“Hollywood Flirts with Short Films on the Web” was a New York Times headline from June 2000. Sites like iFilm, Pop and, most prominently, AtomFilms were seeking broadband gold by streaming shorts online. AtomFilms even had a coup—it had just “premiered” George Lucas’s USC film school short, Electronic Labyrinth: THX-1138 4EB. In the article, Atom CEO Mika Salmi talked about the new and growing audience ready to devour shorts “on airplanes, in shopping malls and even in elevators,” while the author also wrote about shorts budgets heading into the millions of dollars. Just three months later the dotcom crash would […]
In Guava Island, a musician (Donald Glover) incurs the wrath of a tropical despot when his plans for a celebratory music festival threaten to shutter the fictional isle’s silk factory for a day. The film, which runs 55 minutes with musical interludes from Glover’s alter ego Childish Gambino, features many of the talents behind the FX show Atlanta. That includes Emmy winning cinematographer Christian Sprenger (The Last Man on Earth, GLOW), who spoke to Filmmaker about working on location in Cuba and his magic formula for making the Alexa LF look like 16mm film. Guava Island is currently streaming on […]
For five years, I’ve been rounding up the previous year’s US theatrical releases of films shot, in whole or significant part, on 35mm—yes, this year’s tally is lower than any of my previous totals. The total number is unlikely to soar above 40 anytime in the foreseeable future, and every film loyalist taking the year off makes a large difference. Part of the low tally can be attributed to lack of new films from J.J. Abrams, Quentin Tarantino, P.T. Anderson, Ken Loach, Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, Zach Snyder, James Gray—directors who simply won’t budge on working from film. That aside, […]
I first watched Pet Sematary on a family vacation when I was 11 years old—well, watched may be a bit of an exaggeration. My older sister and I made it through the second appearance of Pascow’s rotting corpse before we retreated beneath the hotel bed’s comforter. I eventually braved the entirety on my 13thbirthday, a memorable sleepover double feature with The Fly II. No movie ever scared me more than Pet Sematary. But while other horror flicks that sent me scuttling under the blankets as a kid now seem almost comically unthreatening in adulthood—your Silver Bullets and My Bloody Valentines—the themes of […]
When Avengers: Endgame hits theaters in a few weeks, it will conclude a chapter in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that encompasses 22 films over more than a decade. Considering the disparate tones, settings and filmmakers involved in the “Infinity Saga,” the fact that the movies fit so seamlessly together and have been so consistently entertaining is a remarkable achievement. Part of the magic trick of integrating the superhero adventures into a cohesive whole comes from the work of colorists, who have been entrusted with ensuring the Tesseract glows the same shade of blue whether it appears in Thor, Infinity War or the […]
On the night of her 36th birthday, New York video game developer Nadia (played by the show’s co-creator Natasha Lyonne) stumbles out of a party in her honor and is killed by an oncoming car. Thus begins a cycle of “resets” in the new Netflix series Russian Doll, with each demise bringing Nadia right back to the same birthday party bathroom mirror on the same night. The Groundhog Day comparisons are unavoidable, yet as Russian Doll unfolds across its eight episodes it reveals layers of emotional complexity and existential angst that extend beyond that Bill Murray classic and its Christmas Carol-esque […]
As Barry Alexander Brown toiled on the editing of School Daze, he was convinced that, at any moment, he’d be found out. That someone would inform director Spike Lee he was no longer working in the indie trenches of She’s Gotta Have It. That he was now working under the auspices of Columbia Pictures and could no longer simply hire his buddies to cut his movies. Recalls Brown, “I was sure somebody was going to come into the editing room and say, ‘What are you doing here?’” That never happened and, three decades later, Barry Alexander Brown is still cutting movies […]
In Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, two determined women — Rachel Weisz’s refined but ruthless Duchess of Marlborough and Emma Stone’s desperate and cunning chambermaid Abigail — vie for the titular preferential position alongside the ill and melancholy Queen Anne. Anyone expecting a beautifully mounted but stuffy 18th century period piece has not seen a Yorgos Lanthimos movie. Employing the same absurdist sense of humor as Lanthimos’s The Lobster, The Favourite also imposes the director’s preferred set of aesthetic restrictions — namely, wide angle lenses and shooting almost entirely with available light. Irish cinematographer Robbie Ryan (American Honey, Fish Tank), who […]
For Filmmaker‘s annual look at our top posts of the year, as determined by Google Analytics, we break the list into two: the top 10 posts of the year, and the top 10 2018 posts drawn from our archives. So, jumping right into it…. The Top 10 New Posts of 2018 D.P. Larkin Seiple Breaks Down Every Shot from Childish Gambino’s This is America. I’ll immodestly say that Matt Mulcahey’s Shutter Angles column presents the best DP interviews out there, and this one, hot on the heels of the Childish Gambino viral hit, topped our list of the best new […]
If you’re a fan of the music of the 1970s, your favorite artist may soon have a biopic on the way. An Elton John flick is already en route. We’ll probably get a Bowie movie. Maybe Zeppelin. I’m crossing my fingers for The Jim Croce Story. You can thank Bohemian Rhapsody for that potential onslaught. The Queen biopic has grossed more than $600 million worldwide so far on a budget of roughly $50 million. With the film still out in theaters, cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel (Drive, Three Kings, The Usual Suspects) spoke to Filmmaker about recreating Queen’s epic concert lighting, […]