all, never about the destination (Cozumel?) and entirely about the journey, hundreds of miles through legally murky international waters with the promise of a lethal formula: “Hot sun. Cold cases. Unforgettable vacation.” A marine offshoot of the hugely successful CrimeCon, the 2023 CrimeCruise promised lectures from famous crime scene investigators, podcast hosts and a self-described “walking lie detector” to an almost entirely white, female audience that preferred to avoid sunburns, instead spending time in windowless lecture halls interpreting stippling patterns and keyhole-shaped entry wounds. […]
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Editor’s Letter
As I type this editor’s note, Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, which I’ve had on YouTube in the background, has just ended. As many of you already know, the flagship announcement this year had to do with AI. Apple has dubbed its use of artificial intelligence “Apple Intelligence,” which refers to its systemwide integration across Apple operating systems and apps, use of in-house tools and privatized cloud servers. Its rebranding of the term “AI,” which didn’t even require them to change the initials, is a clever marketing move, as it elides the fact that Apple has shunned the use of […]
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How to Ace a Film School Admissions Interview
I turned in this column way late this quarter. My excuse? Admissions. Like film faculty across the country, my colleagues and I in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California are reading dozens of applications for a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate filmmaking, screenwriting and media arts programs, and sorting through personal statements, work samples, grades, letters of recommendation and more, trying to sense who might be best for our program and how our program might best suit potential applicants. There are more applications than ever, even though recent analyses suggest that students consider the […]
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Credits Where Credits Are Due
Tyler Perry believes that generative AI could soon drastically reduce location filmmaking. He recently announced plans to pause an $800 million expansion of his Atlanta-based studio complex, telling The Hollywood Reporter, “I no longer would have to travel to locations. If I wanted to be in the snow in Colorado, it’s text…. If I wanted to have two people in the living room in the mountains, I don’t have to build a set in the mountains.” But state legislatures and film offices haven’t gotten that memo. As we take our annual look at film tax incentives around the country, the […]
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Solutions Based: Who Should Save Independent Film?
The Sundance Film Festival is a time for movie watching, deal making, talent scouting and, often, much soul searching about the state and future of the independent film industry. This year in particular there was no shortage of media coverage and conversations about distribution and the sustainability of the independent business. As Sundance CEO Joana Vicente told The Ringer’s “The Town” podcast, “Everyone is thinking about solutions… How can we help and figure out how all these films find a home, and what’s our role in the distribution exhibition piece?” For Sundance’s more commercial films—of which there were several this […]
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“I Hope It’ll Be Comforting to Trans People, Because the Butterfly Narrative Leaves Out the Reality of the Experience”: I Saw the TV Glow Director Jane Schoenbrun Interviewed by Gregg Araki
“I often don’t remember my dreams, and so when I do, I’ve learned to listen to what my subconscious could be trying to tell me,” director Jane Schoenbrun told Filmmaker in the leadup to the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where their sophomore dramatic feature, I Saw the TV Glow, premiered to acclaim. That admission could be seen as something of a mission statement for Schoenbrun, one that might also have been made about their 2021 microbudget debut, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. In World’s Fair, a sinister online role-playing game haunts the internet, becoming a sort of roiling […]
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Las Cruces Days: Making Sundance Grand Prize-Winner In the Summers Using New Mexico Tax Credits
Alessandra Lacorazza’s In the Summers is a film of moments spread across years—moments quiet and seemingly insignificant, as well as larger events whose significance is downplayed at the time only to be properly understood years later. It’s the story of two teenage girls who, each summer, are sent by their mom to spend a few weeks with their charismatic yet irresponsible father, whose ability to love and be a parent is continually undermined by his addictions to drugs and alcohol. Winner of the Grand Jury U.S. Dramatic Competition prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, In the Summers finds a […]
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Martini Shots
Lithuania-born filmmaker Robertas Nevecka was making short animated pictures and working as an assistant director when, on a location shoot, he began to draw. It was 2019 and “It was really hard,” Nevecka remembers. “We were shooting in a small village, living in trucks, and, during the off time, I started drawing stuff about the things that happened during the day. That was the start.” Five years later, Nevecka’s film-shoot pastime has grown into a much larger endeavor, a small business that finds his witty visual accounts of set life on t-shirts, playing cards and, most recently, collected in a […]
