Filmmaker

Latest Issue — Spring 2025

A woman sits in a small bush while a man stands near the right door.

Following the Currents: Jia Zhangke and Zhao Tao on Caught by the Tides

Few major auteurs have successfully used footage from their previous films to create an entirely new one on equal footing with their greatest works, but for Jia Zhangke, whose project has in large part been to document changes in China’s landscape and society, such reflexive behavior makes particular sense. In Caught by the Tides, we witness the intertwined changes in his aesthetic sensibility as partly determined by the technology that’s enabled it, from mini DV to the cold, immaculate sheen of today’s professional grade digital cinema equipment. Moreover, we witness the changes in Zhao Tao—Jia’s collaborator since Platform (2000) and, […]

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Features

A woman holds a cat while standing outside.

Blue Skies in Park City: Against the “Off Year” Sundance 2025 Narrative

Reports of Sundance’s death are greatly exaggerated. Even before this year’s festival was over, industry journalists rushed to declare its demise, from The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman (“Low Sales. No Standouts. Slow Sundance. Where Does Independent Film Go From Here?”) to The Ankler’s Richard Rushfield (“Get it Together, Indie A-Holes. What part of ‘extinction event’ do you not understand?”). But let’s not jump to conclusions. Maybe “the vibe was off,” as one producer notes, but what do you expect after twin catastrophes—the Los Angeles fires and the inauguration of Donald Trump—were still smoldering during the event?  “I think the market was […]

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  • A person sits on a green field in front of a house on fire. Arriving at a Resolution: Remastering Movies for 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

    We have reached a tipping point in the format wars, with UHD poised to overtake standard definition DVDs for first place. Now, there’s a new species of reply guy—one who responds to every Blu-ray release announcement with, “Why no 4K?” As a home video producer for Kino Lorber, I will try to explain the continuing rise of 4K UHD, as well as the economic realities of why it’s not possible to release everything in the format.  4K UHD (full name: 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray) is the highest resolution disc available and the one preferred by collectors. Introduced in February 2016 […]

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  • A blond woman holds a phone to her right ear. Black Smoke: David Lynch, L. Frank Baum and California

    On day two of January’s Los Angeles fires, I took a picture looking east from the hills where I live. The zoomed-in, abstracted shape in the frame resembles a reverse hourglass; the dark plume rising from the center, Altadena, seems drawn up from the ashen ground to fully conceal the sky. The color of that central plume isn’t the rusty brown of wildfire smoke but an artificial black, like burning tires or the “SURRENDER DOROTHY” message the Wicked Witch writes across the sky with her broom—one of the great practical effects in The Wizard of Oz. I’ve read that David […]

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  • Passing Through the Black Lodge: David Lynch and Native Culture

    There’s an episode in David Lynch’s memoir Room to Dream that I think of often, from his cross-country journey from Philadelphia to Los Angeles to begin his time as a student at the American Film Institute, where he would go on to create Eraserhead. At the end of the drive’s second day, David, his brother John and future collaborator Jack Fisk pulled over to the side of the road in the New Mexican desert:  It was a moonless night and we went down into these bushes to sleep. It was real quiet, then suddenly there was a whooshing sound and […]

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Other articles

  • A turkey. Weird Life Events: Universal Language Director Matthew Rankin’s Awards Season Diary

    30 August 2024. Montreal.  Our movie has been named as Canada’s Official Supplication to the Academy Awards. Lord, please increase my bewilderment! So crazy. I think it’s the first Winnipeg movie to enter this horserace since Richard Condie’s La Salla in 1996. We are told that months of campaigning await! We are not competitive people, but Pirouz Nemati came over and led the whole team in a 12-minute group hug, and we started practicing our back-slapping and glad-handing techniques. David Lynch says, “Look ‘em in the eye and speak from the heart.” FOOTNOTE: My Hater has started an ambitious letter-writing […]

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  • A woman stands in a forest. Escape Routes: Miguel Gomes on Grand Tour

    At its core the story of a man taking extreme measures to avoid his fiancée, Grand Tour originated when Portuguese director Miguel Gomes read W. Somerset Maugham’s The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930) just before his marriage to co-screenwriter Maureen Fazendeiro. The cast of their previous collaboration, 2021’s The Tsugua Diaries, included the couple, who played variants of themselves in a meta-comedy about trying to direct a movie under COVID lockdown restrictions; Grand Tour is their second, exponentially more ambitious pandemic production.  Grand Tour specifically grew from a story told early in Maugham’s Asia travelogue, as the author recounts meeting […]

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  • A reverse negative image of a home DVD library. Disc Security: How to Care for Physical Media

    There has been no shortage of articles recently regarding the premature death of physical media and, most specifically, physical home video. While vinyl LPs have had a well-publicized resurgence in recent years, with much ink spilled about Taylor Swift’s assistance in that area, the opposite could be said for Blu-ray, 4K UHD and DVD, all of which are currently active, disc-based, home video formats vying for consumer shelf space in the studio and the boutique marketplace. Physical media, in general, can feel nebulous; when speaking about it, both positively and negatively, it can be used to cover a swath of […]

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Also: Speaking in Tongues: How Koyaanisqatsi Was Reborn as The Vivid Unknown An Interview with Jake Mahaffy Life, Compressed: Austin Bunn’s Short Film Screenwriting: A Craft Guide and Anthology Frequent Flying: Location Shooting in 2025 The Gotham Pages: Three Filmmakers Reflect on the Short-to-Feature Pipeline Out of the Ashes: Life after the Fires Editor’s Letter

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