After the 1970s grit of X and the Technicolor sheen of Pearl, Ti West and cinematographer Eliot Rockett turn to the 1980s with MaXXXine. Shot with the same combo of Sony Venice and Vantage MiniHawks, the L.A.-set story finds adult actress Maxine Minx’s big break into mainstream films curtailed by a series of giallo-esque murders. With the movie freshly out on VOD, Rockett spoke to Filmmaker about the concluding chapter in the trilogy. Filmmaker: Ti talked in an interview about how MaXXXine is his first film shot in L.A. despite living there for 20 years. X and Pearl were both […]
The Gotham, Filmmaker‘s publisher, announced today the projects and creators accepted into the 2024 Gotham Week Project Market, which takes place in Brooklyn and Manhattan September 30 – October 4. A long-running program of The Gotham, the Project Market introduces projects in development seeking financing or distribution to industry partners, including producers, sales agents and distributors. It returns this year following last year’s break due to the ongoing Writers Guild strikes with 112 projects spanning feature films, documentary and television. Among the projects are Buffalo Stone, which Lily Gladstone co-wrote and produced, with co-writer-directors Daniel Glick and Ivy Macdonald and […]
Film at Lincoln Center announced today the Main Slate lineup of the 62nd New York Film Festival. Among the lineup are the latest from David Cronenberg (The Shrouds), Paul Schrader (Oh Canada) and Mike Leigh (Hard Truths) are world premieres by younger American auteurs, including Julia Loktev, who will debut the 332-minute, five-part My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow, about the young female independent journalists at Russia’s TV Rain during the first week of the invasion of Ukraine. Robinson Devor (Police Beat, Zoo) world premieres his documentary Suburban Fury, about would-be presidential assassin Sara Jane Moore. […]
Still in his early career, Dylan Arnold has already built a diverse catalog of roles, including a breakout one in season three of Netflix’s You, reprising a fan-favorite for the Halloween franchise in Halloween Kills, and last year, of course, playing Frank Oppenheimer, holding much more than his own, opposite Oscar-winner Cillian Murphy. Now he goes a good bit darker in Alma Har’el’s Apple TV+ series The Lady In The Lake. On this episode, he talks about the differences between these two incredible actor’s directors, Har’el and Christopher Nolan, and what works best for him. He explains the importance of […]
Set a century before The Phantom Menace, The Acolyte follows a Jedi master (Squid Games star Lee Jung-jae) and his former apprentice (Amandla Stenberg) as they hunt for a killer who’s dispatching Jedi. The new series holds a distinction that no other live action Star Wars saga can claim—not the half dozen Disney Plus shows or the eleven feature films, not the Star Wars Holiday Special, not even that Ewok movie with Wilfred Brimley. The Acolyte is the first live action story set in the heretofore unseen High Republic era that served as the zenith of Jedi influence and power. […]
Nearly twenty years ago, Lucy Walker was making a film on the slopes of Everest following a group of blind teenage Tibetan climbers. While on the mountain, she heard of an incident that had taken place when a male guide attacked his wife and climbing partner, a Nepalese woman named Lhakpa Sherpa. Lhakpa’s cursed expedition was the focus of a damning book published a couple of years later, as well as a feature in Outside Magazine. At that point Lhakpa had summited Everest seven times but was living in a cramped apartment in Connecticut as an illiterate single mother, still […]
David Garelik was in Trey Edward Shults’ Waves, Peter Berg’s Mile 22, and recently finished a run of an Off-Broadway 2-hander at the WP Theater, co-produced with Colt Coeur. Now you can see him as the bad guy/enucleator, opposite Liana Liberato, on this season of Criminal Minds: Evolution on Paramount+. On this epic episode, he recounts his journey from moving to New York with zero acting experience and “being a bad auditioner,” to making naivety work for him and “changing the game” by refusing to play it. It’s a story of perseverance, endurance, and growth, fueled by focus on the […]
Back in 2021, filmmaker Jessica Oreck (Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo), who appeared on Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2009, launched her Office of Collecting and Design, which she describes as “part wonderland, part library, and part nostalgia machine, devoted to the diminutive, the misplaced, the unusual, and the forgotten.” A truly unusual endeavor, the Las Vegas-based tiny museum is exhibition space, animation studio and prop house — in short, a physical extension of the enthusiasms that have powered Oreck’s filmmaking. From my print issue profile of the project: A cinematic sensibility permeates the whole endeavor, not just in the […]
If having your first feature premiere at the Sundance Film Festival is an accomplishment, being nominated for an Academy Award the same week is pretty much unheard of. Nonetheless, that’s what writer-director Sean Wang experienced last January when his coming-of-age narrative feature, Dìdi, premiered to glowing reviews (and a distribution deal with Focus Features) while his nonfiction portrait of his two grandmothers, Nai Nai & Wài Pó, was nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Short. Still in his 20s, Wang’s career has skyrocketed over the past year, and now Dìdi “younger brother” in Chinese) opens in theaters riding a […]
At Filmmaker we’ve long been a fan of Zach Clark, director of such witty and genre (and genre-adjacent) work as Little Sister, Vacation! and White Reindeer. He always brings real style and subversive smarts to his pictures, which often apply ingenious tonal twists to familiar situations and set-ups. For his latest, The Becomers, Clark fuses an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-type tale with a classic rom-com set up. Reviewing the film out of Fantasia, Erik Luers wrote: In depicting two shape-shifting entities who arrive separately on Earth searching for their misplaced mate, Clark’s film provides his Midwest cast the opportunity […]