Filmmaker

Click here to read our winter 2025 issue, featuring Nickel Boys's RaMell Ross, profiles of six below-the-line awards season contenders and more...

Latest Issue — Winter 2025

A young man stares directly at you while outside.

Sentient Images: RaMell Ross on Nickel Boys

RaMell Ross’s 2018 feature debut, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, is a non-narrative portrait of its Alabama locale, shot entirely by the filmmaker over years of immersion, his instinctually captured material assembled into intricate juxtapositions. Few scale-ups for a second film have been more dramatic: Nickel Boys is a narrative feature adapted from a pre-existing text (Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys), proceeding in more-or-less linear order through an incident-filled narrative, with an on-record budget of around $23 million and production handled by Plan B Entertainment and Louverture Films. The latter’s Joslyn Barnes was also a producer and […]

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Features

A jury sits in a courtroom.

Careless People: Mark Asch on Gamification, Impunity and 2024 in Film

Juror #2, which I saw the night before the presidential election, concerns a man who looks at his phone while driving, hits and kills a fellow citizen, and keeps going. A year later, summoned to serve on a jury at the trial of the man wrongly accused of the crime, the driver scrambles to escape responsibility for his actions while still telling himself that he’s a good person. Clint Eastwood’s film, a Southern courtroom thriller in the John Grisham mode, has been called a throwback. For one thing, the juror’s car is a midsize SUV from Grisham’s mid-1990s heyday, not […]

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  • Hits & Misses 2024: Case Studies of Six Sundance 2024 Premieres

    In September, Variety declared, “Indie Films Are Staging a Box Office Comeback,” touting the success of the films Longlegs, Thelma and Late Night with the Devil as signs of life for a segment of the industry “crushed by COVID, strikes and streaming,” as reporter Brent Lang wrote. “And while it’s a long way from the arthouse heyday of the 1990s and early aughts, the turnaround is impressive.”  Maybe not that impressive.  Citing the more than $100 million global gross of Longlegs, a NEON-produced wide-release serial-killer movie, as some kind of indie darling misses the point. Thelma and Late Night are […]

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  • The Cinevator, a device for making film prints Striking Film Prints in a Digital World: Laser Printing, CRT Screens and a One-Stop Film Recorder from Norway

    In 2006, Rune Bjerkestrand was on the Universal lot in Hollywood, far away from his home country of Norway. His brand-new invention, the Cinevator, could create a film negative from a digital file in real time—a vast improvement over other recorders that could take 10 days or more to craft a negative for a 90-minute film. But was the quality there? Technicolor set up a blind test to find out. “We didn’t really have a clue about film, about film technology, about the film industry, about film machines—nothing,” Bjerkestrand says. After the split-screen test footage ran, everyone in the theater […]

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  • My Hot Librarian Summer: Libraries and Distribution Strategies

    It can take two or more years for independent films to progress through festival, theatrical, VOD, streaming and maybe airline releases, after which their discoverability fades. For filmmakers, the question then becomes, “How will people discover my movie now?” For many, the answer revolves around libraries. Across public, college and university libraries, there are estimates that up to 30 percent of library checkouts are movies, not books. Filled with DVDs, libraries have become the new Blockbuster—but, increasingly reliant on library-specific streaming services, they’re also becoming the new Netflix. Many independent filmmakers are so excited to sign a distribution contract (any […]

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Other articles

  • A man with a mustache holds a movie camera in an open field. Border Crossings: Paul Schrader on Oh, Canada

    The face of Leonard Fife (Richard Gere) is a slab—gaunt, ashen, with a firm, unsmiling mouth. In front of the camera, he’s at once impassive and confessional before his two interlocutors, Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill). They’ve recruited the old man, a celebrated American documentary filmmaker now wasting away from cancer, to recount his life for posterity, in the process conjuring the young man (Jacob Elordi) Fife once was. Or was he? I’m not sure where Fife the Elder and Fife the Younger begin and end in Paul Schrader’s latest film. Nor could I tell you at which […]

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  • Access Against Common Sense

    “Just because we are in the same room does not mean that we belong to the room or to each other.”—Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People, p. 10 “We come to this place for magic.”—Nicole Kidman, “AMC Theatres: We Make Movies Better,” 2021 I recently began reading New York Film Festival co-founder Amos Vogel’s 1974 book, Film as a Subversive Art, because my film An All-Around Feel Good was premiering at this year’s festival. I had seen several people on social media urging filmmakers to boycott the event for its entanglements with sponsors complicit with Israel’s genocidal siege […]

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  • A man struggles to close a door on a flooding submarine. Replicating Images: Submerged, AI and Immersive Cinema

    In October, Apple released its first scripted immersive film production, Submerged, on Apple Vision Pro (AVP), its mixed-reality headset. The film follows a submarine crew during World War II who fight for survival after enduring a torpedo attack. The high-end technological production included a submarine set, a proprietary 3D camera by Apple and headsets for the crew to monitor the shots in real time. The production design is impressive, the use of close-ups peculiar and novel—it’s a well-crafted film. However, more than the film itself, the experience of watching Submerged on the headset is what truly shines. A making-of trailer […]

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Also: Order Fulfillment: Halina Reijn on Babygirl All Protocols are Not the Same: Joanne McNeil on Bluesky The Final Outfits: Massimo Cantini Parrini on Maria‘s Costumes Gale Force Cinema: Studying with Luis Recoder and Sandra Gibson Editor’s Letter

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