Before David Cronenberg evolved – or rather, in keeping with Cronenberg’s preoccupations, mutated – into a respected auteur, he rose to prominence as the purveyor of a distinct subset of genre films labeled as “body horror.” At the heart of his early tales of transmogrification, decay and disease lay an innately human fear of mortality. In Cronenberg’s latest, Maps to the Stars, the director explores a uniquely post-millennial form of mortality he has christened “pre-death.” In a culture obsessed with recording and sharing, to not be photographed is in some sense to cease to exist. That existential crisis runs through […]
Early in the new film Focus, a veteran con man played by Will Smith teaches his fledgling grifter protégé (Margot Robbie) the tools of the trade: misdirection, deception, subliminal suggestion. They’re a few of the tools applied in Focus by cinematographer Xavier Grobet as well, who is tasked with not only making the New York, New Orleans and Buenos Aires locations sleek and alluring but also with pushing audiences alternately toward and away from the plot’s various double-crosses. Focus marks the second collaboration between Grobet and I Love You Phillip Morris directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa. The Mexican cinematographer […]
My annual exercise in what our audience — as well as our “audiences,” the latter term used to refer to the concoction of first and possibly last-time readers driven to our site by algorithmic determinism and SEO “best practices” — is always a mixture of the predictable and the unexpected. Regular features like our 25 New Faces series and Vadim Rizov’s survey of 35mm production always show up, as do articles by our excellent columnist Matt Mulcahey and podcaster Peter Rinaldi. I was particularly happy to see this year on the list two pieces that were especially deeply researched and […]
During the NBA playoffs this year, a Miller Lite commercial unexpectedly compelled my attention. The frames’ edges were rounded, the images’ scratches conspicuous—this was either shot on film or trying very hard to look like it. Further digging confirmed the spot (title: “You Never Forget”) was shot on 35mm, perhaps in keeping with its nostalgic world of bars with CD jukeboxes and cathode-ray TVs. I’d often read over the past decade that commercials and music videos have been using celluloid with increasing frequency; collating this year’s (tenth!) annual edition of U.S.-released features shot in whole or part on 35mm [2014, […]
With many viewers struggling with subscription-itis — a costly overload of SVOD memberships that inflate credit card bills at the end of each month — it’s no wonder that the so-called FAST (free ad-supported streaming television) channels are taking off in popularity. For filmmakers, these channels offer a new revenue stream, and for viewers not only no-cost entertainment but the chance to discover many titles that for whatever market-based reasons aren’t streamable on Netflix, Amazon Prime or Criterion. Filmmaker‘s Web Editor, Natalia Keogan, and I took a look through the current offerings of the most well-recognized FAST channel, Tubi, to […]
Dune: Part Two will hit theaters just over two years after Dune, director Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 landmark sci-fi novel. The first trailer arrives six months before the second and final installment of Villeneuve’s saga is set for release. The story will continue to follow characters from the first film (save for Oscar Isaac, whose Duke Leto Atreides perishes during the first half of the story), with roles reprised by Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Dave Bautista, Stellan Skarsgård, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Charlotte Rampling and Javier Bardem. Yet there’s a considerable amount of buzz surrounding […]
“Go make movies.” That was my Editor’s Letter signoff here in the earliest days of this publication. And, over the ensuing 30 years, many of you did! I won’t give Filmmaker anything more than a small amount of credit for the independent production boom in the years following our 1992 launch, but we have certainly been out there issue by issue, web page by web page, encouraging new independent filmmakers. We’ve also tried in these pages to deliver doses of reality along with our encouragement. We’ve run articles on the vicissitudes of financing, the high cost of delivery, difficult sales […]
Winners of the Best Screenplay and Best Picture awards at last night’s Oscars for their Everything Everywhere All at Once, the Daniels — Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert — have appeared in our pages many times over the years, with the various articles and interviews offering a historical timeline of the iconoclastic creators’ move from music video stars to celebrated feature directors. The two showed up first in 2015, in our 25 New Faces list, while they were in production on their first feature, Swiss Army Man. But we had already been knocked out by their music videos for the […]
Filmmaker‘s most recent print issue features our annual selection of below-the-line artists whose work has excited us through this Fall’s awards season. Linked below are profiles by A.E. Hunt, Vikram Murthi, Matt Mulcahey, Isaac Feldberg and Abbey Bender on the most impressive technical aspects of six recent films, which we highly recommend viewing. Editing: Everything Everywhere All At Once‘s Paul Rogers, by A.E. Hunt Production Design: The Fabelmans‘ Rick Carter, by Vikram Murthi Cinematography: Bardo‘s Darius Khondji, by Matt Mulcahey Original Score: Women Talking‘s Hildur Guðnadóttir, by Isaac Feldberg Costume Design: The Banshees of Inisherin‘s Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh, by Abbey […]
As 2022 comes to a close, Filmmaker returns with our annual recap of the year’s most read posts. As I click through Google Analytics, this piece always becomes something of a revelation, a mixture of the predictable (our 25 New Faces list); the news-triggered (an old profile resurfacing on the director’s recent success, for example, or, more sadly, their passing); evergreen articles on filmmaking itself; and pieces for which strong content, aided by SEO and provocative headlines, meshed to attract an abnormally large slew of first-time readers. As in the past, the list is divided into two: the 10 most […]