The world of commercial sea fishing is captured in all its stark and violent beauty in LUCIEN CASTAING-TAYLOR and VÉRÉNA PARAVEL’s Leviathan.
PABLO LARRAÍN completes his Pinochet- era trilogy with No, the compelling and unlikely tale of the ad men who unseated a dictator.
At some point in every film nerd’s life we watch Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera. We learn of the foreboding “cinematic apparatus” — of how the film projector mimics our human eye, causing the audience to become a part of the machine, to identify with the protagonist, to root for the hero with all of our psychological ego-driven urges as we complete the circuit of cinematic perception. But now what? As theaters all over the world are moving to digital projection, the simple mechanism that mirrors our human eye is becoming obsolete. Film prints have now become a […]
Over the last decade, as the tools of filmmaking became less expensive and more generally accessible, there was much excitement about what came to be known as the “democratization” of filmmaking. Suddenly, one didn’t have to be rich or the relative of a studio executive to get a movie made. In addition, websites such as YouTube and others opened up distribution to the masses, creating a new paradigm that was dubbed “user-generated content.” All of this sounded great on the surface, but like other seemingly positive advances — remember the “1,000-channel universe” or the “long-tail theory?” — there are always […]
James Swirsky & Lisanne Pajot are the directors, producers and distributors of the Sundance award-winning feature documentary, Indie Game: The Movie. Before we began production on Indie Game: The Movie, we saw Louis C.K. perform in our hometown of Winnipeg, Canada. It was a great show. He was hilarious, and we walked away cemented in the idea that Louis C.K. is one of the funniest people on the planet. Creatively, it’s hard not to be inspired by someone performing at the top of his or her field. However, little did we know, two years later, Louis C.K. would be inspiring […]
Documentary filmmaker Farihah Zaman shares the secrets of the Good Pitch.
In April 2012, comedian Mark Malkoff embarked on an extraordinary challenge when he set out to use his Netflix account to watch as many streaming movies as possible over the course of one month. Reasoning that he wanted to get the best value possible for his $7.99 monthly subscription, Malkoff pushed Netflix’s promise of a deep catalog of streaming movies to absurd lengths, managing to watch 252 movies — about eight titles per day — and bringing his cost per film to an impressively low three cents. The stunt helped to illustrate how easily and cheaply consumers can access and […]
Citadel New Video – January 29 A cousin of sorts to 2011’s Attack the Block, Irish writer/director Ciarán Foy’s Citadel ruminates on the sad lot of a new widower, caring for the prematurely born young child he lives with in a soon-to-be-demolished British suburban housing project. Little does he know that the hooded gangbangers who attacked his deceased wife with syringes and continue to hound him from afar are, in fact … wait for it … goblins! Skating around (or perhaps right through) some pretty ugly ethnopolitical undertones (the movie was clearly made pre-Trayvon), Citadel has the savage intensity and […]
Maybe it was the weather. It was a warm night. Perfect Los Angeles, balmy, the reason people put up with that town. I was in Culver City. It was the second night of IndieCade, and I was half an hour away from finding myself having what I can only describe as a transcendental experience. IndieCade is the game world’s Sundance; I know I’ve written about it before in these pages, but bear with me. I was walking around with one of my favorite game designers, Jonathan Blow, (Braid and, forthcoming, The Witness) At some point, we became aware of a […]
It’s easy to imagine movies now as mutable data shuffled endlessly between clouds and hard drives — and for some movies, this is at least sort of the case. But the enduring value of original physical media — prints, expensive video masters and even physical screenplays — is being demonstrated in a dispute that is roiling the experimental film and video world. For the last two years, filmmaker Mark Rappaport has been unsuccessfully attempting — via private correspondence, public pleas and a court case — to retrieve needed archival materials he left for safekeeping with film critic and Boston University […]