Filmmaker

Latest Issue — Summer 2024

A middle-aged white woman leans her chin on a younger white man's shoulder.

Late in Life: Jonathan Lethem in Conversation with Between the Temples‘s Nathan Silver

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, but one I could never have believed possible—one of the best films of his busy early career, one of the best romantic comedies in decades. Schwartzman’s romantic partner-in-crime—his counterpart, his frenemy, his fateful nemesis, in the […]

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Features

A man walks down the hallway of a long cruise ship.

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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  • Hundreds upon hundreds of...beavers Of Mascots and Men: Mike Cheslik and Ryland Brickston Cole Tews on Hundreds of Beavers

    The phrase “word-of-mouth indie theatrical hit” sounds as outdated in 2024 as “coming soon to LaserDisc.” And yet, the slapstick fur-trapping adventure comedy Hundreds of Beavers has graduated from its lengthy festival run to become that rarest of things, a star-free independent film that has already grossed more than double its $150,000 production budget during its self-distributed gradual cinema rollout (still continuing as of this writing, despite its release on VOD). First-time feature writer-director Mike Cheslik previously teamed with lead actor/producer/co-writer Ryland Brickson Cole Tews on the latter’s feature directorial debut, the black-and-white adventure comedy Lake Michigan Monster. In classic independent […]

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  • A family of snails gathers around a laptop on a couch. A Crisis of Faith: Have Funders Lost Faith that Art Films Can Make an Impact?

    In April, the collapse of Participant Media sent shockwaves through the film industry. How could a 20-year-old company—with box office hits such as An Inconvenient Truth and The Help and 21 Oscars, including two Best Picture winners (Spotlight, Green Book)—close its doors without warning? But earlier that same month, another nearly two-decade-old indie film company made a surprising move that offers potential answers to what happened, how the film industry is changing and how well-meaning financiers are reacting to it. Cinereach, a longstanding nonprofit that has supported hundreds of indie films through grants, financing and mentorship, announced a major shift […]

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  • A white man with a large beard and long hair sits in a video store. Mutual Assists: Joanne McNeil on How a Massachusetts Video Store is Aiding Local Journalism

    Imagine you are in the basement of a home somewhere in the suburbs amid towers of cardboard boxes and items bought in bulk. There are bikes with training wheels and cobwebs between the spokes. Behind a broken recliner is a fake Christmas tree with garland and fairy lights still on it. On wire shelving racks are boxes filled with VHS tapes and DVDs. You see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Meet the Fockers, Waiting to Exhale, The Godfather trilogy box set and the 25-disc edition of Six Feet Under. A few of the videos are still wrapped in […]

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Other articles

  • In an overhead view, a Black woman lies on top of a white woman's stomach. Internal Lives: Annie Baker on Janet Planet

    For a playwright, making their feature directorial debut comes with a certain degree of anticipatory hype, and the results are evaluated with a fine-toothed comb to make sure they aren’t too “wordy” or “stagey.” As with David Mamet’s House of Games, Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me, John Patrick Shanley’s Joe Versus the Volcano or ​​Celine Song’s Past Lives, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker’s Janet Planet should put any fears to rest as to how the director would take to creating specifically for the screen. Not that there should have been any doubt: Her interests have long been steeped […]

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  • A young white teenager gazes out through tree branches in a forest. Offscreen Dialogue: India Donaldson on Good One

    In writer-director India Donaldson’s feature debut, Good One, 17-year-old Sam (outstanding newcomer Lily Collias) embarks on a weekend camping trip with her father Chris (James LeGros) and his lifelong pal Matt (Danny McCarthy). For Sam, a meek college-bound lesbian, the interactions with the two adult men with whom she treks through the forest fall back on conventional gender dynamics ranging from idly domestic to outright degrading: She cooks dinner, washes utilitarian dishware and fields insensitive comments about her sexuality without protest, demonstrating the extent of her excellent manners, so defining of her character that they’re referenced in the film’s title.  […]

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  • A white man and young white boy stare from behind a chain-link fence at a baseball game. Reality Checks: How Film Schools are Adapting to Entertainment Industry Changes

    Scan the entertainment business press and everywhere you’ll see the phrase “the great contraction.” The aftermath of COVID shutdowns, labor strikes, the wind-down of zero-interest-rate policies, the end of peak TV, changes in the competitive streaming landscape, the rise of TikTok—all have conspired to make the ever-perilous path toward a career in feature film and television even more uncertain.  The economic laws of supply and demand, as they pertain to the labor market, would indicate, then, that film schools must be feeling an enrollment pinch, but talking to various graduate and undergraduate chairs and professors from across the country, that’s […]

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Also: Crosstown Connections: The Cinephilic Community Building of the Tallgrass Film Center Editor’s Letter The Gotham Pages: Mel Sangyi Zhao is Creating Space for More Complex Women Characters

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