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“How Would Frederick Wiseman Order This Procession of Images?”: Making Robert Kolodny’s The Featherweight
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Robert Kolodny's Venice-premiering The Featherweight is the dramatic story of real-life boxer Willie Pep as he exits retirement to attempt a comeback in the ring — all as he's shadowed by a documentary crew. The film's action occurs two decades after Pep's 1940s heyday, with Kolodny and his team, who include producer and screenwriter Steve Loff and editor Robert Greene, convincingly replicating the look and rhythms of 1960s verite documentary to meditate on both the past as well as the boxing film's durability in the present. Wrote The New Yorker's Richard Brody in his review, "It's an instant classic of a boxing movie, with its closeup view of the inseparable agonies and passions of a sport that’s shadowed with death." With… Read more
“We Needed to Steer the Film to a Place Where It Wasn’t a Biopic”: Cinematographer Turned Director Ellen Kuras on Her Kate Winslet-Starring Lee
Kate Winslet in Lee
For years filmmakers have tried to tell Lee Miller’s story. Famous first as a model for artists like Man Ray, then as a fashion photographer, Miller became a war correspondent during World War II. She captured some of the most iconic images of her time, from views of Hitler’s life to the horrors of concentration camps. For her feature debut as a director, Ellen Kuras was determined not to fall into standard biopic conventions. Starting from a book of Miller’s photographs, she collaborated with star and producer Kate Winslet and writers Marian Hume, Liz Hannah, and John Collee to find a dramatic framework for Miller’s life, one that often ignores biographical details to concentrate on her day-to-day struggles as an artist… Read more
21 Films to See at the 2024 New York Film Festival
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With this year's New York Film Festival underway, Filmmaker is recommending 18 films to watch over the course of the festival, which runs this year from September 27 through October 14. This year, our staff has covered several festivals— including TIFF, Venice, and Cannes,—whose premieres will be screening at NYFF during these upcoming weeks, some of which have previously been featured on our site. Below, we have compiled a list of the must-see films playing at the New York Film Festival, along with links and excerpts from director interviews and festival dispatches as well as, for three titles we have covered yet, the reasons we're anticipating them. Anora "A Cinderella fantasy that plays out in Brighton Beach... [Sean Baker's Palme d'Or-winning Anora]… Read more
“I Didn’t Expect It to Make People Laugh So Much”: Alain Guiraudie on Misericordia
Félix Kysyl and Jacques Develay in Misericordia
In Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, a young man named Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to the village where he lived as a teenager to attend the funeral of his former employer. Like his protagonist, Guiraudie is back in familiar territory with his seventh feature, which finds the French filmmaker revisiting the murder mystery template of his 2013 breakthrough Stranger by the Lake. Except here, Guiraudie trades the thriller trappings of that earlier film for something more mischievous and darkly comic, more along the lines of his offbeat fables The King of Escape (2009) or Staying Vertical (2016). A kind of rural riff on Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), Misericordia begins innocently enough with Jérémie arriving in Saint-Martial, a commune in southwest France, where the funeral for… Read more
The Monster You Become: Coralie Fargeat on The Substance
Demi Moore in The Substance
Even for the most callous horror-heads, Coralie Fargeat’s debut feature, Revenge (2017), stunned with its gruesome rape-revenge plot and blunt-force style, announcing the French director as a genre talent on the rise, capable of invoking her cinematic inspirations while departing from them on her own frenzied, feminist terms. The Substance, which won the award for Best Screenplay when it premiered at Cannes earlier this year, somehow cranks up the madness even further, unfolding a dark Hollywood fairytale about aging and feminine beauty standards that stands among the most adventurous in the body horror genre. Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a celebrity fitness guru forced to retire from her long-running aerobics show thanks to the misogynistic plottings of her network’s producers,… Read more
Shudder Speed: Fantasia International Film Festival 2024
John Adams in Hell Hole (courtesy of Shudder)
The largest genre film festival in North America, Montréal’s ever-growing Fantasia International Film Festival celebrated its 28th edition this summer. This was my seventh year covering for Filmmaker, my ninth in attendance and I arrived with a severe case of FOMO: at an industry party last year, I met a man dressed head-to-toe in a gigantic beaver costume, allegedly to promote a feature he had at the festival. He was charming, so I told him I’d make an effort to see Hundreds of Beavers, but a part of me, taken aback by the man’s zany attire and commitment to self-promotion, knew I wouldn’t necessarily prioritize it. The joke was on me: the film went on to become one of the few… Read more
