With “Halloweekend” upon us, Filmmaker recommends 13 horror films perfectly catered to the season. As the site’s newly-minted Web Editor, I wanted to infuse the list with long-time personal favorites of my own and recent genre standouts. It also felt important to highlight our existing coverage of these films/filmmakers, while also ensuring that each title is readily available to stream for all those who’re interested in checking them out. Due to these self-imposed restrictions, a number of horror highlights (at least in this writer’s opinion) were regretfully omitted in the end: Álex de la Iglesia’s Day of the Beast (1999), […]
“Ms. Monroe, it’s time,” are the first ominous words heard in the just-released trailer for Andrew Dominik’s long-awaited Netflix production, Blonde, based on Joyce Carol Oates’s book about actor and movie star Marilyn Monroe. Ana de Armas plays Monroe in the dark drama. In addition to first glimpses of de Armas’s performance, among what’s striking about the trailer is Chayse Irvin’s cinematography, which, across scenes, instantly recalls the different period photographic styles — in cinema, paparazzi shots, and media and magazine coverage — associated with Monroe’s depiction. Interestingly, Blonde is Irvin’s second credit this year. The BlacKkKlansman DP also shot […]
A year ago in this space, I noted that by the time most people received their issue a COVID-19 vaccine would be available, and that film production was beginning to surge back after the shutdowns, “but when it comes to our film business and culture, there will be no single lightswitch moment.” Now, in this spring ’22 edition of Filmmaker, I’m seeing evidence confirming that prediction, as many of the articles here grapple not with COVID-19, per se, but the types of changes that have occurred alongside the pandemic that are either directly or tangentially caused by it. In his […]
Filmmaker‘s current print edition contains our annual section devoted to the below-the-line artists that excited us through this Fall’s awards season. Read below profiles by Abby Bender, Scott Macaulay, Matt Mulcahey, Vikram Murthri and Vadim Rizov, and, if you haven’t checked out these films, we recommend you do! Cinematography: Passing‘s Edu Grau, by Matt Mulcahey. Costume Design: Belfast‘s Charlotte Walter. Editing: Licorice Pizza‘s Andy Jorgenson, by Vikram Murthri. Original Score: The Power of the Dog‘s Jonny Greenwood, by Scott Macaulay Production Design: The Tragedy of Macbeth‘s Stefan Dechant, by Erik Luers Sound: The Memoria Sound Team of Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr, Richard […]
Thirteen months ago, I was writing this letter from Berlin, where I was attending the festival and working on the issue with one of our designers. And sure, I noticed all the people coughing at the DAU. Natasha premiere. And that my screenwriter tutor pal extended an elbow rather than a hand when we sat down for lunch. And how empty the plane was on my trip home, just one day before the European travel ban. In the next week, I attended my last party of 2020, a post-Sundance celebration with a number of local filmmakers. Surprisingly, the oncoming pandemic […]
Since 2015, I’ve annually rounded up interviews and features covering the previous year’s U.S. theatrical releases shot on 35mm, an inherently melancholy collation of (increasingly dead) links. (“This is your most quixotic project,” a friend messaged recently.) The 25-ish 35mm releases of 2020 I’ve tallied this time are in line with each previous year’s 30-or-bubbling-under features, a boutique fraction of the larger landscape. Each list builds toward a larger index of minor deaths. My first edition, covering 2014, noted the close of Australia’s last commercial film lab and Bong Joon-ho’s return home to South Korea after Snowpiercer, only to discover […]
To rhyme with the year, I’ve expanded this year’s roundup of our most popular posts, as determined by Google Analytics, from 10 to 20. It’s full of both expected entries — our 25 New Faces scores highly every year — as well as a few surprises. It also shows the dominance of TV and streaming, or perhaps the ’20 decline in theatrical exhibition. So many of the articles on this list — which aren’t “a best of the year,” although many are indeed that — are the ones that intersected best with search analytics, caught viral waves, or rode along […]
Welcome to Filmmaker’s 28th anniversary edition. If you are reading this editor’s letter, there’s a good chance you are reading it in a print issue that has been delivered to your mailbox or that you purchased at a newsstand or bookstore. After a summer issue break, when Filmmaker went PDF due to bookstores closing and all the uncertainty around the pandemic, we’re grateful to be back with a physical edition—grateful to our advertisers, our publisher, IFP and to you for your continuing readership and support. There’s a reason we pushed hard to return to print with this issue, and it’s partly sentimental: […]
Writer-director Scott Wiper’s The Big Ugly is the best kind of genre film, a crime movie aware of the traditions in which it’s working but not beholden to them; combining elements of ’40s and ’50s crime fiction (Jim Thompson seems to be a particular touchstone) with the flavor of ’70s Sam Peckinpah and Walter Hill filtered through the visual grammar of ’90s Tony Scott, The Big Ugly synthesizes its influences into a unique and compelling western noir. Its emotional power comes largely from Wiper’s richly textured script and the performances by his consistently riveting ensemble, which includes Vinnie Jones, Malcolm […]
As previously announced, Filmmaker‘s Summer 2020 issue is being published as a PDF, and it’s now online and available for single-issue purchase. It’s our largest page-count ever (244 pages!), and our designers, Caspar Newbolt and Charlotte Gosch, tweaked the whole design to make it a beautiful and comfortable experience on both a tablet and a laptop in either portrait or landscape view. For the first time, we’ve also enabled the issue to be purchased individually as a PDF for $5.95, and you can do that by clicking here or on the button below using PayPal or your credit card. On […]